‘Parvati and Ravan will be back. Let me sleep.’
‘You come here,’ she screamed at him, ‘did you hear what I said. Come here and fuck me. I want that child.’
Shankar-rao’s reply was curt. ‘Go fuck yourself. You are never going to be pregnant.’
Parvati knocked and entered and put off the lights.
Had she brought all those troubles upon herself and her innocent child? Getting to be a young man now and hardly innocent after his meeting with Aunt Lalee. She excused herself in the middle of the act, went into the kitchen and brought out the willi with which she had been cutting cabbage on the day Shankar-rao had brought his sister home. She sat astride her husband. He had been too engrossed in foreplay to react to Parvati’s sudden departure. He tried to grasp Parvati’s breasts in the palms of his hands. It was sheer torture. His eyes closed and he mooed at his good fortune. Lalee was lascivious and her face, manners and posture suggested undiscovered worlds of lechery and pleasure but she was mostly a cock-teaser and nothing more except on the rare days when she needed urgent satisfaction. He increasingly had the feeling that at heart she was bored with sex. In the last few months except that one occasion when Parvati had walked in, it was always, you want it, go ahead, work at it, just so long as you don’t expect me to stop combing my hair, or chewing aniseed or just plain sleeping. He would get so frantic wanting her, he usually mistimed and that made her nasty and bitchy. Besides she had loose, semi-solid boobs. Even the slightest movement and they tended to become unstable and go in the most unexpected directions. Didn’t even qualify as medium-sized. Now look at these. These weren’t pomegranates, they weren’t giant watermelons, they were cannon balls. No, what he had in his hands was the earth, one in each hand. Stupendous, his hands couldn’t support them for more than a minute. They got exhausted holding up the crystal globes and dropped them. Mom, Dad just come and look at these monster jackfruits from my personal garden. Yeaaaaahhhhhh, if this isn’t paradise.…
He felt something sharp at his Adam’s apple. For some stupid reason, Parvati had decided to blabber in the midst of his sacred trance, nothing short of a profound mystical experience. But he was Shankar, the Lord of Destruction, he was going to open his third eye and burn her tongue to ashes; just the tongue, no no no no no no no, not those two wonders of the world. Never, what did you take him for? A fool? Wouldn’t allow that third eye to touch the bells of heaven. Nothing could match them, they were priceless. He opened his eyes and his magnificent erection collapsed. It was not even semi-solid, it was a vanishing species, it evaporated, there was a void where it had stood so magnificently. Nothing, the primal emptiness. But there were even more urgent calamities and crises to be dealt with. The crescent blade of the willi had settled like the thin fine line of a thread on his neck. Parvati held the wooden handle casually with her whip hand.
‘Please,’ tears rolled down from Shankar-rao’s eyes, ‘please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you want, anything. I’ll go back to work. I beg of you. Spare me. I was wrong. I should never have got her. I’ll get Lalee to pay for her stay and meals and the stoves.’
‘Will you shut up and listen to me?’
He shut up.
‘You may have sex with me, once or twice a week. But only when Ravan is in school or at his lai tando classes.’
Does she need to slit my throat to tell me this? ‘Will you please take the willi away?’
‘I’m not finished. If your sister ever shows up here, I’ll kill you.’ She pressed the blade down a little with her thumb. A red crescent began welling up all around his throat. ‘If you bring another woman to this house, I’ll kill you.’ She pressed the knife edge down a little further. ‘If you ever sell any of the goods in our house, stoves, fans, beds, vessels, anything, I’ll kill you.’
‘It’s hurting.’ A tear slid down his left cheek. Several others followed. ‘Please don’t kill me. I’m your husband.’
‘Then behave like one. And like the father of a boy who needs to be set a good example. Don’t get your tarts and mistresses here. This is our home, not a whore-house. Do I make myself clear?’
He was crying now, oddly enough only from his left eye.
‘I want an answer: a yes or a no.’
‘Yes. Anything you say.’
‘You may finish making love to me.’
Life is not a victory, Parvati thought, it’s a hard-won compromise. She picked up Shankar-rao’s lifeless hands and placed them where they had been.
Seventeen
Rock Around the Clock ran at the Strand for seventeen or maybe nineteen weeks. Eddie should have seen it over fifty times if he had averaged three shows a week. But due to certain unforeseen circumstances he saw it only fourteen times. On Tuesday, he was doing his routine, sidling up behind men who looked lost and were asking for extras. He chanted his mantra in quick short bursts: ‘One-rupee-five-anna tickets for five rupees. One-rupee-five-anna tickets for five rupees.’ The latter half of that last word was to prove prophetic. A midnight blue shadow fell across the road and a hard, calloused hand clamped down on Eddie’s arm. The intention was not to cut off the flow of blood, it was to break the arm. It belonged to a policeman. The only presence of mind that Eddie could muster in that moment of crisis was to pee in his pants.
The other scalpers continued to work undisturbed. With a little experience Eddie could have resolved matters on the spot. The policeman too realized his mistake a little too late. The criminal’s wet pants and the combination of ‘Sorry, sorry’ with ‘I didn’t do anything, I swear, I didn’t do anything’ had gathered a substantial crowd. One or two people half-heartedly said, ‘Let him go, he’s still a child,’ but Eddie’s dripping shorts changed the focus and made everybody laugh. It became, unfortunately, a matter of the policeman’s honour and professional dignity.
It was 2.45 p.m. by the time the policeman and Eddie reached St Sebastian’s School. The peon sensed the gravity of the occasion. He got Father Agnello out of his eleventh grade algebra class.
‘What is it?’ Father Agnello asked him impatiently.
The peon was cryptic. ‘Come and see for yourself.’
Father Agnello made a sour face but followed the peon obediently.
‘You want a kick in your butt? You trying to make an ass of me?’ The policeman asked Eddie when he saw Father D’Souza.
Eddie didn’t look up.
‘Is this the man?’ There was horror and a glimmer of prurient recognition on the policeman’s face. Eddie nodded his head.
‘This boy says you are his father.’
‘That’s true. Everybody calls me Father.’
‘Real father or that kind of father?’ The policeman directed the question at Eddie. He was leering and his voice had become offensively familiar. He had always known that these priests were not to be trusted. Pretending to be celibates all their lives. Sure, so long as they could have as many flings as they wanted on the side.
Eddie looked a long time at Father Agnello D’Souza but wouldn’t speak.
‘Eddie, behave yourself. What seems to be the problem, havaldar? What’s the meaning of a policeman bringing you to me in the middle of a class, Eddie? And what’s that evil smell coming from you?’
‘Take charge of your son. Call yourself a priest and yet fathering children all over the place. Should be ashamed of yourself. Like father, like son. No wonder your brat was selling tickets in the black at Strand.’
‘Whose son, whose father?’ A vein in Father Agnello’s temple was throbbing dangerously and his face had gone red. His voice was thinner than a screech. ‘What did you tell this policeman?’ It was Father Agnello’s turn to grab Eddie’s arm now even as he made a superhuman effort not to do violence to the boy-Satan in front of him.
‘I told him what Ma said that Sunday. You are my father.’
Poor Father Agnello. He was beginning to fear this boy. What was his purpose, meaning and role in life? Was he the eye God kept on him? Or was he the living and breat
hing flesh and blood of the devil?
This time instead of Violet calling upon Father Agnello, the priest summoned her.
‘Mrs Coutinho, I’m at my wit’s end. He’s selling film tickets on the black market and telling the police that I’m his father. What should I do with him?’
‘Don’t ask me, Father,’ Violet told Father D’Souza while pointedly ignoring her son, ‘I’m only a woman and his mother.’
‘What does that mean?’ Father D’Souza was greatly perplexed by Violet’s answer. Had the woman lost her senses or had he lost touch with reality altogether?
‘Starve him. Break his legs. Drown him.’
There was, the priest had to admit, much merit in Violet’s suggestions but as a man of God, Father Agnello D’Souza could not take such extreme measures against Eddie. Instead he caned Eddie and had him report to him at every recess between classes. But the adamantine rigour had gone out of Father D’Souza’s wrath and punishments. His spirit was broken. Had the boy been telling the truth the first time when he said that he had gone to see Rock Around the Clock? Then what about Ravan and the Mazagaon Mawalis and the rest of his confession?
Was there no longer such a thing as truth?
After the Rock Around the Clock episode, Father Agnello and Eddie crossed swords only once before Eddie left school. Eddie had just learnt to masturbate. Some of his friends had taken to the practice with the diligence, devotion and single-mindedness needed to fulfil the most difficult and exhausting of vows. At times they would waste their manhood six or seven times running. Of course they were aware that playing with oneself was not just the despoiling of the body but a cardinal sin. It is open to debate whether the boys would have indulged indefatigably in such handiwork if their elders had not proscribed it. Like hundreds of thousands of their peers, they compared the width, length and peak flows of their dicks and ranked their manhood on a daily basis.
It would take another fifteen to twenty years for the Spanish word ‘macho’ to become a commonplace in English. Till that time, English had not taken cognizance of two factors about sex: the public nature or aspect of intercourse and its innate competitiveness. The people from the lower storeys of the CWD chawls did not feel this inadequacy. They understood that there are always dimensions of valour to the male principle. Men are brave and courageous even when they merely lie in bed. Which is why in Sanskrit, Marathi and the other local tongues, man’s sticky emanations and seed are called virya or ‘heroism’. Men are heroic inside the vagina, in wet dreams, quickies or in love.
That day Joachim Correa had got a page from Playboy. In those days, Playboy, too, had a strong sense of shame. It may have been a sex magazine but it knew what was decent and what was obscene. It was Hugh Hefner who established the law—which he himself would break later—that the region around the female organ is as unblemished as a mirror.
It is impossible to guess how many normal and healthy repressed Indians (there aren’t any other kind, or at least weren’t in British and early post-colonial India) went into shock when they discovered that their women had hair in places other than their heads.
Perhaps Eddie too would be traumatized later in life at the sight of the real thing. For the moment, he merely raised his right pinky in class, and the geography teacher, Mr Sequeira, who believed that physical needs took precedence over intellectual edification, granted him permission to evacuate his bladder. There was a titter among Eddie’s friends but Eddie kept a straight face and walked to the toilets. He latched the door and faced it since the sun was streaming in from the window at the back. He took out the picture from Playboy from his right pocket while unbuttoning his shorts and roughly pushing aside his briefs with his left hand. He unfolded the page with both hands. He was careful not to damage it, many others were to get their pleasure yet. Bloody hell, instead of naked female flesh, there were three columns of printed matter. That bastard Errol, he had played the same trick on him two weeks earlier and passed on a page from some trigonometry book. He would fix the bugger after school. Or was it Joachim’s idea this time? He unlatched the door and was about to leave when he saw the black and white picture on the other side.
The name in a delicate black typeface under the right hand corner of the picture read Anita Ekberg. A vertical fold ran over her left breast and a horizontal one bisected her navel. Since she had turned her head sharply to the left you could see only her right profile. She sat a little cramped, her right leg folded under her left. Her belly-button was a soft blur on her stark white complexion. She had drawn her shoulders and hands tightly behind her, and the tension between the breasts and her body was so finely distributed that there wasn’t a millimetre of slack. Her left nipple stood out like a faded doorbell. On the taut column of her neck stood the solitary flower of her ear. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail. There was not a shadow of self-consciousness on her body or face. But she refused to raise her head and look at Eddie.
Eddie had heard of Anita Ekberg because of her stupendous breasts. But he did not feel any sexual attraction for her now that she was seated before him. He stared at the picture for a little over five minutes. He had held the pictures of many nude women in his hands during the last few months, but the reaction this picture evoked in him was a little strange. Even though his body refused to respond to Ekberg, watching her gave him a quiet sense of happiness and pleasure. His eyes felt good. The undercurrent of guilt that laced his bouts of sexual turbulence was absent today. A stillness and peace descended upon him.
The dirty toilet bowl, the rusty chain of the flush tank, the walls with graffiti effaced by the censoring hand of the Father Prefect, the smell of ammonia that had accrued over decades … he forgot his environs. Like a star that was turning to ashes, the light from Anita Ekberg flowed soft and unfocused. She looked insubstantial. He guessed intuitively that the mystery of her beauty lay in that light. Not just in the picture, even if she had been sitting in front of him in person he would not have dared touch her. In the deepest recesses of her beauty there was the chill of an iceberg. She was made of flint or marble. The breath of life could never touch her. She was only a stone sculpture.
Eddie folded the picture and put Anita Ekberg in his pocket. He was about to button up his fly when he heard Joachim’s voice from the next toilet. ‘How’s it going Eddie? Isn’t Anita something else? I’ve broken all records today. Jerked off eight, I swear to you, eight times with Anita today. Soon as you are through, I’ll start again.’
Eddie felt a sudden rush of envy. What the hell, why am I wasting my life?
‘Joachim,’ he hollered loudly.
Joachim was terrified. ‘Eddie, talk softly, you bastard.’ But Eddie was not to be stopped and sang out, ‘Little boy, little boy, what are you holding in your hand? Is it a bat and ball, or your cock standing tall?’
Joachim threw all caution to the winds. ‘Yes sir, yes sir, my prick is for one and for all. It’s at your beck and call.’
Eddie looked up a few moments after the door opened. His eyes were locked into Father Agnello’s. Damn, he had forgotten to relatch the door.
‘What are you doing, Eddie?’
It maddened Eddie when Father Agnello refused to see what was in front of his eyes and pretended ignorance.
‘As if you didn’t do it.’
The blood drained out of Father Agnello’s face.
Eddie tore the picture in a rush and pulled the chain several times. A part of Anita Ekberg’s thigh stuck to the wall of the toilet bowl and would not be flushed down.
Eighteen
‘No.’ Parvati had her back to Ravan.
‘Please, Ma,’ he begged of her.
‘No.’
Since the business of Dil Deke Dekho, his mother’s vocabulary seemed to have shrunk to that one word. ‘Come on, Ma. Tomorrow’s Sankrant, the only day in the year everybody flies kites. Chandrakant’s got a dozen, the Gokhale boys have fifteen among the three of them. Even that boy from upstairs, Eddie, he’s got six. I’m
just asking for one kite and a bit of manja.’
‘No, you learn to pass your exams. Then maybe I’ll buy you a kite.’
At least she no longer expected him to, come within the first ten.
‘You don’t buy me books, how do you expect me to pass?’
‘Where’s my gold earring?’
He gave up. It was a long time since he had pawned his mother’s gold earring. Parvati had paid the shopkeeper and redeemed it but any time Ravan wanted something, she demanded that he return it. He didn’t hold it against her. He had stolen it and he would have to pay for the theft all his life. It would have been the easiest thing for him to snitch an eight-anna coin from his mother’s purse and buy the kite, but the thought did not occur to him.
He was not about to walk out of his home because his mother had refused him some money. But her continuous nos had begun to get him down. A walk and a bit of fresh air might help him forget the kite. He was on the main road adjoining the compound of the CWD chawls when he realized that wandering around in this area was not such a good idea. Every grocer, cycle shop, chemist and even the corner Irani restaurant was selling kites and manja so sharp it would cut not just kite strings but bystanders’ throats.
If he had his way, he would make manja at home as Syed Ali from the adjoining Rafiya Manzil did. Syed Ali was the king of kite-cutters. He prepared a special glue with exotic dyes, mixed microscopic glass in it, ran thousands of yards of thread through it and then hung it up to dry. A couple of days later, he wound the red, blue, green, yellow, violet threads around wooden phirkis. It was deadly stuff. If your manja barely brushed against Syed Ali’s you could say goodbye to your kite. It would float in the air with its remnant of thread, all the tension and purpose gone out of it till it sank to street level. Suddenly seven or eight kids would appear from nowhere, weave in and out of the traffic and chase the drunken kite. Three or four pairs of hands would rise to grab the coloured paper diamond and more often than not rip it apart.
Ravan and Eddie Page 28