Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  There were still a few young couples and four or five families talking to each other in the large compound of the church. But Eddie’s mother, sister and Granna were not among them. He felt forsaken. Was it possible that even the woman who had caused him such wordless pain and agony had lost interest in him? He felt dead, formless and empty. Entire galaxies could have traversed through him unhindered. He was touched by the terrible loneliness of the Son of God.

  Some blows are such that it takes years for the wounds to appear. There is no greater loneliness on earth than when someone turns his back on you. The loneliness of death, misunderstanding, distance, separation and irreconcilable differences cannot match it. But the aloneness that even Jesus could not bear was the loneliness of being forgotten.

  Jesus was Lord God. The only Son of our Father. God sent him down to cleanse the sins of mankind. The nailed Christ broke down once, just once. ‘Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me.’ What was he trying to say? After all Christ was all-knowing and knew God’s plan for him. How could he speak his mind? How could he reveal that God had not deserted him but that he had completely slipped out of God’s mind? How else can you explain a father abandoning his only son to suffer such terrible pain and suffering and loneliness?

  ‘So, what did Father D’Souza have to say about your unforgivable conduct?’ Since nobody else was willing to ask, Pieta took it upon herself to enquire of Eddie. His mother gripped the primus stove firmly in her left hand and with her right she pumped air rapidly into its brass belly. The chill blue flower above the burner blossomed in a rush. And along with it the flaring hiss that would drill into your brain long after you were asleep, long after you were dead. Violet put the pot of beef stew on the stove. Eddie felt relieved. Granna was grating a coconut. Eddie picked up a pinch of snow-white fluff and put it in his mouth and said softly to Pieta, ‘Father D’Souza said your sister Pieta is such a sweet girl, kick her in the butt at least five times a day without fail.’

  He had an innocent and ingenuous smile on his face. Pieta leaned forward to hear his whispered message. She planted her nails in Eddie’s face and tried to scratch him but Eddie wouldn’t hold still. ‘Ma, did you hear what Eddie said? He said that Father Agnello told him Pieta is such a sweet girl, kick her in the butt at least five times a day without fail.’

  Violet gave Eddie a searing look and incinerated him. The silence continued. She was not willing to make peace. Granna said, ‘Enough now, Eddie. Get out of those torn clothes and take a bath. And you, Pieta, if you tattle on your brother once more, I’ll not give you that piece of silk I bought for your birthday.’

  Pieta was aghast. Here was the criminal standing next to her in person. Instead of banishing him for life, though come to think of it a public hanging in the CWD grounds would have been more apposite, Granna, her very own grandmother, had insulted her. She was sure now that rank injustice and unfairness would be her lot in life.

  ‘I’m leaving. See if I step into this house ever again.’

  Granna and her mother ignored her. Eddie was the only one who was sympathetic and had kind words for her though he mimed rather than spoke them. Go, my pet, go. Leave this instant, his hands and expression suggested, don’t ever come back. These people don’t deserve you. Pieta was in a fix. She certainly did not want to acquiesce in her brother’s wishes. And yet it was a matter of honour, now that she had spoken. Who was worse, her mother and Granna who had taken the news of her impending departure so calmly or her rogue brother who continued to encourage her magnanimously in her proposed course of action? Her resolve, however, was shaken only for an instant. She walked to the door and lifted the latch decisively. She opened the door and looked back. She was not the tallest in the house but she managed to look down on her family. Her gaze passed over her brother, Granna and then Violet.

  ‘I’m leaving. We’ll not meet again. I’m going to commit suicide. I’m going to leap into the creek. Perhaps I’ll lie across the rail tracks and the local train will make three equal parts of me. One for Eddie, one for Ma and one for Granna. I do not bear a grudge against any of you. It is not your fault. You are incapable of appreciating me. You won’t know my value till I die. You must learn to take care of each other since I’ll no longer be here. If you repent and grieve for me, try not to weep too much. It will be too late.’

  Eddie watched his sister in awe. His admiration for her at this moment was boundless. He was not sure that he had followed all the metaphysical ramifications of her speech but he was staggered by the audacity and reach of her imagination. He saw the three parts her body had been cut into. Head and legs on either side, torso in the middle. One for Ma, one for Granna and one for me, she had said. Which one do I get? He was enthralled and overcome by Pieta’s inspired acting. He had not seen the likes of it before. Truth to tell, if you had called it acting, he would have called you a fool. When it’s truer than true, how can you possibly call it acting?

  Pieta guessed that she had floored her brother Eddie. Two more heart-rending emotional sentences and the fellow would sob his heart out. When she said her last ‘goodbye’ softly, he would be on his knees, begging her forgiveness and mumbling distractedly, ‘Never, never again will I say such awful things to you, please don’t go, please, I’ll do anything you want, just change your mind.’ But Pieta’s sights were set on greater things, infinitely greater things. She was going to make her mother and Granna cry till they got hiccups. Revenge, sweet revenge. Let mother and daughter break down and plead, let them bring the building down with their tears and sorrow, lesser hearts would crack but not hers, she was not going to pay any heed to them. That train was heading straight for her. The driver saw her. He blew the horn. He put his entire weight on the brakes. Too late. Nothing was going to be of any use now. All she needed to do was take her father’s name. Victor Coutinho. The Papa she had never had or had had only for a year. He was the only one in this world who would understand what she had been through. I’m now going to him forever. That said, her mother would crumble. She would pursue her on peeling, bloody knees and hold Pieta in her arms and rock her till she fell asleep. She knew all the dialogue and action by heart. But before she delivered the fell blow, she would have to prepare the ground a little, draw out the last drop of emotion. ‘You may take my ruler and eraser, Eddie. My doll Cecilia I leave to Aunt Grace’s Ruth. The perfume which John Uncle got me from Madagascar and which I’ve used only twice so far I leave to you, Mamma. Whenever you apply it, even when you merely open the bottle, you’ll remember your one and only daughter, Pieta. And to Granna, I bequeath the polka-dotted red and white silk,’ Pieta was not one to shy from the full weight of irony, ‘with which she was going to make me a dress. Make a blouse in my memory with it and wear it to church every Sunday.’

  Not just her audience, Pieta herself was wrung out by the elegiac quality of her peroration. But her shameless and heartless Granna destroyed the tragic effect she had so meticulously and painstakingly built. A stone would have melted and wept. Instead Pieta’s grandmother cracked up. Not a soft snigger or a smile that hovered between the lips and the cheeks, either. A full, immoderate and villainous ha ha ha till the tears flowed from her eyes. And even then she continued to laugh.

  Pieta was filled with loathing and disgust. She felt such boundless pity for herself, she forgot her climactic and masterly final stroke. She did not want to spend another minute in this house with its worthless people. She walked out but not without slamming the door hard.

  ‘Pieta, Pieta I was wrong. Please forgive me. Honestly I am sorry,’ Pieta kept walking down the staircase despite Granna’s words. When she reached the second floor she craned her neck and looked up. She waited till her grandmother was just fifteen steps behind her, then she set out determinedly to die.

  Eddie’s sorrows were of a different order. He drew the curtains and sat on the stool with rotting legs in the tiny area in the kitchen where the family bathed. The first mug of cold water on his body and back, and his courage cav
ed in. How was he to face the evening? How was he to present his black face, his black sins and his black soul to Father Agnello D’Souza? And yet, if his problems had ended there; he would have considered himself lucky. His worries and fears were legion. It was no state secret that he had committed horrendous and unmentionable crimes. Why else would Father Agnello be so enraged? But he could not for the life of him guess what they were or give them names. He had tried to speak the truth this morning but it was plain that that was not going to be enough. He was more than willing to confess before God. But he was beginning to understand just how low he had fallen: he did not even know what his crime was.

  As he finished his bath, the sizzling blue flame in the primus stove turned yellow and leapt almost to the ceiling. His mother tried to pierce the micron hole at the bottom of the burner with a primus pin, gauge number four. But she couldn’t locate it and, even when she did, the carbon particle or speck of dust that had lodged itself there would not budge. He wondered why the flames did not engulf him and put an end to his misery. The pin went in and the stove began to breathe freely.

  He had been fasting since last night. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and he was ravenous. But when he sat at the table, he couldn’t get a single morsel down. Though Pieta’s attempts at suicide had not met with success, the atmosphere at the dining-table was funereal. Granna had caught up with Pieta outside their chawl. Pieta had put up heroic resistance and performed a stunning one-woman show in technicolour and stereophonic sound without the aid of loudspeakers. ‘I will not return, not on my life. Everybody mollycoddles and pampers Eddie. I am a stepdaughter in my own house. Let go my hand or I’ll miss the 12.47. After that there isn’t a fast train till 3.30. And without a fast brain, there won’t be clean cuts and three even parts.’

  She said she could hear her father calling her. Her timing was slightly off, her throat was sore and her voice was hoarse with all that screaming and weeping and her mother wasn’t there but she knew that everyone in the CWD chawls was her audience, even that villain Ravan was watching spellbound. She took a deep breath and said that devastating piece about her father, how he alone knew her value and how she was now going to be with him forever. Not just the very old and the womenfolk but strong young men who had not shed tears for many years wept like babes at Pieta’s monstrously sad tale and its tragic end. Not just men and women and children but even the inert and cold brick buildings of the CWD complex cried their hearts out. Suddenly, Pieta’s mother was at the window. A six-syllable streak of lightning without thunder fell to the earth. ‘Pieta, come on up.’ When Pieta came home Violet slapped her. Pieta’s head swivelled a hundred and eighty degrees. Violet repeated the gesture. Pieta’s head returned to its normal position.

  It was a red-letter day. A day that would go down in history. A day that Eddie had prayed for fervently for many years. God had answered his prayers with a generosity that would have converted a hardcore atheist. For the first time in living memory, his mother had hit Pieta. But the fates must surely be sourpusses and spoilsports. How else could you explain Eddie’s failure to take an interest in the proceedings? He did not jump for joy. He did not take his friends out for a night on the town. He did not declare the next day a national holiday. Instead, he lay in a state of hopelessness. He was in a tunnel and there was no light at the end of it because there was no end to the tunnel.

  For the hundredth time today, he went over all that had transpired between 5.30 p.m. yesterday and 10.30 a.m. this morning. But the voice which should have shrieked in his heart and told him the difference between right and wrong, and which Father D’Souza said was the compass on the ocean of life, had gone dead. Or to be more precise, God’s voice or his conscience was malfunctioning and could not tell him where he had gone wrong. He considered praying, but what was the point? It was clear that God had lost interest in Eddie and forgotten him.

  It was a Sunday but Violet’s sewing machine was not idle. There was a bird in it which was condemned to peck mechanically at the same loop of thread all its life. It was a sound that was sewn into the lining of Eddie’s brain. Whether he was in class, in the playing field, in the cinema theatre, the bird was always pecking away at his brain. But it was also a soothing sound. It was the sound of sleep for Eddie. All his living years he had dozed off at night while his mother was still working. Today was one day when that soporific was not going to work. The cares of the world were nothing compared to his problems on this black Sunday.

  At a quarter to five Granna woke him up for a cup of tea. He looked at the clock on the wall, checked the time with his grandmother and got into his Sunday clothes and shoes and combed his hair in a frantic hurry. Only a callous sinner like him could have lost consciousness and slept during one of the worst crises of his life.

  ‘Where are you going in such a rush?’ Granna asked him. His mother had not yet broken her vow of silence.

  ‘For confession.’ Eddie was out of the door.

  ‘But I thought you confessed this morning?’

  ‘Father Agnello wanted me to come in the evening.’

  The sinners stood in two rows. There was no knowing which line would end up at Father Agnello’s booth. Seven in one queue, nine in the other. Eddie opted to start his penance before confession. The longer he waited, the longer he would suffer. And if he suffered, Jesus might just possibly take pity on him, and, instead of Father Agnello, he could relate his litany of sins to Father Constantine. He joined the longer queue.

  He was second in line. He suddenly had a premonition that this would lead to Father Agnello. He changed queues and went all the way to the back. He was number eleven now. Was it not possible to be absolved before confession?

  It was his turn now. He tried to peep through the latticed window behind which the emissary of God sat in his black box. He pressed his nose, he twisted his neck, narrowed his eyes, but the darkness did not yield its secret. He would have disregarded the woman behind who was getting impatient, but the priest inside cleared his throat twice, knocked his elbow against the wooden partition and emitted a ‘huh?’ to nudge the sinner. Eddie’s throat went dry and his tongue became immobile.

  The voice of God’s proxy thundered at him in a stage whisper, ‘Stop fidgeting, Eddie, and wasting my time. Start your confession.’

  Oh God, I trusted you, I really did. I changed queues, stood that much longer. I suffered and what do I get for all my troubles? Father Agnello. Is there no fair play left in the world? Eddie put his neck on the block.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was on Thursday.’

  ‘Stop mumbling.’

  ‘Ma sent me to get onions last evening but I didn’t get them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Paul Monteiro asked me to go to Crystal’s home and tell her that his father was seriously ill and was being taken to Masina Hospital.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then? Do you expect me to prompt you after every word?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Speak up. I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘I went to see Rock Around the Clock.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rock Around the Clock.’

  ‘I heard you. How dare you go to see a film that the Church has not approved of yet and may very likely never do?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was not approved, Father.’

  ‘Don’t you read the Good Samaritan, our school journal? It says so clearly in it.’

  ‘Paul gave me the tickets. He should’ve known.’ Got away this time.

  ‘Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law, Eddie. But we’ll come to that later. What happened then? The truth, Eddie, nothing but the truth. Watching a film won’t deprive you of half your collar and shirt buttons. And make you filthy as a gutter rat.’

  ‘That Ravan has a gang, Father. They call themselves the Mazagaon Mawalis. Their members always make fun of us. They insult our mothers and sisters. When we go to school
they throw orange peels and rotten eggs at us. On Friday night I sent a message to Ravan. I said, “Sala, if you’ve got guts, come and meet us face to face. We’ll have a fight to the death on Saturday evening. Our gangs will meet at the playground next to the Railway Colony.” He said okay. I immediately got our gang ready and prepared for the fight. Santan Almeida is my deputy chief. Roger, Peter, John are the other members.’

  ‘What’s the name of your gang?’

  ‘Do or Die Devils. We fought for an hour and a half. They were nine, we were five. But we fought like lions and saved the honour of the top floors. Peter got scared and wanted to run but I stopped him. You see this wound under my chin, Ravan hit me with an iron pipe. He tore my collar too. Then I lost control. I punched him so hard I broke the bridge of his nose. He cried and he cried. He touched my feet and begged me to stop. He said, “Please stop, Eddie. Please. You and your Devils have won, the Mawalis have lost.” But I didn’t listen. I asked him whether they would chase after our women. He said, “Never.” I said if he ever touched our women, I’d break his legs.’

  Eddie felt spent after that fight. He wiped his mouth and waited to hear the penance Father Agnello would give him.

  ‘Huh.’

  Eddie didn’t have the courage to disappoint Father Agnello.

  ‘Then we went to Cafe Light of Iran and ordered five Cokes. I ordered two plates of mutton samosas for the gang. You know where you get the best non-veg samosas in Bombay? Light of Iran. But be there before six or they’re over. Then I ordered two more plates. We polished them off but then I realized I had no money. Boy, did we run for our lives. The waiter and the Irani just stood by and watched us disappear.’

  ‘Huh.’

  More? What more did Father Agnello want? Eddie had already ransacked his memory for plots from all the comic books he had read. Mutt and Jeff, Archie, Roy Rogers. He added whatever tit-bits he remembered from the conversations of older boys and his friends but even that was not enough. He had to fall back on his own resources and imagination now and concoct his own masala. How many more terrible things could he have done in just one evening? But there was no end to Father Agnello’s appetite. Nothing was going to satisfy him and Eddie feared he would still be here when the church reopened for six o’clock mass the next morning.