Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  The much scratched and colourless half-litre bottle glinted dully over Eddie’s head. Would she drop it or smash his head in with it. He grabbed the bottle and got up. It took him a while to locate the rupee coin his mother had left on the dining-table. He was at the staircase. Mother of God, he had forgotten to put on his shirt. He went back, fought his way into an old shirt and slammed the door behind him. There was always a shortage of milk at the Aarey Dairy milk booth. If he didn’t hurry, there would be none left and even Granna would stop talking to him. He was leaping, flying down the stairs, colliding into Ravan in his tae kwon do uniform, each making space for the other and yet continuing to race down fast fast fast. They stopped. The bottle fell from Eddie’s hand and he screamed and screamed and clung to Ravan. And Ravan swayed but didn’t let go of Eddie.

  They butted and burrowed blindly into each other; buried their heads into the cavities they had scooped out from one another’s breasts. They had closed their eyes. They could not and would not look without. The world was shut out once and forever. They were sufficient unto one another. Great and uncontrollable tremors shot through and ravaged them, and tried to break them asunder. But they had become the double helix that entwines the very essence of our lives. The bonding of fear is greater than the throb and embrace of sex, illicit passion or love. They were a circle, a completeness that would not brook intrusion or interruption. Only mortal enemies could trust each other so wholly, without suspicion and without thought of consequence. They had witnessed the betrayal of life in the early morning light and earned their wings as adults. Perhaps this is what it means to be born again or twice-born. You are now initiated and may consciously and deliberately, of your own free-will, break a promise to yourself or others, stab someone in the back, let others down, inflict pain or suffering, be the initiator and perpetrator of hurt and guilt.

  Somebody was hanging from an old iron hook in one of the beams of the second-floor ceiling. The sun was rising behind her. The youngest son of the Deshmukhs, one-year-old Susheel, was leaning on the fallen stool, holding on to her feet and trying to stand up. He couldn’t manage it and flopped down. The body rocked back and forth gently. This time the sari did not hide the black pouch with the crude white cross-stitching on it.

  There were people gathering on the stairs now. Eddie’s mother looked in disbelief at her son hugging Ravan.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Ravan told her. ‘I swear I didn’t.’ But there wasn’t much conviction in his voice. It was a long time before Violet moved. She bent down and collected the broken pieces of glass and put them in a corner. She picked up Susheel Deshmukh who had begun to cry and returned him to his mother. Then she took Eddie firmly by the hand and whisked him away. She was not about to let her son get close to the murderer of her husband.

  Epilogue

  The matriculation exam in those days was after the eleventh grade. Like a lot of other students from municipal and not-so-fancy parochial schools, Ravan and Eddie never went past the tenth grade. There were scenes, bitter fights, Shankar-rao turned his back upon the proceedings but Violet broke her vow of stubborn ‘no comment’. The boys were threatened with eviction, told repeatedly not to follow in the infamous footsteps of ‘the other boy’ and made to reappear for the tenth-grade exams. But the education of Ravan and Eddie, at least the formal academic variety, was over. Whatever the hopes and ambitions of their mothers, the two boys had minds of their own and the cussedness to disregard their mothers’ wishes. They were going to be bandleaders. Eddie was going to follow in the footsteps of Bill Haley, Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley. Raju, the hero from Dil Deke Dekho, was Ravan’s role-model. He would sing and play the drums and blow the horn just as his hero had done. He kept an open mind. A girlfriend and a job as musician on the hotel circuit were a must. But who knew, he might even join the movies and become a hero.

  What was the world out there for if not to conquer? Coming home a little late one evening, Ravan was taken aback to see Eddie working out with a staff. It was a beautiful sight and Ravan lingered despite himself. For some reason, he was sure that Eddie was performing for his sake. What Eddie held in his hands was not a wooden staff or a bamboo pole. It was greased lightning, it was a liquid rod, a swirling and unravelling instrument of infinite danger and grace. The staff was in front of him, over his head, behind him, weaving in and out and around him. It seemed unconnected to his body and his hand. It had taken on a life of its own. He advanced, he fought the armies of twilight, he turned somersaults in the air, he retreated and sprang back.

  It was too much for Ravan. His hands and arms uncoiled. He went rigid. His body became a series of planes and angles in motion. It was as if he was gathering momentum. He made tentative probes, drew back. He circled his quarry trying to intuit a way to enter the shifting magnetic field that Eddie kept generating around himself. Then with a flying leap he was in. They were in perfect harmony, intersecting each other’s orbits in a Pythagorean paradise. It was a duet. Two volatile martial arts in a state of continuous equilibrium. Two warriors and two life-long enemies locked in the ritual of battle.

  Acknowledgements

  In 1978, a well-known director of serious Hindi films approached me to write a screenplay for him. He and I met a few times to discuss a detailed treatment of the screenplay but the as yet untitled project did not persuade him to think of me as the great new hope of Indian cinema. I think he saw clearly that our minds worked differently, that after a point I would always rat on my earnestness with something farcical, bawdy or self-deprecatory.

  The film director may have dropped my two heroes and their story but I owe Ravan & Eddie to him. I fell for these two guys who did not know how to give up on life. Within a year I had not just finished a longish screenplay in English on them (four and a half hours: any takers?) but had written close to seventy pages of a novel in Marathi on them.

  Other more important things intervened: the problems of making a living and other minor preoccupations.

  In 1991 I took a few months off and got back to Ravan & Eddie, this time in English.

  I had not realized what a pleasure it would be to thank those who have helped get this book together. I wish to thank Nancy Fernandes who has typed and re-typed the repeatedly corrected versions of Ravan & Eddie; Rani Day who helped Nancy decipher my illegible, tiny scrawl; Anita D’Souza who took time off from work to key in more corrections; Neal Robbins whose generosity I would not know how to pay back and who sat late into the night to type in a missing chapter and reformat the book; Susan Daruwala Robbins who didn’t just read the manuscript a couple of times but was kind enough to opine on whole new chunks at very short notice; Tulsi Vatsal who read through the manuscript and helped with critical corrections with a saint’s patience while I made myself as unpleasant as possible and treated her helpful suggestions as if they were bent on destroying the fabric of the book; Daljeet Mirchandani, whose greatest asset is an open mind that never stops growing, with whom I’ve shared good and thin times, who would never dream of reading a novel, but has been a friend of Ravan and Eddie without knowing them; a special thank you to David Davidar who took time off from being the book’s publisher to edit it.

  KIRAN NAGARKAR is one of the most significant writers of post-colonial India. His first novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis translated into English as Seven Sixes are Forty-Three, was quickly recognized as one of the most significant novels ever written in Marathi. His subsequent novels include Ravan and Eddie and Cuckold, which won the Indian Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi) Award for best novel and which Gore Vidal called “a fascinating book, a sort of fantastic marriage between the Thomas Mann of Royal Highness and the Lady Murasaki.” His most recent works are God’s Little Soldier and The Extras, a sequel to Ravan and Eddie. His books have been translated into many languages. Apart from his work as a novelist, Nagarkar has written plays and screenplays, and is a literary and social critic. He has been awarded many prestigious international fellowships, the most recent of which was a F
ulbright appointment at Ithaca College, New York. He currently lives in Mumbai.