Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 21 of 40

April

Two of the lights were green.

The sanitary fittings were decided on the twenty-ninth of November, a day inside the deadline, middle range, by a society that had enjoyed choosing them. The plaster caught up: Salvi got the internal plaster from the fifth floor to the twelfth between November and February, which was faster than it had run at any point in the job, and which he did by moving eleven men off the external and accepting that the external would then run into the monsoon, and which was the right trade and worked.

The lifts were the third light.

The order had gone on the fourth of October 2005 against the earliest delivery commitment that supplier had ever given anybody, which was the eleventh of January 2006. Jagdish had put that date in front of a room in a school hall in November, on paper, and Bhalerao had come and looked at it, and it was a real date given in good faith by a real company.

The cars came on the ninth of March.

Not through malice and not through anything anybody could have prevented from Dombivli. A component came from elsewhere and did not come, and the supplier’s man rang Salvi himself in December to say so, and rang again in January with a revised date, and the revised date held. Fifty-seven days.

A lift is not a lift when it arrives. It is installed, and then it is tested, and then it is inspected, and the inspection is not a thing a builder schedules; it is a thing a builder joins a queue for.

The lifts were signed off on the second of June.

The fourth light was money, and it was the one nobody in the school hall had thought to ask about.

The year to March 2006 was not a bad year. It was an ordinary one, which after the year to March 2005 felt like a stone in the shoe. Thakurli was sold and handed over and gone. The commercial job was let and its money was in. There was one new job, a small society at Titwala that he had finally taken in the autumn, and it was eleven months from any receipt.

What Jagdish had promised in November was Sundays from February and doubled finishing gangs from January. Both of those are cash. A doubled gang on the finishing trades at that scale was, on Salvi’s figures, a little over four lakh a month in additional labour and about two and a half in materials brought forward, against a project whose sale flats could not be registered until occupation and whose entire remaining income was therefore on the other side of a certificate he did not have.

He went to the bank in January and got it, at a rate, against the sale flats, and it was the right decision and he made it without agonising.

He doubled the gangs on the sixteenth of January.

He did not work Sundays in February, because on the first Sunday Salvi had eleven men and no supervisor and sent them home at ten, and because a Sunday gang without a supervisor is how you get the item that costs you a month. Sundays started properly in April.

April 2006 was the month in which the building became, to anybody standing in the compound, finished.

That is what makes the four months that follow hard to hold in the head. There is a version of lateness that looks like abandonment — a stopped site, a watchman, weeds in the shuttering — and the eleven families in Kopar would have known what they were looking at. That is not what this was.

By the end of April the flooring was down to the ninth floor. The lift cars were in the shafts and being commissioned. The external plaster was in progress on two elevations. The compound had a gate on it. On the twenty-second of April a man from the society drove past and reported, at the tea shop, that it was ready, and he was wrong, and he was not being stupid; it looked ready.

What remained was the certificate, and the last twenty per cent of the finishing, and the external plaster that was going to run into the monsoon because Salvi had traded it away in November for the internal, and the second-floor common passage that had been redrawn in an amended plan two years earlier and had to be built to the amendment and not to the original, which cost nine days that nobody had budgeted because nobody had remembered.

April went by on the thirtieth.

Jagdish did not go to them in May.

He had a reason and it was the same reason as the last one, which is the whole point of Part Three: the reason was that the true date was moving while he stood there.

On the first of May, Salvi’s figure was mid-July. On the twentieth of May, with the lift inspection unscheduled, it was August. In the second week of June, with the lifts signed off and the monsoon three weeks early on the external, it was September, and Salvi said September and then said, in the same breath, that he would not put his name to September.

Every time Jagdish resolved to go, he resolved to go with a date, because he had learned in November — correctly; it had been the best evening of the project — that a room can take almost anything if it is given a number and a piece of paper. And every time he had a number for four days, it moved.

So he waited to have one that would hold. That is the sentence. It is not a lie, it is not a rationalisation, it is what happened, and it is exactly the same sentence as October 2003 and July 2004 and September 2005, and by the summer of 2006 Jagdish Wagh had said it to himself so many times that it had the smoothness of something true.

Bhalerao’s register for those four months contains thirty-one entries. Nineteen are site visits with a floor count. Four record the transit rent arriving on the first. Two record telephone calls to the office in which Pallavi said she would ask. One, on the eleventh of June, reads:

11/6/06 — Drove past. Lifts appear working (lights). Bldg appears complete from outside.

The letter came on the fourteenth of July.

It was two paragraphs, typed by Bhalerao’s nephew, and signed by every one of the eleven households, including the Naiks, who had never lived in the building, and including Sanjay Kanetkar, who was signing for a dead woman’s flat, and it was, by the standards of what it could have been, extraordinarily mild.

It said that the revised date of April 2006 given at the meeting of the twelfth of November 2005 had passed on the thirtieth of April. It said that the society had not received any communication since. It requested a meeting and a revised date in writing.

It did not use the word breach. It did not copy a lawyer. It did not mention clause 9 or clause 14 or the rent. It requested a meeting.

Jagdish read it twice in the office and then took it to Ketkar the same afternoon, which was the first time in twenty-three years that he had taken a letter from a society to a solicitor before answering it himself.

Ketkar read it and put it down and said that it was a perfectly reasonable letter and that he should go and meet them, and that he should take the site programme, and that he should not, on any account, give a date he was not certain of.

“That’s what I did in November,” Jagdish said.

“I know what you did in November,” said Ketkar. “You gave them April.”

The meeting was fixed for Friday the eleventh of August, at seven, in the school hall.

On the ninth of August, at about six in the evening, Bhalerao came to the office above the bank without an appointment, carrying two things.