Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 10 of 40

Clearance

The amendment was necessary because of Annexure B.

Flat 4 had been moved from the third floor to the first in April 2003, at Meera’s insistence and against Ketkar’s drafting, at a cost of a little over a lakh and a half, so that a woman of seventy-eight would not spend the rest of her life on a staircase. To move it, the flat above had to be moved, and the plate on the first floor had to be redrawn, and a common passage shifted by nine hundred millimetres.

It was a small amendment. The draughtsman did it in three days. The building was not affected above the second floor, and Pradhan signed it without comment, and the file went in on the ninth of February 2004 with the fee paid and the receipt taken and filed by Pallavi in the manner she filed everything, which was better than the office deserved.

It came back on the twenty-second of June.

Nothing was wrong with it. That is the part which is hard to convey to anybody who has not sat on the other side of that counter. The file was not rejected, queried, returned for want of a document, or opposed. It was in order on the ninth of February and it was in order on the twenty-second of June, and in between it was in a building.

Jagdish went four times. He knew the process well enough to go at the right hours and to bring nothing that could be misread as pressure. The first visit produced a file number. The second produced the information that it was with the section. The third produced a man who was genuinely helpful, who found it, who established that it wanted one signature, and who explained without embarrassment that the signature was not being withheld, and Jagdish believed him, and still does.

The fourth visit produced Marathe.

Marathe was not an official. This is worth stating precisely, because the version of this that gets told in bars has an official in it. Marathe was a man in his fifties who had, at some point in the eighties, occupied a desk somewhere and had been in the corridor ever since, and who was known to four builders Jagdish knew and to a dozen he did not. He did not ask for anything. He sat on the low wall outside with Jagdish for eleven minutes and talked about the drainage on the new road, and then he said:

“That first-floor amendment. Small thing.”

“Very small.”

“Small things are the worst. Nobody’s file is small to him, but a small file has nobody behind it.” Marathe scratched his ear. “I could see where it is.”

“I know where it is. It wants one signature.”

“Then I could see about the signature.”

And that was the whole of it, and Jagdish, who had been in the trade for twenty-two years, heard the shape of the number in the pause and did not ask for the number, because asking for the number is the transaction.

He said: “Thank you, Marathe saheb, but I’ll wait.”

Marathe took this without any change of expression at all, because he had had this answer before, and because in his experience the men who gave it that year gave a different answer two years later, and he was in no hurry.

Jagdish’s position on this was not moral and he would have been irritated by anyone who called it that.

His position, held since about 1989 and stated out loud perhaps twice in his life, was arithmetical. A man who pays for speed once has bought speed. A man who pays for speed twice has bought a reputation for paying, and a reputation for paying is not a thing you can hold at a fixed price, because the price is set by the other party and reset every time. He had watched two builders in Kalyan go under between 1993 and 1997 and in both cases the visible cause had been something else and the actual cause, as far as he could reconstruct it, had been that by the end every file they touched cost money and none of it appeared in any ledger they could show a bank.

So he paid what was on the receipt, and he waited, and he had built eleven buildings that way, and it had cost him, by his own rough estimate, somewhere between four and seven months across seventeen years. He regarded this as cheap.

The estimate had never before been concentrated into a single file.

Four months and thirteen days.

It did not stop the site. That is the thing people outside the trade get wrong. The amendment affected the first-floor plate; the raft was done, the columns to plinth were done, and Salvi ran the podium and the first slab and started the second while the file sat, because you do not stop a building for a passage that moves nine hundred millimetres.

What it did was worse and quieter. It took the second-floor slab out of sequence — you cannot cast above an unapproved plate — so the cycle broke, and a broken cycle is not a delay you can point at. The gang that had settled into a fourteen-day rhythm was stood down for three weeks in April and given other work and came back at eleven men instead of nineteen. The formwork sat. Salvi resequenced twice, well, and each resequence cost four or five days that appeared in nobody’s diary as a delay because on every single day of them there were men working on that site.

Salvi’s figure, when Jagdish asked for it in July, was six weeks.

Nine and six. Fifteen weeks under, in July of 2004, against a completion of August 2005.

He went to see the site on the evening the amendment came back, and stood on the second-floor slab in the last of the light with the paper in his jacket, and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding since April.

Fifteen weeks was not nine. Nine you bought back in the finishing. Fifteen was the finishing, all of it, with nothing left for the ordinary trouble that arrives in the second year of every project ever built.

He could go to them now. June 2004. Fourteen months of work to show them, a slab you could stand on, a raft over a filled well that had cost him twenty-six lakh. He could stand in a hall in Kopar with photographs and say: the ground was worse than the bores and I paid for it; the amendment took four months and I did not pay for it, and I will not; here is where we are; the date is now the first quarter of 2006.

And Bhalerao would ask — Bhalerao, who filed his electricity bills — why did the amendment take four months?

And the answer to that question, the true and complete answer, was: because in April of last year my wife made me move Mrs. Kanetkar from the third floor to the first so that she would not have to climb, and that required an amended plan.

Jagdish stood on the slab and turned that sentence over and found that he could not say it. Not because it was shameful. Because it was unbearable — because it would be heard in that hall as a man laying a fifteen-week delay at the feet of a woman of seventy-nine who had asked him for a Diwali, and no amount of explanation afterwards would take it back out of the room. Mrs. Kanetkar would hear it. She would apologise. She had apologised in March 2003 for something she should never have had to be given, and she would do it again, and Jagdish would have to stand there while she did.

So there was a true and complete answer, and it could not be given, and a partial answer would have been worse than none.

He put the amendment back in his jacket and drove to the office and told Pallavi to file it, and the second-floor slab was cast on the ninth of July, and the cycle restarted at fourteen days, and Salvi got it to twelve by September and was proud of that, and told him so, and Jagdish said well done and meant it.