The Old man and the Building
At a vertiginous moment in this
brilliant Novel the eponymous last man in the tower - Masterji - looks at the
neighbors he has lived with for 30 years and asks the question “Am I looking
at good people or bad?” It is the sort of question we find ourselves asking about
people around us whom we feel we knew who change drastically when circumstances
change and to our dismay they become strangers. 'Last man in Tower' is a
devastating portrayal of shifting morals of shifty people in the city of
Mumbai. A city which is always asking “What do you want?” and goading you to
get it and in the process enriching you and itself thereby making it into a megalopolis.
Here is when a person like Masterji stands out as an anachronism as he wants “nothing”.
Yogesh Murthy or Masterji is an
obdurate teacher and widower belonging to the Vishram society in the northern
suburb of Mumbai. Vishram society is “a dreadnought of middle class
respectability” built in the 1950s and by the start of the Novel already
creaking under infrastructural problems. The society is home to a kaleidoscope of
people belonging to various castes and creed who over the years have shared each
other’s joys and sorrows and have generally got along like one big family.
Enter Dharmen Shah who sees in
the acquisition of this society for redevelopment a chance to become the
biggest builder in the city. He has in fact called the new luxury apartment building
he is set to build on the site ‘Shanghai’, a tribute to the Chinese who he idolizes for their sheer will power. He is no novice in such matters as
he believes that “human greed must be respected” and hence makes a generous
offer to the residents of the society. Eventually all but Masterji are goaded
to accept the offer by appealing to their basest selfish desires. Only Masterji
holds out despite his neighbors’ pleas and eventual boycott as he is the one
who has least to gain from the offer as the building is “pregnant with his past”.
A past with his loving but deceased wife and daughter. Also he sees in this
final battle a chance to redeem his lifelong timidity in dealing with similar
situations earlier in his life. A chance to become a man again at the age of
61. So much is his stubbornness that it seems to border on Nihilism making him an
ambivalent hero whom we are not sure whether to sympathize with or not.
Masterji hails from the Karnataka
coast and has made it as a teacher in Mumbai. He has old world virtues and
moralities and a penchant for acquiring knowledge. His son has inherited none
of his qualities and has moved out with his family which has left Masterji
alone. He has recently retired and spends the time teaching the society kids
and despite being agnostic reads spiritual books about transmigration of the
soul to understand what became of his wife and daughter. He is the kind of man
who does not trod over a Times of India copy because one of his students writes
for it now.
Dharmen Shah on the other hand is
also a self-made man who came from his Gujarat village to the city with a
handful of rupees and made it as one of the most important builders by a
combination of “charm and brutality”. He can charmingly breakup a mutiny of
laborers as well as threaten people with violence to leave their homes. He believes that “deep down, everyone admires
violence”. He divides the world into two kinds of men “those who can get things
done and those that can’t” and he places himself proudly in the former. On the
verge of greatness he encounters a man who has the same stubbornness as him but
on the other end of the morality spectrum. And he knows he has met his match in
Masterji in whom he sees, “a weak man who has found a place where he feels
strong”.
As Hegel used to say a tragic
situation is one when two rights collide. And here in the collision of the
builder and the old teacher we have a classic tragic situation which Adiga
brilliantly delineates. Along the way Adiga shines his light on the amoral
nature of human beings and the collusion of vested interests in the city and
society in general who will eventually get what they want even at great human
cost. Hence Adiga is ringing a gong about the kind of society we have become
and it is gripping as it is disgusting to see what unfolds.
Once the battle lines are drawn
both the teacher and the builder dig their hoofs in. Masterji takes recourse to
what he thinks are institutions of democracy – Police, Law and Media – who all
disappoint him showing how hollowed out with corruption they have become to be
of any use to the weak. Shah himself is trapped in his own image as a builder
who will be the first suspect if anything happens to Masterji. Hence he relies
on psychological tactics to influence Masterji’s neighbors to do what he
himself cannot do. The denouement of the Novel deals with how these two
opposite men face off each other and who wins in the end. However ironically
they never meet through ought the Novel and their fight is carried out in the
shadows of the city and its institutions. They are like two massive celestial
beings circling each other trying to gobble each other up without ever meeting.
Although this book does not have
the biting satire of the White Tiger it is one of the finest examples of
character studies ever attempted in fiction. The characters are put inside the
cauldron created by the clashing moral universes of the two protagonists,
allowed to simmer in their hypocrisy and in the end stripped of their basic human
decency. They look like the people Adiga characterizes in his other Novel 'Selection
Day' while describing the Indian middle class
“What are we, then? We are
animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbor's children in five minutes,
and our own in ten”.
This Novel is a moral playground of
epic proportions and is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the decadence
of our times.
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