Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 31 of 40

Quiet Year

The first enquiry came in January, nineteen days after the Federation talk, from a society at Vishnunagar whose chairman had asked him a question in the third row about what a normal gap was.

The second came in February, through Athavale, from a society near the station with nineteen families and a clean title.

The third came in April and was the best of them: forty-one families, two buildings, a plot with nothing wrong with it at all, the kind of job a builder of his standing waits eleven years for.

The fourth came in July, through Gokhale, from Gokhale’s wife’s sister’s society at Thakurli, and it came with the sentence, delivered pleasantly across a table, that they had asked for him by name.

He turned down all four.

He had reasons for each and they were not the same reason, and every one of them was true, which is a pattern this book has established and does not need to labour.

Vishnunagar was declined on capacity; he had Titwala running and one supervisor. The station society was declined on title, honestly, after Ketkar found a defect in a 1978 conveyance that took four months to explain and which the society itself did not know about, and Jagdish spent two hours explaining it to them for nothing and they were grateful.

The forty-one family job at the end of April he declined in a meeting that lasted eleven minutes, and he declined it on the ground that he could not staff it, and it was the only one of the four that was not true. He could have staffed it. He could have had Kambli’s number two inside a month and everybody in that trade knew it.

Thakurli he declined by letter.

Athavale asked him about it in September, over tea, after a sub-committee meeting, in a manner that made clear he had been asked to ask by somebody else.

“Wagh saheb, forgive me. You are on this committee drafting model clauses for redevelopment, and you have turned down four redevelopments this year.”

“I know.”

“People notice.”

“Let them notice.”

Athavale stirred his tea. He was sixty-nine and had been a schoolmaster and had a schoolmaster’s ability to leave a silence in exactly the right place.

“I’ll say it plainly,” Jagdish said. “I don’t want to be in a room with eleven families and a period.”

“Then say that to the sub-committee. It would be the most useful thing anybody has said to it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because the clause we wrote in June is a good clause and it works, and it will work better coming from a builder with a clean record than from a builder who has told a room he cannot sleep.” He put his cup down. “If I say it, the clause becomes a confession. Somebody will look into why I said it, and they will find a job that was fourteen months late, and the clause will be about Shivaji Chowk instead of being about every building in this district. Let it be a technical clause written by a technical committee.”

Athavale considered him for a while.

“That is either very generous or very convenient,” he said, “and I have not decided which, and I do not think you have either.”

The firm went from forty to twenty-two across 2007 and nobody was sacked.

That is a real distinction and it mattered enormously to Jagdish and it should be recorded accurately. Salvi left in November 2006. Nikam went with him in February to the Ambernath firm, and Jagdish wrote the reference. Two of the three site supervisors went in the natural way of a trade where men follow work; the third stayed and is still with the firm. The junior draughtsman was let go with three months and a reference and got a better job. One accountant left and was not replaced. Four site staff on the Titwala job were on the Titwala job and finished when it finished.

Nobody was called into the eleven-by-nine room and told there was no work. Jagdish would have regarded that as a failure of a different order and he arranged the year specifically so that it would not happen, and it cost him money to arrange it that way, and he never mentioned it.

By December there were twenty-two on the rolls, one live site at Titwala, one small commercial enquiry, and a bank balance that was, for the first time since 1998, entirely uncomplicated.

Rege telephoned from Pune in November, having heard about the forty-one family job.

“You’ve gone off it.”

“I’ve gone quiet.”

“Jagdish.” A pause down a bad line. “A builder who goes quiet at forty-nine does not go loud again at fifty-two. He goes quiet, and then he goes small, and then one day he takes something he shouldn’t because he needs it, and everybody says how sad, he used to be so careful.”

“Is that a prediction?”

“It’s a description,” said Rege. “I’ve watched four men do it. Take the good job. Take the forty-one families. Take it because you don’t want it.”

Jagdish said he would think about it, which meant no, and Rege knew it meant no, and they talked about Rege’s granddaughter for eleven minutes and rang off.

That is the last useful conversation between them recorded in this book. Rege died in 2012 and Jagdish went to Pune for it.

Aditi went to Pune in July.

Planning, five years, and the argument about whether it was a real profession had run from February to May and had been conducted almost entirely between her and her mother, with Jagdish brought in twice as an authority and finding, both times, that he was not required to have an opinion so much as to be present while one was formed.

He drove her down with two bags and a steel trunk.

On the way, somewhere past Lonavala, she said: “Can I ask you a work thing?”

“Ask.”

“At Shivaji Chowk. Why didn’t you tell them in 2004?”

He drove for about a kilometre.

“Because I didn’t have a date I could stand behind,” he said.

“That’s what you’d tell a committee.”

“It’s also true.”

“I know it’s true,” said Aditi. “That’s not the same as it being the reason.”

She was nineteen and had not yet read a development agreement in her life, and she said it looking out of the window at the ghats with no particular emphasis, the way you say a thing you have been carrying for a while and have decided to put down somewhere it will not make a mess.

Jagdish did not answer. She let him not answer, which was new, and which he noticed, and which frightened him more than the argument would have.

They stopped for tea at the usual place and talked about her hostel.

Nikhil turned sixteen that October and was not driven anywhere.