Part One — The Promise · Chapter 4 of 40

The Agreement

The society voted yes on the ninth of March, nine for, one against, one abstaining, and the development agreement came back from Ketkar’s office on the fourth of April running to forty-one pages and two annexures.

Advocate Ketkar was sixty-one and had drafted for four builders in Dombivli for thirty years and was, by the standards of that trade in that decade, scrupulous. He did not put traps in agreements. He put doors in them, which is different, and which every builder he worked for understood and no society ever did, because a door only becomes visible when somebody walks through it.

Jagdish read it on a Sunday at the dining table with the fan on and his mother’s radio going in the next room.

He was a good reader of agreements. Not a lawyer’s reader — he could not have argued one — but he had signed eleven of these and been surprised by two, and the two had taught him to read for the places where a sentence stopped early.

Clause 9 was the period: twenty-six months from vacant possession. Clause 9(b) was the door, which was force majeure, and which ran to two-thirds of page twenty-two and included, in a list of eleven items, delay in receipt of any permission, sanction, no-objection or approval from any statutory or municipal authority notwithstanding diligent application by the Developer.

He read 9(b) twice.

It was, he thought, a fair clause. It was also the clause he had privately promised himself he would never need, because he had built five weeks of hidden margin into the schedule precisely so that a slow permission would come out of his own pocket and not out of the society’s patience. The clause was there the way a spare tyre is there.

He put a tick against it and went on.

Meera read it on Tuesday, in one sitting, at the office, with a pencil.

She had stopped keeping the books in 1998 for reasons that had been discussed at the time as being about the children and were not entirely about the children. What she had not stopped doing was reading. Every agreement, every quarterly, every bank statement, three days a week, in the room with the window that looked at another window, with the door open.

She came in at four with the pencil still in her hand.

“Two things.”

“Sit.”

“Clause 14. Transit rent escalates at seven per cent annually from the date of the agreement.” She put it in front of him with her thumb on the line. “Not from the date of vacant possession.”

Jagdish looked. It took him nine seconds.

“April to June,” he said. “Two months.”

“Two months and eleven days, and eleven families, and it’s four thousand rupees. It isn’t the four thousand.” She sat down. “It’s that when they notice — and Bhalerao will notice, that man files his electricity bills — the four thousand will not look like a drafting slip. It will look like the first thing you took.”

“Ketkar didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I know Ketkar didn’t do it on purpose. Ketkar is sixty-one and he copied clause 14 out of the Ambernath agreement where there was no gap between signing and possession.” She tapped the page. “Fix it anyway.”

He wrote ex VP in the margin. “Second thing.”

“Annexure B.”

“The carpet areas.”

“The carpet areas are correct.” Meera turned two pages back with the ease of a woman who had read the annexure before the agreement, which was the correct order and which almost nobody did. “Flat 4 is wrong.”

Flat 4 was Mrs. Kanetkar’s.

“It’s not wrong in the number,” she said. “It’s wrong in the floor. Annexure B puts her back on the third. She’s on the first now.”

Jagdish sat with that for a moment.

“There’s no lift in the new building until handover,” Meera said. “So it doesn’t matter for two years. And then it matters for the rest of her life.”

“Ketkar’s put her on the third because the third is a bigger plate and her entitlement doesn’t fit on the first.”

“Then somebody else goes on the third and she goes on the first, and you make the difference up out of the sale flats, and it costs you about a lakh and a half.” She closed the file. “She’s seventy-eight, Jagdish.”

He did the sum. It came to a little more than a lakh and a half and he did not say so.

“Do it,” he said.

Both changes went to Ketkar on Thursday. Both came back in the executed version. The transit rent ran from vacant possession, and Annexure B put flat 4 on the first floor, and in the room that afternoon there were three careful people — a competent lawyer, a builder who read for the places where sentences stopped early, and Meera Wagh with a pencil — and among them they produced a document that was, in every particular any of them examined, correct.

Here is what none of them did.

Nobody in that room had, or wanted, or thought to want, a record of what had been said in the society hall on the eleventh of February.

There was no reason to want one. The hall was where you explained the agreement; the agreement was where the explanation was written down; that was the whole architecture of the thing, and it had held for eleven societies. A general body meeting was not minuted verbatim. Bhalerao’s minutes for that evening ran to a page and a half and recorded that the Developer had explained the proposal, that queries were raised and satisfactorily answered, and that the matter was put to vote on the ninth. Nobody signed them for four months and then everybody did.

So the sentence about the boxes was not written anywhere on the fourth of April.

It existed in the memory of about twenty-six people, in the way such sentences exist — some of them not remembering it at all, some of them remembering it as roughly what a builder says, one of them, Mrs. Kanetkar’s son, remembering it with a specific gratitude that he never mentioned to his mother and later wished he had.

And in a spiral notebook in Bhalerao’s cupboard, in a column ruled by hand, under the date, in the secretary’s small upright writing, there was a line that read:

26 mo. Said in front of GBM. Will carry boxes.

Bhalerao had written it because Bhalerao wrote things down. He had been secretary for nine years and had learned, mostly from a dispute in 1997 about a water tank, that the difference between being right and being able to show you were right is a notebook.

He did not write it as evidence. He wrote it the way he wrote down the meter reading.

He put the notebook back in the cupboard, and in June he handed over his flat and moved to Kopar, and the notebook went with him in a carton marked SOCIETY — OLD, and it sat in a cupboard in a transit flat for three years and two months, and nobody opened it, including him.