Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 12 of 40

The Second Contractor

Sawant had supplied steel to Wagh Infrastructure since 1993 and had never once been paid on time, and this had never once been a problem, because being paid late by a builder who pays is the entire business model of a supplier in that district and both men knew it.

What changed in September 2004 was not the lateness. It was the shape of the lateness.

Twenty-six lakh had gone into the ground at Shivaji Chowk in the last quarter of 2003. It had gone in as piling and engineered fill and a raft, and it had gone in out of margin, which meant in practice out of the working capital that moved between four sites, and which meant that across 2004 every payment the firm made was made eleven days later than it had been made in 2002. Not sixty days late. Seventy-one. Then seventy-eight.

Sawant’s own bank had done something to his limit in July. He came to the office himself in September, which he had not done in six years, and sat in the eleven-by-nine room and was extremely polite, and asked for sixty days.

“I can’t do sixty,” Jagdish said.

“Saheb, I’ve done ninety for you for eleven years.”

“You’ve done ninety when the ninety was a habit. It isn’t a habit now, it’s a number I’d be promising you, and I’d be promising it on the Thakurli receipts, and Thakurli is slow.” He put his hands flat on the desk. “I’ll do seventy-five and I’ll do it on paper, from Pallavi, dated, every month. Or I’ll clear your whole outstanding over four months and we stop, and there’s no bad word from me anywhere, and when Thakurli sells you come back.”

Sawant thought about it for a long time, and Jagdish let him, and afterwards was glad he had made the second offer honestly rather than as a threat dressed as an offer, because the second offer was the one Sawant took.

They shook hands. It was, on both sides, a decent piece of business between two men who had run out of room. Sawant was paid in full by January. He is still in the trade. He supplied Wagh Infrastructure again in 2009 and never once, in any bar in that district, said a word about the firm that was not respectful.

None of that helped anybody in October 2004.

Salvi found the replacement in nine days, which was fast.

The man’s name was Tayde, he worked out of a yard past Diva, he was eleven per cent under Sawant on the rate, and he had two things wrong with him that Salvi identified immediately and reported.

The first was that eleven per cent under is not a discount, it is a message. Tayde was buying work. A supplier buying work is a supplier with capacity, and a supplier with capacity in a September when everybody else is full is a supplier other people have stopped using.

The second was the yard. Salvi went to look at it, which is the sort of thing that made Salvi worth what he was paid, and reported that it was well kept and that the stock was covered and that there was not very much of it, and that Tayde’s delivery ran on one truck and a hired second.

“He’ll be slow,” Salvi said, on the telephone, on a Wednesday afternoon in the first week of October.

“How slow?”

“Two days on a call-off instead of one. Sometimes three.”

“On a twelve-day cycle.”

“On a twelve-day cycle.” A pause. “It won’t break the cycle. It’ll make the cycle thirteen and a half.”

Jagdish was in the car outside the Thakurli site with the engine off and a purchase man waiting for him at the gate.

He should have said: no, pay Sawant’s rate to somebody with two trucks, we cannot afford a day and a half on a cycle when we are fifteen weeks under. That was the correct instruction and he was the only person in the firm with the authority and the information to give it, because he was the only person in the firm who knew the number fifteen.

What he said was: “What do you want to do?”

It was not abdication. He had asked Salvi that question perhaps four hundred times in nine years and it was, most of the time, the best sentence a man in his position could say, because Salvi’s answer was usually better than his own would have been and because a site manager who is asked becomes a site manager who thinks.

“Take Tayde,” Salvi said. “The eleven per cent is nine lakh across the job and nine lakh is real, and a day and a half a cycle I can absorb by pulling the block work forward. I’d rather have the money and the trouble than no money and a different trouble.”

“Then take him.”

And it was, given everything Salvi knew, exactly the right call.

He did not know the number fifteen. He knew there had been rain and he knew about the well because he had stood in it, and he had given Jagdish six weeks for the amendment himself in July. He had, if he had ever sat down and added his own figures, most of the pieces.

But adding them was not his job, and nobody had ever put a completion date in front of him and said this is the true one, not the one on the board. The board said August 2005 and had said August 2005 for twenty months, and Salvi ran his site against the board, and a man running against a board that is fifteen weeks wrong will make correct decisions all day and arrive somewhere else.

Tayde was slow. He was slow in the way Salvi predicted and then, in February 2005, slow in a way nobody predicted, when his hired second truck stopped being available for eleven days and the call-offs went to four days and the cycle went to fifteen.

Salvi pulled the block work forward exactly as he said he would, and it worked, and he was right about the nine lakh, which was nine lakh and forty thousand and which is in the accounts and can be found.

The cycle averaged thirteen point eight days across the remaining eighteen slabs.

Against twelve, on eighteen slabs, that is thirty-two days.

Nobody calculated it. Salvi did not calculate it because he was tracking against the board and absorbing as he went, and Jagdish did not calculate it because by the spring of 2005 he had stopped calculating the total, and had begun instead — he could not have told you when it started — to track the project as a series of individual weeks that were each, on their own, recoverable.

That is the mechanism. It is not dramatic and it does not require anybody to be a fool.

Fifteen weeks in July 2004. Thirty-two days across the slab cycle. Nine days in November when the plumbing drawings were revised. Six in February for the lift shaft. And every one of those numbers passing under the eye of a competent man who looked at it, correctly, as a thing that could be got back.