Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  Paul Junior had stood in the queue at the Strand cinema for four and a half hours on Tuesday morning to buy tickets for Rock Around the Clock. He had not expected his father to bear him such ill-will and enmity as to prevent him from going to the movie.

  ‘Why don’t you operate tomorrow, Doctor Uncle? It’s a Sunday. You can take the whole day if you want.’

  ‘Stop wasting time, you fool, unless you want to see your father die in front of your eyes. I’ll call for an ambulance and arrange for the surgeon. You and your friends carry Paul down the stairs. That way we’ll save time. Be very careful. No jolts.’

  ‘I’ll walk.’ A small voice spoke up. It came from the dead man. Paul’s heart jumped up in joy.

  ‘Sure. I’m sure you can walk to Masina Hospital.’ Dr Carvalho spoke with uncalled-for sarcasm.

  ‘See, nothing’s the matter with him,’ Paul said. ‘Nothing that won’t wait till tomorrow.’

  The ghost sat up. He put his foot down and raised himself. Doctor Carvalho watched him with interest. He knew when Paul Senior’s legs would give and had his hands ready to hold him.

  ‘Another word from father or son and I’m going home.’

  Paul’s wife put his head on her lap while their son closed the door of the ambulance. There was a crowd of people gathered in a semi-circle behind it. An ambulance and its seriously ill or dying patient and its retinue of weeping relatives was classic theatre. The chawlwallahs were connoisseurs of drama and wouldn’t miss it for the world. If pressed, they would have had to confess that the Monteiro show was not up to scratch. Short on emotion, small cast and that doctor was in the damnedest hurry. Even Eddie who was at the head of the crowd was disappointed.

  The ambulance stopped. There was hope. There was reason to believe the show was going to come back to life. Maybe Paul Senior had kicked the bucket. Maybe Mrs Monteiro would break down now. The doors opened and Paul Junior looked out. A hundred people were difficult to focus on. They might as well not be there. His eyes hunted for a familiar face but could not prise one out. That idiot Eddie was smiling and waving as if Paul and his parents were going to Kashmir on a holiday.

  ‘Eddie.’

  Eddie ran forward.

  ‘Go and tell Crystal that I won’t be picking her up for the movie because my father’s seriously ill. Tell her we are going to Masina Hospital.’

  Eddie wanted to tell him to go jump, he had better things to do than tramp down to Ballard Estate and meet Crystal. And anyway he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. His mother had asked him to buy two pounds of onions and one anna’s worth of ginger and was expecting him fifteen minutes ago.

  ‘Here, take this.’

  ‘What’s it?’ Eddie had stepped back, ready to make a run for it.

  ‘Tickets, stupid. Tickets for Rock Around the Clock.’

  Eddie couldn’t believe his good fortune. There was bound to be a catch.

  ‘Sell the other ticket and bring the money back.’

  ‘Shut the bloody door or I’ll throw you out,’ Dr Carvalho was screaming.

  Before Eddie could ask, ‘What about the bus-fare?’ the doors of the ambulance closed and it whizzed off. Eddie decided not to think of the whacking he would get at night, the complaints to Father Agnello D’Souza the next morning after mass, Father D’Souza’s turned-down mouth and hopeless face silently wondering what terrible mischief Eddie had been up to while speaking bitterly to him of the afterlife, and what lay in wait for him.

  He had recently learnt the f … word. He didn’t know what it meant but it reflected his frame of mind. ‘F … it,’ he said and caught a moving bus. ‘Mother-fucker,’ the conductor asked him, ‘do you want to die?’

  Eddie handed him the money and said, ‘Two pounds of onions.’

  Thousands of people had laid siege to the Strand cinema. It had become one of the holiest shrines in the city of Bombay. It would take another hour and a half or two for Eddie to become a devotee. The Lord God of one, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock; five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, rock; nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, rock; we’re gonna rock around the clock had not yet taken possession of Eddie’s soul to the exclusion of all else.

  Time and again Eddie crashed against the impenetrable mass of people and fell back. Even the greatest military formations have chinks. The trick is to find them. In Eddie’s case the chink found him. Someone asked him, ‘Extra?’ Before he could understand the implications of the question, thirty-three people fell upon him from all sides. His mother, Granna and sister would have to recover his dismembered body from the morgue at J.J. Hospital. When Eddie rose from underneath the stampede, he was devoid of a shoe along with its sock, the collar of his shirt, two buttons of his fly and Crystal’s ticket.

  There is no rational answer to how Eddie managed to salvage one ticket from the maelstrom, when both had been laminated into a single indivisible entity by sweat and heat. It should have been possible to tell who had made away with Crystal’s ticket once he got into the theatre and had been shown to his seat. He tried asking both his neighbours for reimbursement of the ticket. One shoved his face away and the other said, ‘Bugger off.’

  Eddie was incensed by his own helplessness. Zap zap, wham bam, kaboom, Eddie wanted to let loose his raging anger the way Captain Marvel and Superman did in the comic books. But that’s one good thing about life: willy-nilly you become wise to the ways of the world. Captain Marvel and Superman had underlined the same truth. If you wanted to pick a fight, make sure it was with a weaker adversary. Eddie swallowed his pride and sat quietly smouldering in his seat.

  The main picture started and Eddie forget all, his neighbours, Father D’Souza, his family, his dead father, his homework, the terrible fate that awaited him. What was going on on the screen would make him forget to eat, drink, sleep and breathe. And if you could forget to breathe, you could forget the very name of God. No wonder so many state legislatures in the United States wanted to ban the work of Satan which Bill Haley and his Comets, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and all the other godless people called rock’n’ roll. A controversy raged amongst clergymen and decent lay folk across India whether or not Rock Around the Clock should be declared enemy number one in Catholic Journals, and any Catholic who saw it despite the proscription, excommunicated.

  It was difficult to decide what was worse: the events on the screen or those in the aisles of the theatre. The primitive rhythms and gods of Africa had flown across continents and invaded the Strand cinema. The young men and women in the theatre were obviously possessed by the most dank and evil spirits. They had regressed God knows how many millennia to their tribal origins. They had gone wild. Stark raving mad. They danced besottedly. They would be tearing their clothes off next and fornicating like reptiles right there to the bumping, grinding and libidinous rhythms emanating from the screen.

  Eddie had never witnessed such pandemonium before. For some time he watched the proceedings on the screen and in the aisles with a half-open mouth and ripped open eyes that would never again close. Then his hands and legs and arms began to twitch as if electrocuted. They had severed their connections with his body and gained a life of their own. He tried to hold himself still but to no avail. He was no longer his own creature. The witch-doctors and shamans and the dark forces of the earth had taken charge of him. In a fourteen-inch circle, Eddie managed to perform what seasoned dancers could not have on a 320×320 foot stage.

  The plywood bottom of his seat broke and Eddie’s chin cracked on the back of the seat in front of him. His brains, sinuses, eyes and tonsils crashed into each other and could not be unscrambled. He felt his chin. Apart from a three-inch gash and exposed bone and a permanent cavity where his former brain had resided, there was no injury whatsoever.

  Eddie had no alternative now but to step on to the floor. ‘Giddiup ding dong, giddiup,’ the whole auditorium rocked on its feet and clapped as if the audience had been training all its life for that
one song. There were about a hundred couples dancing in the aisles and in the space between the screen and the seats. Eddie didn’t have a partner but he made such a song and dance all on his own that the other couples drew back grudgingly. At first he was nothing but a pesky twerp whom the men would have happily pushed out but for their girlfriends who were more patronizing and willing to watch the little boy’s antics for a while. Eddie had two things going for him. He didn’t know how to dance and he equated his body completely with the music. He let go. He didn’t just dance with his legs; his kidneys, liver, fingers, tendons, pancreas, bronchi, throat, chin, buttocks, everything responded to the music and danced.

  He was coming out of a particularly frenetic phase when he saw a young woman in a dress with red, blue and green stripes alternating with white, leave her partner. She was unconscious of what she was doing and seemed only to be waiting for a cue to enter the magic web he had been weaving. She slid in. A single finger welded the girl to him. He spun her all the way till she was nestling against him for an instant and then let go of her. She uncoiled. The edge of her skirt undulated and touched him. He felt the blade of a knife run under the entire length of his skin.

  Now even a finger did not join them and yet they wound and unwound in each other’s arms. They had become mind readers though they had not set eyes on each other before. Their bodies were yin and yang, exact opposites that drew them together and repelled them.

  Now Bill Haley was belting out See You Later, Alligator. Eddie had not thought much of him when he first saw him on screen. He was a pudgy, slightly crosseyed fellow with a swirl of hair slicked carefully on to his forehead. One of his eyes was somewhat volatile and kept wandering away from the other. But then he started singing and Eddie thought he was the handsomest man he had seen. He wanted to wear the same clothes Haley had on, black trousers and shiny jacket with a lame or velvet lapel, frilled shirt buttoned at the collar, and of course the very same hairstyle. Come to think of it, he thought the eyes rather charming now. There was no question in his mind, he wanted to be Bill Haley now and forever.

  He got into the bus and realized that he had no money. The conductor called him all kinds of names and stopped the bus to make him get off. He didn’t mind walking. The girl’s skirt brushed against him. In the Bombay heat and night, he shivered a little.

  Fourteen

  Parvatibai may have made prophetic pronouncements about her son’s career (as with all prophecies the point is not whether they come true or not, but whether people believe the dark and dour prognostications of the soothsayer) but on the level of self-preservation alone it would have been more profitable if she had spent the same time and effort on her husband and divined what he and the future held in store for her family. Frankly, she did not need to examine his horoscope or palm, the tea-leaves at the bottom of his teacup or the entrails of sacrificial animals, or measure the shadow of her husband at the first light of dawn. All she needed to do and didn’t, was to pick up clues and signals, and there were plenty of them, and interpret them. For instance on a Tuesday, four months ago, he changed the parting of his hair. When the thin plaited leather bridge of his Kolhapuri chappals gave way, instead of picking up the shoe in his hand and bringing it home for Parvatibai to get repaired, he took it to the cobbler himself.

  He had shown other signs of independence and initiative. In the last three weeks he had shaved seven times which was some kind of record for him since he normally shaved once every fortnight. As usual his objective, at least the immediate one, was clear. The intention was not to erase the stubble on his chin and cheek, it was to gouge out the top layer if not the second one of his skin. He did a fairly good job of it and a Hindusthan blade assisted him considerably in the task. It was a dual purpose blade. Cut-and-paste artists from advertising agencies broke it into tiny jagged pieces and cut art card, poster paper, bromides, box board and mountboard into the sizes they wanted or impaled individual typeset letters or words on a point and carried out proof-corrections in artworks according to the proofreader’s or copy-writer’s instructions. It was also, as you have already learnt, used for shaving.

  Economics alone would not account for Shankar-rao’s use of this particular brand of blade. Parvatibai was willing to buy him an imported 7 O’Clock or Gillette steel. They were a little more expensive but they lasted longer and they didn’t disfigure the face as systematically as Hindusthan blades did. Perhaps the appeal of the Indian blade was an aesthetic one. After a good, clean shave, Shankar-rao had, on an average, seventeen tiny bits of Bittambatmi stuck all over his face and throat. The newspaper fragments absorbed the blood as it clotted. When he took them off, the nicks opened and his face once again looked like the scene of a bloody miniature battle. Shankar-rao avoided drinking water after a shave for fear of springing leaks and the water flowing out like a fountain from his throat.

  The writing on the wall should have been clear by then even to a blind man or woman, but even if it was not, there was one sign no one could have missed. On two occasions Shankar-rao had effectively shut up Ravan’s warbling. What he did was so unusual, it should have silenced all the people of the CWD chawls. He sang two phrases of one of the songs from DDD repeatedly as he lay doubled up facing the wall on the bed and when he traipsed to the toilet at the end of the corridor on his floor. Parvatibai did not notice this or if she did, she did not pay any heed to the signs of turbulence and catastrophe ahead. What else can one say but that she had it coming to her?

  Parvati’s and Ravan’s torture sessions came to an abrupt end one evening. His father, Shankar-rao, had gone to buy his tabloid, Bittambatmi, and had come back two and a half hours later with his sister. Parvatibai was sitting on the floor slicing cabbage on a willi at a speed that made her hand almost invisible. She must have been among the last ten women in Bombay, if not the whole of Maharashtra, who still used this traditional gadget without turning her fingers, palms and hands into ready-to-eat, raw mincemeat. It had a serrated disc sticking out at the end of a steel crescent with which she grated coconut but she had flipped back the curved knife which normally rested with its blade facing down on a wooden platform and was shredding the cabbage to fine confetti. Ravan, who was not having much success with his homework in history since he had no books, not even a maths book to refer to, looked up at his father in wonderment.

  ‘Sister?’ Parvatibai asked her husband as she continued to slice the cabbage for the next day’s lunch, ‘you never had a sister.’

  Shankar-rao smiled and threw up his hands. ‘Seeing is believing. There she is in flesh and blood. Father had a mistress and this is the fruit of that relationship,’

  ‘I will not contest the truth or otherwise of that statement.’ Parvatibai lost her concentration and cut her finger for the first time in all these years on the willi. The blood ran all over the green flakes of the cabbage but she was not aware of it. ‘There’s a young boy here and I would appreciate it if you spared us the details of the lady’s antecedents.’

  ‘Have it your way. She’s here to stay.’

  Parvatibai caught hold of Ravan’s wrist and tried to drag him into the kitchen. He was transfixed. His eyes had lost all lateral motion. He would not be able to close his mouth in this life or the ones that would ineluctably follow for a Hindu. His father was a magician, a miracle worker. He had shoved his hand into an invisible hat and pulled out not a white dove, or a rabbit or a string of flamboyantly coloured scarves but a live woman, not just any woman but a sister. The door to the past was always locked. But his father had a key to it. A past that must have stretched to a time when Ravan was not born. Who could tell, tomorrow or a month later he might bring back a brother, his brother’s children or a grandmother. It would be terrific to have children of his own age to play with. He could show Chandrakant Dixit and his classmates that they were welcome to leave him out of their games because he had lots of friends of his own.

  What he yearned for most was a grandmother. He had seen Eddie’s ‘Granna’ and
how she pampered and shielded him and told him stories sitting at the top of the stairs on the fifth floor. For a brief while, Ravan too had had a family. He had never felt as secure and happy and wanted as the time when Shobhan and her folks had adopted him. He wasn’t going to miss them any more. He had an aunt now. It would take time to get to know her but that was OK. She would play carrom with him and buy him schoolbooks. She was wearing kumkum and a mangalsutra and would very likely have sons or daughters as old as Ravan. And even if she didn’t, she could start now. Just think of it, that silent, empty and uncommunicative house of his was going to come alive. It would be bubbling with laughter, there would be long conversations, arguments, disagreements, the children would throw tantrums, he would set his jaws tightly one upon the other, flatten his lips till they were a razor-thin slit and quieten them with just one disapproving look.

  His mother jerked his hand hard. What was the matter with her? He knew that she never allowed her lunch and dinner customers to step inside the house. Whatever converse there was between them, it was always outside in the common passage. But this was his aunt, his own father’s sister. Could she not make her feel welcome? The fact was his mother was an unsociable person, all work and no play had killed all feeling in her. Do surgery on her and instead of a heart, you would find a stone. What was wrong with sitting down in this room? He always did. It wasn’t as if his father and aunt had something private to discuss. And even if they had, they had all the time in the world. Hadn’t his father just said she was here to stay? Ravan rose unwillingly, his head was turned back and his eyes were still fixed on his aunt. And then it happened. He was astounded, delighted and speechless. His aunt winked at him.