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Just One Minute
THE NEXT DAY Wapa comes home from work a little early. He offers to take me to the La-la-la Restaurant for mango ice cream.
“Yay! Ice cream? Can I call Reeni?”
“Of course.”
I ring Reeni’s doorbell. She asks Arvind Uncle. He goes and gets his wallet. Which is how not two, not three, but four of us end up around a table at the La-la-la Restaurant, chatting over little bowls of creamy melt-in-your-mouth mango ice cream.
Ice cream is not the only thing to share. There is news as well. Reeni’s daddy has a job! He is going to be working at the TV station. They needed an accountant and now they have hired him. He is excited, so Reeni is excited, too. And so am I, since that is how friendship works.
“Samples of new surprise ice cream for anyone?” the waiter says.
Reeni and I both want to try the new surprise ice cream. The waiter says he’ll be back in just one minute.
As he disappears into the back of the La-la-la Restaurant, the talk at our table turns to Book Uncle.
“Would you believe the mistake I made?” Arvind Uncle says. He talks about that letter he wrote to Mayor SLY. “Bad mistake, I tell you. I was upset because our association got threatened with a fine of two thousand rupees for debris and clutter on the pavement.”
“Why?” Wapa asks. “Why would they suddenly decide to fine us?”
“Politics and crookedness, that’s why,” says Reeni’s father. He said that after he sent his explaining-not-complaining letter, he got suspicious. So he asked a few questions. He found out that a crew of city workers had been sent to clean up the street just outside the Palm Tree Hotel.
The Palm Tree Hotel is down the road from Horizon Apartment Flats. Why was the city suddenly so worried about the road outside the hotel? So Reeni’s daddy found out who owns that hotel.
“It seems the owner’s daughter is getting married and the future in-laws are coming here from Mumbai for the wedding.”
Naturally they’re going to stay in that very fancy hotel that we walk past all the time but have never been in. They want to get the sidewalks cleared and cleaned in time for the wedding.
We know that Palm Tree Hotel very well. Whenever the pressure in our water taps goes down, Umma grumbles, Look at the lawn of that Palm Tree Hotel! Look at those fountains. They’re drinking up our water.
The just-one-minute waiter finally brings little sample cups with very pink scoops in them. Pomegranate. It tastes zippy and sweet.
“So who is he?” says Wapa. “The owner of the Palm Tree Hotel?”
Arvind Uncle lowers his voice. “You won’t believe it. One of the reporters at the station told Shoba. It’s the mayor.”
“The mayor?”
Suddenly an ice cream scooper has scooped a giant hole in my insides. “Mayor SLY?”
What? This is why he wants Book Uncle off the pavement at the corner of St. Mary’s Road and 1st Cross Street? To clean up the street for his daughter’s wedding?
“All the hoopla about fines and permits is just an excuse,” says Arvind Uncle.
It’s unbelievable.
Book Uncle is not debris. He is not clutter. How can anyone say that about a lending library that puts the right book into the right hands on the right day?
That sweet and zippy pomegranate ice cream suddenly tastes flat.