Ravan and Eddie were not twins. Ravan did not wince with pain if Eddie was hurt. Eddie’s thirst was not quenched when Ravan drank five glasses of water. If one studied, the other did not pass his exams. Later on, when one copulated, the other did not have an orgasm.
Let alone blood brothers, they were not even stepbrothers. Eddie and Ravan’s lives ran parallel, that’s all. And there is no greater distance on earth than that which separates parallel lines, even if they almost touch each other. One city, one chawl, two floors, two cultures, two languages, two religions and the enmity of two women separated them. How could their paths possibly meet?
It was music that brought Rani Roopmati and Baz Bahadur together. The paths of Baiju and India’s greatest singer, Tansen, crossed because of music. And music it was which made Laila and Majnu, the legendary lovers, immortal. The music from Dil Deke Dekho should have bound Ravan and Eddie for ever and ever. But Eddie went to see Rock Around the Clock and the reconciliation between our mighty heroes was jinxed once again.
Fear not, my friends. This is a Hindi film story. Even if it’s written in English, it is not bound by the petty logic and quibbling of the colonizer’s tongue. Even and odd dates fall on the same day here and parallel lines which should meet only at the horizon criss-cross each other merrily in our universe (or Bollywood as it’s called). But patience, for it is not to be yet, not yet. Who knows, perhaps not in this book at all, but in the next one.
That Saturday evening, Paul Monteiro was going to take his girlfriend Crystal to Rock Around the Clock. Just as Paul was about to leave home at five-thirty, his father, the one and only Catholic freedom fighter from the CWD chawls, began to get shooting pains in the stomach. The doctor, Sylvester Carvalho, who had been a classmate of Paul’s father before he abandoned school to join the struggle for independence, asked the patient, ‘What the fuck were you doing all this while, Paul?’ There was the usual confusion and neither Paul Senior nor Junior attempted to answer since each thought the question was addressed to the other. ‘I’m talking to both of you. I’ve told you a hundred times to change your son’s name. One would think there’s just one name in the English language.’
‘His name’s Mohan. What am I to do if nobody calls him by his Indian name?’
‘Stop groaning like a horse. I want to know why you didn’t call me earlier. What about you, didn’t you know that your father was very ill and in such pain that no normal human being could bear it?’
It was unfashionable in those days to give a vernacular name to a Catholic child. But then Paul Monteiro was an odd bird. He had called his son Mohan after the father of the nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose band of non-violent fighters he had joined in his youth, despite his parents’ threat to disown him. The name Mohan did not take hold. The Catholics from the CWD chawls called Paul’s son Paul.
It was impossible for both the Catholic community and clergy to understand how a Catholic boy from a Catholic school could have been drawn to a toothless Hindu leader in a dhoti to the point of giving up his education and meagre inheritance. But Paul Senior had not stopped at that. His best friend was another freedom fighter, Ravan’s neighbour Mr Dixit, who had revealed that Ravan was an active partner in Gandhi’s murder. They were not just ‘bum chums’ to use Paul Monteiro Senior’s phrase, they were in and out of each other’s houses, dined with each other often, exchanged plates of sweets and savouries at Diwali and Christmas and what was even more exasperating, sang old Saigal and Punkaj Mullick Hindi-film songs. There were other more unforgiveable crimes Paul Senior had committed. He lost all control over himself when any CWD Catholic supported the Portuguese presence in Goa after 1947. He spread absurd stories that but for accident, Vasco da Gama might have landed in Calcutta or in Thailand and that all the Goans would then be Hindus and worshipping idols.
‘He didn’t say a word. How was I to know?’
‘Do you realize how serious the situation is? He’s got a burst appendix. If he’s not moved to hospital immediately and operated upon …’
‘I thought the pain would go away.’ The blood drained from Paul Monteiro’s face.
‘It will. It usually does after a person dies.’ Senior was moaning so melodramatically by now that his son began to laugh.
‘Like hell he’s going to die. He’s just pretending to be sick. The bugger wouldn’t leave Mama alone till one thirty or two at night. She said, “Not now. Paul’s not asleep yet.” “So what,” he says, “I’m not trying to make out with somebody else’s wife, am I?” Isn’t that the truth, Ma?’
‘Shut up, Paul.’ Paul’s mother went as red as the crimson bindi on her forehead at her son’s revelations. ‘Grown-up man like you, still don’t know how to talk in front of your Doctor Uncle?’
‘Arre, what’s the matter? Don’t pretend you’re a saint, Ma. You were just giving Daddy a hard time, so he would get even more excited. Speak up, Daddy, what were you up to last night?’
‘Paul, you bastard.’ He couldn’t control his laughter and that made the pain worse.
‘Sala, if Mama’s alone in the house for one minute, the bugger latches the door and grabs her.’
Paul’s breathing had become uneven and he was sweating unnaturally but that didn’t dampen his spirits. He loved to hear his son praise his libido and sexual prowess.
Their neighbours found it difficult to understand the camaraderie between father and son. It was uncouth to suggest that a mother had sexual characteristics and needs. Her gender was mother and nothing more. Besides, even in families where relations between children and parents were friendly and open, there were unspoken but sharply drawn boundaries. Paul and Paul were culpable on two counts. They broke the code and gave other people’s children all kinds of ideas. What if their children became familiar and started to talk in a similar vein?
‘That’s because you never give us a chance,’ said Paul Senior trying to massage his swollen stomach down to its normal size. ‘Any time Crystal’s here, even if she’s here a minute, this bugger’s hand is missing. You don’t have to look far for it. It’s under her slip. Take my word for it, he’ll disappear altogether when he gets married. Inside his wife’s dress. All of him. True or not?’
Paul’s father didn’t get to hear the answer to his question. He opened his mouth to laugh at his joke and became unconscious.
Paul Junior was his parents’ only child. His mother should have been in The Guinness Book of Records. According to conservative estimates she had had seventeen miscarriages. After her marriage she had never had to use sanitary towels. She was pregnant every three or four months. Within eleven weeks on the outside, the foetus would say goodbye and begin to drip stickily. The day she dropped the foetus, she got pregnant again. In the old days, Paul’s mother would lie in bed at home or in a hospital without turning on her side or moving a centimetre. Doctors, alternative medicine, Mount Mary, novenas, potions and lotions, black and blessed threads tied around her wrist or waist, talismans, even gurus and babas thanks to her fecund Hindu friend, Mrs Dixit … she had tried everything. To no avail.
One day she said to her husband when he woke up, ‘Think of a number.’
‘What for?’ Paul asked her.
‘Never mind.’
Seven days she asked her husband the same question. His answer did not vary. On the eighth day he lost his temper.
‘Sala, seven times I’ve asked you what the hell for but …’
‘Seven times. Thank you for the number, Paul.’
He had no idea what she was thanking him for but she smiled so beatifically, he pulled her skirt down right there.
Days, weeks and months passed. Nothing changed.
She became pregnant. She bled. After the sixth miscarriage, Paul’s father lost heart. He couldn’t figure out whether it was his fault or his wife’s. Did God will it so or was it fate? He went to see his classmate Dr Sylvester Carvalho. ‘Why should you worry, Paul? You do your job. Keep trying.’
‘De fuck. What do you think this is, a cycle pump or my prick? I try and I try but all my wife’s got to show for it is hot air.’
‘That’s nonsense, Paul. Your wife gets pregnant like clockwork.’
‘I don’t want a clock,’ Paul screamed at him. ‘I want a baby.’
Men, as women well know but will wisely not admit, are at best sprinters. When it comes to that marathon called life, it’s the members of the weaker sex who have staying power. Paul Monteiro’s wife Yolanda didn’t throw up her hands because the odds were against her, she merely tried a little harder.
‘Once, just once. Only once,’ Paul’s wife begged him every day. She would wake him at odd hours, play with him, kiss him, sing him songs, rub her breasts against him, lick his earlobes. To no avail. Neither the man nor his member responded.
‘Don’t give up Paul. Please don’t give up.’ That did it. Paul Monteiro, freedom fighter, Gandhi’s non-violent disciple, indefatigable copulator, enlightened Roman Catholic from Goa and ceaseless aspirant to fatherhood, lost his head and lit into his wife. ‘Fuck off. Can’t you leave me alone.’ Even as he was hitting his beloved Yolanda, he began to cry.
‘Forgive me, Yolanda, forgive me,’ he sobbed and wept and coughed and choked. His wife was unnerved by the violence of his repentance.
‘What shall I forgive? You were right. I’ve importuned you and pestered you every hour of the day for weeks. I wouldn’t listen. Even God would have lost patience.’
That would have reassured the devil himself but Paul walked in the path of Gandhi and non-violence. He had been beaten with hard wooden police batons that had no give, his head had been broken open and his kidneys damaged permanently, he had been dragged by the hair for sixty yards and then kicked in the face. His self-control had been tried to the very limits when British police officers and their native underlings had brutally manhandled women, and yet he had not retaliated because Christ, and Gandhi, asked him to turn the other cheek. And now, because of an unborn foetus which was a drop-out way before it had entered the world, he had beaten his uncomplaining and loyal wife. He was staggered by the discovery of the repressed and pent-up violence in him. Everything that he stood for and had fought for was destroyed by that one random action. He knew that if it could happen once, it could happen again. Hadn’t Adam fallen for all mankind? Was it necessary for everyone else to continue to fall? It was humiliating to know that he was no better than others.
His mood changed. The self-loathing in his lower lip was replaced by a dour resolve. It was unsettling to look into his eyes. They had reached a point of no return. He got up and went into the kitchen. He picked up the big cleaver in his left hand and placed his right arm on the wooden cutting block so worn out with use, there was a trough in it.
‘More violence?’ His wife Yolanda was standing at the door in the partition that separated the kitchen from the living area.
Paul Monteiro came as close to hating a living organism as he would in his entire life. ‘What do you want me to do then?’
‘Lie with me.’
That was one thing Paul Monteiro could not bring himself to do.
Four months had long passed and yet Yolanda Monteiro’s stomach stayed flat. It was a subject of grave concern in the CWD chawls. Paul’s mother may not have given birth to a single child yet, but her sheer persistence and state of chronic pregnancy had become symbolic of fertility in the chawls.
It is difficult, if not impossible to appreciate the dimensions of the crisis that gripped the CWD chawls then. Paul’s mother had been spotted buying Sirona sanitary towels. It was certain that something terrible was going to happen. The residents of the CWD chawls were still divided, but for the first time in living memory, the division was not along religious lines. One group defended Paul, the other spoke up for his wife.
‘How much longer do you want him to keep trying? Keeping that woman pregnant is a round-the-clock, round-the-year job. What do you expect, a Qutab Minar after all these years? He’s worn it out till it’s disappeared.’
‘It’s she who should be exhausted. All he does is clamber on to her. She is the one who has to do the bearing and the losing.’
Prayers were said for Mrs Monteiro in every home in the CWD chawls. On the thirteenth of September, for the fifth month running, Paul’s mother got out of the house in the morning. Oh God, please, not to the Happy Family Chemist’s, please. But everyone’s worst fears came true. The Sirona pack was wrapped in newspaper but she might as well have strung the twelve napkins into a garland and worn them around her neck. Paul’s father who was Mr Nonstop Cheerful all these years had begun to look gaunt. He was almost uncivil now and would not respond to a greeting if he could avoid it. His low spirits and moodiness had not affected his wife’s sunny temperament so far. Some kind of immense faith kept her happy and smiling. But the dry and barren fifth month changed her too. She lost colour and seemed to be plunging into a depression. Even the inimical tension that had kept the husband and wife going disappeared. They had lost all interest in each other and life.
Then one day what should not have happened, happened. While he was rejoining the broken yarn on the power-loom at the Jeejibhoy Spinning and Weaving Mills, a centimetre-long, black ant slipped in where no decent ant should. Paul Monteiro tried to ignore its gentle explorations, but the creature continued to tickle him. He squirmed and wriggled as it wandered around. Then, for a full three-quarters of a minute he stood transfixed to the ground. What his hands chanced upon was a living miracle. His shy, withdrawn and almost non-existent prick had grown into the mother of all hard-ons. He left the yarn from the loom hanging loose and abandoned the bobbin that slapped against his eardrum twice every second and walked away.
He walked fast without hurrying. A big black ant is neither necessary nor sufficient cause. Psychoanalysts and novelists need reasons. Life subsists on excuses and pretexts. Paul’s problem was to extend the duration of the miracle. He had not moved his hands. They held on tightly to the living miracle and warmed it in broad daylight and in the heavy traffic. It was difficult to climb on to a local train without support, but Paul Monteiro picked up his leg from the knee and stepped in. He got off at Byculla and started walking in the direction of the taxi-stand when he realized his folly. He would need at least one hand to open the cab door and would then have to fish out the money from his wallet. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. The sun was still almost overhead. His shirt, armpits and face were soaked in sweat. From Byculla to Mazagaon, Paul’s father-to-be looked straight ahead and ignored the stares and salacious remarks of passers-by. He was tempted to take long strides. He controlled himself. He walked at a steady pace till he reached the chawls. Others may have laughed and scoffed at him. Not the people from the chawls. They knew he was carrying a lamp. A slight breeze, a false step and the flame would die.
On the third floor there was a crisis. Only he and his God knew the depth of his despair at that moment. It occurred to him that the manhood he had preserved and protected for forty-five minutes could vanish with the same celerity with which it had appeared. He stood still while that thought played havoc with him. He felt he had slipped into an air pocket. The soles of his feet opened up and all his substance was sucked out. He was flung from one wall of the pocket to the other and yet he kept falling. But he was a strong and wilful man. It would take more than atmospheric turbulence to rock him. He exhaled slowly for a long time, then took a deep breath and climbed the last two floors.
‘Shut the door,’ he said.
Yolanda Monteiro became pregnant for the seventh time. Seven, the magic number. Consequence: Paul Junior.
‘Peritonitis has already set in. There’s a chance that he might survive if he’s operated upon right now. But I’m not guaranteeing anything.’ Dr Carvalho looked grim. Mrs Monteiro was wiping Paul Senior’s forehead. She wasn’t going to permit herself to work out the implications of what the doctor had said. Even the dead had more colour than her husband.
Paul Junior had stood in the queue at the Strand cinema for four and a half hours on Tuesday morning to buy tickets for Rock Around the Clock. He had not expected his father to bear him such ill-will and enmity as to prevent him from going to the movie.
‘Why don’t you operate tomorrow, Doctor Uncle? It’s a Sunday. You can take the whole day if you want.’
‘Stop wasting time, you fool, unless you want to see your father die in front of your eyes. I’ll call for an ambulance and arrange for the surgeon. You and your friends carry Paul down the stairs. That way we’ll save time. Be very careful. No jolts.’
‘I’ll walk.’ A small voice spoke up. It came from the dead man. Paul’s heart jumped up in joy.
‘Sure. I’m sure you can walk to Masina Hospital.’ Dr Carvalho spoke with uncalled-for sarcasm.
‘See, nothing’s the matter with him,’ Paul said. ‘Nothing that won’t wait till tomorrow.’
The ghost sat up. He put his foot down and raised himself. Doctor Carvalho watched him with interest. He knew when Paul Senior’s legs would give and had his hands ready to hold him.
‘Another word from father or son and I’m going home.’
Paul’s wife put his head on her lap while their son closed the door of the ambulance. There was a crowd of people gathered in a semi-circle behind it. An ambulance and its seriously ill or dying patient and its retinue of weeping relatives was classic theatre. The chawlwallahs were connoisseurs of drama and wouldn’t miss it for the world. If pressed, they would have had to confess that the Monteiro show was not up to scratch. Short on emotion, small cast and that doctor was in the damnedest hurry. Even Eddie who was at the head of the crowd was disappointed.
The ambulance stopped. There was hope. There was reason to believe the show was going to come back to life. Maybe Paul Senior had kicked the bucket. Maybe Mrs Monteiro would break down now. The doors opened and Paul Junior looked out. A hundred people were difficult to focus on. They might as well not be there. His eyes hunted for a familiar face but could not prise one out. That idiot Eddie was smiling and waving as if Paul and his parents were going to Kashmir on a holiday.
‘Eddie.’
Eddie ran forward.
‘Go and tell Crystal that I won’t be picking her up for the movie because my father’s seriously ill. Tell her we are going to Masina Hospital.’
Eddie wanted to tell him to go jump, he had better things to do than tramp down to Ballard Estate and meet Crystal. And anyway he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. His mother had asked him to buy two pounds of onions and one anna’s worth of ginger and was expecting him fifteen minutes ago.
‘Here, take this.’
‘What’s it?’ Eddie had stepped back, ready to make a run for it.
‘Tickets, stupid. Tickets for Rock Around the Clock.’
Eddie couldn’t believe his good fortune. There was bound to be a catch.
‘Sell the other ticket and bring the money back.’
‘Shut the bloody door or I’ll throw you out,’ Dr Carvalho was screaming.
Before Eddie could ask, ‘What about the bus-fare?’ the doors of the ambulance closed and it whizzed off. Eddie decided not to think of the whacking he would get at night, the complaints to Father Agnello D’Souza the next morning after mass, Father D’Souza’s turned-down mouth and hopeless face silently wondering what terrible mischief Eddie had been up to while speaking bitterly to him of the afterlife, and what lay in wait for him.
He had recently learnt the f … word. He didn’t know what it meant but it reflected his frame of mind. ‘F … it,’ he said and caught a moving bus. ‘Mother-fucker,’ the conductor asked him, ‘do you want to die?’
Eddie handed him the money and said, ‘Two pounds of onions.’
Thousands of people had laid siege to the Strand cinema. It had become one of the holiest shrines in the city of Bombay. It would take another hour and a half or two for Eddie to become a devotee. The Lord God of one, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock; five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, rock; nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, rock; we’re gonna rock around the clock had not yet taken possession of Eddie’s soul to the exclusion of all else.
Time and again Eddie crashed against the impenetrable mass of people and fell back. Even the greatest military formations have chinks. The trick is to find them. In Eddie’s case the chink found him. Someone asked him, ‘Extra?’ Before he could understand the implications of the question, thirty-three people fell upon him from all sides. His mother, Granna and sister would have to recover his dismembered body from the morgue at J.J. Hospital. When Eddie rose from underneath the stampede, he was devoid of a shoe along with its sock, the collar of his shirt, two buttons of his fly and Crystal’s ticket.
There is no rational answer to how Eddie managed to salvage one ticket from the maelstrom, when both had been laminated into a single indivisible entity by sweat and heat. It should have been possible to tell who had made away with Crystal’s ticket once he got into the theatre and had been shown to his seat. He tried asking both his neighbours for reimbursement of the ticket. One shoved his face away and the other said, ‘Bugger off.’
Eddie was incensed by his own helplessness. Zap zap, wham bam, kaboom, Eddie wanted to let loose his raging anger the way Captain Marvel and Superman did in the comic books. But that’s one good thing about life: willy-nilly you become wise to the ways of the world. Captain Marvel and Superman had underlined the same truth. If you wanted to pick a fight, make sure it was with a weaker adversary. Eddie swallowed his pride and sat quietly smouldering in his seat.
The main picture started and Eddie forget all, his neighbours, Father D’Souza, his family, his dead father, his homework, the terrible fate that awaited him. What was going on on the screen would make him forget to eat, drink, sleep and breathe. And if you could forget to breathe, you could forget the very name of God. No wonder so many state legislatures in the United States wanted to ban the work of Satan which Bill Haley and his Comets, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and all the other godless people called rock’n’ roll. A controversy raged amongst clergymen and decent lay folk across India whether or not Rock Around the Clock should be declared enemy number one in Catholic Journals, and any Catholic who saw it despite the proscription, excommunicated.
It was difficult to decide what was worse: the events on the screen or those in the aisles of the theatre. The primitive rhythms and gods of Africa had flown across continents and invaded the Strand cinema. The young men and women in the theatre were obviously possessed by the most dank and evil spirits. They had regressed God knows how many millennia to their tribal origins. They had gone wild. Stark raving mad. They danced besottedly. They would be tearing their clothes off next and fornicating like reptiles right there to the bumping, grinding and libidinous rhythms emanating from the screen.
Eddie had never witnessed such pandemonium before. For some time he watched the proceedings on the screen and in the aisles with a half-open mouth and ripped open eyes that would never again close. Then his hands and legs and arms began to twitch as if electrocuted. They had severed their connections with his body and gained a life of their own. He tried to hold himself still but to no avail. He was no longer his own creature. The witch-doctors and shamans and the dark forces of the earth had taken charge of him. In a fourteen-inch circle, Eddie managed to perform what seasoned dancers could not have on a 320×320 foot stage.
The plywood bottom of his seat broke and Eddie’s chin cracked on the back of the seat in front of him. His brains, sinuses, eyes and tonsils crashed into each other and could not be unscrambled. He felt his chin. Apart from a three-inch gash and exposed bone and a permanent cavity where his former brain had resided, there was no injury whatsoever.
Eddie had no alternative now but to step on to the floor. ‘Giddiup ding dong, giddiup,’ the whole auditorium rocked on its feet and clapped as if the audience had been training all its life for that one song. There were about a hundred couples dancing in the aisles and in the space between the screen and the seats. Eddie didn’t have a partner but he made such a song and dance all on his own that the other couples drew back grudgingly. At first he was nothing but a pesky twerp whom the men would have happily pushed out but for their girlfriends who were more patronizing and willing to watch the little boy’s antics for a while. Eddie had two things going for him. He didn’t know how to dance and he equated his body completely with the music. He let go. He didn’t just dance with his legs; his kidneys, liver, fingers, tendons, pancreas, bronchi, throat, chin, buttocks, everything responded to the music and danced.
He was coming out of a particularly frenetic phase when he saw a young woman in a dress with red, blue and green stripes alternating with white, leave her partner. She was unconscious of what she was doing and seemed only to be waiting for a cue to enter the magic web he had been weaving. She slid in. A single finger welded the girl to him. He spun her all the way till she was nestling against him for an instant and then let go of her. She uncoiled. The edge of her skirt undulated and touched him. He felt the blade of a knife run under the entire length of his skin.
Now even a finger did not join them and yet they wound and unwound in each other’s arms. They had become mind readers though they had not set eyes on each other before. Their bodies were yin and yang, exact opposites that drew them together and repelled them.
Now Bill Haley was belting out See You Later, Alligator. Eddie had not thought much of him when he first saw him on screen. He was a pudgy, slightly crosseyed fellow with a swirl of hair slicked carefully on to his forehead. One of his eyes was somewhat volatile and kept wandering away from the other. But then he started singing and Eddie thought he was the handsomest man he had seen. He wanted to wear the same clothes Haley had on, black trousers and shiny jacket with a lame or velvet lapel, frilled shirt buttoned at the collar, and of course the very same hairstyle. Come to think of it, he thought the eyes rather charming now. There was no question in his mind, he wanted to be Bill Haley now and forever.
He got into the bus and realized that he had no money. The conductor called him all kinds of names and stopped the bus to make him get off. He didn’t mind walking. The girl’s skirt brushed against him. In the Bombay heat and night, he shivered a little.
