Mr Sarang was a liar. He had forgotten Meena and forgiven God because even now he was garlanding the portraits of Shankar, Rama, Krishna and Dutta on the wall.
‘How come you’re the only son, Ravan? As a matter of fact the only child?’ Mr Sarang peered closely at Ravan as if the question had been bothering him a long while. Ravan looked nonplussed.
‘Is your father planning to have any more or not?’
Mr Sarang waited for an answer.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Odd. Your mother is obviously not barren since she begot you. And your father looks like a man in good health and you are living proof that he’s a capable man. Then how is it that you don’t have any more siblings? Most puzzling.’
‘Leave him be, Father,’ Shobhan interrupted her father. ‘The poor child doesn’t know what you are talking about.’
‘It’s unfair, that’s what I say. People who have less children should pay a sur-tax to support the excess children of others. What sin have I committed that I have so many? Just look at them, no room to move. Can’t get a single one married. Sharada was the only exception. See Suman there, she’s thirty-three. Who’s going to marry her? Savitri’s thirty-one, maybe thirty-two. A few more years and her menopause will start and she’ll require full dentures. Yamuna, twenty-nine but not a sign of a husband. All of them darkies, who’s going to look at them? All that Snow they slap on can’t make them fair or attractive. Your ticket, Master Ravan? Kindly buy your ticket. There are no free rides in the world. I can barely feed this brood on my salary. Where am I supposed to get the money for their dowry? It’s a vicious circle.’
‘That’s enough, Father.’ Shobhan had a soothing effect on her father. ‘Go and wash your feet and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Tell me, Master Ravan, do you have any ideas on the subject? My Mrs and I produced one beauty, one really fair and lovely girl but she’s even more of a problem than the others. Don’t know who begot her, the misshapen, club-footed wretch. See my feet, is there any defect in them? None, right? Mrs, come here.’
‘Let it be now,’ Mrs Sarang spoke from inside the kitchen. ‘I’m cooking.’
‘I said come out this instant. We have an impartial observer here. Let him be the judge.’
Mrs Sarang came out wiping her hands on her sari. She looked resentful but could not deny her husband his catharsis.
‘Pick up your sari.’
Mrs Sarang shook her head.
‘Only up to your ankle.’ She did. She had done it a hundred times before.
‘The best pair of ankles in the CWD chawls. Walk.’
‘He’s seen me walk.’
‘Walk. He’s young, he may have forgotten.’
Mrs Sarang walked back into the kitchen.
‘Perfect equilibrium, wouldn’t you agree, Master Ravan? Vision 20:20; 20:20 feet and legs. And then look at this gargoyle.’
Shobhan stood still.
‘Show him,’ Mr Sarang screamed. Suman, Yamuna, Savitri and the rest of the sisters did whatever they were doing a little more intently.
Shobhan picked up her sari and showed her pouch-bound right foot.
‘Take that bloody sack off, the one that costs me half a month’s salary and show him the whole fucking mess, the twisted bones and the knotted, revolting skin around it. Let him see the beauty and the beast all in one and let him tell me how I’m supposed to marry off such a loathsome creature. Show him, I said show.’
‘I don’t want to see, I don’t want to.’ Ravan ran and clung to Shobhan.
Mr Sarang started to bash his head on the bars of the window. ‘What kind of father am I? I can’t get my daughters married, so I humiliate them to hide my shame. I am going to kill myself. Yes, I am. They’ll stay spinsters but at least they won’t be tortured and disgraced by their own father.’
He was bleeding now, the blood from his forehead was flowing freely. Mrs Sarang came out and drew him away. She made him sit on the bed and applied cold compresses to his head.
Ravan became a regular at the Sarang home. Shobhan and he played hop-scotch and marbles. He taught her and her sisters how to spin a top and use a catapult. Shobhan taught him noughts and crosses, a game that he lost 239 times out of 240 on an average day. The last one was usually a draw. Ravan’s grades improved. Shobhan sat with him while he did his homework and helped him out when he was foxed by a sum in arithmetic or a question in geography. They played cards: not-at-home, bluff and rummy.
He introduced them to carrom. They bought a carrom board. In the summer holidays, they played non-stop. Sometimes Mr Sarang would join them. Even Mrs Sarang who was busy in the kitchen the whole day tried her hand at it. Ravan fought vehemently with Tara when she surreptitiously picked up a card from the discards piled up in the middle or innocently dispatched her own pieces down the pockets of the carrom board with some delicate fingerwork when no one was watching. She would burst into fake tears rather than admit to finagling. She and Ravan often came to blows.
Tara was Ravan’s area of darkness. She confused him. His feelings about her were in a state of constant flux. She teased and needled him unceasingly, mussed his hair, asked him whether he would have her as his girlfriend and when he said ‘no’, she told him she would commit suicide by leaping off the two bottom steps of Chawl No. 17 because he was the one and only man in her life and if he didn’t care for her, there was no point living. She hid his shoes. When he asked for a glass of water, she poured it down the back of his shirt and shook her head sorrowfully. ‘How could you, Ravan? You are a grown-up young man. How can you still wet your pants.’ He would pray that she would not be at home when he visited the Sarangs and yet if she was not there, he would be restless and ask a dozen times when she would be back.
She was his secret passion, his puppy love, his infatuation and he was her go-between, messenger and alibi. He took her messages to the twilight zone, the ground floor of Chawl No. 22, and occasionally tramped up to the garage at Byculla, where Shahaji Kadam trained and worked, for last-minute changes of plans.
Shahaji Kadam, now there was an enigma. Ravan had checked him out surreptitiously and sometimes frontally. He had scrutinized his face, his legs, his feet, his hands, his ears, his back. He was often black with grease but so were most of the mechanics at the Byculla Automobile Repairs and Maintenance Works. But when he had cleaned up and shaved and went to a movie with Tara he looked like any other man; actually he looked better than a lot of the lean and hungry specimens from the CWD chawls because he worked out at the Telang Gym every morning. It was true he sweated a lot but so did Ravan’s mother. Then why did almost everybody avoid him and his people? He would have liked to have asked his mother but she was not exactly the fount of knowledge, and her view of the world was rooted in commerce. Does he want meals? Noons and nights or both? Can he pay?
Who and what and why were Shahaji and his people untouchable? It had taken a lot of doing but Ravan had touched Shahaji when he took him for a long ride on a motorcycle. Ravan had put his arms around his waist just as Tara did. He was for real all right, a solid wall of muscle. He always had a different car or bike when he and Tara went out to the movies or to Malabar Hill, the Gateway of India or anywhere else for a ride. She never met him anywhere near the chawls, at least not in daylight. They fixed the location of an assignation in advance and trysted there. Did Shobhan know about Shahaji and Tara? Tara said it was their secret, Ravan’s, Tara’s and Shahaji’s.
Seven
What had made Eddie join the Sabha? There were of course mercenary considerations, no denying that. A Wilson pen and ballpoint laid out on purple velvet and anchored in an ebony black plastic box with thin black elastic bands was no mean temptation. Had he known the contents of the stories, the book alone would have sufficed. But when the offer was made, he had no idea what the Mahabharata was, nor could he guess that he would continue to flip through its pages almost every day long after he knew the stories by heart.
The fact is, Eddie, b
orn of Catholic parents and a confirmed and practising believer in the sacrament of our Lord Jesus Christ (granted, he would have been as devout a Muslim, Sikh, Jew, Zoroastrian, Buddhist or Hindu had he been born in any other sect or denomination), was favourably disposed to joining the Sabha. He would have been surprised if you had told him that its inspiration was Hinduism. He would have been completely befuddled if you had added that while Muslims were suspect and unwanted in the Sabha’s paradigm of India, minorities like Christians and Parsees were welcome so long as they subscribed to Hindu pre-eminence. Like most other Catholics, he would have found it enlightening to learn that the Sabha was meant to be a group dedicated to the service of the nation.
The Sabha was of considerable interest to him because of the six-foot wooden staff and what could be done with it. He had seen them wield the staff, especially the teacher, with such dexterity, fluidity and prowess, that he had stayed glued, watching them for hours from the window of his kitchen, the balcony on the landing and on his way back from school. The Sabha boys would be locked in deadly combat, one wooden staff crossed and pressing down upon the other, when suddenly, as if at a predetermined signal, they would disengage, whirl around, throw their staffs into the air, catch them and swing them with such speed that you could barely see them till they were once again sparring, whipping, connecting and clashing.
Eddie grasped the principles of the wooden staff within a couple of months. Technique took longer, but he practised for long hours by himself and with his colleagues. The objective was clear enough. You fielded the assault of your opponent by presenting the broadside of your staff, recoiling and then taking the offensive. But how did you anticipate which way he would swing and bring down the staff? A slight miscalculation and your flank was exposed and ribs cracked. Or if you didn’t leap aside in time, your head was split open. Ironically enough, the secret of the staff and its attraction lay in the suggestion, but conscious absence, of violence. It was like a dance fraught with danger. It was physical chess. The better you anticipated your opponent’s game plan and were also conscious that he was changing it in response to your own moves, and the more swift and alert and seized of the dynamics of the combat you were, the greater the likelihood of your being safe.
There was no denying the discrimination at the Mazagaon Sabha branch. Lele Guruji was more attentive to Eddie, he watched and coached him continually. Only the older boys were allowed to exercise and practise with the staff but Eddie was adamant about learning to use it. Rather than lose him, Lele Guruji spent time teaching him after class. Eddie too put in much more effort than the other students. He was like a dog. He wanted Lele Guruji’s approval and encomiums daily, so he worked harder than all the other boys, not just at the staff but at everything else.
He was fascinated by the traditional Indian-style gymnasium. Its centrepiece was a sandpit in which stood a ten-foot high wooden pole called the malkhamb. It was a foot across at the bottom and tapered to a mere four inches at the top. Young men and boys with well-oiled bodies gripped it and glided up effortlessly. Months and years after Eddie mastered the art, he couldn’t get over the wonder of the strange chemistry between the column and the human body. Technically, you cupped your feet and hands around the pole and pushed yourself up. But it was like rising out of the deep. With just a flip of the toes and a little fingerwork you shot up. En route you did some incredible acrobatics. Head down or sideways, you twisted and wrapped yourself around the pole. You let go of your hands, your body arched out, your legs zipped through the air and came full circle. Atop, you stretched out parallel to the earth, wheeled around and almost disproved the laws of gravity.
The accent was never on building muscles for their own sake or pumping iron. Muscle tone, suppleness, deep-breathing were all that mattered. Eddie did surya-namaskars, the stunted and utterly inadequate version of which the West calls push-ups. He did baithaks in which you rapidly squatted on your haunches and stood up. They looked easy—all those exercises did—but do them twenty times and you were flat out for the next week or two. He did pranayam, the system of breathing that is at the heart of yoga, and he practised on the parallel bars.
Outside he worked on the lezhim with his new-found peers. Lezhim was the part of the exercises Eddie enjoyed the most. It was nothing but a wooden stick and a chain with steel discs on it. But if you held it right in both your hands and performed in unison with the other members, it created its own compelling percussive patterns and the rhythms meshed into a heady dance that gradually turned hectic without losing its sinuous grace or exhilaration. At the end of the session, he sat down with the others for a fifteen-minute bowdhik. This should have been the most tedious part of the class, but Eddie’s arrival had transformed the guru as much as the pupil. Lele Guruji’s sermons had always bored his class but that had never bothered him. But let Eddie’s attention wander and the master was in a panic. If Eddie stopped coming, Lele would be in hot water with the authorities. But in fairness to Lele, it must be said that he didn’t just want the boy to stay, he wanted to inspire him. The battle was not for Eddie’s body, it was for his soul. And Eddie’s attention, he discovered by chance, was up for grabs if you could spin a tale.
A kind of intellection had always been a key part of the Sabha dogma and doctrine. The teacher dwelt on abstractions, theory and cerebral rigour and, alas, more often than not succeeded in alienating his youthful audience. The dropout rate was directly in proportion to the dryness of the bowdhik.
Lele Guruji’s stories, to his amazement, had turned all his pupils into avid listeners. Attendance and numbers, albeit only Hindu, swelled. Lele Guruji ransacked his mind for stories and when he had scraped the bottom, discovered the Central Library.
History was stories, literature was stories, the Puranas were stories, biographies were stories and so were the Mahabharata and Ramayana. One day, almost accidentally, Lele stumbled upon the trick of turning geography and philosophy into stories and vice versa. Without knowing it, Lele, the tyrant and bore, had become magician and pied piper.
‘What is the hurry, Ravan-rao?’ Mr Tamhane’s voice struck like a fist-sized hook in Ravan’s back.
You don’t need an afterlife to pay for your sins. You pay for them here and now. Ravan had been in no hurry till he heard his name being called out. Did he really think that he would get away with what he had done to Mr Tamhane’s son? He could hear Mr Tamhane closing in on him.
Ravan remembered the manic glee he had felt seven days ago, maybe it was ten. He was standing at the balcony on his floor, watching the world go by: Chandrakant Dixit was pretending to be Shivaji and embracing Sanjay Rawate, whom he had persuaded to impersonate the great Afzal Khan, and was dismembering him just as the Maratha king had done with steel claws. Shambhoonath’s replacement Narottam was whipping up a blizzard of dust beating the doormat at the grocer’s with a stick borrowed from one of the Sabha boys. Mr Sawant who had retired from his job at the Municipal Corporation twenty years ago was taking his evening constitutional, and the unattainably beautiful and serene princess, Eddie’s sister, Pieta Coutinho, was returning home. Wait a minute, that head peering out from the balcony on the second floor, wasn’t it Anant Tamhane’s, no, couldn’t be, what would he be doing in Chawl No. 17, damn, I’ll cut my heart out and lay the bloody, palpitating thing in front of the next petrol tanker, it is the one and only Anant Tamhane rolling the spittle in his mouth and taking aim at Pieta. It was Anant Tamhane’s favourite game. He would stand in the balcony of his own chawl and spit on unwary passers-by. Ravan had been one of his victims and was willing to do almost anything to get back at him.
Ravan mustered all the saliva in his mouth and dropped the spit bomb. It landed and splintered on Anant Tamhane’s thin, long head. He was screaming shrilly, summoning his father and mother from Chawl No. 23 and craning his neck up to see who had dared pay him back in his own coin.
Ravan thought he had escaped detection by hurriedly pulling his head back but the long and skinny arm of the la
w had caught up with him.
Sadashiv Raghunath Tamhane was five feet five inches tall but looked much shorter because of his stooping shoulders. He had high cheekbones, darting fish-eyes and a pinched straight nose that gave the impression of being hooked. His skin was sallow and his face sagged. Even when his mouth was closed he seemed to be cackling with his thin, crisp lungs. Ravan saw him sitting on the topmost bough of a leafless banyan tree looking down disapprovingly at the world below.
Mr Tamhane was a man of infinite faith in the depravity and crookedness of his fellow man. He suspected everybody of the very worst and refused to be disappointed when he was proven wrong. All goodness was a front, a feint, an expedient retreat before a person showed his true colours. He couldn’t have chosen a more fulfilling career. It confirmed his worst fears about the human race. He was a clerk at the Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court at Marine Lines. Every day there passed in front of his eyes an endless procession of petty thieves, hit-and-run drivers, indigent blackmailers, violent drunks, unsuccessful kidnappers, wife-beaters, extortionists, closet sodomites, pimps and prostitutes, down-and-out racketeers, forgers and counterfeiters, greenhorn delinquents, vernacular pornopeddlers, quacks, babas, hoaxers and spiritual swindlers with wandering hands, false prophets and fraudulent water-diviners, exhibitionists, peeping toms, failed suicides, shoplifters and con men. He enumerated their offences and dilated upon their criminal psychographics at such length and with such sour pleasure, his lips stayed open at all times in a rictus of distaste.
Under Indian Penal Code Section 407, Clause 3C, Your Honour, the defendant was caught red-handed spitting on the head of a mere innocent. The defendant may be of the same age as the plaintiff but I urge you, Your Lordship, to look at his previous record. In the annals of the most heinous crimes, you will not come across a criminal so hardened and beyond redemption as this child of the devil himself. He first killed an unborn son’s father in the prime of his life and widowed a wife and orphaned a lovely girl barely one year old, and then with Nathuram Godse, he shot and murdered Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a.k.a. the Mahatma. There is no punishment on our planet, nay, in our universe, which is commensurate with his unmentionable deeds and yet we must make do with what we have. I beseech you My Lord, think not of Anant Tamhane as my son but as the flower and future of India and the trauma he has suffered at the hands of this nasty, short and brutish Ravan, King of Ceylon and evil incarnate. Jail him your honour, not just for life and without parole but put him behind bars, and do not release his bones even after he is dead and gone, for his crimes are such that an eternity of incarceration is not enough.
Ravan and Eddie Page 9