Trapped.
Caged. Hemmed in by relentless circumstance. Tough times, sure. And if someone made you a generous offer, would you not take it?
That is the question of Aravind Adiga's fine new novel, "Last Man in Tower," a hardwood puzzle of a story that fits airtightly together, yet slides apart to display vast worlds within. In Mumbai, India, a real estate developer of limitless wealth has set his ambition on a massive luxury redevelopment on the site of Tower A of the Vishram Society. Once "pucca" (solid, permanent), Vishram Society's Tower A has sagged to match the precarious fortunes of its residents. Most have been members of the society for decades. They are neighbors, friends, fellow hangers-on as modern Mumbai heaves and buckles from the earthquake of too much money, too much corruption and too little room for human kindness.
So when developer Dharmen Shah makes an offer of unprecedented largess to everyone in Tower A contingent only on their leaving, all the residents rush to accept, dreaming of the new lives that soon will be theirs -- all but one. Sixty-one-year old Yogesh A. Murphy (known as Masterji), a retired schoolteacher who has lost his wife and daughter, does not wish to vacate. And under the charter rules of Vishram Society, his lone refusal to sign Shah's papers will quash the deal and condemn all the residents, including his lifelong friends, to a future without hope.
Shah's generous offer is matched by Adiga's own generous descriptions of his characters. The novel opens with a floor plan of the residents of Tower A -- both to help us remember and to help us connect. In the book's early pages, Adiga acts as a warmhearted tour guide to the tower's five floors. By the time we meet Dharmen Shah, the presumed villain, we have come to understand what is at stake in the residents' choices. But Adiga's achievement is to transform a conventional morality play (evil developer versus heroic holdout) into a hall of mirrors where "good" and "bad" blur into uncertainty and flux. With their futures on the line, the emotions of Masterji's neighbors -- whom we have come to know intimately -- rise to an operatic pitch, and they take ever more desperate measures to change the schoolteacher's mind.
"'Masterji!' The Secretary raised his voice. 'This is too much drama. It is just a simple thing -- a simple mistake that we made! And I keep telling you, it was not my idea. It was Ajwani!
"Masterji took the crumpled form from the floor and straightened it out. He read it again. 'It is a signature,' he whispered. 'My signature.'?"
From the delicate tensions of lifelong neighbors who'd be happy never to see each other again, to the roiling streets of the city, Adiga misses nothing. "He saw a drunk, half asleep; a foreign tourist who had clearly not slept in a long time; two vendors from the market who had probably been behind on their payments to the station; and then the men with vague, varied, and never-ending business who populate any police station."
When an irresistible object collides with an immoveable force, can anything remain standing? "Last Man in Tower" coils toward a shattering climax of ferocity, chaos and grace. We are left with the old uncomfortable truths: that humans create, destroy, love and hate in equal measures and all at once.