‘It was my mother’s mother who arranged the whole thing. For years my father had refused to remarry. God knows they tried a dozen times every year. Then out of the blue this nineteen-year-old tart turns up, she’s a third or fourth cousin of mine, flashes her teeth and makes eyes at my father and my father suddenly insists I need a new mother. She’s done some black magic, I swear to you, I can’t recognize my father. He puts dye in his hair and takes her to the movies at least twice a week, this man who couldn’t bear to watch a film. As for me, he doesn’t even remember he has a son. Hemlata this and Hemlata that, it’s Hemlata morning, noon and night. Can’t wait for me to go to sleep. Before it’s ten-thirty he’s busy picking up her sari. Doesn’t get enough of it at night, so he’s begun to take days off from work. A man who never in his entire career took a day off, not even when my mother died. Just cremated her, took a shower and went straight to work, the minister won’t know where the files are, he said. Now the same man says the minister can look for the files himself if he needs them that badly, or the country can come to a standstill, he doesn’t give a damn. Nobody’s been as conscientious as I’ve been, he says, and all I’ve got to show for it is one measly watch they gave me after twenty-five years of service and that too stopped working a long time ago. High time I took it easy, he says, and you, you Prakash, get off your bloody arse. I’m not going to support you all your life, you fail this year and you’re out, out of school and out of this house too. I know that bitch has been whispering in his ear, that’s the reason he’s been giving me a hard time. He says to me, you can take up a job and find a place of your own. And if you don’t fancy that, too bad, four months is all you’ve got to shape up. And don’t look at your mother, I’ll smash your bloody face if I ever catch you eyeing her that way. Hemlata was telling me that you talk back to her and call her Lata. You watch your mouth, boy, if you want any teeth left in it. You’ll call her Mother and touch her feet every morning. And the bitch stands there plaiting her hair and nodding her head and smiling sweetly at me.
‘Do you understand the hell I must be going through? No child I know has ever been put through such torture. Save me, Ravan. Snuff that woman out.’
It was about a week after this overwrought confession that Rajeev Borade slipped a dirty crumpled envelope into Ravan’s hand during the geography class. Ravan excused himself and went down to pee.
My dear Ravan,
Please cut off my father’s left hand. He’s a leftie. He hit me yesterday because I stole eight annas to go thrice on the merry-go-round and to buy ice-fruit at the Mahashivratri fair. Once he has no left hand, all he’ll be able to do is wave his stub in the air when he wants to bash me up. And he’ll lose his job too.
Am enclosing three rupees and seventy paise.
Yours gratefully,
Rajeev
Ravan buttoned up his shorts, left the lavatory and sat down on the lowest step of the staircase. He felt drained by the first intimations of the power of evil. It would be the source of his ethical ambivalence at many critical moments in later years. He had never been so confused in his life. Nothing had given him as much pain and as many nightmares as the discovery that he was a murderer. He had lost his sleep and he had lost weight. He was ashamed to walk among human beings for fear that they would recognize him for what he was: a parricide. A killer of not just an unborn baby’s father but the killer, albeit part-killer, of the father of the nation.
Now all of a sudden everybody knew his past and instead of spitting on him and running away from his very shadow, they were seeking him out, asking him to commit the most terrible crimes and paying him cash, not on delivery but in advance. He felt a delirious sense of power. He also felt like throwing up.
Was this his vocation? Was he born with a career which he was too opaque to recognize? Should he give up school? There was clearly a lot of money in this business. His mother Parvati wouldn’t have to slave all day and half the night. He could buy her a nice bed and place it on the other side of the room, opposite his father’s.
The next morning when he was going home, Sudhir Salunke accosted him. He was a little incoherent and took a good deal of time to come to the point but the gist of what he said was clear enough. The landlord of Sudhir’s chawl was threatening to evict his family because they hadn’t been able to pay rent for the last seven months. Sudhir’s father had told the landlord that he was about to get his job back but the landlord was adamant. Would Ravan please dispatch the man, name and address—Mr J.V. Sardesai, 49, Jamshedji Road, Nana Chowk. They could negotiate a price to be paid half in advance, half after commission of services.
The most memorable day in Ravan’s new-found calling occurred a fortnight later. When he returned home from school, his mother rushed him into the kitchen and said in a hushed voice, ‘There’s a letter for you.’
‘For me?’ There was as much awe in Ravan’s voice as in Parvati’s. She handed him an envelope.
‘I didn’t want it to fall into his hands,’ she said pointing in the direction of his father’s bed.
Parvati gave him a knife to open the envelope but he decided to have his cup of tea and the snacks his mother always served him after school, first. He had not felt so important even when Prakash had approached him with his momentous request.
He wiped his hands on his shorts and sliding the knife into the sealed flap of the envelope, sliced it open.
‘What does it say?’ his mother asked before he unfolded the lined notepaper on which the letter was written.
‘It’s private.’ Ravan had yet to read it. Parvati was taken aback by this unexpected answer. She looked at Ravan with new respect.
My dear Ravan,
My father beats my mother, me and my nine brothers and sisters every night. Yesterday he hit my mother with my cricket bat and broke open her forehead. We had to take her to hospital. The doctors gave her seven stitches and have kept her under observation.
Will you please help me and my family? God won’t. He never hears any of my prayers. All of us will owe you an everlasting debt of gratitude if you get rid of our father. I would not ask you to do this if he thrashed just me and my brothers but I can’t bear to see him hitting my mother. If we don’t stop him now, he’ll kill all of us. Last night he threatened to do just that when we said we wanted to take my mother to the hospital. He was in a bad temper this morning and bashed my oldest sister and stopped only when she fainted.
You need not fear about what will happen to all of us after his death. Half the time, my father does not go to work. When he does, he spends most of his money on drink. I’ll take up a job somewhere. My two older sisters are already working as servants. We’ll manage.
Please do something soon. You are a real saint.
Yours gratefully,
Ashok
P.S. Do not worry about money. My brothers and I will pay you every month all your life.
Subtly over the next few weeks, the centre of power in school shifted. Nobody kowtowed to Prakash any longer. He didn’t seem to demand it either. He was now one of the boys. But while people began to treat Ravan with deference, it was all covert and never spelled out. Even when they came to ask him for favours, there was something furtive and clandestine about their requests. Most of them like Ashok Sane preferred to write.
‘Ravan.’ It was Prakash.
‘Are you going to kill my stepmother or not? Or are you just so much hot air? And all those tales about your earlier murders nothing but lies?’
‘Yelling won’t get you anywhere. Neither will your impatience.’
‘No more talk. Give me a fixed date.’
‘Your stepmother, you yourself admitted, is doing black magic. The only antidote for black magic is stronger black magic. The stars have to be right and you have to perform very expensive rituals and ceremonies. All you’ve got is a piddling hundred and twenty-five rupees. One false move and her ghost will sit on your neck and drink your blood every night. If you are unhappy with the way I’m handling
things, go and get somebody else to get rid of your stepmother.’
‘I’m sorry, really sorry. I thought you were going to kill her with a knife or shoot her with bullets, the way you killed Gandhi. Now I understand, but please do it fast. I can’t take it any more.’
Damn. He had escaped for the moment but what was he going to do? Couldn’t God make him disappear? How was he going to face all these people? If he didn’t deliver fast, they would turn on him and maybe lynch him. Every day for the past two months he had avoided confronting the two questions that needed urgent answers. How was he going to live up to all these people’s expectations of him? How was he going to commit these dire acts? He couldn’t for the life of him recall how he had terminated his first two victims.
‘Run, Ravan, run.’ Ashok Sane almost knocked Ravan down as he ran the length of the school corridor in search of him during the recess. Prakash’s looking for you and …’
Too late. The rest of Ravan’s class watched silently as Prakash Sonavane got his hands around Ravan’s neck.
‘I told you to kill my stepmother, not my father, you bastard.’ He was crying like a child. His nose was running and he couldn’t make up his mind whether to wipe it or throttle Ravan first. He wanted to speak. He had perforce to take his hanky out and blow his nose. ‘I’m going to kill you. Give my father back to me. Or I’ll kill you.’ His hands were back at Ravan’s throat.
‘Do you want the black magic to kill you too?’ Prakash withdrew his hands as if he had touched live electric wires. Ravan may not have known what black magic was or how it operated but he had no doubt in his mind that there was black magic in the world and that he was an old hand at it. How else could you explain the words that had escaped his lips just now? He certainly hadn’t spoken them. He had never wished Prakash’s father ill, let alone dead. He had never even wished any harm to Prakash’s stepmother. And yet Prakash’s old man was dead. All because of him. Did he need any more proof that he was a murderer?
Ten
‘I’ll do as I please.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘It’s my life.’
‘No longer. You’ve got two children.’
Mother and daughter were not shouting at each other. It was the intense hostility in his mother’s voice that had woken up Eddie.
‘They are doing okay.’
‘They would if their mother was all right.’
‘Are you suggesting that I’m not right in the head?’
‘You are a hard, bitter woman in whom all love has dried up.’
‘What do you expect of a widow who has to work twelve to fourteen hours a day to feed her children, not to mention you.’
‘You were a hard and bitter woman even when Victor was alive.’
‘That’s not true. I tried. I tried my best till the end.’
‘He tried, not you. He tried to win you over in every way he could. He bought you pearls. That gold necklace you’re wearing he bought you for giving him a daughter. He took you to the cinema, he tried taking you to dances but you pursed up your lips at everything.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You are lying to yourself, Violet. You never forgave him for marrying you.’
‘Mummy, if you go on any more about the past, I’m going to stop talking to you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about the past. I’m trying to get you to live in the present.’
‘By getting me married off again?’
‘You are still young. There’s no point denying your body. You need a husband.’
‘I don’t need anybody.’
‘Your children need a father. He’ll be firm but not inflexible like you. They can go to college instead of starting to work as soon as they finish school. He’ll earn money as the man of the house should. You can take it easy and not work like a dog.’
‘I don’t mind working for my children.’
‘All I’m asking you to do is to see Mr Furtado. If you don’t like him, forget him. There will be many others.’
And I thought you were on our side. How could you do this to me, Granna? It was shameful the way Granna was carrying on, trying to get his mother to marry Machado, Furtado, Figuereido or someone as bad. What did they need a man for, they had got along fine without one for the last eleven years or so and would do so for the next hundred.
When he was a child he had two names. He was called Eddie at home and Poor Eddie by almost everybody outside. (Poor Eddie but never Poor Pieta. Not that he minded, but it struck him as a little odd, after all they shared the same father.) He surmised that he was poor because he had no father, and he did pretty well for himself out of his fatherless state. People, especially women, got a wet, emotional look in their eyes and went into their kitchens and got him something, usually a sweet, to eat. His mother whacked him a couple when she caught him polishing off these morsels of pity, but that didn’t deter him from looking dolefully into the eyes of mothers whose children continued to have fathers.
Some time back, Mrs D’Costa gave him a shirt and a pair of shorts. He had a hunch that his mother would not approve of his latest acquisitions and hid them under the rest of his clothes in the bottom drawer. But nothing escaped her eyes and in no time at all she uncovered the culprit shirt and shorts. The ferocity and violence of her reaction left him breathless. She took it as a personal affront that Mrs D’Costa had presumed to gift him clothes. She threatened to throw him out of the house. He had not gone asking for the clothes but she called him a beggar and an emotional blackmailer and ordered him to take them back that very instant. He was about to leave with his head hanging in shame when, to his even greater horror, she decided to accompany him.
‘It was indeed very kind of you to give your ninth child’s hand-me-downs after they had seen service with your first eight,’ she told Mrs D’Costa. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to look for someone else to give them to or wait till you have your next one since we do not care to be the objects of your charity.’
Time had blunted people’s memories. And even if they remembered that he was ‘Poor’ Eddie, it didn’t often send them scurrying for a chocolate or marzipan.
He was not quite sure what role fathers played in families. His field sample was the thirty-nine other Catholic families who lived on his floor. Wherever there was a father, a living one, there seemed to be a hell of a lot of children and the mothers were pregnant round-the-clock. There was not a moment when a chorus of babies, half a million on his floor and a zillion lower down, was not raising alarms in all five continents of the earth. The Castellinos had seven, four girls and three boys, and Mrs Castellino perpetually walked with her hands clasped around her jutting belly. The Rozarios had three but they had been married only five years. The De Penhas had nine. He wasn’t sure but it looked as if Mrs De Penha was beginning to show signs of another pregnancy. The record-holder was Mrs Aranha. She had eleven and you wouldn’t believe it if you saw Mr Aranha, he was so old, wispy and forgetful. But he had got another baby in the works. The Correas had five, Pereiras six, Mirandas nine, Almeidas four, Rodriguezes seven. Eddie could have gone on in this fashion for another fifteen neighbours. At least twenty of them had grown-up children who would start making babies any moment now.
If he got a new father, the man would work and earn money and from what he gathered, his mother would stop working. He had no idea if there was much of a difference between what his mother earned and what the newcomer would make. It seemed doubtful if, apart from the switch in the role of breadwinner, there would be much more money coming in. The only other thing that seemed certain was that babies would start rolling in. Whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed. His mother, as a matter of fact, would have no alternative but to start working again. So much for his mother’s life becoming easier. As to babies, that was a subject that Eddie wasn’t even willing to contemplate. Did you see how the Da Cunha’s Cyril popped out his yellow-brown, semi-solid shit? Celebrated his
third birthday last week and yet did it standing, you won’t believe it, he even did it while he walked. If you went to any of the homes on Eddie’s floor, they always reeked of unformed milky shit and at any time there were at least fifteen to twenty-five cloth nappies strung up on clothes-lines criss-crossing the room and giving off a sick, moist smell. The latest child of that endless mother, Mrs Aranha, was unquestionably the most beautiful baby in the world, so beautiful that the usually circumspect and cautious Eddie had impulsively taken her in his arms and what do you think had happened? She had bobbed up and down and gurgled away happily while throwing up all over Eddie’s shirt-front and shoulder.
And where were all those babies that his mother would inevitably have, going to sleep? Even more important, where was the Man going to sleep? In his mother’s bed? Perish the thought. And what was this intruder, this destroyer of the Coutinho family’s peace, to be called? Eddie could not, even in his thoughts, bring himself to call him by the name children use for the husbands of their mothers. And the brats? As it was, it took a superhuman effort to cope with that arch-nemesis of his life, his legitimate sister, Pieta. But these half-blood, half siblings of his, what was he to do with them? Was his mother going to ask him to rock them to sleep, clean their mess and wipe their butts, listen to them screaming all day long and all through the night, make baby-talk and entertain them while the lord and master of the house took his ease?
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