A Meditation on Neighbours
Depending on your point of view, there are some elementary or critical differences between the Catholics and Hindus in the CWD chawls. It would be unwise, however, to generalize and a little excessive to say that these differences separated all Catholics from Hindus in India.
Just a few examples will suffice to help you understand how irreconcilable the differences between the two communities in the CWD chawls were. Hindus bathe in the morning, Goan Catholics in the evening. Do not expose your vast ignorance in such delicate matters and scoff and say that this is an absurd or picayune non-issue. It is conceivable that the whites will go back to their countries of origin and leave the Americas to Amerindians and the IRA only marry the daughters of British policemen and the Croats and the Serbs share wives but it is unthinkable that Roman Catholic Goans and Hindus from the CWD chawls will sit together and hammer out a compromise which says, for instance, that all Hindus and Catholics will henceforth shower or rather have bucket baths in the afternoon or at midnight.
Hindus, at least those who had access to a little water, were hyperconscious about personal cleanliness. They bathed religiously or at least let the water wet them every day and even forced their poor gods to shower whether they were installed at home or in temples. Christians, on the other hand, didn’t think that salvation and bathing were causally related.
Hindus ate betel nut and chewed paan and tobacco and spat with elan and abandon in the corners of staircases, on the road and, if you didn’t watch out, streaked you an earthen red from double-decker bus windows. Hindus didn’t think that spitting was peeing through the mouth. Catholics did. They didn’t eat paan, and could not be faulted for indecent public acts.
Catholics ate beef and pork. Even non-vegetarian Hindus hardly ever did. Hindus went to free municipal schools, Catholics to schools run by priests and nuns. Hardly any of the Hindu boys went to college. And when they did, they got into some el cheapo place. Catholics went straight to heaven or rather its equivalent on earth, St Xavier’s College, even if they got barely 45 or 50 per cent marks in the higher secondary exams.
Hindu women wore saris, Catholic women dresses except on special occasions, when they switched to saris. At home Hindu men moved about ‘shamelessly’ in striped underpants or pyjamas. It was normal for Hindu men to roll up their vests almost to the armpits like Ravan’s father and expose their flat, nascent or pot bellies when relaxing at home. Since their banishment from Paradise, Catholic men were shy of exhibiting their midriffs. And if they did, they didn’t do things halfway, they didn’t wear anything on top.
It was of course religion that was the source of all the differences between the two communities. Hindus went to temples as and when they felt like it. Catholics, one and all, went to mass on Sundays. For Ravan, it was Sundays that separated Hindus from Catholics. Run-of-the-mill, routine weekdays, when everybody went to work or school, were shared by both communities in equal measure. But, on Sundays, God turned His back on the Hindus. Ravan had not expected such discrimination, out and out partiality, and injustice from God.
What did the Hindu men do on that day of rest? They got up late, took their morning tea and breakfast in an easy chair in the corridor, read the papers while scratching or aimlessly fiddling with their dongs. Around 9.30 or 10 a.m., unshaven and unbathed, they got into loose striped pyjamas, made of the same cloth as their underpants, put on a shirt over them and went to the bazaar with a tote-bag to buy mutton and fish. (The word for mutton and fish among many of the Hindus was, tellingly enough, bazaar. While women did all the other household shopping, bazaar was macho and the prerogative of men.) The Sunday trip for ‘bazaar’ was the one domestic chore the man of the house performed. Often he took the youngest boy with him, perhaps as an initiation and training for later life. The arguments and occasional fights with the fisherwomen were always more acrimonious than those with the butchers who were men. Lunch at 2.30 p.m. after a late bath. Then a long siesta. Eventless evenings since there was no TV in those days, unless your father decided to take the family to the garden or the beach at Chowpatty. That’s it, a lazy, lacklustre end to the week.
On the fifth floor, it was a different story. It was as if the whole of the Catholic community was going to a wedding between 6 and 11 a.m. If you belonged to the older generation, a freshly cleaned and ironed shirt, woollen trousers and shining shoes were not enough. A tie and a jacket were de rigueur. Some of the people from below might call it a fashion parade but they were just envious. Would you go to see your boss in shabby clothes? God was Chairman and MD of the world. You obviously took the trouble to dress up for the occasion. Nylon and polyester had not invaded the country yet, so women wore cotton or silk dresses, with puffed, raglan or full-length sleeves copied from foreign magazines. They covered their heads in church but only after they had permed, curled or back-combed their hair. Ravan had a vague recollection that somebody in his chawl had said that only women of loose character wore lipstick and other make-up. He wished that all women were loose and wore nail-polish, mascara, eyeshadow, rouge and that fantastic microscopic stuff that transformed their eyelids into starry, twinkling skies. If you had any doubt that they belonged to a superior race, all you had to do was look at their arms and legs. They were hairless and shiny and smooth like Kwality’s coffee ice-cream. Ravan could lick them all day long. But that was not all. On rare occasions, some Catholic women sheathed their legs in sheer silk. However, if Ravan had been asked to define the essential difference between Hindu and Catholic women, he would have told you without a moment’s hesitation that Hindu women were flat-footed, or rather, wore the most boring, flat sandals whereas the feet of the women above almost never touched the ground. It was a mystery how they kept their balance on four- or five-inch heels. He wanted to lie down and ask those women to walk all over him and stab his heart with their stilettoes.
Inconceivable for a Hindu to go to a temple without bathing and you might hear snide comments about the cleanliness of Catholics and why the women from the top storeys had to wear Tata’s Eau de Cologne or some foreign perfume that kept Ravan awake at nights and lingered in his memory for years. Their children were just as handsomely turned out, especially the girls. Eddie’s sister Pieta’s blue chiffon dress had so many pleats that when she pirouetted, and she always made it a point to do so, the whole skirt filled out and rose up to reveal coordinated blue bloomers.
Add fine, upright and doting grandparents, multiply them a few hundred times, and you’ll begin to get a faint idea of the impact the Catholic families had on those below as they walked down the stairs and out of the chawls, greeted each other and proceeded as one single, quiet and dignified community to Saint Sebastian’s Church.
If the folks from the lower storeys felt left out or a trifle envious, they made it a point to never mention it. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have religious occasions when the whole community got together and celebrated. Gangadhar Tilak, the shrewd and implacable freedom fighter from Maharashtra, had transformed the Ganapati festival into a public and political event since pre-Independence times, with the image of the elephant-headed god installed in every lane and alley. But even at such times, there was never any discipline informing their actions. Perhaps it is too late to impose it now.
Fortunately it did not occur to members of either community to wonder whether their faith, culture and mores were superior. They took it for granted. It was a happy coincidence that both sides shared the conviction that they were the chosen people. It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that barring exceptions, they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables, who fell beyond the pale of the caste system had ample reason to convert to Catholicism. The caste-Hindus, as a matter of fact, left them no choice. As sub-humans they were little better than slaves.
In the eyes of Jesus Christ and his energetic missionaries, the new converts were equal to any man or woman, at least to any other Indian. The new religion not only gave them self-respect and dignity but educated them and offered them a chance to work at any profession they fancied. Bread, or the Western concept of bread, was both the motive and symbol for conversion. If you broke bread with a Christian or drank from a well where a devious Christian missionary was bruited to have thrown a slice of bread, you were tainted for life and excommunicated from Hinduism.
The recent converts had no memory of their past unless they came from the higher castes. Jesus Christ and the new faith notwithstanding, the former Brahmins did not forget, nor would they allow anyone else to, that they were the highest of the high. They ensured the purity of their stock and maintained their exclusive status by marrying other Brahmin-Catholics and occasionally the expatriate grandees of Portugal.
Along with religion, the other great divider in the CWD chawls was language. Often, the one got confused with the other. Hindus spoke Marathi, Catholics, English. Konkani was still very much the lingua franca in the Goan home but outside the house, the younger people communicated almost entirely in English.
English was the thorn in the side of the Hindus. Its absence was their cross, their humiliation and the source of their life-long inferiority and inadequacy. It was a severely debilitating, if not fatal, lack that was not acknowledged, spoken of or articulated. It was the great leveller. It gave caste-Hindus a taste of their own medicine. It made them feel like untouchables. It also turned the tables. The former outcastes could now look down upon their Hindu neighbours.
Perhaps Dr Ambedkar was wrong to convert millions of his untouchable brethren to Buddhism. He should have converted them to English. That would really have stood the caste-Hindu world on its head. Roman Catholic missionaries were seized of the power of English long before the rest of the population caught on. Outside Goa, they abandoned Portuguese and took the English tongue almost as seriously as their faith. They went on a spree and opened English-medium schools and colleges across the country.
‘Chhya men, he’s a dutty bugger. Tree times I told him don’t climb the tree to look at my sas. Leave my sas alone, men. I asked him ‘gain and again but he din listen, so I gave him a hit, straight on the face like. De bugger began to cry like a baby, men. He begged me like but I din listen. I told him, you look at my sas, and I’ll break your bones and balls.’ Goan English is easy to mimic and an easy target for well-educated and affluent Bombayites. It is burlesqued in plays, reviews and films. Such niceties and caricature are lost on the Hindus from the CWD chawls. Ask any one of them, in an unguarded moment and he’ll tell you that he would give his right hand, make it his left, to be able to speak like the people from the top floor. Because there are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who have English and those who don’t. Those who have English are the haves, and those who don’t, are the have-nots.
How could you possibly grasp the meaning and value of English if you spoke it before you were toilet-trained or had a place reserved for you in an English-medium school? English is a mantra, a maha-mantra. It is an ‘open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens up new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another.
English makes you tall. If you know English, you can wear a ‘suit-boot’, do an electrician’s course or take a diploma, in radio and refrigeration technology. You can become a chef at the Taj Mahal Hotel or a steno at Hindustan Lever, even a purser with Air India or Pan Am. If you know English and someone steps on your foot, you can say to him, ‘Bastard, can’t you see?’ You can talk like a foreigner. Sit down in a local train and hold a best-seller like Peyton Place in front of your eyes and even read it. If you know English, you can ask a girl for a dance. You can lean Eileen Alva against the locked door of the terrace and press against her, squeeze her boobs and kiss her on the mouth, put your tongue inside it while slipping your hand under her dress.
Language is leverage. Not a very original or revolutionary perception really. Our ancestors had grasped the principle two or three thousand years ago. The word for culture and tradition was sanskriti. Those who spoke Sanskrit had sanskriti. What about the rest of the folks? Well, what about them, they spoke Pali or some such dialect and ate crow. Did they have any choice in the matter?
There is only one difference between then and now. Sanskrit was the language of the gods, thirty-three million gods and of Parameshwar or Everlasting God (our great great grandfathers were certainly aware of the difference between small-time, easy-come, easy-go gods and the Big One) and of Brahmins. As go-betweens, middle-men, spiritual hustlers and keepers of our deities, Brahmins had exclusive and total rights to God. Since they coined the words and phrases, they called themselves Brahmin or the people who know Brahman or God. Dynaneshwar, the boy saint who finished his life’s work by age twenty-one and bid goodbye to the world, may have caused a few hiccups when he translated the Bhagawad Gita and wrote a commentary on it in the 13th century in a local and young language called Marathi, but that didn’t lessen our grudging respect and admiration for the learning, erudition and culture of the Brahmins. But Goan Catholics were not even Brahmins. They had not learnt the Puranas by heart nor discoursed on the Upanishads, nor had they preserved and perpetuated our culture. And yet without in any way earning it but doing what they so aptly call ‘bugger all’ they had English on their tongue. Just like that.
The fact is there is no justice on earth.
There is one other difference between the Hindus and the Catholics. Or at least there was at that time. Hindu boys and girls and their parents saw Hindi movies. Catholics wouldn’t dream of it. They went to English films. It was the kind of difference that would take Ravan and Eddie further apart than they already were.
At the end of the fifties, Ravan’s life took on a new colour and complexion. It changed the landscape of his mind and the way he viewed the world more deeply and pervasively than any revolution or traumatic experience could have.
Vivekanand met Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Mephistopheles found Faust, the Buddha sat under a pipal tree and gained enlightenment, the Virgin Mary woke from a deep sleep with an immaculate conception, Ravan saw Dil Deke Dekho.
It was Subhash Vachnani’s birthday and he was taking the entire 5.30 a.m. tae kwon do class to a movie at Broadway cinema. He would have liked Mr Billimoria to come along but Mr Billimoria was more snooty than the Catholics and would never deign to see a Hindi film. And anyway he had classes in the evening.
Ravan was no friend of Subhash’s but certain privileges accrued to all members of the tae kwon do fraternity and Subhash’s mother was not one to stint on a few balcony tickets and chocolate ice-creams and packets of popcorn because some of the boys did not belong to their social milieu or were not in Subhash’s inner circle of friends.
Dil Deke Dekho was not Ravan’s first film. At the yearly Ganapati festival, they always showed at least one film as part of the celebrations. During municipal elections, some of the candidates hired a projector and showed some ancient film on the main road after 9 p.m. The film would keep breaking off, the speakers would crackle and flutter with every treble note and sometimes the projector would pack up halfway but it was unthinkable for anyone from Mazagaon not to be there for a free show. Ravan had seen Mela with the young Dilip Kumar as the hero. He had fallen asleep during the second reel though he was deeply impressed by the villain Jeevan who spouted letters from the English alphabet as if they were full-fledged words. The cobras and other snakes in the mythological Naag Panchami had kept him awake through the movie and through the next ten nights for fear that one of them would turn up in his bed. There were a few others, but he had forgotten them.
Then came Dil Deke Dekho. No English translation will do justice to the alliteration, pacing or ellipsis of the Hindi. ‘Give your heart away’ is the closest one can get to the meaning.
Most Hindi commercial films in those days were love stories but they were sad and woebegone. And even if they weren’t tragic, their heroes and heroines were mature adults. Dil Deke Dekho was revolutionary. It was about youngsters, teenagers.
A Not So Short and Utterly Unnecessary History of Romantic Comedies in Hindi Films in the 1950s and 60s
Dil Deke Dekho started a trend that is revived every few years in Indian cinema. It was the brainchild of Subodh Mukherjee, an old pro from the world of Hindi cinema who had decided to make films under his own banner called Filmalaya. Filmalaya was meant to be a film institute, not just a production company.
Filmalaya would train young people to be actors, actresses, directors, music directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers and technicians in its own school and then give them breaks in its own films.
Dil Deke Dekho was everything Mukherjee had promised. Barring its hero and director, it featured unknowns in their late teens or early twenties.
Mukherjee was taking an enormous gamble handing the job of music director, and that too of an out and out musical, to a newcomer and he compounded the risk by giving it to a girl who was very likely the first woman music director in Hindi films.
Director Nasir Hussein and hero Shammi Kapoor were the only veterans in the film.
Let’s pause a minute here and survey the contribution of Hussein and Kapoor to Hindi cinema. Commercial Hindi cinema was rarely expected to make sense, and to its credit it never pretended to, either. Hussein made the same film over and over again. He mostly kept clear of social relevance, neo-realism and family dramas. His films were romantic comedies. He had a light touch and he kept the intermittent plot moving with music, romance and masala. The masala could be anything: suspense, smugglers, comedy, mystery, children and parents separated by the machinations of villains.
For the longest time, the music and stars in Hussein’s films played a major role in giving him hit after hit. They said he had a special feel for music. Maybe he was just lucky in the music directors he chose. But the magic was bound to pall at some time and it did. Not because the next generation of film-makers had anything new to say or said it differently. No, they just imitated him better than he could.
The one thing nobody could do was imitate his star, Shammi Kapoor. He was one of a kind, a phenomenon. He came from a family of thespians.
Shammi Kapoor was the second of three sons. His older brother, Raj Kapoor, joined his father’s theatre company, moved to films and became a matinee idol. Within a short time he established his own film production company. He was Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra and Vittorio de Sica all rolled into one.
As a director, he had a superlative instinct for the box office. Along with his critics and audiences, he confused worthy themes and profound shallowness with social commitment and artistic cinema. He played the same character, Raju, in almost all his films. He was the eternal hobo or vagabond with a heart suppurating with emotion; a naïf and waif among the corrupt and the rapacious who brought about a change of heart even among hardened criminals and walked away with the heroine. He was the clown and the joker who made the whole world laugh while concealing his own sorrow.
Raj Kapoor rolled up the cuffs of his trousers and appropriated the mantle of Charlie Chaplin in India. It was a smart move. It effectively shut up his critics. Questioning him meant questioning the great Chaplin. His humour, if you could call it that, was elementary and jejune. Devoid of Chaplin’s powers of sharp observation, irony, and visual and verbal wit, he improved upon his shortcomings: the soft sentiment and the easy tear.
Shammi Kapoor grew up in the shadow of his flamboyantly successful older brother and joined the world of films when he was barely twenty. He was a tall, athletic man with a swashbuckling Errol Flynn moustache. Try as he might, his star wouldn’t rise and flop followed flop.
One day he took off his moustache and his career took off. Is there a nexus between the two? Who is to say, we are talking about Hindi commercial movies here. Overnight with Tumsa Nahin Dekha, Shammi became a cult figure. Nasir Hussein and he were made for each other. Shammi rarely ventured into serious or social films. He didn’t have the sensitive or romantic good looks of his brother Raj Kapoor. He had an unfinished face as if someone had lost interest while working on its lines, bones and structure and had never got back to it. An unlikely face for romantic comedies, so Shammi Kapoor changed the nature and content of the form itself. The romantic heroes of Hindi films before him were soft, shy, tentative or intense. They were gentle and appealed to genteel, middle-class audiences, especially women. Shammi Kapoor was not just the exact opposite, he was unthinkable and inconceivable till he happened.
One of his later films was called Junglee. That’s what he was, wild and uncouth. He was not a conscious actor but he had instinctively carved out his own niche. The older generation of cinema viewers shunned him and the critics were superior and found his antics tasteless and risible. But his market was the young people, the working classes and the lower stalls. They went berserk when he appeared on the screen. Short of throwing coins and notes at him, a practice which was reserved only for nautch girl sequences, they showed their appreciation in every other way. They hollered, whistled and interspersed catcalls with raw, bawdy comments.
Cinema and not religion had become the opium of the masses after the country won independence and Shammi Kapoor gave the people of the smaller cities and towns a high that no other celluloid hero could.
Shammi seemed to suggest that it was all right to work in a restaurant or a band and not belong to the hoity toity classes. You could still make it and get the girl. What he had was a total lack of self-consciousness. He was uninhibited and utterly indifferent to making an ass of himself. He didn’t give a centipede’s shit about how absurd you thought he was. Quite the contrary. He rejoiced in the knowledge and cocked a snook at you and went on to perform even more ridiculous capers.
His clarion call was an apt and symbolic one though chosen without any conscious sense of irony. It was a ‘yaa-hooo’. It echoed in theatre halls and wherever he went. He could never sit still. He was perpetual motion and distortion. He had a putty face and his ears, nose, throat, eyes and lips seemed to be interchangeable. He was slim, boneless and made of polyurethane foam. He turned and twisted upon himself, tied himself in knots and undid them all in the same breath. He could not say a simple yes or no, much less a full sentence without going into a series of contortions, raising and wrinkling his brows, pulling a face, dropping a shoulder, running his hand over his slicked-back hair.
Shammi never needed a pretext to be outlandish but he really came into his own in song sequences and his films were strewn with them. He threw a tantrum in mid-air, he landed on his butt and thrashed his legs. He flung his head back, he yelled ‘yaa-hooo’, he rolled in the snow, he went stiff as a flamenco dancer, he sank to his knees, he dislocated and fractured his body in a dozen places. He walked mincingly, dropped in a dead faint, his narrow mouth went all over his face—all in the course of one song.
Indian critics never tire of saying that Raj Kapoor was the ultimate showman. His brother Shammi may be underrated but he was no side-show either.
When the lights went out, Ravan saw a houri, an apsara, a celestial creature in black and white of incredible beauty and vivacity. He was hard put to understand how such a rarefied and refined aesthetic experience could induce such painful tightness and tension in his groin. He would have been horrified if anyone had opined that her thick lips gave the impression that they were just a trace out of synch with the words she spoke or that the slacks she wore only helped to emphasize the magnificence of her hips. How could anybody be so gross about a creature so ethereal? His dilemma was altogether different: would Neeta, the heroine of the movie who was so mischievous, carefree and adorable, fall in love with the hero or would the villain get her? But if Neeta rocked the earth under Ravan’s feet, the hero Raju swept him off his feet at gale winds of 700 m.p.h. Raju was a musician, a singer who played the drums. He had hands that could caress the drums, turn them into flurries of rain or avalanches of intricate rhythms that rolled in, wave upon wave and dispersed as a fine mist of sound.
He was a rascal, a real badmash who could do no wrong and he had a hundred tricks up his sleeve. He was a one-man fancy dress competition and changed personalities, accents and his dress so fast that nobody, not even Neeta, realized he was the same person. He was a magician in a goatee one minute, a fat old mullah with a beard that reached to his belly and a tummy that extended a yard ahead of him, the next. He was so funny and such fun and so handsome, Ravan decided to adopt him as an older brother.
For a moment there, things looked extremely dicey and Ravan had some anxious moments. It was like this: Raju had been separated from his mother since childhood. Now the villain had convinced the mother that he was her long-lost son, Raju. It was so complicated even Ravan couldn’t always get it straight. And then by chance, imagine, what fantastic luck, the real mother and the real son were standing face to face but oh God they didn’t know it and Ravan bit his fingernails almost to the knuckles and nearly shouted, Raju, Raju that’s your mother, the real, actual, long-lost mother you’ve been pining for.
The audience including his classmates went bananas when there was a song. They knew every word and they sang every word while keeping perfect time by clapping their hands. Ravan sat back in his chair in a state of rigor mortis. They had forgotten to close his eyes and mouth before he died. He had the sensation that he was breathing the songs, swallowing mouthfuls of them. He felt them going down his throat. Both the sound and visual flow entered directly into his bloodstream and lit him up. His body had become transparent, the veins and arteries in it glowing brightly like the filament in an electric bulb. He dared not move for fear that the spell would break. There was little doubt in his mind that he was in heaven. His five senses had got together and created a sixth one that had to be divine. His whole body, every pore in it and every hair, was standing on end playing the songs. He became weightless. He lost all awareness of his body. He was no longer a medium for iridescence. He was light and joy and they were the same thing.
The next day Ravan asked his mother for two rupees to see Dil Deke Dekho.
His mother could not contain her astonishment. ‘But you saw the filim yesterday.’
‘I need to see it again. It’s important.’
‘No way. Who’s going to do your homework?’
‘If not today, how about Sunday? I’ll finish all my school work on Saturday.’ He used patience and restraint with this woman who seemed incapable of understanding the momentous nature of his request.
‘Is your father going to shell out the money so you can see the same filim again and again?’
‘How about on the first when all the customers have paid you?’ Ravan endeavoured to accommodate his mother and keep open the pathways for a mutually acceptable solution.
‘Mention that filim once more and I’m going to whack you. Why don’t you open your books instead and study? Came forty-third in the class last time and you still want to see a filim, not any filim but the same one you saw yesterday. If you are that keen on going to the cinema, come among the first ten in your next exam. I’ll take you to see the filim myself, that’s a promise.’
Ravan smiled. He felt that the hopes and expectations of human beings should be rooted, however tenuously, in reality. Stand among the first ten in class? Might as well expect him to climb Mount Everest or be Tarzan. After that day he did not broach the matter of DDD again. First he sold his books, one after another. Next, he took money from Parvati without asking or telling her. When that was used up, he considered taking money from his father’s stash at the bottom of the papad tin but decided against it. His normally inert father could fly off the handle without warning. It was best to steer clear of him. Ravan sold one of his mother’s gold earrings. If the need had arisen, he would have undone the clasp of the mangalsutra from around her neck while she slept, and pawned it. Luckily, Dil Deke Dekho was taken off after celebrating a silver jubilee and Parvatibai’s mangalsutra stayed around her neck.
In all, Ravan saw Dil Deke Dekho seventeen times. And there was nothing Parvati could do to stop her son who had turned into a full-fledged thief overnight. She whipped him across his back, caned him and hit him with her shoes; she scratched him with her nails. She singed his calf with burning coal, almost cracked his kneecap with a rolling pin. Ravan passed out. Parvati kept him without food and water for two days. The beatings exhausted her. She felt faint and giddy. She told him regularly that he was going to be the cause of her death.
‘If you stop pounding me, you won’t die.’ Ravan ventured to tell her this a couple of times, but his counsel had unfortunate consequences.
‘Here my blood is rising and you’ve got the gall to give me advice?’ Even a truncated ailment sounded so much more dire and desperate in English. With renewed zeal she returned to her task. She fell upon him with the strength of eleven elephants. Six to box and bash him and invent new modes of pulverizing him. Three to call upon her parents, her recumbent husband, Sai Baba and any other baba and guru she could recall, upon God in all his incarnations and to scream murder until she went black and blue in the face and lost her voice. The last two to sigh and moan in a ghastly manner. Parvatibai was a tigress, no, she was the goddess who rode the tigress in her most malevolent avatar. From time to time she would call out the name of her son whom she had so recently mangled and almost mutilated. ‘Ravanya, ayyayyayyayya, just see what you’ve done to me. There’s not a bone left in my body that’s not broken and bruised. Are you listening, you wretch? Don’t you have any feelings for your poor mother?’ Again that sky-rending ayyayyayyayya. ‘Don’t just lie there, press my body.’ Shameless Ravan. He complied. He massaged, kneaded and soothed his mother’s hurting and aching body.
At the best of times, there’s nothing private in a chawl. Within a matter of weeks, Parvatibai had become the most public figure in Mazagaon. She felt trapped between her unrepentant son and her own daily atrocities. She dreaded the thought of going out and showing her face to the world. She was willing to put in as much effort as necessary to discipline Ravan and bring him back to the straight and narrow. But Ravan’s mute forbearance wore her down. All her life she had assumed that persistent endeavour was always followed by success. She now realized she was wrong.
Moments after Ravan had undergone third-degree corporal punishment, he would break into song. He had always been more than a mere bathroom singer but DDD turned him into a crooner with professional ambitions. He practised songs from DDD all day and part of the night till Shankar-rao sat up in bed and in a dangerously low voice asked Ravan to shut up.
Ravan was both singer and unappeasable critic. If he was unhappy with the rendering of a particular phrase, he sang it a couple of thousand times. His neighbours lost patience and threatened to call the police or slit his voice-box. Ravan carried on undeterred. His mother was too worn out to respond to his ceaseless musical outpourings. What infuriated her more than anything was the fact that despite her dour resolve to have nothing but violent converse with her son, she would on occasion catch herself humming cluelessly along with Ravan.
To punish Ravan and to teach him a lesson, Parvati refused to replace the textbooks he had sold. Ravan spent the following year in the same grade. He did not deny that he had taken the money or sold the earring. Parvati said repeatedly that her son was beyond redemption. If he had become a thief and highway robber at such an early age, can you imagine what the future held for him? She became aphoristic and prescient. ‘Coming events cast their shadows. Mark my words, you’ll become a dacoit and spend a lifetime behind bars.’ Who can talk of the future with any certainty? But since an event of the magnitude of DDD did not occur again till he grew up and started working, Ravan did not feel the need to indulge further in petty or other larceny at home or abroad.
