‘I’ll do as I please.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘It’s my life.’
‘No longer. You’ve got two children.’
Mother and daughter were not shouting at each other. It was the intense hostility in his mother’s voice that had woken up Eddie.
‘They are doing okay.’
‘They would if their mother was all right.’
‘Are you suggesting that I’m not right in the head?’
‘You are a hard, bitter woman in whom all love has dried up.’
‘What do you expect of a widow who has to work twelve to fourteen hours a day to feed her children, not to mention you.’
‘You were a hard and bitter woman even when Victor was alive.’
‘That’s not true. I tried. I tried my best till the end.’
‘He tried, not you. He tried to win you over in every way he could. He bought you pearls. That gold necklace you’re wearing he bought you for giving him a daughter. He took you to the cinema, he tried taking you to dances but you pursed up your lips at everything.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You are lying to yourself, Violet. You never forgave him for marrying you.’
‘Mummy, if you go on any more about the past, I’m going to stop talking to you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about the past. I’m trying to get you to live in the present.’
‘By getting me married off again?’
‘You are still young. There’s no point denying your body. You need a husband.’
‘I don’t need anybody.’
‘Your children need a father. He’ll be firm but not inflexible like you. They can go to college instead of starting to work as soon as they finish school. He’ll earn money as the man of the house should. You can take it easy and not work like a dog.’
‘I don’t mind working for my children.’
‘All I’m asking you to do is to see Mr Furtado. If you don’t like him, forget him. There will be many others.’
And I thought you were on our side. How could you do this to me, Granna? It was shameful the way Granna was carrying on, trying to get his mother to marry Machado, Furtado, Figuereido or someone as bad. What did they need a man for, they had got along fine without one for the last eleven years or so and would do so for the next hundred.
When he was a child he had two names. He was called Eddie at home and Poor Eddie by almost everybody outside. (Poor Eddie but never Poor Pieta. Not that he minded, but it struck him as a little odd, after all they shared the same father.) He surmised that he was poor because he had no father, and he did pretty well for himself out of his fatherless state. People, especially women, got a wet, emotional look in their eyes and went into their kitchens and got him something, usually a sweet, to eat. His mother whacked him a couple when she caught him polishing off these morsels of pity, but that didn’t deter him from looking dolefully into the eyes of mothers whose children continued to have fathers.
Some time back, Mrs D’Costa gave him a shirt and a pair of shorts. He had a hunch that his mother would not approve of his latest acquisitions and hid them under the rest of his clothes in the bottom drawer. But nothing escaped her eyes and in no time at all she uncovered the culprit shirt and shorts. The ferocity and violence of her reaction left him breathless. She took it as a personal affront that Mrs D’Costa had presumed to gift him clothes. She threatened to throw him out of the house. He had not gone asking for the clothes but she called him a beggar and an emotional blackmailer and ordered him to take them back that very instant. He was about to leave with his head hanging in shame when, to his even greater horror, she decided to accompany him.
‘It was indeed very kind of you to give your ninth child’s hand-me-downs after they had seen service with your first eight,’ she told Mrs D’Costa. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to look for someone else to give them to or wait till you have your next one since we do not care to be the objects of your charity.’
Time had blunted people’s memories. And even if they remembered that he was ‘Poor’ Eddie, it didn’t often send them scurrying for a chocolate or marzipan.
He was not quite sure what role fathers played in families. His field sample was the thirty-nine other Catholic families who lived on his floor. Wherever there was a father, a living one, there seemed to be a hell of a lot of children and the mothers were pregnant round-the-clock. There was not a moment when a chorus of babies, half a million on his floor and a zillion lower down, was not raising alarms in all five continents of the earth. The Castellinos had seven, four girls and three boys, and Mrs Castellino perpetually walked with her hands clasped around her jutting belly. The Rozarios had three but they had been married only five years. The De Penhas had nine. He wasn’t sure but it looked as if Mrs De Penha was beginning to show signs of another pregnancy. The record-holder was Mrs Aranha. She had eleven and you wouldn’t believe it if you saw Mr Aranha, he was so old, wispy and forgetful. But he had got another baby in the works. The Correas had five, Pereiras six, Mirandas nine, Almeidas four, Rodriguezes seven. Eddie could have gone on in this fashion for another fifteen neighbours. At least twenty of them had grown-up children who would start making babies any moment now.
If he got a new father, the man would work and earn money and from what he gathered, his mother would stop working. He had no idea if there was much of a difference between what his mother earned and what the newcomer would make. It seemed doubtful if, apart from the switch in the role of breadwinner, there would be much more money coming in. The only other thing that seemed certain was that babies would start rolling in. Whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed. His mother, as a matter of fact, would have no alternative but to start working again. So much for his mother’s life becoming easier. As to babies, that was a subject that Eddie wasn’t even willing to contemplate. Did you see how the Da Cunha’s Cyril popped out his yellow-brown, semi-solid shit? Celebrated his third birthday last week and yet did it standing, you won’t believe it, he even did it while he walked. If you went to any of the homes on Eddie’s floor, they always reeked of unformed milky shit and at any time there were at least fifteen to twenty-five cloth nappies strung up on clothes-lines criss-crossing the room and giving off a sick, moist smell. The latest child of that endless mother, Mrs Aranha, was unquestionably the most beautiful baby in the world, so beautiful that the usually circumspect and cautious Eddie had impulsively taken her in his arms and what do you think had happened? She had bobbed up and down and gurgled away happily while throwing up all over Eddie’s shirt-front and shoulder.
And where were all those babies that his mother would inevitably have, going to sleep? Even more important, where was the Man going to sleep? In his mother’s bed? Perish the thought. And what was this intruder, this destroyer of the Coutinho family’s peace, to be called? Eddie could not, even in his thoughts, bring himself to call him by the name children use for the husbands of their mothers. And the brats? As it was, it took a superhuman effort to cope with that arch-nemesis of his life, his legitimate sister, Pieta. But these half-blood, half siblings of his, what was he to do with them? Was his mother going to ask him to rock them to sleep, clean their mess and wipe their butts, listen to them screaming all day long and all through the night, make baby-talk and entertain them while the lord and master of the house took his ease?
But perhaps the Man would not take his ease but raise Cain instead as a lot of the men in the CWD chawls did. There were many things that a displaced Goan male missed in Bombay: siestas, foreign goods (until Goa lost its colonial status and started, according to some, the process of assimilation, decline and fall into the Indian subcontinent), cashewnuts, mangoes, feni, dances, all-night revelry—but his sense of deprivation was most acute in the matter of booze. It was not as cheap as air, but the price of beer in Goa was the next-best thing to getting it free. And there was no sin in it, whereas in Bombay and most of India it was undoubtedly one of the cardinal sins. Most Goan men continued to drink but their imbibing became as joyless as that of the rest of India’s population. In Goa drinking was badinage and banter, good spirits, theatre, political and social commentary that encompassed everybody including the non-drinkers in its good cheer. In Bombay it was a lonely and solitary business, even when you sat with others. More like work than fun. It was an act of rebellion, perhaps the only one available. The men sat in speakeasies or occasionally brought the stuff home and drank it dutifully till they became boisterous, then morose and finally unconscious. Between maudlin and stuporous, it was touch and go. The men suddenly wanted to get even with the world and beat up all and sundry, including their wives.
Did the sought after stranger drink? And would he too, like Mr Sequeira, Mr Cardoz, Mr Pereira and so many others wallop Eddie and Pieta?
‘He had taken a month’s leave. He couldn’t wait for me to get out of the house. I was never at home anyway.’ It was difficult for Ravan to keep pace with Prakash’s narrative. They were sitting on a bench in the garden on Mazagaon Hill. ‘He moved my stuff and mattress into the common balcony. He wanted to hump her all the time. I could hear him struggling at nights trying to get it up. When things got unbearable he took it out on me but never her, never, though she was the cause of his failures and all our troubles. That night when he woke her up, she snapped at him: “Leave me alone, seven tractors won’t be able to raise it. I don’t know why I got married to an impotent old man.” I could hear him whimpering and weeping early in the morning. How I thanked God that she was lying dead to the world and couldn’t see this final defeat of my father. Throw her out, throw the bitch out, I kept saying to myself, and everything will be as it was.
‘She was serving me dinner two days before he died, I don’t know what got into his head, he kicked my thali. “Find some other place for yourself. Your mother has better things to do than wait on you hand and foot all day long. If I see you in this house after Sunday, I’ll kill you.” I was so flabbergasted, I didn’t know what to say. “Where do you want me to go?” I finally managed to ask him. “Go to the Himalayas, walk into the sea for all I care. Eighteen years old and still in the sixth grade.” “Seventeen, not eighteen,” I yelled at him. Before I knew what was happening, he had slapped me for the first time in my entire life. “Don’t you dare talk back to me. What difference does it make, you’ll be twenty-six and still in the sixth grade.” He said that in front of my stepmother. I felt bloody humiliated. She tried to intervene on my behalf, the bitch, but he wouldn’t listen. She brought me another thali and cleaned up the mess on the floor. I sat there stunned but not stunned enough not to wish my father dead. I have never wished for anything so hard. I wanted him dead then and there. I saw a BEST bus lurch to the sixth floor of our building. It speeded towards him. The driver saw him screaming but he didn’t veer away. My father ran for cover but the driver kept chasing him and knocked him down. Then he reversed and ran over him again and again and again. Nothing has given me as much pleasure as watching my father die.
‘I blamed you for my father’s death but knew all the while who was responsible for it. You had warned me about how delicate the whole black magic business is. No wonder everything went wrong. Do you know who the driver of the bus was? It was me. The black magic went wrong because I wished my father dead.’
Prakash always left Ravan exhausted—in the old days with the sheer physical effort Ravan had to put in, and in the last few months with this endless stream of words. It was not a stream, a stream is linear. Prakash’s words piled themselves one on top of the other till they formed a heap that became a mountain. The mountain kept rising till it broke through the sky while it pressed down on Ravan until he couldn’t breathe. He had lost Prakash several times. He couldn’t understand why Prakash’s father needed to mount his stepmother. What was supposed to rise? And why would he want to beat his own prick? But Ravan had learnt to turn off his curiosity and to hold his silence.
‘I want that bitch dead, Ravan. Let her pay for her sins. If she hadn’t come into our lives, my father and I wouldn’t have fallen out. And he wouldn’t have gone out of his mind wanting to sleep with her day and night. You better work your magic again. I’ll pay you as much as you want once she’s dead because all my father’s money will come to me.
‘Do it quick but let her suffer.’
Prakash’s father’s death, especially his blaming Ravan for it in public, had one peculiar effect. Ravan wasn’t sure whether he was happy about it or distressed. The boys from his school stopped coming over with death wishes. They liked the idea of a hit man but only so long as he didn’t kill anyone. Ravan had actually killed a classmate’s, albeit an ex-tyrant’s, father when he was supposed to have killed the stepmother. The boys treated Ravan with respect but were now clearly afraid of him and kept away. Ravan was relieved by this new development at first but not for long. He was surprised at how happy he felt when Prakash turned up at school after months and spoke to him.
‘Can you undo something you’ve started, Ravan, something that is perhaps on the verge of completion?’ Prakash’s voice was trembling.
Ravan had got that faraway look in his eyes. He reverted to the stony silence of the sphinx. What did the bugger want now? Prakash was nothing but trouble, always one thing after another.
‘Help me, Ravan, please help me. I’ve made a grievous error. My stepmother is a saint. Please don’t kill her. I’ll do anything you say, anything. Please, Ravan, please.’
Ravan looked away. He had no idea of how to respond to the metamorphosis of Satan to saint.
‘Hell, what’s the point of lying to you? You know everything anyway. Hemlata is no longer my stepmother. She and I are, oh what the hell, lovers. She’s the most fantastic person I’ve ever met. I’m going to take up a job and then we’re going to get married. Her parents want her to go back, her mother even came and stayed with us a month, but now there’s no going back. It’s not too late, is it, Ravan? Have you set things in motion that no one can take back?’
Ravan stuck to his silence.
‘You have? Oh God what have I done? Please, Ravan, anything, absolutely anything.’
‘I don’t know. Almost impossible.’ Again that other voice, the one that spoke through his mouth but had nothing to do with him.
‘Try. Please try.’
‘Can’t say whether it will work. Cost you a lot of money.’
‘Don’t worry about money, that’s the least of our problems. Just do it, that’s all.’
The Prakash episode is good for one last platitude. Money promised is not money in hand.
Reputations, even unfounded ones, are prone to sudden deaths. It was doubtful if within a year or two, any of Ravan’s classmates would remember his black-magical powers. Prakash never returned. Ravan heard that the minister under whom Prakash’s father had worked had given Prakash a job and that his ex-stepmother, Hemlata, was pregnant.
