Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  But perhaps the Man would not take his ease but raise Cain instead as a lot of the men in the CWD chawls did. There were many things that a displaced Goan male missed in Bombay: siestas, foreign goods (until Goa lost its colonial status and started, according to some, the process of assimilation, decline and fall into the Indian subcontinent), cashewnuts, mangoes, feni, dances, all-night revelry—but his sense of deprivation was most acute in the matter of booze. It was not as cheap as air, but the price of beer in Goa was the next-best thing to getting it free. And there was no sin in it, whereas in Bombay and most of India it was undoubtedly one of the cardinal sins. Most Goan men continued to drink but their imbibing became as joyless as that of the rest of India’s population. In Goa drinking was badinage and banter, good spirits, theatre, political and social commentary that encompassed everybody including the non-drinkers in its good cheer. In Bombay it was a lonely and solitary business, even when you sat with others. More like work than fun. It was an act of rebellion, perhaps the only one available. The men sat in speakeasies or occasionally brought the stuff home and drank it dutifully till they became boisterous, then morose and finally unconscious. Between maudlin and stuporous, it was touch and go. The men suddenly wanted to get even with the world and beat up all and sundry, including their wives.

  Did the sought after stranger drink? And would he too, like Mr Sequeira, Mr Cardoz, Mr Pereira and so many others wallop Eddie and Pieta?

  ‘He had taken a month’s leave. He couldn’t wait for me to get out of the house. I was never at home anyway.’ It was difficult for Ravan to keep pace with Prakash’s narrative. They were sitting on a bench in the garden on Mazagaon Hill. ‘He moved my stuff and mattress into the common balcony. He wanted to hump her all the time. I could hear him struggling at nights trying to get it up. When things got unbearable he took it out on me but never her, never, though she was the cause of his failures and all our troubles. That night when he woke her up, she snapped at him: “Leave me alone, seven tractors won’t be able to raise it. I don’t know why I got married to an impotent old man.” I could hear him whimpering and weeping early in the morning. How I thanked God that she was lying dead to the world and couldn’t see this final defeat of my father. Throw her out, throw the bitch out, I kept saying to myself, and everything will be as it was.

  ‘She was serving me dinner two days before he died, I don’t know what got into his head, he kicked my thali. “Find some other place for yourself. Your mother has better things to do than wait on you hand and foot all day long. If I see you in this house after Sunday, I’ll kill you.” I was so flabbergasted, I didn’t know what to say. “Where do you want me to go?” I finally managed to ask him. “Go to the Himalayas, walk into the sea for all I care. Eighteen years old and still in the sixth grade.” “Seventeen, not eighteen,” I yelled at him. Before I knew what was happening, he had slapped me for the first time in my entire life. “Don’t you dare talk back to me. What difference does it make, you’ll be twenty-six and still in the sixth grade.” He said that in front of my stepmother. I felt bloody humiliated. She tried to intervene on my behalf, the bitch, but he wouldn’t listen. She brought me another thali and cleaned up the mess on the floor. I sat there stunned but not stunned enough not to wish my father dead. I have never wished for anything so hard. I wanted him dead then and there. I saw a BEST bus lurch to the sixth floor of our building. It speeded towards him. The driver saw him screaming but he didn’t veer away. My father ran for cover but the driver kept chasing him and knocked him down. Then he reversed and ran over him again and again and again. Nothing has given me as much pleasure as watching my father die.

  ‘I blamed you for my father’s death but knew all the while who was responsible for it. You had warned me about how delicate the whole black magic business is. No wonder everything went wrong. Do you know who the driver of the bus was? It was me. The black magic went wrong because I wished my father dead.’

  Prakash always left Ravan exhausted—in the old days with the sheer physical effort Ravan had to put in, and in the last few months with this endless stream of words. It was not a stream, a stream is linear. Prakash’s words piled themselves one on top of the other till they formed a heap that became a mountain. The mountain kept rising till it broke through the sky while it pressed down on Ravan until he couldn’t breathe. He had lost Prakash several times. He couldn’t understand why Prakash’s father needed to mount his stepmother. What was supposed to rise? And why would he want to beat his own prick? But Ravan had learnt to turn off his curiosity and to hold his silence.

  ‘I want that bitch dead, Ravan. Let her pay for her sins. If she hadn’t come into our lives, my father and I wouldn’t have fallen out. And he wouldn’t have gone out of his mind wanting to sleep with her day and night. You better work your magic again. I’ll pay you as much as you want once she’s dead because all my father’s money will come to me.

  ‘Do it quick but let her suffer.’

  Prakash’s father’s death, especially his blaming Ravan for it in public, had one peculiar effect. Ravan wasn’t sure whether he was happy about it or distressed. The boys from his school stopped coming over with death wishes. They liked the idea of a hit man but only so long as he didn’t kill anyone. Ravan had actually killed a classmate’s, albeit an ex-tyrant’s, father when he was supposed to have killed the stepmother. The boys treated Ravan with respect but were now clearly afraid of him and kept away. Ravan was relieved by this new development at first but not for long. He was surprised at how happy he felt when Prakash turned up at school after months and spoke to him.

  ‘Can you undo something you’ve started, Ravan, something that is perhaps on the verge of completion?’ Prakash’s voice was trembling.

  Ravan had got that faraway look in his eyes. He reverted to the stony silence of the sphinx. What did the bugger want now? Prakash was nothing but trouble, always one thing after another.

  ‘Help me, Ravan, please help me. I’ve made a grievous error. My stepmother is a saint. Please don’t kill her. I’ll do anything you say, anything. Please, Ravan, please.’

  Ravan looked away. He had no idea of how to respond to the metamorphosis of Satan to saint.

  ‘Hell, what’s the point of lying to you? You know everything anyway. Hemlata is no longer my stepmother. She and I are, oh what the hell, lovers. She’s the most fantastic person I’ve ever met. I’m going to take up a job and then we’re going to get married. Her parents want her to go back, her mother even came and stayed with us a month, but now there’s no going back. It’s not too late, is it, Ravan? Have you set things in motion that no one can take back?’

  Ravan stuck to his silence.

  ‘You have? Oh God what have I done? Please, Ravan, anything, absolutely anything.’

  ‘I don’t know. Almost impossible.’ Again that other voice, the one that spoke through his mouth but had nothing to do with him.

  ‘Try. Please try.’

  ‘Can’t say whether it will work. Cost you a lot of money.’

  ‘Don’t worry about money, that’s the least of our problems. Just do it, that’s all.’

  The Prakash episode is good for one last platitude. Money promised is not money in hand.

  Reputations, even unfounded ones, are prone to sudden deaths. It was doubtful if within a year or two, any of Ravan’s classmates would remember his black-magical powers. Prakash never returned. Ravan heard that the minister under whom Prakash’s father had worked had given Prakash a job and that his ex-stepmother, Hemlata, was pregnant.

  Eleven

  How was Eddie to recognize the Man who was about to change his life forever? Was he tall or short, did he have a limp, did he have thick dark eyebrows, was he fair, was he young or old? Maybe he had a squint and had to wear two-inch-thick lenses. Maybe he was hunchbacked. He dismissed that possibility instantly. Any man who aspired to his mother’s hand would have to be good looking.

  ‘Are you Mr Furtado?’

  It was getting clos
e to six. If he didn’t act quickly the Man would slip through his fingers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Furtado? Are you Mr Furtado?’

  Eddie was keeping a lookout for the gentleman at the corner of Chawl No. 17.

  ‘Do I look like Mr Furtado?

  That was an odd question if he had ever heard one. Did Mr Furtado have his name spelt out on his forehead?

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Stupid bugger, don’t waste my time.’

  The man walked past Eddie and past Chawl No. 17. Eddie realized that the fellow was right. It was stupid of him to take a position at the corner of the building. The only way he could narrow his margin of error was to stand inside the building at the bottom of the stairs. It would be ideal if he positioned himself on his own floor, but Granna was certain to catch him and order him back into the house. She had forced Eddie to put on the white silk shirt and the deep blue trousers that he had worn at her grand-niece Judy’s wedding. The trousers didn’t quite reach his ankles and they were a little tight around the waist, but Granna, who usually indulged him, was adamant about this choice of garments. She even made him wear a burgundy bow.

  ‘Sit on the bed next to your sister and don’t fidget.’ Sit next to Pieta, didn’t Granna know that she was asking for trouble? Just look at Pieta. You would think Mr Furtado was coming to meet her. She wore a white blouse with puffed sleeves that were gathered with red ribbons and a tutu-like skirt made of sky-blue organza. Her pearly white shoes were topped by blue socks that matched the sheer organza. She had waist-length hair which she thought the Queen of Sheba would have envied. She left it loose and at the slightest pretext shook her head and let it swirl around.

  He could have forgiven her anything (and there was much to forgive, according to him, her patronizing airs, her coming first in class in every subject) but the expression on her face. It made him violent. He wanted to scratch it out the way some boys in class ran their nails on the blackboard till everybody dug their fingers into their ears and begged them to stop. Those prissy lips pressing upon each other and that sunny, oh so sunny, holier-than-thou look in her eyes. Not just the eyes, her forehead, her mistily pink cheeks, the almost invisible pores in her flawless complexion, everything told you, ‘Look at me. I’m better than you and everybody else you know. Kiss my feet. Now. Because if you don’t, I may change my mind and you may never again get an opportunity to do so.’ If it meant wiping out her life to wipe out that look, he was willing to do so.

  He yanked at the red ribbon on her sleeve which disappeared under the white cloth and resurfaced every couple of centimetres.

  Granna had disappeared inside the kitchen where Violet was changing from black cotton to black silk under duress; they could hear Granna insisting that she wear the pearl necklace Victor had given her. ‘Granna, Mom, Eddie is tormenting me and has torn out the ribbon from my blouse and ruined my hair and is making it impossible for me to live with him under the same roof.’

  How he loathed her at such moments. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, unpredictable about Miss Prim and Preening. Normally Pieta needed to call upon heaven and its Lord of hosts to get a response from Granna. Today things were different. Before she could complete her tirade, Granna had smartly whacked Eddie on his back. ‘Not today, Eddie. Not a word to Pieta. And don’t touch her. Sit still, do you hear me? And as for you, little Miss Muffet, one more word against your brother and I’ll chop off your hair.’

  Granna went in and Eddie sprang out of the open door. ‘Granna, Eddie’s run away though you had told him not to move.’ He would have to deal with Pieta some other time, he had more urgent matters on hand. He took off his bow as he ran down the stairs. He would have liked to get into more sensible clothes but there was no time for that.

  ‘Mr Furtado?’ He had let five men enter Chawl No. 17 without springing the question on them. They were Hindus and he knew his mother was not about to marry one of them. He wondered how he could separate the Hindus from the Catholics with such assurance. It was not a question of dress. The majority of them wore the same clothes as Catholic men. It was certainly not because they didn’t wear a cross on a chain, hardly any Catholic men wore them outside their shirts. Catholics spoke English and not too many of the Hindus he knew did. But they didn’t have to open their mouths for him to tell them apart. So what was it? Was ‘Roman Catholic’ written in large letters on his people’s foreheads and ‘Hindu’ on theirs? Was it the way they walked or stood or the way they held themselves? Did religion make people look different? Or was it language? Because even among Hindus, he could tell a Gujarati from a Maharashtrian and a Punjabi from a Bengali. Did one’s mother tongue leave a permanent mark on one, change the way one’s face was set and alter the contours and lines of one’s features?

  He was intrigued by these questions but had no time for them just now. The rumpled man with an even more rumpled face whom he had just accosted was saying something.

  ‘Which Furtados did you have in mind? The ones from Mhapsa are known as the cashew-kings of the East Indies. They own half of Mhapsa. Very upper crust, their voice carries weight even in Lisbon. The grandsons are a dead loss. Not a patch on their grandfather. He was the enterprising one. Ambitious, ruthless and devious. It was his eldest son, the current head of the family, who consolidated the empire, diversified, went into shipping and mining. His third son Joachim was with me in school, a real wastrel.’

  ‘But are you Mr Furtado?’ What was this weirdo talking about? Eddie had run out of patience.

  ‘I guess you could say we are. I’m married to my third cousin. On her mother’s side, they have some Furtado blood, not the Mhapsa Furtados, mind you, but the ones from Diu.’

  Mother of God, he could have strangled the man. Was he never going to say whether he was Mr Furtado or not.

  ‘Is your wife alive?’

  ‘I resent that question, young man. I deeply resent it. Of course she is …’

  There was another man fixing his tie on the first floor-landing. He wore a double-breasted suit with a herringbone pattern. His pallor was ashen. He had thinning hair which he was patting down at that moment. In three leaps Eddie was standing next to him. The suit hung loose on the man, he had obviously lost a lot of weight. He had transparent skin which was stretched thinner than that of an over-inflated balloon. Beads of perspiration stood out on his closely shaven upper lip and the lobes of his ears.

  ‘Are you Mr Furtado?’

  The man almost jumped with surprise. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Going up to see Mrs Coutinho?’

  ‘How do you know so much about me?’

  Eddie looked around. This fellow was even more nervous than he was.

  ‘Everybody knows.’

  ‘Everybody? How? Have there been others before me?’

  Shoot. How was he going to answer this one? He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘That many? How many?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You’ve lost count? Mary, Mother of God, what am I getting into? Is this Coutinho woman, this Violet, a worldly woman?’

  ‘What’s worldly?’

  Mr Furtado ignored Eddie’s question.

  ‘Does she have any boyfriends?’

  The man’s transparent fears struck some deep chord within Eddie. They fed his imagination and liberated him. He would have been surprised and hurt had anyone told him he was lying. Life was nothing but a series of possibilities. Why was only one chosen to be reality? Fiction was a fact that had not yet occurred but certainly could. (Would anyone have predicted a fortnight ago that the widow Violet would entertain the idea of getting married again?) By now Eddie’s re-working of the truth had more to do with the artistic impulse than the thought of material gain.

  He said, ‘Lots. Sixty-seven.’

  ‘How do you know the exact number?’

  ‘Arre, everybody in the building knows.’

  Eddie’s blood tingled. He felt alert and buoyant. It was not m
erely the exhilaration of inventing a new mother that thrilled him. Instead of her being the boss and putting the brakes on him whenever she felt like it, he could now control her future and reshape her past. Her fate was in his hands. He was able to render Mr Furtado’s suspicions prophetic and self-fulfilling.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mr Furtado. Eddie could see that it was taking some time for the information to sink in. ‘Would you say then that she’s a fast woman?’

  Eddie didn’t quite see his mother as a racing car but he liked the idea.

  ‘Very fast.’

  ‘They have parties?’

  ‘No parties, sharties.’ One of Granna’s pet phrases came back to Eddie. ‘Every day’s a carnival.’

  ‘Drinks?’

  ‘Drinks, dance, music. All the neighbours complain but they don’t listen.’

  ‘Why don’t they call the police?’

  ‘What can the police do?’

  ‘She’s got them in her pocket too? Does she also drink?’

  ‘Like a fish.’ He saw his mother sprawled out like Mr Mendez in Room 63. Her eyes were glazed, the bottle in her hand empty and she was screaming, ‘Sala, give me a drink. Who do you think is paying for it? Your father? I am. With my blood, sweat,’ at this point Mr Mendez usually started to cry, ‘and tears. See them? See?’

  ‘Then why does she need a husband?’

  ‘To earn money, what else? Granna said once you’re there, Ma can take it easy.’

  Alarms seemed to go off in Mr Furtado’s parchment face. His eyes bulged and he became short of breath.

  ‘Is she your mother?’

  Shit, shit, shit, how could I have let that slip out.

  ‘What?’ He played for time.

  ‘Why did you call her Ma?’

  Eddie was now impatient with the man’s obtuseness.