Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  ‘Because I was repeating what Eddie’s grandmother said.’

  ‘What else did she say? I thought at least she would be a decent person.’

  ‘What decent? Everybody in their house is a chor. She said that the children can go to college instead of working because you would look after them.’

  ‘If those witches think they’re going to get a slave by putting a ring on my finger, they’re in for a surprise. I’m nobody’s fool, you tell them that.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘No, no. Not yet. What are her children like? Don’t be shy. You can be quite frank with me.’

  ‘The mother’s a saint compared to the daughter.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Eleven.’ Eddie paused for breath. ‘Eat a biscuit, step out to play, come home five minutes late, she’ll tattle about everything. She’ll take two hours to wash her hair but you take more than five minutes for a bath and she’ll scream her head off.’

  ‘Spoilt rotten. And the boy?’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear more about Pieta?’ He could have gone on for weeks.

  ‘I think I’ve got the picture. Tell me about the boy.’

  ‘The son’s a devil. Even his mother says so. She’s afraid of him.’

  ‘Why’s she afraid of the brat?’

  ‘He lies all the time. Comes and goes as he likes.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry me. I’ll straighten him out.’

  This was too much for Eddie. He would have to put the fear of God into this man. ‘He has a knife.’

  Mr Furtado was not impressed.

  ‘I saw him stab two people. Even threatened his mother.’

  ‘I can handle the boy. He won’t breathe without my permission. But his mother’s a different story.’

  Eddie was not about to give up.

  ‘Eddie’s going to buy a gun.’

  ‘How do you know so much about them?’

  ‘We are neighbours.’

  ‘I really don’t know how to thank you. Will you do me one last favour?’

  What now? ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I was here.’ Mr Furtado took out a five-rupee note and gave it to Eddie. ‘Is that a promise?’

  ‘Okay.’ Eddie smiled.

  Mr Furtado shook Eddie’s hand.

  ‘Thank you. You’ve been so helpful and I still don’t know your name.’

  ‘Eddie Coutinho.’

  Shishupal.

  He knew what Shishupal felt like when he had committed his quota of a hundred crimes. He could have gone down on his knees, wept and begged and apologized and sold himself and the next hundred generations of his children and their children as slaves but it was doubtful if that would have loosened Mr Furtado’s grip on his wrist. Mr Furtado had thin long hands to match his body, the bones stuck out at the knuckles as if they had been broken. And though he was slight and had looked as if he was about to pass out a little while ago at the discovery of the infamy of the Coutinho family, he was a new man now. There was colour in his face, almost a rosy hue. He had got his breath back and though Eddie was a deadweight he was taking the steps three at a time.

  There was no need to knock, the door was open. It was dark in the common passage and even darker inside. Mr Furtado groped for the electric bell and then rang a little too long. Eddie could see the trinity waiting inside the darkness. Not the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost but his mother, Granna and Pieta. They sat still like Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, who Lele Guruji said always sat at the very end of the sanctum sanctorum, the black garbha-griha of the temple. Shiva, the destroyer got up and came forward to perform the dance of death on Eddie’s limp body. Granna was wearing a silk dress with red roses printed on it. She smiled but Eddie knew that the end of the universe was no cause for sorrow to Shiva.

  ‘Come in, Mr Furtado. I’m so glad that Eddie came to receive you.’

  Furtado stepped in but the blade-like grip of his fingers did not relax. ‘You must forgive me for this delay. I was held up by none other than your grandson.’

  ‘This is my daughter, Violet, and my granddaughter, Pieta. Won’t you sit down, Mr Furtado?’

  ‘It is my great misfortune that I have been introduced to the whole family by the wrong person. I owe you all the gravest apology.’

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  ‘Not until I’ve revealed all and whipped this viper in the breast of your family till his skin and soul have fallen off in shame.’

  ‘What did he do?’ Violet’s voice was low but steady.

  ‘Ask him.’

  As someone long dead, Eddie was incapable of speech.

  ‘He lied. For half an hour, the half-hour that I was delayed, he told me the most deadly and dastardly lies about you, madam and you, his most revered grandmother and this innocent child.’

  ‘My son never lies, Mr Furtado. It does not reflect well upon the listener that he stood and listened for a full thirty minutes to all manner of lies and stories.’

  ‘I had no choice. He called you a fast woman and a loose one. He would have called you even worse names if I hadn’t stopped him. He said I was to earn money while all of you lived off me.’

  ‘I repeat, Mr Furtado, my son does not lie.’

  Mr Furtado paled. He could not understand Violet. What was she saying? Was she trying to tell him that her son had told him the truth?

  ‘Then you’re a woman of loose morals and dubious character?’

  ‘I would let you be the judge,’

  The subject of Violet’s marriage was closed for good after that. Eddie didn’t know what to make of his mother. People were so unreliable. He waited for her to slap him, hit him with anything that came to hand, the stick with which she hung clothes on the clothes-line, her shoes, the broom. She didn’t. Granna came to him and asked him, ‘Did you say any of those things, Eddie?’

  ‘Ma, that chapter is over. Whether he said anything or not is not the issue. What matters is that I made my children feel so insecure.’

  He could never forgive his mother. He wanted to be shriven. She let him burn in his own hell.

  Twelve

  A Meditation on Neighbours

  Depending on your point of view, there are some elementary or critical differences between the Catholics and Hindus in the CWD chawls. It would be unwise, however, to generalize and a little excessive to say that these differences separated all Catholics from Hindus in India.

  Just a few examples will suffice to help you understand how irreconcilable the differences between the two communities in the CWD chawls were. Hindus bathe in the morning, Goan Catholics in the evening. Do not expose your vast ignorance in such delicate matters and scoff and say that this is an absurd or picayune non-issue. It is conceivable that the whites will go back to their countries of origin and leave the Americas to Amerindians and the IRA only marry the daughters of British policemen and the Croats and the Serbs share wives but it is unthinkable that Roman Catholic Goans and Hindus from the CWD chawls will sit together and hammer out a compromise which says, for instance, that all Hindus and Catholics will henceforth shower or rather have bucket baths in the afternoon or at midnight.

  Hindus, at least those who had access to a little water, were hyperconscious about personal cleanliness. They bathed religiously or at least let the water wet them every day and even forced their poor gods to shower whether they were installed at home or in temples. Christians, on the other hand, didn’t think that salvation and bathing were causally related.

  Hindus ate betel nut and chewed paan and tobacco and spat with elan and abandon in the corners of staircases, on the road and, if you didn’t watch out, streaked you an earthen red from double-decker bus windows. Hindus didn’t think that spitting was peeing through the mouth. Catholics did. They didn’t eat paan, and could not be faulted for indecent public acts.

  Catholics ate beef and pork. Even non-vegetarian Hindus hardly ever did. Hindus went to free municipal schools, Catholics to schools run b
y priests and nuns. Hardly any of the Hindu boys went to college. And when they did, they got into some el cheapo place. Catholics went straight to heaven or rather its equivalent on earth, St Xavier’s College, even if they got barely 45 or 50 per cent marks in the higher secondary exams.

  Hindu women wore saris, Catholic women dresses except on special occasions, when they switched to saris. At home Hindu men moved about ‘shamelessly’ in striped underpants or pyjamas. It was normal for Hindu men to roll up their vests almost to the armpits like Ravan’s father and expose their flat, nascent or pot bellies when relaxing at home. Since their banishment from Paradise, Catholic men were shy of exhibiting their midriffs. And if they did, they didn’t do things halfway, they didn’t wear anything on top.

  It was of course religion that was the source of all the differences between the two communities. Hindus went to temples as and when they felt like it. Catholics, one and all, went to mass on Sundays. For Ravan, it was Sundays that separated Hindus from Catholics. Run-of-the-mill, routine weekdays, when everybody went to work or school, were shared by both communities in equal measure. But, on Sundays, God turned His back on the Hindus. Ravan had not expected such discrimination, out and out partiality, and injustice from God.

  What did the Hindu men do on that day of rest? They got up late, took their morning tea and breakfast in an easy chair in the corridor, read the papers while scratching or aimlessly fiddling with their dongs. Around 9.30 or 10 a.m., unshaven and unbathed, they got into loose striped pyjamas, made of the same cloth as their underpants, put on a shirt over them and went to the bazaar with a tote-bag to buy mutton and fish. (The word for mutton and fish among many of the Hindus was, tellingly enough, bazaar. While women did all the other household shopping, bazaar was macho and the prerogative of men.) The Sunday trip for ‘bazaar’ was the one domestic chore the man of the house performed. Often he took the youngest boy with him, perhaps as an initiation and training for later life. The arguments and occasional fights with the fisherwomen were always more acrimonious than those with the butchers who were men. Lunch at 2.30 p.m. after a late bath. Then a long siesta. Eventless evenings since there was no TV in those days, unless your father decided to take the family to the garden or the beach at Chowpatty. That’s it, a lazy, lacklustre end to the week.

  On the fifth floor, it was a different story. It was as if the whole of the Catholic community was going to a wedding between 6 and 11 a.m. If you belonged to the older generation, a freshly cleaned and ironed shirt, woollen trousers and shining shoes were not enough. A tie and a jacket were de rigueur. Some of the people from below might call it a fashion parade but they were just envious. Would you go to see your boss in shabby clothes? God was Chairman and MD of the world. You obviously took the trouble to dress up for the occasion. Nylon and polyester had not invaded the country yet, so women wore cotton or silk dresses, with puffed, raglan or full-length sleeves copied from foreign magazines. They covered their heads in church but only after they had permed, curled or back-combed their hair. Ravan had a vague recollection that somebody in his chawl had said that only women of loose character wore lipstick and other make-up. He wished that all women were loose and wore nail-polish, mascara, eyeshadow, rouge and that fantastic microscopic stuff that transformed their eyelids into starry, twinkling skies. If you had any doubt that they belonged to a superior race, all you had to do was look at their arms and legs. They were hairless and shiny and smooth like Kwality’s coffee ice-cream. Ravan could lick them all day long. But that was not all. On rare occasions, some Catholic women sheathed their legs in sheer silk. However, if Ravan had been asked to define the essential difference between Hindu and Catholic women, he would have told you without a moment’s hesitation that Hindu women were flat-footed, or rather, wore the most boring, flat sandals whereas the feet of the women above almost never touched the ground. It was a mystery how they kept their balance on four- or five-inch heels. He wanted to lie down and ask those women to walk all over him and stab his heart with their stilettoes.

  Inconceivable for a Hindu to go to a temple without bathing and you might hear snide comments about the cleanliness of Catholics and why the women from the top storeys had to wear Tata’s Eau de Cologne or some foreign perfume that kept Ravan awake at nights and lingered in his memory for years. Their children were just as handsomely turned out, especially the girls. Eddie’s sister Pieta’s blue chiffon dress had so many pleats that when she pirouetted, and she always made it a point to do so, the whole skirt filled out and rose up to reveal coordinated blue bloomers.

  Add fine, upright and doting grandparents, multiply them a few hundred times, and you’ll begin to get a faint idea of the impact the Catholic families had on those below as they walked down the stairs and out of the chawls, greeted each other and proceeded as one single, quiet and dignified community to Saint Sebastian’s Church.

  If the folks from the lower storeys felt left out or a trifle envious, they made it a point to never mention it. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have religious occasions when the whole community got together and celebrated. Gangadhar Tilak, the shrewd and implacable freedom fighter from Maharashtra, had transformed the Ganapati festival into a public and political event since pre-Independence times, with the image of the elephant-headed god installed in every lane and alley. But even at such times, there was never any discipline informing their actions. Perhaps it is too late to impose it now.

  Fortunately it did not occur to members of either community to wonder whether their faith, culture and mores were superior. They took it for granted. It was a happy coincidence that both sides shared the conviction that they were the chosen people. It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that barring exceptions, they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables, who fell beyond the pale of the caste system had ample reason to convert to Catholicism. The caste-Hindus, as a matter of fact, left them no choice. As sub-humans they were little better than slaves.

  In the eyes of Jesus Christ and his energetic missionaries, the new converts were equal to any man or woman, at least to any other Indian. The new religion not only gave them self-respect and dignity but educated them and offered them a chance to work at any profession they fancied. Bread, or the Western concept of bread, was both the motive and symbol for conversion. If you broke bread with a Christian or drank from a well where a devious Christian missionary was bruited to have thrown a slice of bread, you were tainted for life and excommunicated from Hinduism.

  The recent converts had no memory of their past unless they came from the higher castes. Jesus Christ and the new faith notwithstanding, the former Brahmins did not forget, nor would they allow anyone else to, that they were the highest of the high. They ensured the purity of their stock and maintained their exclusive status by marrying other Brahmin-Catholics and occasionally the expatriate grandees of Portugal.

  Along with religion, the other great divider in the CWD chawls was language. Often, the one got confused with the other. Hindus spoke Marathi, Catholics, English. Konkani was still very much the lingua franca in the Goan home but outside the house, the younger people communicated almost entirely in English.

  English was the thorn in the side of the Hindus. Its absence was their cross, their humiliation and the source of their life-long inferiority and inadequacy. It was a severely debilitating, if not fatal, lack that was not acknowledged, spoken of or articulated. It was the great leveller. It gave caste-Hindus a taste of their own medicine. It made them feel like untouchables. It also turned the tables. The former outcastes could now look down upon their Hindu neighbours.

  Perhaps Dr Ambedkar was wrong to convert millions of his untouchable brethren to Buddhism. He should have converted them to English. That would really have stood the caste-Hindu world on its head. Roman Catholic missionaries were seized of the power of English long before the rest of the population caught on. Outside Goa, they abandoned Portuguese and took the English tongue almost as seriously as the
ir faith. They went on a spree and opened English-medium schools and colleges across the country.

  ‘Chhya men, he’s a dutty bugger. Tree times I told him don’t climb the tree to look at my sas. Leave my sas alone, men. I asked him ‘gain and again but he din listen, so I gave him a hit, straight on the face like. De bugger began to cry like a baby, men. He begged me like but I din listen. I told him, you look at my sas, and I’ll break your bones and balls.’ Goan English is easy to mimic and an easy target for well-educated and affluent Bombayites. It is burlesqued in plays, reviews and films. Such niceties and caricature are lost on the Hindus from the CWD chawls. Ask any one of them, in an unguarded moment and he’ll tell you that he would give his right hand, make it his left, to be able to speak like the people from the top floor. Because there are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who have English and those who don’t. Those who have English are the haves, and those who don’t, are the have-nots.

  How could you possibly grasp the meaning and value of English if you spoke it before you were toilet-trained or had a place reserved for you in an English-medium school? English is a mantra, a maha-mantra. It is an ‘open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens up new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another.

  English makes you tall. If you know English, you can wear a ‘suit-boot’, do an electrician’s course or take a diploma, in radio and refrigeration technology. You can become a chef at the Taj Mahal Hotel or a steno at Hindustan Lever, even a purser with Air India or Pan Am. If you know English and someone steps on your foot, you can say to him, ‘Bastard, can’t you see?’ You can talk like a foreigner. Sit down in a local train and hold a best-seller like Peyton Place in front of your eyes and even read it. If you know English, you can ask a girl for a dance. You can lean Eileen Alva against the locked door of the terrace and press against her, squeeze her boobs and kiss her on the mouth, put your tongue inside it while slipping your hand under her dress.