Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 15 of 40

A Good Year

The year to March 2005 was the best in the firm’s history and it was not close.

Thakurli sold out in February, all twenty-two, at a rate nobody in that lane had achieved before and which was in the newspaper. The commercial job near the station — the one Jagdish had taken for cash flow and disliked on sight and had never once described to anybody as architecture — returned a margin of thirty-one per cent and was let in full before completion. Ambernath had closed clean in 2003 with a snag list of eleven items and had produced, eighteen months later, four referrals, three of which became enquiries and one of which became a job.

Sawant was paid in full in January, eleven days early against the schedule Jagdish had promised him in September, and Jagdish telephoned him himself to say the last cheque was ready rather than letting Pallavi do it.

The bank moved the limit up in April without being asked twice.

The turnover for the year was the first time the firm had crossed a figure that Rege, in Pune, telephoned about — not to congratulate, exactly; Rege’s call consisted mostly of asking whether the money was in the bank or in the ground, and Jagdish said both, which was true, and Rege said that was the correct answer if you meant it and the wrong one if you were saying it to end the conversation, and Jagdish laughed and did not answer.

By any measure any bank, any accountant, or any of the forty people on the rolls could have applied, Wagh Infrastructure in the year to March 2005 was a firm that had come right.

It is necessary to say this plainly, because the shape of the story invites the reader to look for the year things went wrong, and the year things went wrong was the year things went well.

The prosperity was not a distraction from Shivaji Chowk. It was made of the same substance. The twenty-six lakh under the ground in 2003 had squeezed the working capital, which had lost him Sawant, which had brought in Tayde at eleven per cent under, which was nine lakh forty on the job and part of why the year looked as it did. The four months on the amendment had pushed the finishing trades into a window that overlapped Thakurli’s completion, which meant one set of supervisors covering both, which was efficient and was in the margin.

Every rupee of the best year in the firm’s history had some part of Shivaji Chowk’s slippage folded into it, and none of it was fraud, and none of it was even cutting corners. It was a competent builder running four jobs and moving what he had between them, which is the trade.

He was not at Shivaji Chowk between the fourth of January and the twenty-third of March 2005.

Eleven weeks. He did not notice it and nobody counted it at the time; the figure comes from Nikam’s gate register, which recorded vehicles, and which nobody ever looked at again until a clerk in Ketkar’s office went through it in 2006 for a different purpose entirely and mentioned it in passing.

The eleven weeks are accounted for and the accounting is dull. Thakurli’s completion and handover took four of them and was, in fairness, where a builder should have been. The commercial letting took two. There was a fortnight in February on the enquiry that came out of Ambernath, which was a society at Titwala and which he did not, in the end, take. There were nine days when Sumati was in hospital with her chest and came out again, and about which no one in the family made any fuss at the time, including her.

And there were, scattered through it, perhaps twelve days that could have been Shivaji Chowk and were something else, and Jagdish could not have told you what.

He spoke to Salvi three times a week throughout. He signed everything. He knew the structure was at the tenth floor, then the eleventh, then topped out on the sixth of March, and he knew the brickwork was running four floors behind and that this was normal, and he knew that Tayde’s truck had failed for eleven days in February because Salvi told him so on the telephone within two hours.

He knew every fact. He had not stood on the slab.

There is a thing that happens to a man standing on a slab that does not happen to a man being told about a slab on a telephone, and Jagdish Wagh knew what it was better than almost anybody in that district, because it was the whole basis of the career he had built on plots nobody else would take.

What happens is that you look at the wrong thing.

You go up to check the brickwork and on the way you notice that the shuttering oil is being applied thin, and that means one of two things, and you ask, and it turns out to be neither, it turns out that the oil is thin because the drums are eleven days late, and the drums are eleven days late because the same truck that is late with the steel is late with everything, and you have just learned something about your supplier’s cash that no telephone call in the world was going to give you.

That is the mechanism. Not vigilance — accident. A man on a site is a machine for accidental information, and Jagdish had run his firm on that machine for nineteen years, and between the fourth of January and the twenty-third of March 2005 he switched it off, in exchange for Thakurli, which was the best building his firm ever put up.

He went on the twenty-third of March and walked the whole thing from the raft to the twelfth floor, and it took him three hours, and he came down with fourteen items in his notebook, of which eleven were ordinary, two were Salvi’s judgment calls that he agreed with on reflection, and one was the plumbing.

The plumbing item was four lines. It concerned the routing of a stack in relation to a duct-shaft dimension that had come off the amended plan — the amended plan, drawn to move flat 4 down two floors, approved in June 2004 — and it was the sort of thing a good site manager sees in the drawing and a good builder sees in the concrete, and it needed a revision.

The revision took nine days in November, which is a figure that has appeared in this account already, and which now has a cause.

Standing in the compound on the twenty-third of March, with the topped-out frame above him and the best year in his firm’s history behind him, Jagdish Wagh looked at his own notebook and had a thought that he would have been unable to explain to Rege, to Meera, to the bank, or to any one of the eleven families in Kopar.

The thought was: I should have been here.

He wrote nothing down. He drove to the office and had a good afternoon.