ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

A strange thing happened the first time I listened to this book.  It’s a few years ago now, when I was still working and listening to audio books on the daily commute.  I got almost to the end of Booker-winning Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower and found that I just couldn’t bear to continue because I feared what might happen to its flawed hero Masterji.  I had become so invested in his story that I just didn’t want to know if something awful happened to him…

I had the paperback copy at home too, but I kept putting it aside for other things.  I had never had this kind of reluctance before, and it was still rankling a bit when I saw the audio book again at the library last week and decided to tackle it again in a more stalwart frame of mind.

Masterji is a member of the Vishram Society, a group of middle-class residents who live together in Tower A of a fading apartment complex in Mumbai.  Once smart but now needing more money than the residents can spare for repairs, the apartments are right next to the Dharavi slums, where they have attracted the attention of real estate developer Dharmen Shah.  He wants to capitalise on Mumbai’s real estate boom by demolishing them both and building a luxury high-rise on the land…

Although there are rumours that Shah does not always make good the promises he makes, most of the residents are keenly interested in his generous offer to buy them out with a combination of cash and a new residence somewhere else.  And although they are a bit ambivalent at first because the offer breaks up their close community, as time goes by, even those who were ambivalent eventually succumb to a combination of threats and inducements, until just one resident is holding out, Masterji…

The problem is that the deal is an all-or-nothing arrangement.  There is a deadline, set in concrete, and unless there is 100% agreement, Mr Shah will take his money elsewhere.  Or so the residents think.  They pressure Masterji because they see their hopes of a better future fading.  But what they don’t realise is that since Tower B was a pushover, full of ambitious young executives only too happy to desert their fading apartment block, Shah absolutely has to acquire Tower B or he will be stuck with land that is only half the size he needs to build his luxury complex.  However, Shah has a ‘left-hand man’ called Shanmugham who helps him to get his way in situations like this. 

So Masterji is besieged on the one hand by Mrs. Rego and Mrs. Puri, Mr. Ajwani and Mr. Kudwa, and on the other by Shanmugham and his thinly-veiled threats.

The tragedy of this scenario is that Masterji’s neighbours are corrupted by the deal.  Masterji wants to stay where he is because he is old, and because his apartment is full of memories, of his wife who died just a year ago, and his newly graduated daughter who was killed when waiting for a train and pushed by the unheeding crowd onto the tracks.   But his neighbours have their heart-rending stories too, especially Mrs Puri who is getting too old to care for her intellectually disabled son Ramu, and blind Mrs Pinto, who has memorised every bump in the stairwell wall so that she can still get about with some independence.  The characterisation is so deftly done that the reader is torn between impatience with Masterji’s obstinacy and with his poignant desire to put his head in the sand and ignore the rampant development all around him because he just wants to keep his home.

There are moments of droll humour, but the story takes a dark turn as one by one the community turns on Masterji.  The narration by Sam Dastor is excellent: the huge cast of characters are all rendered as individuals and the subtlety of their moral corruption is well-paced and depicted with care so that nothing seems one-dimensional.

Time and again we see stories of communities displaced by the building of Olympic ‘villages’, new freeways and urban reconstruction – Last Man in Tower puts a human face on the phenomenon, showing us that the Big Bad Developer does not work alone.  There are always others who benefit from development and their ethical standards can be just as flexible as his when money is involved.

Author: Aravind Adiga
Title: Last Man in Tower
Narrator: Sam Dastor
Publisher: Bolinda Audio, 2011
ISBN: 9781742854267
Source: Kingston Library