Parvati cut him open with a butcher’s knife. It was her favourite fruit. It reminded her of her childhood and her mother’s home and carefree days. The suppurating yellow smell made her sigh in ecstasy. She gouged out his soft, pale, voluptuous, gold fruit-flesh. She gorged herself to her eyes all day long and dug in for more. Then she threw him up. She vomited for days and weeks and months till she became nothing but a transparent collapsible shell. She was pale and lay dying in her own filth. The men and women who were shopping crowded around her and looked down, way down into the well where she lay. It was her last breath but she was trying to say something. They couldn’t make out what she was saying but Ravan understood her. ‘More. Just a little more jackfruit.’
Ravan’s father Shankar knew only two postures, the foetal position and a prostrate one in which he stretched out on his back. He practised the first for about eighteen hours a day, when he lay curled on his side in bed, with his face to the wall. Over the years the bed had begun to resemble a hammock. The web of steel springs that stretched under it from end to end was about six inches from the floor in the middle. The slightest variation in pressure and position made the bed squeal anxiously. Shankar had no problems living with the creaking. Every nine or ten months when the springs began to sound like cats in heat, Parvati poured coconut oil into a cup and oiled them. Then for a few months the bed’s protestations were muted.
Ravan thought that his father was born in striped shorts and a short half-sleeved vest which he rolled halfway up his chest because of the heat.
When he was not in bed, he was sprawled on a grandfather armchair. It had a cane back and the length of the arms could be doubled by extending the flat boards under them. Shankar lay on the chair, his legs resting on the lengthened arms, his head collapsed to one side and the newspaper held in front of him. It was an effort to read the paper but this was one task which he did not shirk. He read the tabloid with the concentration, unease and intensity of people who have to pick out letters to form the harder words and are not too sure of their meaning.
Bittambatmi was the highest-selling paper in Bombay. The name Bittambatmi meant every bit of news and that’s what it had, so long as it was sensational, gaudy and mostly fabricated. The schematics, if anyone bothered to study them, were always the same. Three rapes or near rapes, one of which was a confession by the rapist, the second an emotionally charged and suggestive account from the victim and the third a mere news item. Murders, contraband hauls and gang wars were headline stuff. The second page was the police beat, the third a review of the criminal cases in the courts and excerpts from the memoirs of police inspectors, customs officials and lawyers. The fourth was devoted to astrology, miracles, rebirths, two-headed babies, triplets with one conjoined set of lungs, and a column where Auntie Lalan sternly answered or deflected readers’ queries on every conceivable weakness, failing and sexual aberration. Of late, the paper had been taking a high moral stand on wife-burnings and abuse but managed to spend the greater part of its time and space instructing its readers on exactly how to proceed in such matters.
While his father read about a man who lured women to his home, kept them chained for months and raped them repeatedly, Ravan did his homework on the floor. There were eleven problems in arithmetic that he had to solve and after almost an hour he was still on the first. He did not really have any difficulty with them; it was just that he had not even looked at them. Were memories dreams or dreams memories? And were there memories that the mind did not remember? Was it possible to do something while one slept and not recall it? Then how come Eddie, who was younger than him, remembered something he did not? Was it possible to access someone else’s memory without that person’s knowledge? When had he killed Eddie’s father? And how? And why? Was he leading two lives and did the one not know of the other? Did his parents know that he was a murderer? Were they keeping mum because he was their son? And it wasn’t as though this was a solitary accident. He seemed to be adept at killing though he couldn’t recall the second murder either. Mr Dixit obviously had very clear memories of his killing Gandhi. Did he kill Eddie’s father first or Mahatma Gandhi? Or did he commit both crimes on the same day? It was all very puzzling. Lele Guruji said that Nathuram Godse killed Gandhi and had become one of the great heroes and martyrs of the Hindu cause. They had hanged Godse. What about Ravan? Would they be coming to get him one of these nights? Are you hanged twice if you commit two murders? If they hanged him, would he too become a hero and martyr? Or was it something more complex than that, since he had killed Eddie’s father which both Lele Guruji and Appa Achrekar disapproved of? Had his father’s paper Bittambatmi carried the news, a blow-by-blow account of how he had done it? Done them? Did Godse fire the first shot? Or did he? Where was the gun? And Eddie’s father, had Ravan shot him or stabbed him with a knife? And what if his parents didn’t know anything about his past either? What would happen when they discovered it? Would they throw him out? What a question. Who would harbour a murderer?
The previous year Parvati had bought a ceiling fan and had it installed in their living-cum-bedroom. When she got back from the temple and after the meal boxes had been dispatched, she brought out the vegetables that needed to be cut for the next day and sat under the fan next to Ravan. As she sliced the long green beans, she hummed a song from Baazi, a film she had seen a couple of years earlier. Usually, Ravan interrupted her to tell her that the words she sang were not in the song she was trying to sing and could she possibly refrain from singing because there were limits to tunelessness and she was breaking every one of them? She thought he was bloody cheeky but in this one instance she loved it. Because if you sang badly, Ravan couldn’t resist telling you and would instantly show you how the tune went and what the words were. And he never sang a couple of lines but the whole song.
What Ravan meant to her, Parvati would never be able to say and would not want to either. But when he broke into song, she sat agape in wonder, amazement and pleasure. Did you hear his voice? Would you believe he was just a child? He held nothing back, he put everything he had into it. It was a voice as open, as guileless as he was. It reminded her of the blue sky in her village. It was blue blue, it was dense, it was higher than the sun and it danced. It reminded her of the wind on the hill in her village and the green that stretched forever. It brought back the river to her, the big, vast and deep river that flowed so quietly, you thought its waters were still. Where did he get that voice from? And how did he learn the words when they had no radio (she was going to buy him one as soon as she had collected enough money), and how did he hold a tune, every nuance of it and how come he was utterly, utterly unselfconscious?
She deliberately hummed some more but there was no response from him today. She had been watching him for a while now. He did his homework regularly and she was not one to bawl him out because his mind had wandered. But something was amiss today. She had not seen him so unnaturally still before. It was as if he wasn’t there.
‘What’s the matter, son?’
She had touched a mansion eaten through by termites. The whole edifice of Ravan Pawar (eight years and two hundred and thirty-seven days old, black hair, widow’s peak, trusting eyes) crumbled before Parvati. There was no sound to his tears.
‘You never told me I killed Eddie’s father.’
Parvati was speechless. He didn’t need reconfirmation but there it was—her silence, the sudden throb of memory in her eyes, the flash of rage that ignited her tongue.
‘Has that Violet woman been talking to you?’ So his mother knew and so did Eddie’s mother. They had an understanding, a pact of silence.
‘You didn’t kill him. He almost killed you.’ He had never seen her so angry. But he was not deceived.
‘How come I’m alive and he’s dead?’
Parvati’s hand flew out and hit Ravan hard on the cheek.
‘Don’t you ever say something so terrible.’ She drew him to her. He resisted but she wasn’t aware of it. She clasped him to her bre
ast and kissed him all over his face as if this was the last time she was going to see him. ‘May all your ill-wishers die this minute. I got you back from death. No other mother has been as fortunate as I. I don’t intend losing you now.’
Five
‘I’ve got so much homework, multiplication, division, geography, history, English. I’ll have to sit up late tonight.’ Coming as it did from Eddie, this was such a novel sentiment, it was almost revolutionary. Violet was impressed. Was he turning over a new leaf? Or was he being his usual mendacious self? He hated studying and homework.
Whether the liberties Eddie often took with the truth indicated a creative flair or were just plain hogwash depended on your point of view. Violet thought the future boded ill. This was the stuff of which hardcore criminals like that unmentionable devil with the unmentionable name on the fourth floor were made. Every lie would plunge him deeper into the fiery pits of hell. But to turn a blind eye to sin was also a sin, especially when the sinner was your own son. Besides, timely punishment was a lesson and a deterrent. She was not very hopeful, but there was a chance that it could change his ways and save him from damnation.
Victor, Victor, the bell in her mind had chimed every single day and sometimes every minute, how could you have died on me? The thought of betrayal had shrivelled her brain. It had become small and hard and craggy like the seed of a peach and it rattled all day and sometimes through the night. Black was her colour. She wore black every day of her life. Her eyes were black and there was black around her eyes. Her hair was black. (Even when it turned grey in her late fifties, she dyed it black so that there was no break in her mourning.) To her dying day she would not stop mourning for a man she could never forgive. But more wearying than the gong in her head was the bitter, sour taste in her mouth. It had changed her features and coloured everything she did.
Neither Eddie nor his older sister Pieta would ever get used to that bitter, sour odour. It assailed them, and even today took them by surprise when they got back from school or play or from the grocer’s or wherever they had gone. It was not bad breath. Mr D’Cruz from the corner room on their floor had that. You held your breath and you put as much distance between him and yourself as your lungs and your legs would let you if he happened to pass by or, worse still, open his mouth.
No, the smell that emanated from Violet had nothing to do with halitosis. It was the smell of pain, of unshed tears, of dour rectitude, of implicit faith in Jesus and not knowing why he should deal her such a cruel blow. Anyone who came in contact with her, passing contact, was touched and trapped by it. Even dear, ineffectual Father D’Souza, who tried to please everyone and was wracked occasionally by doubts that God was not overly pleased with his performance, dreaded Violet’s visits. She never complained. She bore it all stoically but God help you if you forgot her everlasting grief.
Her mouth was a slightly askew bloodless blue line and her eyes warned you not to put too much faith in your good fortune for that too would pass. Like a kidney stone growing inside her, she nursed her grievance. It was the rock on which she built her life. She was aware that CWD Chawl No. 17 was not the most congenial of places in which to bring up her children. But that only reinforced her inexhaustible sense of being wronged. Where was he, the father of her children? She was the mother, God’s chosen vessel for softness and for gentling Pieta and Eddie. It was her husband Victor’s task to be stern and chastise the children. He should have been the rock instead of her. It was he who should have disciplined Eddie when he said he couldn’t go to school because he had a clot in his left tentacle. She clipped him on the jaw and sent him off. When he failed in three subjects out of eight, he said he had haemorrhoids in his brains which was why his eyes were bloodshot and he couldn’t see clearly during his arithmetic, history and geography exams. She thrashed the daylights out of him that day and every whack of the cane drew a welt on her soul.
When these terminal illnesses failed to move his mother, Eddie shifted ground. ‘No school tomorrow,’ he told his mother one day with tears in his eyes. ‘An Ambassador car ran over my schoolteacher and broke his kidney waters. He’s in hospital dying.’ Kidney was a word Violet understood. She let him stay at home but went to school to check, just in case. She didn’t like Mr Lobo. He looked like a bulldog. The children were frightened of him. So was she. ‘I don’t quite understand your question,’ he said, his voice neutral. ‘As a woman you should be familiar with the phrase “breaking water”. Men do not. At best or worst, depending on your point of view, men will break wind, though that is not their exclusive privilege. These children, I will not call them fiends because you are a mother and may take offence, may have broken my spirit and my heart but my kidneys, I assure you, are as yet unbroken. You may also have noted that despite your son’s fervent prayers and wishful thinking, I am not dying, school is not closed, no damage has been done to any car and class was in progress till you came with your solicitous enquiries about my well-being. As for your son, Madam, I can only recommend, mind you, there’s no obligation, as there is none with the directive principles of the constitution of our nation either, that you break a leg of that perpetually prevaricating son of yours who would see me in hospital or, if he had his way, in a morgue.’
Violet went home and followed Mr Lobo’s advice, to the letter, well almost. Eddie, she knew, was her cross. She bore him as she had borne him on the day of his birth with equal amounts of dignity, resignation and resentment. She suspected that Mr Lobo had been trying to humiliate her with his superior attitude and his highfalutin language. If she had had any say in the matter, she would have had a chat with the principal, Father Giacomello, and had Mr Lobo dismissed.
But in truth, Violet’s anger was against herself. She knew her son and his shams and his ploys and yet she’d been taken in. He was making a fool of her and nobody did that with impunity. He had his father’s charm and the ability to spin a story which she knew was not really different from easy virtue. If she didn’t look out, he would go his father’s way. As always, her own mother who adored Eddie and cracked up every time he pulled a fast one, and Pieta who couldn’t stand the sight of her younger brother, begged and pleaded with her and ultimately wept silently while Violet caned his calves till the flesh broke in an attempt to flagellate herself.
Eddie sit up and study the whole night? Pieta did that when her exams were approaching. Any pretext was good enough to keep her up all night to study. But Eddie? Violet made the sign of the cross and went down on her knees. Why were Violet’s prayers always delivered aloud? Weren’t prayers a matter between you and your Lord? Maybe elsewhere. The essence of life in a chawl is that everything is public property. When you are constantly in each other’s hair, it’s almost impossible to get the lice out of your own hair without picking a few out of somebody else’s. You get used to a larger audience. You can’t always see them but you know they are listening, so you make sure that your stage whisper projects into the last row. Besides, with Violet, prayer was a report to God. He was omniscient but it was best to play safe and keep him informed. Prayer was also a way of letting the children, especially Eddie, know that she knew what was going on and what the score was. ‘Lord, is he pulling my leg? If he’s not, if he’s serious about studying let it not be for a day but forever. You know he has a sharp mind. All those medical terms he uses, he should make a fine doctor. You remember the day he came home with slight fever and said he had got typhoon and, of course, I disregarded his words and that nearly cost his life for he had diagnosed his condition correctly and it was typhoid or at least para-typhoid. If only he applies his mind. Let’s have a fair exchange. Let him become studious and it’s OK with me if Pieta manages to scrape through. She’s the one who’s had her heart set on becoming a doctor since childhood. Where’s the money going to come from? And you know what happens to these overeducated girls. Men don’t want to marry them. You took away Victor. Now give Eddie an early start. I’ll slave away for another fifteen years as I have done these past seven
or eight. Then let Eddie take over. Make him a heart surgeon like Dr Oliviera Cabral of Panjim. Make him the most famous Catholic heart surgeon in India. He’ll make us wealthy and happy.
‘I’ll go to Mahim Church this Wednesday and the next eight Wednesdays and lay a wax brain at Mother Mary’s feet. No, he has enough brains. It’s application he lacks. I’ll make a table of wax with a book on it. Do not disappoint me, Lord.’
His mother’s prayers gave Eddie pause. Did his mother know that this was another of his tricks? His sister certainly did. Liar, she had hissed at him when he made his announcement. Was Violet telling him to pull himself up by his bootstraps? And what was this thing about becoming a heart surgeon? He hated doctors. Do you know what they did when they were drilling your teeth? No more, they said and went ahead and drilled some more. Won’t hurt, their family physician Dr Carvalho told him before giving him an injection for his inflamed tonsils. Brother, did it hurt. Even his mother, his very mother who never had a word of sympathy for him, said that Dr Carvalho had not replaced the set of needles he had inherited from his father’s practice. Short of taking a hammer and hitting the plunger in the syringe on its head, the doctor did everything possible to ram the blunt needle into his buttock. It wouldn’t go in at the bulging centre of his left rump, so he tried again at another spot. Despite his hoarse throat, Eddie screamed blue murder and kicked and recoiled. The syringe fell like an arrow to the ground. Its path was perpendicular. The needle had taken a ‘U’ turn. You could go fishing as soon as you stuck a live fly into it. The syringe itself was shattered to twenty seven thousand glinting, refracting, radiant pieces of kaleidoscopic quartz.
Dr Carvalho was six feet four inches tall. In his perfectly hairless head were a long nose, sad, docile eyes and the ruins of his teeth. When he opened his mouth you felt awed. What terrible battles and wars had been fought here. The hordes of Genghis Khan about whom Eddie read in his history book had gone on a rampage for eleven nights and eleven days and razed the temple to the ground. Not a single tooth was left intact. Instead there were delicate broken pillars and shards in nicotine yellow and brown, and frail grey where the destruction was still in progress. Dr Carvalho had to lean forward to bypass his paunch and look down on Eddie. Before he could say anything, Violet interrupted him. ‘I’ll pay for it.’ ‘Indeed, you will,’ Dr Carvalho said, ‘but it was one of my father’s syringes. Now I have only two of them left.’
Ravan and Eddie Page 5