Rent Agreement

Two BHK, second floor, Al-Hira Residency, Tolichowki, behind the Seven Tombs road. East facing. Covered parking for one bike. Bore water plus Manjeera water on alternate days. Nine thousand five hundred a month, three months’ deposit, no bachelors, no non-veg smell complaints, lift is coming.

That’s how I wrote it on the board outside my office in 2019. I still have the board. I wrote the same thing every month for eleven months, because every month somebody took that flat and every month, inside one week, they left it.

You have to understand, I am not a superstitious man. I am a broker. I have been a broker in Tolichowki and Mehdipatnam for nineteen years, and before that my father was a broker in Malakpet, and between the two of us we have rented out flats with seepage, flats with no windows, flats where the landlord’s mother lived in the kitchen and refused to move. Once I rented a flat in Shaikpet with a dead buffalo in the sump. You learn to see a problem as a commission that hasn’t happened yet.

But this flat.

The first family was from Kurnool, husband, wife, two boys. Six days. The wife came to my office crying, saying somebody was sitting on the end of the bed every night. Not touching, she said, only sitting. You could see the mattress go down. The husband stood behind her nodding and nodding and would not meet my eyes.

The second was a software couple from Gachibowli who wanted something cheaper. Four days. The water in the bathroom bucket kept turning, they said. Round and round. Nobody touching it.

Third, a retired Railways man who said he’d slept in station waiting rooms in Itarsi in 1983 and was not scared of anything. He left on the second night without his suitcase. I still have his suitcase also.

Hallu hallu it got so that the landlord, Siddiqui Sahab, who lives in Jeddah and phones every Friday after Jumma, started asking me what I was doing wrong. What am I doing wrong? I’m renting it, I said. That is the whole job. Keeping them is your flat’s job.

* * *

It was my wife’s idea to go to Maulana Hafeez. Not mine. I want that on the record.

He sits in a little room up a staircase in Purani Haveli, behind a shop that sells attar and those plastic rosaries that glow in the dark. Very old man, white beard down to here, glasses with one arm held on with thread. People go to him for exams, marriages, a husband who has stopped coming home, that kind of thing. He listened to me without saying anything. Then he asked for the address and wrote it down on the back of an electricity bill.

He went to the flat on a Thursday afternoon, after Asr. I stood in the corridor. He went in alone and he was in there forty minutes, and I could hear him talking. Not reciting. Talking. Like a man discussing the price of a plot. Once I heard him laugh.

He came out, wiping his glasses on his kurta.

“Kya hua, Maulana Sahab? He’ll go?”

“Nakko,” he said. “He won’t go. He’s been there since before the building. Since before the road. Your building is on top of his house, mian. Not the other way.”

“So what to do?”

“He has no objection to people. He just doesn’t like how you’re doing it. Nobody asked him anything. You put people in his house without telling him.” Maulana Sahab put his glasses back on. “He wants it in writing.”

“Writing?”

“A proper agreement. Like you do. He says you people are always making agreements. Everyone has an agreement except him.”

I laughed. Then I saw Maulana Sahab was not laughing, and I stopped.

* * *

So I made one. What else was I going to do, I’m a broker. I went to the stamp vendor outside the Mehdipatnam sub-registrar’s office and bought a hundred-rupee stamp paper, and I took the standard leave-and-license format from my computer, the one I’ve used maybe two thousand times, eleven months, notice period one month, all that.

LICENSOR: Mr. Abdul Qadir Siddiqui, through his authorised agent Salim Qureshi.

LICENSEE: and here I stopped for a long time, with my wife looking over my shoulder, and finally I typed: The Existing Occupant of Flat 203, Al-Hira Residency.

I left the terms blank. I don’t know why. Something told me to. I signed it as agent, and Maulana Sahab came with me on the Thursday night and we left it on the kitchen counter of the empty flat, with a pen. A good pen. A Parker my brother-in-law gave me when I got married, which I have never once used because I am afraid of losing it.

In the morning the paper was full.

* * *

I’m telling you exactly. The blank space under TERMS AND CONDITIONS was filled, front side and back side, in handwriting so neat it looked printed. The old kind of handwriting, like the clerks in the Collectorate used to have, every letter joined, every line straight. In English. With numbered clauses.

1. Quiet hours shall be observed from Isha till Fajr. The Licensor’s tenants may speak, but shall not shout, and shall not drag furniture.

2. No dogs. The Occupant has nothing against dogs but dogs have something against him.

3. The holy Qur’an may be recited in the premises at any time, and the Occupant asks to be permitted to listen. But Surah Al-Baqarah shall not be played at full volume through a mobile speaker in the hall for the purpose of removing the Occupant, as was done by the second tenants, which was unkind, and which gave him a headache for a week.

4. The small room on the west side shall be kept empty. It is his.

5. Tenants shall not throw hot water into the drain of the bathroom without first saying Bismillah, as there are children.

I didn’t ask what that one meant. I still don’t want to know.

It went on like that. Eleven clauses. A lot of them were the kind of thing any landlord would want, honestly. Clause 7 was about not drying clothes in the balcony facing the road, because it looks cheap. I agreed with Clause 7.

Clause 11 said:

11. In consideration of the above, the Occupant shall permit the Licensor’s tenants to reside in peace. In return, the Broker shall supply to the Occupant one (1) occupant every Ramzan, on or before the 27th night, for his own household, the Occupant having been alone for a long time.

And under that, where it says SIGNATURE OF LICENSEE, a mark. Not a name. Like a small flame drawn with one line, very carefully, by somebody who had practised.

Maulana Sahab read it twice and handed it back to me.

“Your agreement,” he said. “Your problem.”

* * *

What can I tell you. It worked.

I rented the flat the following week to a nice family from Nanded. The man ran a mobile repair shop near Rethibowli. They stayed. They stayed eleven months and renewed. The wife told my wife it was the coolest flat she had ever lived in, even in May, and that the children slept like stones. The west room they kept for storing the cooler in winter, and they never once went in there for anything else, because I had told them, smiling, it’s the landlord’s room, Siddiqui Sahab keeps some files. Everybody believes in files.

Siddiqui Sahab phoned from Jeddah after Jumma and said Salim bhai, what did you do? I said, I did my job.

And when Ramzan came, I did my job also.

Look. I am not going to sit here and pretend. You want me to say I was sleepless, I prayed, I went to Ajmer barefoot. I didn’t. I thought about it carefully, the way I think about every deal. The agreement said one occupant. It did not say a good one.

The first year it was Pasha. You won’t know him. Everybody in Tolichowki knew him. He took advances on flats that weren’t his and rented the same flat to three families at a time, and when one of those families was a widow with her savings in a steel trunk, he took the trunk also. I rang him and told him I had a flat for him to look at, one month free, no deposit, to be sure he’d come. He came on the twenty-sixth night after taraweeh, chewing paan, and I gave him the key and went downstairs to have Irani chai and Osmania biscuits at the café by the flyover, and when I came back the flat was dark and the key was on the kitchen counter, beside a page of clerk’s handwriting that said only: Received with thanks.

The second year, a man who used to stand at the bus stop near the girls’ college. I won’t say more about him.

The third year, a landlord in Langar Houz who had thrown an old tenant’s things in the road in the rain. The fourth year, I was having difficulty, I’ll be honest, I had a list, but it was getting shorter. That year I gave him a moneylender from Tolichowki market who charged ten percent a month to vegetable vendors. Nobody asked where any of them went. In each case, I want you to notice, nobody asked. You would be surprised how many people in a city of one crore nobody asks about.

The Nanded family is still there. The children are big now. The older boy is doing engineering at a college in Ibrahimpatnam, he wants to go to Canada. Nobody has sat on the end of their bed in six years.

* * *

The renewal notice came this morning, a week before Ramzan. Not on stamp paper. On my own office letterhead, which I keep in the bottom drawer, which is locked. The handwriting was the same.

To: Mr. Salim Qureshi, Broker, Tolichowki.

Re: Renewal of Leave and License, Flat 203, Al-Hira Residency.

The Occupant thanks the Broker for six years of honest dealing, and is pleased to renew on the same terms. Clauses 1 to 10 unchanged.

As regards Clause 11, the Occupant notes that the Broker has supplied, each year, a person whom nobody in the locality would miss, and has been most careful in this. The Occupant has made his own enquiries in the locality, as is his right, and finds the Broker’s list now exhausted, save for one name.

The Occupant has asked in the tea shops and the mosque and at the Broker’s own office, and has been given the same answer everywhere.

The key may be left on the kitchen counter as usual. The Broker need not bring anything. One month free, no deposit.