‘I did, but they meant nothing to me. I wanted to learn to use the wooden staff, both to attack and to defend. I like wrestling and I loved to hear the stories that Lele Guruji told.’
The instant he volunteered that last bit of information Eddie realized that he had crossed the taboo line and revealed what his mind had automatically screened out all these years.
‘What kinds of stories?’
‘Stories from the Mahabharata.’
‘And?’
‘Stories of Krishna.’ Eddie remembered to drop the title Lord in the nick of time. ‘Rama, Shankar, Ganesh, Indra, Shivaji, hundreds of stories.’
‘What did I tell you? He has sold his soul and worshipped pagan gods.’ Violet said this almost triumphantly.
‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’ Eddie was close to tears.
‘Did it never occur to you that you were committing a heinous sin listening to these stories?’
‘No, they were stories, just like any other stories. Even the Bible has stories. Lele Guruji told us those too.’
‘How dare you compare the Bible with these idol-worshippers’ tales? The Bible is the word of God, the one and only true God.’
‘Those people say the Gita is the word of God.’ With the stabbing pain of betrayal, Eddie realized that he was already referring to his former friends as those people.
‘And you believe them?’ Father D’Souza’s wrath now knew no bounds. He looked at Violet. It was as if he needed her to corroborate and seal Eddie’s guilt. ‘Or are you going to believe me and your mother? And Jesus our Saviour who gave his life to save sinners like you?’
Eddie looked up at the statue of Jesus way above him at the back of the church. It had never occurred to him to betray this gentle Son of God whose suffering he could never bear to look at. Why then were his mother and Father D’Souza so angry with him and making such a terrible fuss?
‘Do you know the price of worshipping anyone but our Lord God Jesus Christ? Excommunication.’
That word had been explained to Eddie several times. There was nothing worse that could happen to you. But he knew something worse than that word. It was the awful sound of it. That ‘X’ seemed to shut him out. It was like a sound-proof, one-way glass door. He could see everybody but they couldn’t see him. They never would, though he was just an outstretched hand away from them. There was a finality about it that seemed to press down and crush the very essence of his life and asphyxiate him. It was an inflatable word that grew bigger and bigger. It spilled over and pushed out the moon and Mars and Venus and Jupiter and the sun and all the galaxies till there was no space left and then it squeezed him out over the edge.
Father D’Souza must have realized that Eddie did not understand the full implications of the word. ‘You know what that means?’ He proceeded to give him a vivid exegesis which paradoxically shrank the word and brought it under control.
‘Your soul will burn in hell forever.’
A sob escaped Eddie and then he couldn’t stop crying for the sheer relief it gave him.
‘Repent in front of our Lord and promise never to go to any other Hindu meeting and never to worship any other god but the true God, our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Eddie hesitated for a moment, wondering what was expected of him.
‘Go down on your knees.’ Father D’Souza pressed down on Eddie’s shoulder till he sank to his knees; and then he retrieved for Jesus Christ a soul that He had never lost. ‘Repent and promise. Or I’ll excommunicate you from the house of God and the life hereafter.’
‘I promise. I promise.’ Eddie spoke with such fervour and conviction that even Father D’Souza was pleased.
‘Promise to strangle and break the neck of that viper who was responsible for banishing us from paradise, Satan himself, every time he raises his head in your bosom.’
‘I promise. I promise.’
‘Promise to ask Mother Mary to intervene on your behalf with our Lord Jesus Christ and beg her to ask his forgiveness every day of your life.’
‘I promise. I promise.’
‘Now say a hundred Hail Marys, every day for a whole year. May the Lord find it in his heart to forgive you.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Rise my son.’ Father D’Souza felt good. He had that rare sense of a job well done. He felt cleansed. He put his hand on Eddie’s head as he rose.
‘Is it true that Ravan, the boy who stays below us, killed my father?’
Father D’Souza had the fleeting thought that if he didn’t withdraw his hand it would attach itself to Eddie’s head as with a resinous glue and nothing but sawing it off at the arm would ever separate them. He wasn’t taking any chances. He pulled his hand away harshly. You couldn’t ever be off your guard with this boy. Even when you had just saved his soul and begun to trust him, he would spring a rotten question on you and drag you all the way down to perdition.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Mummy.’
Father D’Souza looked at Violet reproachfully. She stared back at him defiantly.
‘It was an accident.’
Nine
‘Ravan.’
Ravan rose. The disembodied voice came from behind him. He would recognize it long after he was dead. Prakash. Tyrant, terror and a youth of prodigious powers. Prakash was sixteen. He had plugged the fifth grade six times and finally caught up with Ravan’s class. There was only one way to stay out of his orbit. Go and live on another planet, not the closer ones but Saturn or Jupiter. Or better still, pick another galactic system. Even the teachers left Prakash alone.
He wasn’t particularly large or tall but to Ravan and his peers he appeared a colossus. They did his homework, bought cigarettes for him and wiped his four-by-two inch mirror on the seat of their shorts when he wished to comb his hair. He was the only one in the school who had a pair of closed shoes. They were made of buffalo hide but had the sheen of patent leather. Ravan (or whoever else was summoned first thing in the morning) wiped the dust off the top of his shoes, applied daubs of Kiwi shoe polish with his fingers, brushed them steadily for seven minutes—‘lightly, you arsehole, this is delicate stuff, not your coarse hide—and then polished them again till the leather shone blindingly in the sunlight.
The fifth-grade students had no difficulty rendering these services willingly and with dispatch. The world, as Ravan well knew, was divided into slaves and slave-drivers. And then there were those who owned the slave-drivers. He was intelligent enough to realize that he would never be located on the same side of the fence as Prakash. But the source of Ravan’s and his colleagues’ awe lay elsewhere.
‘Watch this,’ Prakash had said six months back to seven of his slaves after class. The school building was deserted. Prakash presided sitting at the head of the staircase while the bonded labourers sat on the steps below. The boys fell silent. His eyes passed over and took in each individual face. What was he going to do? Swallow a sword? Ask them to rob a bank? He undid his fly and exposed his penis. There was nothing spectacular about it. Just like mine and Chandrakant’s and everybody else’s in class, thought Ravan. Prakash Sonavane began to stroke it gently. Is he trying to pee, I can do it without all this show.
It was odd. As Prakash stroked the length of his member, it grew in length. How did he do it? Ravan was mesmerized. It took a little time for him to register that it had also grown in body and width, frankly it had swollen monstrously as if Prakash was pumping air into it. Suddenly it went rigid. Its head looked dopey like the pictures of whales he had seen except that this thing had a vertical slit instead of a horizontal one. ‘It’s going to burst,’ Ravan blurted in panic.
‘It’s a gun. See that hole, that’s where the bullets come from.’ He swung it wildly, then pointed it at Naresh. ‘Shall I shoot?’ Naresh cringed and shrank back. ‘Does anybody have the guts to challenge me?’ Ravan thought it was an absurd question. Not even in his most megalomaniacal dream would it occur to him to cross Prakash.
‘You smirking, Ra
van, you smirking at me?’ Prakash grabbed hold of Ravan’s hair and yanked him down. Ravan fought shy of the barrel of the gun but Prakash held him firmly. ‘Open your mouth, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your brains out.’
Ravan opened his mouth. Before he knew it, the gun had rammed into the back of his throat. It pressed into his windpipe and choked him. His gullet reacted violently to the presence of a foreign body and tried to regurgitate it but Prakash’s hand continued to press his head forward. Ravan’s knees began to give and his eyes bulged out dangerously. He heard Prakash’s irritated voice. It seemed strangely muted. ‘Close your mouth, asshole, close it.’ Despite his fast-ebbing consciousness Ravan responded to the instructions and snapped his mouth shut. Prakash let out a cry of such intensity and urgency, it slapped Ravan out of the darkness descending upon him.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck you, you son of a bitch, you bit my cock off.’ Prakash was nursing his genitals as if they were the last of a rare and fragile species while performing a frenetic dance. Ravan’s classmates were in an uproar, rolling down the stairs. Ravan never forgave them.
The general mirth got to Ravan and he began to smile. Prakash looked at him. Ravan knew he was in trouble. Prakash brought Ravan’s head down sharply and shoved his penis back into his mouth. ‘All right, wise guy.’ The place had fallen so silent, Ravan could hear the words like coins ringing on a metal floor. ‘Close your mouth. Gently. And suck.’ He pulled Ravan’s head back and pushed it forward. ‘In-Out. In-Out. In-Out.’ The minutes passed. Ravan was close to tears. His jaw ached and his head was ready to split for lack of oxygen. He was discovering a whole new geography of pain down his spinal column. There was a skyward crick in his neck and it sang and zinged spottily across his back.
‘Exhausted, asshole? Go on. Go on. Up. Down. And don’t vary the pace.’
What was Prakash talking about? His head was in a fog which was emanating from between his eyes. What would the bullet do? Was there one bullet or many? Would it explode in his head? Would it traverse through and leave a hole with burnt edges and lodge itself into the rear wall?
Ravan felt Prakash’s grip on his head slacken while his body tautened. His hands and legs twitched and jerked in an uncoordinated fashion. He leaned back, his thighs caught Ravan’s head and squeezed it hard, went lax and then tightened again. Ravan surmised that Prakash was having a fit. Gangadhar Thate from the third floor in CWD Chawl No. 14 suffered from them. He would get them anywhere, on the staircase, in the toilet, on the playground. They came without warning and he collapsed on the spot. You had to rush and insert a stick or Yo-Yo between his teeth and hold a smashed onion, the sole of a shoe or an ammonia bottle over his nose.
Prakash was moaning now. Deep, long sighs. He was obviously in pain. Ravan tried to pull his head away. He wanted to put a notebook between Prakash’s teeth but Prakash wouldn’t let go of his hair. As a matter of fact he was pulling back and forth in a frenzied fashion. Suddenly he became inert and something leaked into Ravan’s mouth. It was thick and sticky and sweet with an acidic after-taste. Sala, jerk, the swine had peed in his mouth. He spat it out. It was white and cloudy like gum and not even a mouthful. Couldn’t be pee, what the hell was it?
‘You shit. You spat it out?’ Prakash was not only awake and wide alert, he was beside himself with rage. ‘Don’t you dare. Ever. Lick it. Lick it.’
Ravan stared at Prakash uncomprehendingly. He was willing to do almost anything for him but why drink pee. His line of thought was cut midway as Prakash caught him by the neck and pressed his head to the grey tiled floor.
‘Lick, you asshole, lick. It’s precious stuff, my seed. Within nine months you are going to have a baby. Everyone in our class is going to bear my sons. The girls from the Lady Sirur School will bear my daughters. Naresh, it’s your turn tomorrow. You watched Ravan, so I won’t have to teach you again.’
‘Ravan.’
Was it his turn to service Prakash today? No, as far as he could remember, it was next Tuesday. So what did he want? You never could tell. His shoes were shimmering but that wouldn’t dissuade Prakash from asking him to shine them again. Besides, there were times when he wanted to be sucked six or seven times a day.
He could ask for anything, just about anything, so long as it wasn’t about the baby. As far as he was aware, and admittedly his knowledge in these matters was limited, only women delivered babies. But Prakash was no ordinary mortal. Did you see what he could do with his cock? Amazing, nobody but nobody he knew could pull that off. And anyway, whether men and boys could bear babies or not, he knew he was pregnant. He felt a heaviness in his belly, in the first four months he had thrown up frequently. There were days when his stomach stood out a mile and a half and Prakash himself had put his ear a little below his ribcage and felt and heard the baby turn.
‘Where will it come from?’ Ravan had asked him. ‘From your navel, where else? It will tear open your stomach as the god Narasimha did. Your intestines will be flung on the floor, all two hundred and twenty yards of them. Wind them neatly the way your mother winds wool and put them back carefully. You’ll bleed a lot, the whole floor will be wet, drink it up quickly and then breastfeed the baby. If I hear that you’ve been starving my child, I’ll kill you.’
When was the baby coming? It was way past nine months.
Why, you may well ask, didn’t Ravan spearhead a revolt against Prakash? He could have tossed Prakash with a flick of his wrist, made him turn seven continuous cartwheels in the air, broken his back, shoved his toe in his crotch and unmanned him for life. He could have … but the truth was a little less flamboyant. In time Ravan would become highly accomplished in tae kwon do. But right now it was only an academic discipline. You practised in class, at home, in the open playgrounds in the CWD chawls but it had nothing to do with real life. Even later when he understood that tae kwon do could be used defensively against bullies, local dadas and toughs, he would find it difficult, if not impossible, to translate his skills into an instant physical response. But that’s still missing the point altogether. Ravan was not even twelve yet while Prakash was not just older but brutish, aggressive and vindictive. Whatever his physical dimensions he was a malevolent colossus.
Prakash ran towards Ravan and put his hand on Ravan’s shoulder. What was wrong? Prakash never even walked up to anyone. He called, you ran. He had an odd look in his eyes. ‘Is it true you killed Eddie Coutinho’s father?’
This is the end. The absolute end. The final end. The last final end. There was no point asking how he’d found out. Obviously Eddie had told him. Prakash was going to make him pay for it, with his life, what else.
‘And Gandhi? Mahatma Gandhi?’ Ravan still didn’t answer. ‘Look at me. I heard Godse and you killed him.’
Chandrakant, Chandrakant Dixit, you were my friend, my closest friend. How could you do this to me?
‘Boy, you’re some guy. A real chhupa Rustum.’ So, he was a murderer. The whole world but he knew about it. Ravan couldn’t and wouldn’t look at Prakash.
‘I want you to kill my stepmother. I’ll give you twenty rupees.’
It was now over two months since Prakash had made his request. It had not thrown Ravan. He wasn’t even flabbergasted. He simply blanked it out of his mind. You could call it his best career move to date. It was also one of his most important lessons in life and commerce. Like the kernel of a fable or parable, it would stay buried in his mind but affect his actions. Perhaps even when he grew up he wouldn’t be able to articulate the moral of the experience, but it wouldn’t be the less potent or real for that. He understood that many things, if not everything in life, were for sale and had a price on them, especially the illicit, the immoral and evil. He also began to realize that tides can change, tables can turn, roles switch and those in power become supplicants.
Prakash misunderstood his silence. He raised the ante from twenty to fifty, then to seventy-five.
‘Hundred and twenty-five,’ he said, ‘that’s all the money I have.’ More
than the escalating price on Prakash’s stepmother’s head, Ravan was struck by the change in his voice. It was uncertain and insistent.
‘I’ll think about it.’
Ravan tried to avoid Prakash. He could feel his eyes on him from across the classroom during the next few weeks. Occasionally he came over and lingered politely.
‘When are you going to do it?’ He finally got hold of Ravan while they were on their way to the physical-training class in the school courtyard.
‘I haven’t said yes yet.’
‘Please Ravan, I know the money’s not enough but I’ll get more, even if I have to steal it and pay you later.’
That was the first time Ravan looked Prakash in the face. His teeth were beginning to stain with the tobacco he chewed and smoked. The lock of hair he had trained so carefully to curl upon itself on his forehead had come undone. What had made Ravan think of him as a giant? He was taller and he shaved and he had a moustache, but he no longer loomed over Ravan like a calamity and there was not much in him to hold in awe. Ravan wouldn’t dare say it to himself even now, but with the lower lip of his mouth perpetually hanging slack, Prakash looked a mutt. He had to concentrate hard and long to get the drift of the simplest things. He had room for only a couple of thoughts in his head at a time and any new idea made him ill-humoured and suspicious. Ravan wondered why it had taken him so many weeks since the day Prakash had broached the subject of his stepmother to feel a sense of release and relief. He was a little confused. Did the source of the power that Prakash had exercised reside in Prakash or in Ravan himself?
Life, that most hackneyed of teachers, but also the freshest, was about to teach Ravan another lesson. If you did not show curiosity and were patient, human beings would tell you their entire life-stories, spew out every single sour and rancid detail.
‘You don’t know my stepmother. I was a king before she came. My mother died two years after I was born and it’s six or seven years since my sister got married. My father lived for me. What I said was law. Anything I wanted I got. The headmaster complained about my attendance and performance in school. My father didn’t believe a word of what he said. I could do no wrong. The headmaster threatened to throw me out. My father said he would talk to the minister. I guess you don’t know that my father works at the Secretariat. He’s a peon in the Ministry of Education. I was the apple of my father’s eye. Until she came into our lives.
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