Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  That night Parvatibai made her first false move. She would regret it bitterly, she would curse herself, swear mutely at her shortsightedness and the calamitous consequences that followed from it but there was no undoing what she had done. She spread both Ravan’s and her own mattress inside in the kitchen. She liked to go to sleep early since she had to get up by five and start cooking. By quarter to ten she had switched off the light in the kitchen and was dozing within five minutes. Ravan was restive because although he was still in his own home, he had never before slept in the kitchen.

  She didn’t know what time it was but she was suddenly woken up. Her husband’s sister was panting, screeching, screaming, slapping Shankar-rao, egging him on, instructing him about what she wanted done where, sighing, moaning, biting his ear hard so that he was hollering and hopping. She encouraged him with strings of abuse that the people from Sawantwadi and Ratnagiri in Konkan use continually as endearments or for emphasis and occasionally in deadly earnest. They were sharp, sonorous, brief word-pictures that had more immediacy than the real thing. She called him mother- and sister-fucker, a whore-son, pimp, arse-buggerer, pederast, cunt-licker, father-fucker and then became highly creative in the extensions and variations of her sexual imagery. A horse’s prick in your mother’s gash, tie a knot in your member and whip me with it, your sister’s dash dash is wide enough to accommodate a rhino and have room left. At this point Parvati made her second wrong move. Instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, at least for that night, the scatological exuberance of her husband’s sister induced panic and horror in her. She did not think of her son as an innocent or a nascent Buddha who needed to be shielded from the facts of life but she was of the belief that his sex-education, especially that of a more arcane and erudite variety, should be left for a maturer day.

  Her concern for her son was doubtless valid but her fears at that particular moment were unfounded. A little observation and quiet reflection would have revealed that Master Ravan Pawar was dead to the world and not likely to be resurrected except under the gravest and the most frightful provocation. Unfortunately this was readily available in the state that Parvatibai was in. ‘Get up. Can you hear?’ she whispered urgently to him. ‘What can you hear? Tell me every word. No, I don’t want to hear. Most certainly I don’t want you to hear.’ In a rush of maternal protective instincts she gathered Ravan to herself. Her stupendous breastworks, one on either side of his face, should not only have dampened but drowned all terrestrial and extra-terrestrial sound. They did. They also almost smothered Ravan to death. The boy had been woken up without due preparation and preliminaries and then asphyxiated in a sustained fashion. The more he fought for air, the more Parvati was convinced that he was savouring the martial calls and counter-calls that issued forth from the next room and passed unhindered through the thin plywood partition that rose three-quarters of the way to the ceiling.

  In one last-ditch effort, Ravan flung his mother aside and reeled drunkenly from lack of oxygen. He was sure he was hallucinating. A woman was crying out aloud: on your mark, get set, charge, attack, onward ho. The voice that followed these exhortations was unmistakable. His father, that staid, tepid, and immovable object which had been a part of Ravan’s landscape and furniture since childhood, was vociferously sounding the war-cry of the. Hindus: Har Har Mahadev. Har Har Mahadev. Kill, kill, kill. Fierce and fatal battle was joined by Ravan’s aunt and father. His own mother, the usually sane and solid Parvatibai, was rushing around like a demented woman. She clasped her hands around Ravan’s ears. In the adjoining room, his father’s sister was whimpering and wheedling for more. She yelled and begged in a rhythmic chant that was hypnotic: don’t stop, don’t stop, go on, go on you mother … that dread word from which Parvati wanted to shield her son stayed incomplete. ‘Oh no, don’t tell me. You coward, you’ve admitted defeat even before knowing which way the battle would go.’ Parvatibai had now packed Ravan’s ears with cottonwool and was tying a wet sari that she had pulled down from the clothes-line like a turban around his head. The first two swirls went around Ravan’s ears but the next one covered his nose.

  ‘Stop it, Ma.’ He tried to push his mother away. ‘Stop it, you are suffocating me.’

  Parvati lifted the twisted cloth from over his nose but continued to swathe him. She was in far too much of a hurry and the loops kept slipping down to Ravan’s neck as she drew them tight. It hit Ravan then that his mother was going to strangle him. He yanked the sari out of her hands.

  ‘Give it back to me.’ Parvatibai closed in on Ravan threateningly. For some reason both of them were talking in whispers. Ravan retreated till he was up against the door of the room. Suddenly there was an eerie silence. The scuffle and battle-cries from the next room had ceased. Parvati stood undecided, then went to the plywood wall and put her ear against it.

  What was wrong with his father, Ravan wondered. Had he not after all these years had the good fortune of rediscovering his sister? Why had he brought her home if all they were going to do was swear at each other and fight murderously? And what was the matter with his aunt? He didn’t even know her name yet. His father was the most lethargic man he had ever known. How and why had she provoked him to the point where he was willing to kill her? There was not a sound from outside. Were they both wounded and bleeding or were they already dead?

  Parvati opened the door stealthily and before Ravan realized what was happening covered his eyes, pushed him into the outside room, and without looking right or left, unlatched the front door, shoved him out and down the staircase.

  ‘Please don’t kill me, Ma, please don’t,’ Ravan thirteen and a half going on fourteen was bleating now. But his heartless mother didn’t let go of him. He could hear his aunt laughing uncontrollably.

  ‘Poor Ravan,’ she said and slapped his father. Parvati and Ravan were on the second floor close to the Sarang home but Shankar-rao and his sister were still in splits. At the bottom of the stairs, Parvati unmasked her son and flung the sari over her right shoulder. Ravan was trembling but she ignored him.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she told him and started walking.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  ‘You go, I’m going back home to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t even try it,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ll break your leg right here and now.’

  He didn’t need to look at her. He didn’t disbelieve her words. They walked up to the park on Mazagaon Hill where Prakash and Ravan had sat. The gate was locked. Parvati picked up her sari, climbed over and sat on a bench. Ravan avoided her and lay down on another. Strange and cosmic cataclysms and violent upheavals were under way. He looked at his mother and knew that he had lost her. She didn’t want him any more. All those months when she had pounded him to a fine powder because he had sold her earring to see Dil Deke Dekho, or even before that when he had discovered that he was a murderer, he had not once got the feeling that she wanted to be rid of him. Now he knew his time had come. He didn’t mind that, even though he had pleaded with her not to kill him. What he couldn’t bear was to see her sitting with her head in her hands. He would have liked to smash her face to avoid seeing the despair in her eyes. His mother, his own indomitable, unvanquishable, never-say-die mother, who stood between him and the perils of the world, his first and final resort, she would not look at him or acknowledge him. He would protect and preserve her, fight the armies of the night and the gods of daylight and shield her from whatever evil had befallen her. But she had woven such an impenetrable wall of hopelessness around herself, he found her unapproachable. Ravan had no idea how long he had been asleep when his mother came and woke him up.

  The next morning, around ten o’clock, after Ravan had gone to school, Shankar-rao came into the kitchen and said he and his sister wanted coffee and some snacks. Parvatibai made two cups of tea and took them to the front room. She spoke softly but her voice had Ravan’s tremor of last night. Tea will be at seven in the morning. Lunch is at eleven. Tea and biscuit
s or savouries at four and dinner at eight. Ravan and I will go for a walk from nine to ten-fifteen. Whatever brother and sister wish to do at that time, is your private affair. When we get back I expect the door to be unlatched and the two of you asleep.’

  Shankar-rao tossed his shoulders. ‘We’ll do what we please and …’ His sister put her hand on his arm and said, ‘That’s OK. We’ll be sleeping by the time you get back.’

  The woman saw Ravan staring at her and ignored him. She sat up, the pallu of her sari fell on the bed. She did not pick it up and replace it on her left shoulder. She had a witching smile that fluctuated around her dimples. Her right leg disengaged itself and came down over the edge of the bed. It ran back and forth over a man’s torso.

  He had almost flung his school bag on the floor when he realized he had walked into the wrong house. He stepped back. Couldn’t be Eddie’s place. That woman on the bed in the red sari and green blouse, with her leg pulled up and the back of her head resting on the palms of her hands was not Violet, her mother or Pieta. She had a kumkum dot on her forehead and paan in her mouth which had painted her lips an earthen red. Where the hell was he? Sleepwalking in broad daylight as always, wake up Ravan Pawar. Must be the Jadhav residence on the third floor. Unless of course he had stepped into Chawl No. 16 or 21.

  Ravan was turning around to leave when he glanced down. His father Shankar-rao was lying on the paper-thin mattress on which Ravan had slept all his life. The woman pulled up her sari, scratched her right calf lazily and let the sari down. How could he possibly have forgotten his aunt of last night? Were there some things so terrible that the mind wiped them out instantly?

  Ravan stood undecided for a moment and then ran out of the building. He did not stop till he was out of breath and his feet would carry him no further. Mr Billimoria, his tae kwon do teacher, was used to seeing him turn up at any time in the evening even though he was officially enrolled for the early morning class. He usually entrusted Ravan with the job of supervising the warming-up exercises for the junior section.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked Ravan during a break in the exercises. Ravan nodded his head. He still hadn’t got his breath back. ‘You don’t look it.’

  Mr Billimoria continued with the class. After ten minutes he gave up.

  ‘In India we believe in paying for shoddy work in the hope that others will ignore our own third-rate stuff.’ His voice rose suddenly. ‘But you are not in India. This patch of 20 yards is Billimoria land. I don’t pay you, you pay me and yet it hurts my eyes, my whole being hurts like hell to watch your antics here. I’m considering doubling your fees but that won’t relieve the agony of watching grasshoppers picking their wooden legs to pee all over me.’ He paused and looked distastefully at his pupils. ‘Ravan,’ he did not take his eyes off his recalcitrant students, ‘it seems impossible for me to humiliate these monumental Henry Moore Stones and bronzes. Perhaps you may be foolhardy enough to take this class and demonstrate that what we are attempting here is ensemble choreography and not private twitching.’

  Ravan did as he was bidden but he had the feeling that while the class was particularly lackadaisical that day, his teacher was also making it a pretext to reach out to him. Ravan’s pupils were older than him but he was not awed by them. He could have put the group through their paces blindfolded and yet picked out the slightest discrepancy or laxness. He was his master’s younger version and therefore unable to suffer clumsiness but he was far more patient than Mr Billimoria.

  ‘Good work, Ravan,’ Mr Billimoria told him at the end of the day, ‘but your heart’s not in it today.’

  Was an answer expected of him? What could he say since he didn’t know what the matter with him was.

  ‘Good night, Ravan.’

  ‘Good night, sir.’

  Ravan locked up and gave the keys to Mr Billimoria. He pretended to walk away but after Mr Billimoria had disappeared, he went back and sat on the steps of the tae kwon do gym. It was dark. The lights in the surrounding buildings had come on at least an hour and a half ago. The vast grounds of St Theresa’s School were empty. The stumps and the bails on the cricket field had been removed and the netting used for practice sessions looked like a prison abandoned by its jailbirds.

  Ravan recalled his physics teacher enunciating the laws of thermodynamics. It seemed that whether you converted matter to heat, or heat or electricity to another form of energy, the equations stayed constant. There may be loss of energy or heat in the process of conversion but everything remained within the universe. What did that mean? Were the waves that Mr Billimoria had created when he was demonstrating the poetry of tae kwon do on Ravan’s first encounter with that martial art form still dispersing, reacting and ricocheting against other previous or newer waves in the atmosphere? What had happened to the energy and sound-waves of the ‘ghati’ with which Mr Billimoria had addressed him? Had they left an impress on the air that would last to the end of time? Could it be recovered? Was there really no history to energy? Were the past and the future in the present? Was death a passage of one form of energy into another? He had no idea where these thoughts were leading or what he was trying to get at. He wasn’t quite sure why he was hovering at the edge of questions about the nature and purpose of life.

  He could not decipher the hieroglyphics of the events of late noon that day in his house. Why should a single night turn his world upside down? What was the bond between a son and his father? Ravan felt he was as attached to the chair or fan in his house as he was to his father. That back which he had turned upon the world and Ravan many, many years ago did not give any purchase to Ravan. What had they done with his mother? Had they driven her out? Was he finally an orphan? If aloneness was the same as being on your own and shut out, then despite the rock and citadel and strength of his mother, he had always been an orphan. It was not an alien sensation, certainly nothing to get worked up about. It was like being born with a bodily defect. Either you combated it and got around it or you ignored it as Shobhan did. So why did he think that the earth had slipped from under his feet and he was marooned in space?

  Who was going to look after his mother? There were no rewards in life for doing a good job, supporting your family single-handed, bringing up your healthy husband and school-going son and working close to sixteen hours a day. You could be thrown out at any moment. Were the roles of husband and wife spelt out when two people got married? When two parties came together was it mandatory that one was subordinate to the other?

  Even between a victimizer and victim there was always a sense of belonging, need and bonding. What last night or that leg which rowed across his father’s body like a paddle in water made plain to him was that he was no longer marginal or peripheral to the scheme of things; he was irrelevant. When it was possible at some future date to retrieve the past by unscrambling the air, there would be no trace of him.

  Where was he planning to go? Why was he always asking questions when he did not have the answer to anything. He had heard of boys who ran away from home and joined the circus. There were stories of mendicants who lured runaways or lost children to some distant place and trained them to pick pockets or beg or shine shoes. He could always take a train and go to Delhi, Madras or Hyderabad. But what was the use? If the police caught him wandering around at night, they would worm his address out of him and take him back to his father and the new tenant. Someone tapped him on his shoulder.

  ‘Let’s go home, Ravan.’

  ‘Can’t we go some place else, Ma? Take a room and supply food to your customers from there?’

  ‘We could but we need to pay a big pagdee, fifteen or twenty thousand rupees before anyone will rent a room to us.’

  His mother held his hand in hers, something she rarely did these days. ‘Besides why should we look for another place when we already have a home. That place is yours and mine, Ravan. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.’

  ‘Ma, the second button on my shirt’s gone.’

  ‘Give it to me.’ H
is aunt caught hold of his shirt-tail as he was going to the kitchen. ‘I’ll stitch it for you.’ He tried to pull it away from her. She didn’t let go.

  ‘You would like it to tear, wouldn’t you, so you won’t have to go to school?’

  ‘That’s not true. I like school.’

  ‘Sure. That’s why you fail in every test.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You have only red marks in your notebooks.’

  ‘I still like to go to school.’

  ‘Lots of girls waiting for you there, is it?’ His father’s sister had slowly drawn the shirt out as if she were pulling in a line with a fish at the end of it.

  ‘Chhhya. No girls in our school.’ She pulled out the sewing box from under the bed. ‘Sit down, don’t hover over me and make me nervous while I thread the needle.’

  He looked at her while she sewed the button. She was a source of endless wonder to him. After tea in the mornings she put several plastic clips in her hair. When she took them out, believe it or not, her hair had waves running through it. Often she left a comb in her hair. She took a bath late and wandered around with just a blouse and petticoat.

  ‘Please wear a sari,’ Parvati had told her. ‘There’s a young boy in the house.’ What he had to do with his aunt’s sari was a mystery to him. She had laughed at his mother. ‘And ruin the crease of my sari? You’ve got to be joking. Besides, don’t shelter your son so much, Parvatibai. It’s time he was exposed to the facts of life.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ his mother said sharply. ‘Everything in due time.’

  Come evening, his father’s sister powdered her face, wore an ironed sari and then put on lipstick. Her lips were thin but she made them look wide and full painting them broadly and reshaping them. She had a wooden vanity case that was inlaid with exquisite brass vines, leaves, flowers and fruits. If she wanted to get at coloured powders and pastes, rouge, mascara, eyeshadow, kohl, Snow, foundation and cold creams stored in tiny compartments and boxes in the inner recesses, she lifted the whole lid and laid it back. But if she wanted to look at herself or put the red tika on her forehead, she flipped half the lid back and stood the mirror on the inside at an angle. She spent hours squeezing blackheads from her face, plucking her eyebrows or just gazing at herself.