‘You may share all you have with her but I don’t think I care to humiliate you in front of her.’
Shankar-rao’s face fell. He went into the kitchen.
‘Where is the stove?’
‘What stove?’
‘The third primus stove.’
‘Oh that.’
‘Yes, oh that.’ Parvati did not lose her patience.
‘We wanted to eat some fish and she wanted to buy Ravan a gift but there was no money in the tin under the papads.’
‘So you sold that stove I bought just two months ago?’ There was a crack of disbelief running through Parvati’s voice. ‘Do you know how much these industrial stoves cost? How do you expect me to cook for fifty people without it?’
‘Don’t make a drama of it. Besides we didn’t sell it, we just pawned it.’
‘How am I going to get it redeemed?’
‘You’ll think of something.’ Shankar-rao was pleased with his sense of sarcasm. ‘You always do.’
‘You sell one more thing from this house,’ Parvati walked to the other stove on which the lentils were bubbling, removed the steaming lid with her bare fingers and dipped the big ladle in it, ‘and I’ll throw this dal at you.’
‘Like hell you will.’
‘Try me. Try me now.’
Shankar-rao stopped smiling.
In the past five or six weeks, Parvatibai had taken to going to the temple regularly. She prayed with an intensity that must have intimidated the gods. In mythical times they were often caught in a bind. Overwhelmed by the unswerving and relentless force of an ardent disciple’s devotion, they were compelled to part with boons. Soon a time came when the devotee’s powers posed a threat to the world order and the gods themselves. Desperate and fighting for survival, the gods resorted to dubious, unorthodox and underhand methods—subterfuges, sex, not to mention foul play—to regain the upper hand. Parvati’s was a strange and perhaps misplaced prayer. She appealed to the goodness, reason and sense of fair-play in the gods. She forgot her surroundings and would not have returned home in time but for the fact that the temple-doors shut at 7.30 at night.
There were a couple of things preying on her mind: she had to get her husband’s sister out once and for all, at almost any cost. The reasons were obvious enough. Her son was at extreme risk. The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house. The outsider’s presence also made Parvati realize something about herself. Parvati discovered to her surprise that she actually resented the loss of her independence and freedom. She earned her living. She had, she thought, earned the right to make her own decisions. But there was something which was even more pressing than these matters. What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two? All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit. She had nothing against the unborn child. But she didn’t want him in her house and she didn’t want to support him. It really boiled down to one thing: the woman had to go, she had no idea how, though. If she did, why was she having to importune the gods? The folks up there, however, seemed a little unresponsive. Perhaps they had finally learnt a lesson. Mankind was nothing but trouble. Let them sort out their own affairs. Frankly, gods though they might be, they had enough problems of their own.
Someone she met at the temple told her about an Ananta Baba, a holy man of such powers that he could alter destiny and fate. Parvati was by nature and belief down to earth. She was not favourably disposed towards middlemen and intermediaries. God was a personal matter. The greatest of saints like Dnyaneshwar, Kabir and Tukaram had always maintained that when you could approach the top guy, there was little point in going to the underlings.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. Despite her reservations, Parvatibai visited Ananta Baba on four or five occasions. He was a good man, at least he did not ask for money or payment in kind. He listened patiently to her, gave her a black thread which was blessed and did not say whether things would improve or not.
What was the framework in which the celestials functioned? Wasn’t there a time-frame within which alone intervention and aid had meaning? After all what was the point of succour if the person was beyond help? Was it possible that the gods who lived outside time did not comprehend the concept of time and its finality for mortals? One thing was certain: far from any help or assistance coming Parvati’s way, matters had deteriorated to a point where her livelihood was threatened. Shankar-rao was a fool and that was that. It was his sister who was a conundrum. Parvatibai was of the belief that the key to human beings was self-interest. She was beginning to realize that she was wrong. Self-interest would have dictated that the least the new woman would do was preserve the status quo. Where else in Bombay could she get a roof over her head, three meals and non-stop service, all of them for free? And yet all that Shankar-rao’s sister seemed interested in doing was destroying Parvati’s home. Where would that leave her? She too would be out on the road but that obvious consideration did not figure in her thinking.
Parvatibai had heard that the gods visit trials and travails upon mankind to test them. Test what? Their faith, their loyalty, their fortitude, their capacity for suffering? She thought that this was what rotten parents did: they did not know how to handle their impotence and rage against their partners, fate or the world and so beat their children and said it was for their own good. She had no idea what good ensued from piling hardship upon hardship, evil and torture. If watching people lose heart, break down and squirm, gave the gods pleasure, then they were stranger than men and women. Whatever the truth of the matter, Parvatibai knew that she could not afford to leave the house for such long periods from now onwards. If she had had any choice, she would not have left home even to go shopping for vegetables, rice and other necessities.
The next morning Parvati got up an hour earlier than usual since she had to make do with two stoves instead of three. She went out after the lunch boxes had been collected. One earring was already with the pawnbroker. She gave him the second one and redeemed the stove. On her way back she tried to wrestle with a marketing dilemma: should she raise the price of her lunches and dinners by two rupees a month? Just a month before Shankar-rao had brought his sister home, her clients had raised hell and threatened to take their business to somebody else when she had increased the price of the meals. Would the traffic bear the strain of one more price-hike? It was dicey. At the very minimum, anywhere between five to ten customers would abandon her. Would the gains offset losses? Even if they did, which she doubted very much, she would not get to see the money. As soon as Shankar-rao and his sister heard Parvatibai telling her customers that their meal-ticket was going to cost more, they were bound to want to buy an imported American car like the winged one in which she had seen Raj Kapoor drive past, or a bungalow on Juhu beach. No, she would either have to say goodbye to her earrings or wait for a windfall to repossess them.
Fifteen
‘What have you gone and done to yourself, son?’ Father Agnello D’Souza crossed himself and asked Eddie the question in alarm.
‘Yes, your son. I haven’t begun to tell you the brave and magnificent deeds of your son yet.’
‘My son?’ Father D’Souza stepped back in even greater alarm. Soft black silk slithered on his skin. Eddie’s father’s eyes were fixed on him. The next moment he would raise his right hand from the coffin and point it at him. I need some clarifications here, Father. Is it true Eddie is your son? Not mine? I need an answer, Father. Now. Unless I get to the bottom of this affair, my soul won’t be able to rest in peace. ‘Lord God, Jesus Christ, you are my witness,’ the tremulous words finally escaped him, ‘Eddie’s not my son. Why do you say such terrible and untrue things? What will people say if they heard you?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Father.’ Violet Coutinho laid a gentle hand on his shoulder to pacify the overexcited priest. Burning coal. Atomic radiation. A leper’s hand. Father Agnello drew back even further. Taken aback by his reaction, Violet opened the floodgates on Eddie.
‘This, it’s this boy who’s ruined my whole life, destroyed my peace of mind. I sent him to get onions last evening at 5.30. He returned at 10.45 without the onions or the money. And in this condition, if you please. Not a word of explanation either.’
‘I tried, but you locked the door on me,’
‘Don’t you dare say a word, shameless boy. God knows what he was up to, Father. Please help me, Father. I don’t think I can bear it any more.’
‘You said that the last time too.’ Father Agnello was going to get his pound of flesh today but Violet was determined to have the last word.
‘That’s because you never straighten him out.’
Violet had not taken Eddie into the house the previous night. And she played the same trick she had when Mr Furtado had dragged him upstairs. She had a heart of stone, this woman who claimed to be his mother. Which mother would torture her son, her very own son, in such a terrible fashion? The same stony silence, except that it weighed on him even more this time. Talk of suffering, what did she know about it? No one had stopped talking to her. Starving him was bad enough but to starve herself, Pieta and Granna, only she could have thought of that. (Correct that. He hoped Pieta would starve herself to death.) She alone could be that diabolical. Why couldn’t she be like any other mother and give him a drubbing? Let both her hands and mouth have free play till she felt better. See, he was not thinking of himself or of his own self-interest. He was concerned about her, he wanted to ease her pain. He had always had her welfare at heart. Why couldn’t she at least occasionally reciprocate? When he couldn’t take his mother’s silence any longer, he did something he knew he shouldn’t, but always did. He spoke to his sister in a whisper through the barred window. ‘What’s the matter with Mamma?’
‘What’s the matter with Mamma?’ The words came back amplified a million times over. ‘You should know. It’s because of you that she’s lost her sleep and peace. She hasn’t eaten and neither have Granna and I. At least they are old. But I’m young and growing and I need all the proteins and vitamins I can get.’
On some other occasion, Eddie would have cut her tongue out with a pair of scissors and thrown it to the crows. Or better still, wrung her neck with his bare hands. But today all he wanted was to become an ant or worm and disappear between the stone tiles of the floor. His sister had declaimed her piece to all of Mazagaon and yet his mother continued to darn the dress she wore to church as if unaware that he had returned, and she had locked him out. All the neighbours opened their doors and inspected Eddie’s condition at this late hour. Their children tried to talk to him but they were told to go back to sleep. He asked Sybil Pereira whether he could sleep at her place but before she could answer, Pieta had once again woken up the dead.
‘Don’t you dare interfere, Sybil. Think of my mother who works night and day to feed this boy. Her eyes have become so weak, she can’t thread a needle any more.’ She found the word she was looking for and raised her decibel level. ‘She’s devastated by his conduct.’
You had to hand it to her. She may have been a parakeet but no mere bird could have matched the tremulous quiver in her voice. When his mother complained, Eddie had no problems going deaf. But, when Pieta reproduced her mother’s speech verbatim, she put so much feeling into it, that even Eddie loathed the boy who put his mother through such agony.
They didn’t eat that night. The kerosene stove was not lit the next morning and nobody got breakfast before going to church.
It finally began to dawn on Eddie that his mother had changed her strategy totally. She was not going to raise her hand against him. A new Violet was in the making. Long-suffering, hardworking, forbearing and selfless, the essence of her personality was going to be extreme martyrdom. He would have to bear her like an ache that would not go away. He was right without knowing it. Nobody can match the sanctimonious cruelty of martyrs.
Father Agnello D’Souza was solemn and dour. He took off his specs to glare at Eddie. ‘Come inside.’
‘Why?’
‘For confession.’
‘I confessed last Thursday, don’t you remember?’
‘Don’t argue. Get in.’
‘Must I?’ Eddie asked his mother. She looked away. Pieta pressed her lips together and said a thin ‘yes’. Eddie’s lips moved soundlessly.
‘Mamma,’ Pieta yelped as if some stranger had unzipped her dress on a crowded road, ‘he called me a bitch.’
‘Shush now,’ Violet shut her up.
‘Go, my child.’ Granna put her hand on Eddie’s head. ‘Tell the priest whatever you did last night and beg forgiveness of God. Both you and your mother will feel lighter and better.’
There was a high, dark and arching quiet in the church. Beams of light descended from the skylights and froze whatever was in their path. An ancient woman sat under one of the spotlights. She had broken out of time and the cycle of life and death. She sat alone with her God. The small shrunken body on its knees was more still than a graven image. Her head was bent forward and the light caught in her silver hair hung over her head like a nimbus. The pomegranate beads in her rosary dripped steadily without her arthritic fingers moving.
Far away, above the altar, Jesus Christ continued to haemorrhage silently. His head hung limply to the right. Eddie understood that this was a clay Christ. But each time he looked at him, he had an intense urge to pry out the nails in his hands and feet and bring him down. Sometimes at night he spent hours struggling with those nails. Exhausted, he would try to pull Jesus off, instead of the nails. One of these days, the nails would stay where they were and Jesus would come crashing down on him.
‘Do you have any idea of the consequences of your actions? You are so young and yet how you’ve hurt your father and mother. Ever thought of that? That was no slip of the tongue, I meant your father. Even if he’s not here, he’s watching you constantly. Let alone your parents, do you realize how you are torturing our Lord Jesus? Even a single sin, a single sinful thought can cause him unbearable pain and open his wounds again. He has to bleed again and again to wash your sins.’ A livid Father D’Souza narrated the far-reaching effects of Eddie’s crimes to him in a hoarse whisper.
Eddie was not particularly disturbed by the pain he was causing his parents. His father was beyond his imagination and hence incapable of feeling pain. He had seen his father’s photograph at home but found it difficult to believe this man was once made of flesh and blood. And even if he was, he could neither relate to him, nor did he want to. If his father had had the slightest feeling or sympathy, he would not have allowed Eddie to starve last night and this morning. As for his mother, they were quits. He was giving her as hard a time as she was giving him. Frankly, he thought she was having a better time of it than he was. But he became terribly restive at the thought that Jesus’s wounds were bleeding again because of him. He wanted to break open the hard crust which had formed over the long and throbbing lesion under his chin by hitting it against the back of the bench in front of him. He would keep on bashing his head till the gash reopened and he washed Jesus clean with his blood.
While Eddie’s motives and intentions were mostly laudable, he was wise enough to appreciate that it is easier to bear someone else’s pain—even if that someone else was God himself—than one’s own. For hundreds of years they had left the Son of God hanging on the cross and now Father D’Souza had the temerity to suggest that he was responsible for Jesus’s sufferings. In a fit of temper, Eddie asked, ‘Then why don’t you bring him down and bandage his wounds?’
The blood receded from Father Agnello’s face. He was speechless. It was such a simple and logical thought, it could only have come from the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer himself.
‘Eddie,’ he thundered. The old woman kneeling at the front of the church looked back at them startled. ‘How dare you blaspheme in the house of the Lord?’ He caught hold of Eddie’s neck and forced him to his knees. ‘Father, please forgive this worthless boy. He’s thoughtless.’ But even as he begged the Lord,
that ghastly suggestion Eddie had made entwined itself around his mind. Satan’s coils seemed to feed his anger but he kept a hold on his voice. ‘Where did you go yesterday? Which gang of scoundrels and rascals were you with? Have you seen yourself in the mirror? No decent boy would be seen like this.’
‘I didn’t want to come. Mummy forced me to.’ Eddie was cowed down by now. He didn’t believe his own words. ‘I wasn’t with any gang. Twenty people, no forty, surrounded me and attacked me.’
‘Stop it. What do you take me for, a babe in the woods who’s still being fed milk through a dropper? If you don’t want to tell the truth, at least don’t tell lies.’
Eddie looked at him in despair and amazement. ‘I’m telling you the truth. I swear to you.’
‘Get out. Swearing falsely in the holy of holies, our own Mother Church? Have you no shame? Fifteen or thirty people fell upon you. As if you were carrying gold bricks on your person. I am kind and gentle but not a fool. Leave the church. I can’t bear to see your mother suffer. Otherwise I would not have seen your black face again. Why are you staring at me? I said get out.’
Having decided that Eddie was trying to stare him down, Father D’Souza tried to outstare him. It was an uneven contest. Eddie’s mind had stopped functioning. He continued to gaze blankly at Father D’Souza. Father D’Souza took short, large breaths in an attempt to keep his eyes open. He put pressure on his eye muscles to widen his eyes as much as possible. That made him look more outraged than he was. Am I overreacting? What if he is telling the truth? Is the boy being defiant or am I imagining things? And suppose it is not Lucifer wound round him but Jesus trying to reach him?
The wretched boy was a scoundrel, no two ways about that. Father D’Souza blinked.
Eddie was on the last step leading out of the church when Father D’Souza spoke to him again. ‘If there is a little shame left in your heart, come for confession in the evening and beg the Lord’s forgiveness.’
Ravan and Eddie Page 22