Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 36 of 40

He Takes It

He signed at eleven in the morning on the fourth of November 2008 in Ketkar’s office, and there were three documents on the table and the plot was the second one.

The first was the completion certificate correspondence on the small commercial job, which needed his signature in four places and had needed it for a fortnight.

The second was the agreement for sale in respect of the property described in the schedule thereto, being the plot the district had called Site 14 since about 1986 for reasons nobody could any longer reconstruct, the vendors being one gentleman aged seventy-one and one lady resident at Bangalore acting through her constituted attorney.

The third was a fresh power of attorney for Pallavi to collect registered documents, because the old one had expired in September and nobody had noticed.

He signed them in that order because that was the order Ketkar’s clerk had put them in.

There is nothing else to report about the signing.

Ghaisas was there and did not celebrate. He shook hands, said “Thank you, Wagh saheb,” and sat down, and Ketkar’s clerk brought tea, and at some point in the next fifteen minutes Ghaisas said that he would now go and see about his hip, and everybody laughed politely, and he left with the folder that had been on that desk three times in seventeen years.

He died in 2013. Jagdish went.

The vendor aged seventy-one did not attend. The attorney for the lady at Bangalore was a young man from a firm in Vashi who was in and out in forty minutes and had plainly been told nothing about the history of the plot and would not have found it interesting.

The price was the price. It was paid in the ordinary way.

Registration was on the eleventh. Mutation followed in February.

The engineering was settled before the signature and this is either the most important fact in the chapter or a piece of self-exoneration, and the book has already told you it is not going to decide.

Between the twenty-ninth of September and the fourth of November he had a proper contour survey done, and two infiltration tests at the low corner, and a soil profile that went four metres, and he had Pradhan out on the plot twice. The scheme that went to the draughtsman in the third week of October had a retention tank under the podium at the south-west, sized off the survey, with a controlled discharge — and he opened negotiations with the warehouse company for the easement in November and concluded them in March 2009, at a price, without difficulty, because a warehouse company with a lawyer is a body you can transact with.

Fifty-one lakh, in the end, against the forty to sixty he had done in his head in the rain.

He did not do any of that in order to be able to say he had done it. He did it because that is what he was for and because he had known since he was thirty-three exactly what that plot needed.

And the other reading is available on the same facts, and it is this: a man who wants a plot will find the fifty-one lakh, and a man who does not want it will find that fifty-one lakh is too much, and the survey and the tests and the tank do not tell you which man was standing in the water on the twenty-ninth of September. They tell you what he built afterwards.

Both of those are true. Nobody, including Jagdish Wagh, has ever been able to say which of them came first.

Four days later, on the eighth, he drove Meera to Kalyan for a wedding.

It was about fifty minutes on a Saturday afternoon and she had a wedding sari across her knees in a bag and they had talked about the traffic and about Aditi’s hostel and about whether Sumati should be left alone in the evenings any more, which was a subject that had started in August and had not yet been resolved.

Somewhere past the pipeline he said:

“In April 2005 you started coming in four days a week.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never told me why.”

“No.”

He kept both hands on the wheel.

“Was it Shivaji Chowk?”

“No,” said Meera.

That is the entire exchange. It is the second time he asked and it is the shortest of the three, and she gave him a plain answer to the question he asked, which was a question about Shivaji Chowk, and she answered it truthfully, and it closed nothing whatever.

He drove for a while.

“Is it something I did?”

“Ask me another time,” she said, and put her hand on his arm for a moment, which she did about four times a year, and then took it off. “Not today. We’re going to a wedding and I’ll have to talk to Kanchan for two hours.”

They came back at about ten at night.

And in the car, on the return, with his wife asleep against the window and the wedding sari folded in the back, Jagdish Wagh thought about going to the society office at Shivaji Chowk and asking Phatak for the register.

It was the fourth time he had thought about it and it was the last.

He could see the whole of it. It was a ground-floor room in a building he had put up, with a cupboard he had specified, forty minutes’ walk from where he was sitting, and Phatak was a thorough man without history in the matter who would hand it over to anybody who asked, and would probably make tea, and would certainly not understand what was being asked for or why.

Item six. Register (personal, ex-secretary), 2005–06.

He would take it into a room and read it from the fourteenth of March 2005 to the nineteenth of November 2006 in one sitting, in order, at one go, which is the only thing that had ever been done to that document that he had not done — nine people in a ground-floor office had had it done to them in December 2006 by a man reading an inventory, and Deshpande had tried to describe it in a tea shop and had not been able to finish the sentence.

Four days after taking a plot he had refused in 1991, at the end of the year in which his son had left and his firm had gone from forty people to twenty-two, Jagdish Wagh sat at a signal outside Kalyan and understood, without any drama at all, that he was not going to ask for the register, and that the reason was not that it would tell him anything new.

It was that he had been able to hear it in order at any time in two years and had not, and that the not-hearing was now a longer document than the register.

The light changed. He drove home.