Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 29 of 40

The Federation

The letter came at the end of November and was signed by a man called Athavale, who was the Federation’s honorary secretary and had been for six years, and it asked whether Wagh saheb would address the December meeting.

The subject proposed was: Programme and Time Discipline in Redevelopment — the Developer’s View.

Jagdish read it standing up in the office with his coat still on, and laughed once, out loud, which brought Pallavi to the door.

Then he accepted.

The Federation was not a regulator and had no power over anybody. It was an umbrella body for about ninety housing societies across Dombivli and the immediate outskirts, run from two rooms by three retired men and a part-time clerk, and its meetings were attended by secretaries and chairmen and the sort of committee member who reads the agenda. It existed because in a city where four hundred buildings were going to be redeveloped in fifteen years, somebody had to be the place where a Bhalerao could ask a question.

The invitation was not a joke and Athavale was not being ironic. This is important.

He had asked Jagdish because Jagdish had, six weeks earlier, handed over a redevelopment in which every family got the flat in the annexure, on the specified floor, with the transit rent paid for thirty-eight months, and because Athavale had heard about the twenty-six lakh and the well from Gokhale, and about the meeting in August from three separate people, and because there was a line going round the Federation’s two rooms that autumn to the effect that Wagh had gone and asked a society what it had cost them, which nobody in that district had ever heard of a builder doing.

He was being asked as the good one. That was the whole of it and there was no trap in it anywhere.

He spoke on the tenth of December in a hall attached to a temple trust, to about seventy people, of whom perhaps fifty were office-bearers of societies that had not yet gone into redevelopment and were trying to work out how to.

He had prepared. He had eleven pages of Salvi’s handwriting from September 2005 in a folder and he had made his own notes from them, and he did not use any of it, because four minutes in he put the notes down.

What he said, over about fifty minutes, was this.

That the period in the agreement is not a forecast. It is a number that a developer arrives at by taking his honest programme and removing from it the margin he privately believes he needs, because a period with visible margin in it loses the job to the man next to him who has taken his margin out too.

That every developer therefore hides a margin, and that the hidden margin is never written down, and that a margin which is not written down cannot be tracked, so that the day it is gone nobody knows, including him.

That the three things that eat a programme are not the things societies ask about. They are ground, permissions and the slab cycle, in that order, and of those the ground is the one the developer will tell you about because it makes him look diligent, and the slab cycle is the one he will never mention because it is a day and a half at a time and it does not sound like anything.

That a site manager reports what he recovered, not what he lost, because recovery is what he did and loss is what happened, and that this is not dishonesty, it is the structure of the job, and the only cure is that somebody senior asks for the total in writing every month and writes it on a board where the site staff can see it.

And that a society should insist, in the agreement, on a written revised completion date every quarter, whether or not there is any change, signed by the developer, given whether asked for or not — because the thing that goes wrong is not that a builder lies about the date. It is that there is no occasion on which he is required to say it.

Fifty minutes. No adjectives. It was the best and most useful thing Jagdish Wagh ever said in public, and every word of it was paid for.

The questions were good and he answered them properly, and the fourth one was from a man in the third row who introduced himself as the chairman of a society at Vishnunagar which was six months from signing.

“Wagh saheb, you have told us to ask for a written date every quarter. Suppose the developer gives it. What do we do when the date moves?”

“Nothing,” Jagdish said. “The date moving is not the problem. The date moving is the job. Every building I have ever put up has had a date that moved.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“The gap.” He had his hands behind his back. “The problem is the distance between the day the builder knows and the day you are told. That is the only number in this that anybody should be measuring, and no agreement in this district measures it, and I have never met a society that asked for it.”

A pause.

“What is a normal gap?” the man said.

And Jagdish Wagh, standing in a temple hall in December 2006 in front of seventy people, said:

“On my last project it was fourteen months, once, and then five weeks, and then nine months.”

There was a silence of about two seconds and then Athavale, from the side, said something warm about the value of candour, and there was applause — not a lot, but real — and the man from Vishnunagar sat down looking as though he had been given something, which he had.

Nobody in that hall heard it as a confession.

They heard a distinguished builder illustrating a general principle with a frank example from his own work, which is the most respectable way there is to say a terrible sentence out loud, and which is why he was able to say it at all.

He had done the same thing in Thane in September 2003 with four true words about a bad plot. He was better at it now. That is the only change three years had made: in 2003 he had told the exact truth and been heard as modest, and in 2006 he told the exact truth and was heard as instructive, and on both occasions he had known, while the room was still making its noise, precisely what he had done.

Athavale asked him afterwards, over tea, whether he would do it again in the spring, and whether he would consider joining the Federation’s redevelopment sub-committee, which met four times a year and drafted the model clauses that about ninety societies used.

Jagdish said yes to both.

He served on that sub-committee from 2007 to 2014. The quarterly written-date clause went into the Federation’s model agreement in the revision of 2008 and is in it still, and it is used, in some form, by a number of societies in that district that has never been counted, and it works.

He never told any of them where it came from.