‘Eddie Coutinho is our prodigal son. How many centuries have passed since he and his people were converted and left us? I have lost count. But he is back amongst his own and we rejoice at the return of our prodigal.
‘Mark my words. Eddie will not just bring honour to the Sabha with his valour and devotion, in a couple of years he’ll become the Prefect of the Mazagaon branch and before long one of our great national leaders.’
At this point Lele Guruji got up hastily and, handing a packet to Appa Achrekar, whispered something in his ear.
‘To celebrate this occasion, Eddie, the Sabha wishes to give you a Wilson pen and ball-point set, though I must tell you that I do not approve of these pens and ball-points for children. And here’s a fine illustrated book, Stories from the Mahabharata and Shri Krishna’s Life. Give him a hand, my friends.’
Amidst the thunderous applause they failed to see the comet, that had watched the proceedings transfixed, spin into orbit and race straight to the dais. Ravan was behind the chairs now; he put his hand in the rear loop of Lele Guruji’s half-pants, yanked him back, threw him off balance, and stood in front of Appa Achrekar.
‘Where is my prize?’
The closely tonsured, white-haired, gaunt leader who had not feared the might of the British empire, had shot but not killed a particularly vicious deputy police commissioner in pre-Independence times and been sent to the Andaman islands for life-imprisonment, looked at Ravan through glasses made from soda water bottle bottoms but couldn’t make sense of the raging, wild anger shaking before him.
‘Is this another non-Hindu?’ Appa directed the question at no one in particular.
Lele Guruji had regained his balance. He had not eaten children of ten yet but he was about to make a start. He got hold of Ravan’s collar along with the thin flesh at the back of the boy’s neck and began forcing him to retreat.
‘No, Appa. This is a nobody. What do you want, Ravan?’ One flick, a flip of the tail of a whale and Ravan had shrugged him off.
‘My Wilson fountain-pen.’
‘What fountain-pen, you ass? What have you done to deserve it?’
‘I brought Eddie.’
‘Sambhaji Satpude got him. And he’s already been given his reward.’ Lele Guruji’s hand was tightening its grip on Ravan’s neck while dragging him off the stage. But he had underestimated the strength of the boy. Ravan was not fighting for his life, he was fighting for his honour.
‘I talked to Eddie and persuaded him to join us. Ask him,’ Ravan hollered at the top of his voice.
The world stood still. And the two boys were alone on it. Time forgot to tick the seconds off. A voice like an oiled whip cracked across Ravan’s back. The welts would never disappear from his soul.
‘He’s lying. Why would I talk to him? He murdered my father.’
And now Ravan was alone, truly alone, and the loneliness seared and shrivelled him as if the sun had suddenly withdrawn all heat from the earth. Everyone was looking at him. Appa, Lele, the other youngsters, the people on the road, the CWD chawls, the mercury lamps, the men and women in England, the Red Indians his teacher in school had talked of, the stars that you could not see but were there. They looked at him in horror, wonder and dismay. And yet Ravan, son of Parvati and Shankar Pawar, the ten-headed monster and evil incarnate had only one question to ask.
‘When?’
Ah, the moment of truth. What god in his madness and wanton cruelty had ruled that we must confront it?
‘Ask your mother.’ What turned Ravan’s soul to ice was the certainty in Eddie’s voice. He would ask for proof all his life, but the only proof that mattered he had already heard. He wasn’t aware of the tears, but there was acid scooping inch-deep tracks in his face.
‘I didn’t. I swear to you, I didn’t. I’ve never even seen your father.’
But what was the use of protesting when he knew the truth? In the distance he heard Appa Achrekar asking Lele Guruji, ‘What is the boy doing in our Sabha? Get rid of him immediately.’
As if Ravan wanted to continue in the Sabha or be counted among the living.
Four
Evenings were the quietest time in Ravan’s home. His father went out at 5 o’clock after a long siesta, three hours at the minimum. Teatime was 4.30 and at five he walked to the corner to pick up the evening rag, Bittambatmi. He knew his priorities. Work was anathema; as for the rest, he was willing to make adjustments. People may have sniggered at him because Parvati wore the pants in the family but who had gifted her the pants anyway? In return, he got three meals daily, tea, snacks, clothes, betel nut to chew, pocket money for the evening paper, two movies a month and, most important of all, peace.
Sex was a grey area. Parvati was not just a fine-looking woman, there was a sexual charge in her, an animal magnetism, to use the current popular magazine phrase, that she was completely unconscious of and that drove some men insane and others to asceticism and flagellation.
It was this innocence that women never forgave her. Manu, the ancient law-giver and misogynist was right, they told themselves. Women were a curse but Parvati was a catastrophe. How could she be so ignorant of the effect she had on others? It was a crime. You had to merely look at their husbands, somewhere in the middle distance, to see their members rise in outrageous rebellion, and sunder their jock straps. How their dicks howled, shrieked and bellowed at the sight of her. Tarts were better. At least they did it for a living.
Time and circumstances had taken their toll on Parvati. Besides, she hardly ever stepped out. But she was still a pain in the groin when she was not sweating. Fortunately for Shankar, she sweated. Incessantly. She was a non-stop, squelching, slushy mess. Her hair sweated, her neck, ears, hands, arms, breasts, the small of her back, her buttocks, her thighs, her heels and toes sweated. She wiped herself with the end of her sari and, when that was dripping, with the middle, back and sides of her sari and petticoat. If she stood in one place, in front of the three jumbo stoves in her kitchen, for instance, the sweat dripped from her thighs and calves and formed puddles under her. Time and again she wrung out her clothes but it was a losing battle. She was so wet all day long, everything became transparent. All that remained impenetrable was the shape of her bra and the line of her home-made panties.
And yet, on some nights when she was not thawing feverishly, Shankar-rao would be beside himself and on top of her. Once in a while she let him. Mostly, however, she turned over and lay on her breasts and face. This made him furious but it also drove him crazy. When she stood to put the string of flowers on the miniature gods in the tiny altar in the kitchen, he could see her arse from where he lay in bed and couldn’t decide between her breasts and her buttocks. All he wanted to do was assault her, mount her from behind as she lay motionless for fear of waking up Ravan. But she had a way of tensing her back, buttocks and thigh muscles that gave him no purchase, and if he persisted, all he could show for his efforts was a battered and bruised limb. He would quietly get up, open the tin in which his wife stored papads, pick up the notes hidden at the bottom and walk out of the house.
A man who had little use for time, Shankar was nevertheless obsessively conscious of it. He might as well have been a nail on the wall as far as Parvati was concerned, and she often took him for granted or forgot that he was a member of her household; but come 4.25, and she knew it was wise to make him his cup of tea. Because if it wasn’t on his bed at 4.30, he became vile and vicious and reminded her of all the goods and artefacts her parents still owed him. After he had pronounced that her father and mother were mother-fuckers, he couldn’t think of anything which would top that observation and kept repeating it till Parvati lost all control over herself and threatened to jump from the window. Poor Parvati, it never occurred to her to tell him that she would throw him out of the window instead. Or more to the point—out of the house, physically and literally.
A Harangue on Poverty
For have you not wondered why Ravan’s home did not fold in on itself many yea
rs ago? How do you think Parvati fed her son, husband and herself? Where did she get the money to buy food, pay the rent, send Ravan to school, replace the panes in the windows that Ravan broke, buy clothes? Who paid the electricity bills? Maybe she was born with a gigantic silver ladle in her mouth, maybe Shankar’s grand-uncle had left him real estate in South Bombay, maybe Parvati ran a numbers’ racket. Who knows? Life goes on. You have to take the good with the bad. Everything that happens, happens for the best. No need to be superior and look down on platitudes and cliches. What would we do without them? How else would we bear with such admirable fortitude the trials and travails of others?
In India, as in other poor countries, we have a line that is invisible and abstract and yet more powerful and pervasive than anything the West or the Japanese have invented. It is called the poverty line. Above the poverty line are three meals a day. Below it is a spectrum that stretches all the way from 2.99 to zero meals. As familiar as a clothes-line, most people in India spend their entire lives trying to reach out beyond it. It is their greatest aspiration. If you are fortunate, if the gods smile and you are lucky, you may get a glimpse of it. You can’t see the line, you can’t touch it, and five hundred million people are trying to get to it. But if you brush against it, sink your teeth into it, grow your nails, scratch at it as if you were trying to gouge out the eyes of a man who had tried to rape you, take a breath, deep but quick, and hoist your right leg. No grip, no toehold, no thin end of the wedge, no chink in the armour, just the transparent give of air, what patent nonsense, you knew that all along, you twit, get that leg out, flail, rage, fume, fight, you’ve torn your right thigh, it’s a bleeding, gurgling and bubbly mess, whole chunks of it are flapping red and merry in the air, that’s fantastic, that’s glorious just so long as your leg is pinned and pierced into the barbed wire of that line to the big time. You’ve made it. Because, if one is to believe what they tell us, there are houris and TVs and videos and musk and the seven heavens, not to mention full bellies, on the other side of that line.
As for the rest of the five hundred million, maybe the poverty line is so far away and so high they never get to see it. Or if they do, they tell themselves it is a mirage.
What in god’s name was the matter with Parvati? Why did she sweat so obscenely and voluminously? A hormonal problem, an endocrinological imbalance, a hyperactive sweat system, maybe she drank too much water, maybe she was just a nervous person? Why not come right out and say what her neighbours assumed: her sweating was a direct consequence of being oversexed. What do you expect, all that garlic and onion are bound to send the libido through the roof.
Those, of course, are the facts, the true scientific causes behind Parvati’s excesses. It may however also be mentioned in passing that after Shankar gave up work for higher pursuits, Parvati spent twelve hours a day in front of three monster kerosene-stoves, cooking lunch and dinner for fifty bachelors or at least quasi-bachelors. They had left their wives, farms and homes behind in the coastal villages and hinterlands of Maharashtra and come to Bombay in search of work. Some stayed four to a room, some shared the same space with ten or twelve others. Still others occupied a room in shifts. Parvati supplied them meals. The food was not the greatest, many complained incessantly about it and swore to terminate the arrangement at the end of the month. Parvati’s answer to them was, ‘We eat what you eat.’ The food was hot when it was filled into the tiffin boxes at nine in the mornings and six in the evenings, but tepid or cold by the time it got to the mills, factories and workshops where Parvati’s clientele worked.
You paid for a month’s meals in advance. You missed your payment on the 30th (27th for February), and your tiffin box didn’t turn up the next day. Every once in a while someone who had not got his box came over and threw a tantrum, made a scene or cried his heart out at Parvati’s door promising to pay within two days or a week. Often Shankar intervened on behalf of the defaulter. ‘I know him. We worked together at the Sapna Leather Works (or The Royal Cotton Mills or Graphix Printers). He’s a good man, he’ll pay. Send him his food tomorrow.’ Parvati always acquiesced in her husband’s wishes. ‘I will,’ she said, ‘if you start working from tomorrow.’ That seemed to end the argument, at least as far as Shankar was concerned.
If the client grew abusive and violent, Parvati would look to her husband for help. That was in the old days, but her foolishness became obvious to her soon enough. She understood that there was always help at hand. Its beginning, middle and end was herself, Parvati.
After the tiffin carrier man picked up the dinner boxes at six, the house would quieten down. Parvati would then go shopping for vegetables to the Byculla wholesale market. You couldn’t get fresh vegetables cheaper anywhere else. She could have sent the elderly woman whom she had hired the previous year to help with the peeling and chopping. But there was a fine line between economical and rotten and the old woman invariably transgressed it. The tomatoes she bought were either overripe and squashed or had fungus turning both the seed and red flesh black. She seemed to pick cauliflowers that had more stem and leaves than flower. And she had a predilection for okra, one of Parvati’s specialities, that were so tumid and dry they wouldn’t cook even in her brass pressure cooker.
Besides, there was one other factor. Any minion was bound to come to an understanding with the vendors about prices and margins. There were slim profits in Parvati’s business and the key to them lay in the shopping.
They called her the mother of fisherwomen at the vegetable market. When it came to bargaining or a squabble, you could cross words with a Bombay Koli woman only at the gravest risk not just to your self-esteem but to your person. Parvati did not supply fish to her clientele, but she had mastered the technique of Koli women and made some radical improvements on it. The vendors at the market loved and hated her. She knew everybody by name. Something about her, not just her looks or sex, made them confide unwisely in her about women troubles, troubles at home, good times, who was cheating whom, who had got into debt, who was planning to run off with the neighbour’s daughter, who was paying exorbitant interest. They asked for Parvati’s advice and she gave it freely. Often it turned out to be sound counsel, but it meant that she knew your little secrets and would not hesitate to use them if you gave her cause.
If Parvati came into her own, it was in the market. She chatted with the vendors, asked after their wives, children, parents and second cousins, got spicy bhakarwadis for them, she humoured them, she scolded them. For coughs and colds she brewed home-made concoctions that tasted of green grass mixed with horse-manure. The vendors’ taste buds revolted and their stomachs retched in dry paroxysms, but the phlegm came unstuck and they told her that she was the guardian witch of the Byculla market.
Parvati was born to be Superintendent of the Byculla vegetable market, if not the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India or the Finance Minister of the country. She could make two ends meet and have a bit left over. There was nothing underhand about her. But she was a wheeler-dealer at heart. Bargaining was in her blood. She instinctively knew how to give in on small matters and gain the big advantage. Anybody who dealt with her came out feeling cleansed, heroic and on top. She could scream but you could always out-scream her. She made the vendor taste victory and that made him generous. When both parties feel good after striking a deal, the prospects for future business are bright.
Parvati took Ravan to the Byculla market a couple of times, but he hated it. Lorries were parked three deep and stretched to the end of one’s vision and beyond. Hundreds of bent men, parallel to the ground from the waist upwards, carried loads of vegetables that were bigger than those on the trucks. They wobbled and tottered and couldn’t walk in a straight line. When one of them hobbled past him, Ravan hugged Parvati and sank his head into the folds of her sari. The floor of the market was filthy and slippery with vegetable debris. Parvati told him to watch his step, but a banana peel was stuck to the sole of his right sandal. Every time Ravan moved, his foot slithered and he wo
uld have broken a couple of bones if Parvati hadn’t held his hand tightly.
The vendors sat on raised platforms with stack upon stack upon stack of brinjals, cabbages, spinach, potatoes, onions, beans, pumpkins, melons, bananas, carrots, green beans and cucumbers on either side of them. But there was life under the platforms too, where the reserve stock was kept. Ravan was transfixed by a dwarf at eye level who was burrowing in a hole underneath. No, not a dwarf but a man on his haunches whose duck feet paddled him in and out of the dungeon. On his way out he brought forth an oversized, tumescent jackfruit in his hands. Ravan had never seen anything so large and malevolent. It was breathing, you could see its pregnant belly swell up and deflate. The man on his haunches raised the living, deformed fruit and yelled, ‘How many more?’
Scores of shoppers with overloaded bags and their coolies with big, flat baskets piled high with the day’s shopping collided with each other in the narrow passages between the rows of open shops. They were unaffected by the subterranean drama. The vendor on the platform grabbed the fruit. It was so heavy he nearly fell over. ‘Another fifty,’ he shouted and stood up on a stool and balanced the jackfruit on a pile that seemed to reach the ceiling. They were all breathing, those jackfruits. The pile expanded, Ravan could hear them inhaling. Then slowly they shrank back. The stench of the ripened jackfruit was buzzing in his head. It made him feel faint. He didn’t know what he hated more, their stink or their yellow-green prickly texture. They were hard and misshapen and made of stone. Any moment now they were going to come crashing down and he would be buried under them. Parvati was going to look for him for days but wouldn’t recognize him because his skin would become hard and yellow-green and spiky and his insides would be pale gold and smell sickeningly sweet.
Ravan and Eddie Page 4