Doctor Suresh Narlikar

Doctor Suresh Narlikar is a gynecologist and birth-control advocate whose faith in engineering joins him to Ahmed Sinai in a plan to reclaim land from the sea. The tetrapods meant to advance that project become the site of his death: when Narlikar sees women worshipping one, his anger brings him into conflict with a passing language march, whose members rock the structure until it falls into the water with him. His death overturns the business arrangement, as his female relatives assume control and leave Ahmed without his investment or protection.

Identity and outlook

Narlikar’s professional identity and his political-economic vision are closely linked. A committed advocate of birth control, he welcomes Ahmed’s confession that he has lost interest in sex as a reason to celebrate abstention from procreation. He praises the two men as possessing unusual spiritual worth because they will not add to the country’s population, and proposes instead to direct their energies toward giving people more land. The concrete tetrapods, he argues, will bring soil out of the sea. Ahmed and Narlikar toast this ambition together, while Narlikar’s brief formulation of their priorities—land over love—makes the project sound like an alternative to sexual and familial life.

The narrative connects Narlikar’s opposition to fertility with his faith in sterile concrete, but his death exposes the limits of that opposition. A tetrapod he regards as an icon of technological progress is transformed, in the eyes of the women who worship it, into a sacred object. The episode places Narlikar’s modernizing ideal beside religious practice and popular politics; he cannot control the meaning others give the structure on which his hopes depend.

The tetrapod scheme and Ahmed’s investment

By the end of 1956, the scheme to reclaim land using thousands of large concrete tetrapods appears close to realization. It has also taken on a private meaning for Ahmed: after his sexual life has become dormant, the project serves as a substitute outlet for his energies. Having suffered an earlier financial freeze, Ahmed now invests cautiously, keeps out of sight, and ensures that his name appears on no documents. The new arrangement is designed to limit his exposure, but it also leaves his role difficult to establish when Narlikar dies.

Narlikar’s death therefore breaks more than a partnership. Because he leaves no record of Ahmed’s involvement, Ahmed loses the deal without a clear claim to protect his investment. The narrative presents his hidden participation as a response to past disaster, yet that caution cannot save him when the project’s surviving control passes to others. Ahmed’s subsequent decline begins in the wake of this reversal.

The confrontation and death

The account reaching Methwold’s Estate places Narlikar near Marine Drive after a visit to friends. He intends to walk to Chowpatty Beach for bhel-puri and coconut milk, passing a peaceful language march and the sea-wall where a single symbolic tetrapod has been installed with Municipal Corporation permission. There, he finds a group of beggar-women conducting a puja around the structure. They have lit oil lamps, marked its raised tip with the OM symbol, and are washing it as an object of worship.

Narlikar reacts angrily to the scene and confronts the women. The marchers witness his conduct, take offense at his insults, and turn on him. When Narlikar clings to the tetrapod, the crowd begins to rock it; their combined force overcomes its weight, and the structure falls into the water with him. The splash ends the silence that had gathered around the confrontation. Narlikar is killed by the concrete object that embodied his ambition, in a scene where his attempt to defend technological progress from religious reinterpretation brings him into fatal conflict with a public gathering.

Aftermath and narrative significance

News of Narlikar’s death spreads beyond his apartment, and the story of his final moments reaches the Estate through servants and other witnesses. The account also associates proximity to his body with an intensification of those who see it: Bi-Appah becomes more shrewish, Nussie Ibrahim more duck-like, and Lila Sabarmati gives way to a promiscuity that the narrative connects to later violence involving her husband, Commander Sabarmati. These reported transformations make the death a turning point in the surrounding social world, not merely the close of Narlikar’s personal story.

Two days after the news appears in the papers, Narlikar’s previously unseen female relatives arrive in great numbers. They take over the running of the Nursing Home, investigate his business dealings, and cut Ahmed out of the tetrapod project. They then take Narlikar’s body to Benares for cremation; according to the Estate servants, his ashes are scattered on the waters of the Ganges and float toward the sea. Ahmed refuses to pay his respects and will not use Narlikar’s name, calling him a traitor instead. The loss of the project and the arrival of the women are followed by Ahmed’s gradual paling and the start of a long decline. Narlikar’s narrative function is thus defined by a chain of consequences: his engineering ideal ends in a fatal collision, his death changes who controls the enterprise, and the resulting exclusion helps undo his former partner’s cautious hopes.