In the end, when it was time to dismantle the table-tennis table and move out our discarded furniture to make way for the Americans, we realised we loved the thirteenth floor more than our own plush, over-furnished flats.
For the first eleven months of Varsh Tower's inhabitation, the building's thirteenth floor had remained unsold and derelict. We were to blame. We were bankers, businessmen, advertising professionals, doctors, lawyers.... Despite being active contributors to the machinery of a so-called modern economy, we nursed the most ludicrous superstitions with regard to colours, numbers, and the North-South orientation of beds and kitchens. When it came to booking a flat in Varsh Tower, we, the building's future tenants, were adamant in our choice: anything but the thirteenth floor.
The builder dangled free flat-screen TVs and modular kitchens as bribes. He offered to re-number the building's storeys, skipping thirteen in the count from G to 25. We didn't fall for it. Thirteen by any other name would still retain its malevolent potency.
And so, for the first eleven months of Varsh Tower's inhabitation, the thirteenth floor sat vacant and unfinished, like the last remaining bachelor from a brood of married siblings. It had holes for windows and no electrical or sanitary fittings. When strangers saw our building from a distance, especially at night, the dark, unoccupied thirteenth floor must have seemed to them like a slice of menace wedged between the twelve cheerfully luminous storeys both above and below it.
Only those of us in the know knew the truth: That it was there, within that ill-numbered midway floor, that Varsh Tower's good spirits truly resided.
The tenants of floors fourteen and up were the first to discover the thirteenth's dark allure. What drew us to it was its unclaimed wilderness. It was no one's. During our initial weeks in Varsh Tower, if the elevator accidentally stopped at the thirteenth floor, the metal doors would open on to a staggering expanse of raw space: windswept and sunny in the day, pitch black and foreboding in the night. Viewing the thirteenth floor was like stepping into the past, it was like witnessing the gray rough-edged birth of our gleaming twenty-five-storey building. We didn't like what we saw. The thirteenth's untiled floor, its exposed cement ceiling and the random-seeming positions of its load-bearing walls made us doubt the specialised expertise that had ordained the dimensions of our own "vaastu-friendly" homes. Was this the disarray that lay beneath our marble tiles and behind our velvet finish walls?
Each of us approached the builder—delicately and on the sly—to offer our help in disposing the thirteenth floor's unsold flats. It may not have been propitious enough to live in, but we had no objections to earning fat commissions off that inauspicious storey.