Lessons for Builders From ‘Last Man in Tower’
The whirring of the drill and the clatter of the concrete mixer are sounds familiar to residents of once sedate Indian city neighborhoods where “the builder” has come calling.
The builder is a magician of the (sometimes dark) alchemy of turning a one family bungalow into a four-floor apartment building (in Delhi) or a modest housing society into a gleaming apartment building (in Mumbai).
Aravind Adiga’s Dharmen Shah, a character in the Booker Prizewinning author’s second novel, “Last Man in Tower,” published earlier this month in the U.S. and releasing in India June 30, is one such magician. Mr. Adiga previously won the Man Booker literary prize in 2008 for “The White Tiger,” a tale told by an ultimately mutinous servant in New Delhi.
“He earned a reputation as a man who made other men rich,” writes Mr. Adiga of his Mumbai real estate developer, “always preferring to entice a recalcitrant tenant out of a building with a check rather than with a knife, and waiting until there was no other option.”
The developer’s prized target is Vishram Society, an “absolutely, unimpeachably pucca (solid)” suburban society that has stood for more than 50 years. His dream is to replace it with an apartment tower so grand that “when it is done ... people will know my life’s story.”
Mumbai’s real estate industry serves as a backdrop for Mr. Adiga’s new novel, in which he writes about the nitty-gritty of co-operative housing societies, the mechanics of the construction industry, the dynamics of working around the extended monsoons in the city and the ruthlessness of builder when it comes to redeveloping urban and suburban neighborhoods.
The hotly anticipated novel, which touches on the seedy underbelly of the real estate industry, comes amid a spate of scandals, many of them in the vicinity of Mumbai. In one, it appeared that politicians and their families had been allotted homes meant for war veterans and widows. In another, bankers and executives at a financial services firm were charged with allegedly colluding to steer large corporate loans to certain firms, mainly real estate developers.
Mr. Adiga paints a stark picture of Mumbai’s concrete jungle “slurping up sea, edging towards the other end of the bay like a snake’s tongue, hissing through salt water, there’s more land here, more land.”
A racy plot, which often comes across as a sleek movie script, explores Mumbai’s attitude towards money: One of the overarching themes is the conflict between an old-school, conservative India and a younger more mercenary India. At one point, there is a conversation about the appropriate buy-out for a long-standing tenant. (Builders, listen up).
“You can’t offer them 10 percent or 15 percent above market value,” the builder tells his assistant when asked about the generous nature of his buyout package for the staid Vishram Society. “You are asking them to give up their homes, the only homes some of them ever had. You have to respect human greed.”
In the book, Mr. Shah runs into opposition from a retired schoolteacher, the lone resident of Vishram Society who refuses the buyout and insists he will continue living in what he’s always known as home—and that provides the dramatic tension for the novel.
Of course, that tussle isn’t only an Indian story. Newspaper readers will remember a story of holdout Wu Ping that played out in China a few years ago, in which the real estate developer in question was finally able to buy out the resident and proceed. As for who triumphs over Vishram Society, read the book: Along the way, you’ll also learn plenty about Mumbaikars’ attitudes towards money and definitions of ‘home.’
This piece was first published in the Wall Street Journal website