Parvatibai may have made prophetic pronouncements about her son’s career (as with all prophecies the point is not whether they come true or not, but whether people believe the dark and dour prognostications of the soothsayer) but on the level of self-preservation alone it would have been more profitable if she had spent the same time and effort on her husband and divined what he and the future held in store for her family. Frankly, she did not need to examine his horoscope or palm, the tea-leaves at the bottom of his teacup or the entrails of sacrificial animals, or measure the shadow of her husband at the first light of dawn. All she needed to do and didn’t, was to pick up clues and signals, and there were plenty of them, and interpret them. For instance on a Tuesday, four months ago, he changed the parting of his hair. When the thin plaited leather bridge of his Kolhapuri chappals gave way, instead of picking up the shoe in his hand and bringing it home for Parvatibai to get repaired, he took it to the cobbler himself.
He had shown other signs of independence and initiative. In the last three weeks he had shaved seven times which was some kind of record for him since he normally shaved once every fortnight. As usual his objective, at least the immediate one, was clear. The intention was not to erase the stubble on his chin and cheek, it was to gouge out the top layer if not the second one of his skin. He did a fairly good job of it and a Hindusthan blade assisted him considerably in the task. It was a dual purpose blade. Cut-and-paste artists from advertising agencies broke it into tiny jagged pieces and cut art card, poster paper, bromides, box board and mountboard into the sizes they wanted or impaled individual typeset letters or words on a point and carried out proof-corrections in artworks according to the proofreader’s or copy-writer’s instructions. It was also, as you have already learnt, used for shaving.
Economics alone would not account for Shankar-rao’s use of this particular brand of blade. Parvatibai was willing to buy him an imported 7 O’Clock or Gillette steel. They were a little more expensive but they lasted longer and they didn’t disfigure the face as systematically as Hindusthan blades did. Perhaps the appeal of the Indian blade was an aesthetic one. After a good, clean shave, Shankar-rao had, on an average, seventeen tiny bits of Bittambatmi stuck all over his face and throat. The newspaper fragments absorbed the blood as it clotted. When he took them off, the nicks opened and his face once again looked like the scene of a bloody miniature battle. Shankar-rao avoided drinking water after a shave for fear of springing leaks and the water flowing out like a fountain from his throat.
The writing on the wall should have been clear by then even to a blind man or woman, but even if it was not, there was one sign no one could have missed. On two occasions Shankar-rao had effectively shut up Ravan’s warbling. What he did was so unusual, it should have silenced all the people of the CWD chawls. He sang two phrases of one of the songs from DDD repeatedly as he lay doubled up facing the wall on the bed and when he traipsed to the toilet at the end of the corridor on his floor. Parvatibai did not notice this or if she did, she did not pay any heed to the signs of turbulence and catastrophe ahead. What else can one say but that she had it coming to her?
Parvati’s and Ravan’s torture sessions came to an abrupt end one evening. His father, Shankar-rao, had gone to buy his tabloid, Bittambatmi, and had come back two and a half hours later with his sister. Parvatibai was sitting on the floor slicing cabbage on a willi at a speed that made her hand almost invisible. She must have been among the last ten women in Bombay, if not the whole of Maharashtra, who still used this traditional gadget without turning her fingers, palms and hands into ready-to-eat, raw mincemeat. It had a serrated disc sticking out at the end of a steel crescent with which she grated coconut but she had flipped back the curved knife which normally rested with its blade facing down on a wooden platform and was shredding the cabbage to fine confetti. Ravan, who was not having much success with his homework in history since he had no books, not even a maths book to refer to, looked up at his father in wonderment.
‘Sister?’ Parvatibai asked her husband as she continued to slice the cabbage for the next day’s lunch, ‘you never had a sister.’
Shankar-rao smiled and threw up his hands. ‘Seeing is believing. There she is in flesh and blood. Father had a mistress and this is the fruit of that relationship,’
‘I will not contest the truth or otherwise of that statement.’ Parvatibai lost her concentration and cut her finger for the first time in all these years on the willi. The blood ran all over the green flakes of the cabbage but she was not aware of it. ‘There’s a young boy here and I would appreciate it if you spared us the details of the lady’s antecedents.’
‘Have it your way. She’s here to stay.’
Parvatibai caught hold of Ravan’s wrist and tried to drag him into the kitchen. He was transfixed. His eyes had lost all lateral motion. He would not be able to close his mouth in this life or the ones that would ineluctably follow for a Hindu. His father was a magician, a miracle worker. He had shoved his hand into an invisible hat and pulled out not a white dove, or a rabbit or a string of flamboyantly coloured scarves but a live woman, not just any woman but a sister. The door to the past was always locked. But his father had a key to it. A past that must have stretched to a time when Ravan was not born. Who could tell, tomorrow or a month later he might bring back a brother, his brother’s children or a grandmother. It would be terrific to have children of his own age to play with. He could show Chandrakant Dixit and his classmates that they were welcome to leave him out of their games because he had lots of friends of his own.
What he yearned for most was a grandmother. He had seen Eddie’s ‘Granna’ and how she pampered and shielded him and told him stories sitting at the top of the stairs on the fifth floor. For a brief while, Ravan too had had a family. He had never felt as secure and happy and wanted as the time when Shobhan and her folks had adopted him. He wasn’t going to miss them any more. He had an aunt now. It would take time to get to know her but that was OK. She would play carrom with him and buy him schoolbooks. She was wearing kumkum and a mangalsutra and would very likely have sons or daughters as old as Ravan. And even if she didn’t, she could start now. Just think of it, that silent, empty and uncommunicative house of his was going to come alive. It would be bubbling with laughter, there would be long conversations, arguments, disagreements, the children would throw tantrums, he would set his jaws tightly one upon the other, flatten his lips till they were a razor-thin slit and quieten them with just one disapproving look.
His mother jerked his hand hard. What was the matter with her? He knew that she never allowed her lunch and dinner customers to step inside the house. Whatever converse there was between them, it was always outside in the common passage. But this was his aunt, his own father’s sister. Could she not make her feel welcome? The fact was his mother was an unsociable person, all work and no play had killed all feeling in her. Do surgery on her and instead of a heart, you would find a stone. What was wrong with sitting down in this room? He always did. It wasn’t as if his father and aunt had something private to discuss. And even if they had, they had all the time in the world. Hadn’t his father just said she was here to stay? Ravan rose unwillingly, his head was turned back and his eyes were still fixed on his aunt. And then it happened. He was astounded, delighted and speechless. His aunt winked at him.
That night Parvatibai made her first false move. She would regret it bitterly, she would curse herself, swear mutely at her shortsightedness and the calamitous consequences that followed from it but there was no undoing what she had done. She spread both Ravan’s and her own mattress inside in the kitchen. She liked to go to sleep early since she had to get up by five and start cooking. By quarter to ten she had switched off the light in the kitchen and was dozing within five minutes. Ravan was restive because although he was still in his own home, he had never before slept in the kitchen.
She didn’t know what time it was but she was suddenly woken up. Her husband’s sister was panting, screeching, screaming, slapping Shankar-rao, egging him on, instructing him about what she wanted done where, sighing, moaning, biting his ear hard so that he was hollering and hopping. She encouraged him with strings of abuse that the people from Sawantwadi and Ratnagiri in Konkan use continually as endearments or for emphasis and occasionally in deadly earnest. They were sharp, sonorous, brief word-pictures that had more immediacy than the real thing. She called him mother- and sister-fucker, a whore-son, pimp, arse-buggerer, pederast, cunt-licker, father-fucker and then became highly creative in the extensions and variations of her sexual imagery. A horse’s prick in your mother’s gash, tie a knot in your member and whip me with it, your sister’s dash dash is wide enough to accommodate a rhino and have room left. At this point Parvati made her second wrong move. Instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, at least for that night, the scatological exuberance of her husband’s sister induced panic and horror in her. She did not think of her son as an innocent or a nascent Buddha who needed to be shielded from the facts of life but she was of the belief that his sex-education, especially that of a more arcane and erudite variety, should be left for a maturer day.
Her concern for her son was doubtless valid but her fears at that particular moment were unfounded. A little observation and quiet reflection would have revealed that Master Ravan Pawar was dead to the world and not likely to be resurrected except under the gravest and the most frightful provocation. Unfortunately this was readily available in the state that Parvatibai was in. ‘Get up. Can you hear?’ she whispered urgently to him. ‘What can you hear? Tell me every word. No, I don’t want to hear. Most certainly I don’t want you to hear.’ In a rush of maternal protective instincts she gathered Ravan to herself. Her stupendous breastworks, one on either side of his face, should not only have dampened but drowned all terrestrial and extra-terrestrial sound. They did. They also almost smothered Ravan to death. The boy had been woken up without due preparation and preliminaries and then asphyxiated in a sustained fashion. The more he fought for air, the more Parvati was convinced that he was savouring the martial calls and counter-calls that issued forth from the next room and passed unhindered through the thin plywood partition that rose three-quarters of the way to the ceiling.
In one last-ditch effort, Ravan flung his mother aside and reeled drunkenly from lack of oxygen. He was sure he was hallucinating. A woman was crying out aloud: on your mark, get set, charge, attack, onward ho. The voice that followed these exhortations was unmistakable. His father, that staid, tepid, and immovable object which had been a part of Ravan’s landscape and furniture since childhood, was vociferously sounding the war-cry of the. Hindus: Har Har Mahadev. Har Har Mahadev. Kill, kill, kill. Fierce and fatal battle was joined by Ravan’s aunt and father. His own mother, the usually sane and solid Parvatibai, was rushing around like a demented woman. She clasped her hands around Ravan’s ears. In the adjoining room, his father’s sister was whimpering and wheedling for more. She yelled and begged in a rhythmic chant that was hypnotic: don’t stop, don’t stop, go on, go on you mother … that dread word from which Parvati wanted to shield her son stayed incomplete. ‘Oh no, don’t tell me. You coward, you’ve admitted defeat even before knowing which way the battle would go.’ Parvatibai had now packed Ravan’s ears with cottonwool and was tying a wet sari that she had pulled down from the clothes-line like a turban around his head. The first two swirls went around Ravan’s ears but the next one covered his nose.
‘Stop it, Ma.’ He tried to push his mother away. ‘Stop it, you are suffocating me.’
Parvati lifted the twisted cloth from over his nose but continued to swathe him. She was in far too much of a hurry and the loops kept slipping down to Ravan’s neck as she drew them tight. It hit Ravan then that his mother was going to strangle him. He yanked the sari out of her hands.
‘Give it back to me.’ Parvatibai closed in on Ravan threateningly. For some reason both of them were talking in whispers. Ravan retreated till he was up against the door of the room. Suddenly there was an eerie silence. The scuffle and battle-cries from the next room had ceased. Parvati stood undecided, then went to the plywood wall and put her ear against it.
What was wrong with his father, Ravan wondered. Had he not after all these years had the good fortune of rediscovering his sister? Why had he brought her home if all they were going to do was swear at each other and fight murderously? And what was the matter with his aunt? He didn’t even know her name yet. His father was the most lethargic man he had ever known. How and why had she provoked him to the point where he was willing to kill her? There was not a sound from outside. Were they both wounded and bleeding or were they already dead?
Parvati opened the door stealthily and before Ravan realized what was happening covered his eyes, pushed him into the outside room, and without looking right or left, unlatched the front door, shoved him out and down the staircase.
‘Please don’t kill me, Ma, please don’t,’ Ravan thirteen and a half going on fourteen was bleating now. But his heartless mother didn’t let go of him. He could hear his aunt laughing uncontrollably.
‘Poor Ravan,’ she said and slapped his father. Parvati and Ravan were on the second floor close to the Sarang home but Shankar-rao and his sister were still in splits. At the bottom of the stairs, Parvati unmasked her son and flung the sari over her right shoulder. Ravan was trembling but she ignored him.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she told him and started walking.
‘What for?’
‘Because I say so.’
‘You go, I’m going back home to sleep.’
‘Don’t even try it,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ll break your leg right here and now.’
He didn’t need to look at her. He didn’t disbelieve her words. They walked up to the park on Mazagaon Hill where Prakash and Ravan had sat. The gate was locked. Parvati picked up her sari, climbed over and sat on a bench. Ravan avoided her and lay down on another. Strange and cosmic cataclysms and violent upheavals were under way. He looked at his mother and knew that he had lost her. She didn’t want him any more. All those months when she had pounded him to a fine powder because he had sold her earring to see Dil Deke Dekho, or even before that when he had discovered that he was a murderer, he had not once got the feeling that she wanted to be rid of him. Now he knew his time had come. He didn’t mind that, even though he had pleaded with her not to kill him. What he couldn’t bear was to see her sitting with her head in her hands. He would have liked to smash her face to avoid seeing the despair in her eyes. His mother, his own indomitable, unvanquishable, never-say-die mother, who stood between him and the perils of the world, his first and final resort, she would not look at him or acknowledge him. He would protect and preserve her, fight the armies of the night and the gods of daylight and shield her from whatever evil had befallen her. But she had woven such an impenetrable wall of hopelessness around herself, he found her unapproachable. Ravan had no idea how long he had been asleep when his mother came and woke him up.
The next morning, around ten o’clock, after Ravan had gone to school, Shankar-rao came into the kitchen and said he and his sister wanted coffee and some snacks. Parvatibai made two cups of tea and took them to the front room. She spoke softly but her voice had Ravan’s tremor of last night. Tea will be at seven in the morning. Lunch is at eleven. Tea and biscuits or savouries at four and dinner at eight. Ravan and I will go for a walk from nine to ten-fifteen. Whatever brother and sister wish to do at that time, is your private affair. When we get back I expect the door to be unlatched and the two of you asleep.’
Shankar-rao tossed his shoulders. ‘We’ll do what we please and …’ His sister put her hand on his arm and said, ‘That’s OK. We’ll be sleeping by the time you get back.’
The woman saw Ravan staring at her and ignored him. She sat up, the pallu of her sari fell on the bed. She did not pick it up and replace it on her left shoulder. She had a witching smile that fluctuated around her dimples. Her right leg disengaged itself and came down over the edge of the bed. It ran back and forth over a man’s torso.
He had almost flung his school bag on the floor when he realized he had walked into the wrong house. He stepped back. Couldn’t be Eddie’s place. That woman on the bed in the red sari and green blouse, with her leg pulled up and the back of her head resting on the palms of her hands was not Violet, her mother or Pieta. She had a kumkum dot on her forehead and paan in her mouth which had painted her lips an earthen red. Where the hell was he? Sleepwalking in broad daylight as always, wake up Ravan Pawar. Must be the Jadhav residence on the third floor. Unless of course he had stepped into Chawl No. 16 or 21.
Ravan was turning around to leave when he glanced down. His father Shankar-rao was lying on the paper-thin mattress on which Ravan had slept all his life. The woman pulled up her sari, scratched her right calf lazily and let the sari down. How could he possibly have forgotten his aunt of last night? Were there some things so terrible that the mind wiped them out instantly?
Ravan stood undecided for a moment and then ran out of the building. He did not stop till he was out of breath and his feet would carry him no further. Mr Billimoria, his tae kwon do teacher, was used to seeing him turn up at any time in the evening even though he was officially enrolled for the early morning class. He usually entrusted Ravan with the job of supervising the warming-up exercises for the junior section.
‘You OK?’ he asked Ravan during a break in the exercises. Ravan nodded his head. He still hadn’t got his breath back. ‘You don’t look it.’
Mr Billimoria continued with the class. After ten minutes he gave up.
‘In India we believe in paying for shoddy work in the hope that others will ignore our own third-rate stuff.’ His voice rose suddenly. ‘But you are not in India. This patch of 20 yards is Billimoria land. I don’t pay you, you pay me and yet it hurts my eyes, my whole being hurts like hell to watch your antics here. I’m considering doubling your fees but that won’t relieve the agony of watching grasshoppers picking their wooden legs to pee all over me.’ He paused and looked distastefully at his pupils. ‘Ravan,’ he did not take his eyes off his recalcitrant students, ‘it seems impossible for me to humiliate these monumental Henry Moore Stones and bronzes. Perhaps you may be foolhardy enough to take this class and demonstrate that what we are attempting here is ensemble choreography and not private twitching.’
Ravan did as he was bidden but he had the feeling that while the class was particularly lackadaisical that day, his teacher was also making it a pretext to reach out to him. Ravan’s pupils were older than him but he was not awed by them. He could have put the group through their paces blindfolded and yet picked out the slightest discrepancy or laxness. He was his master’s younger version and therefore unable to suffer clumsiness but he was far more patient than Mr Billimoria.
‘Good work, Ravan,’ Mr Billimoria told him at the end of the day, ‘but your heart’s not in it today.’
Was an answer expected of him? What could he say since he didn’t know what the matter with him was.
‘Good night, Ravan.’
‘Good night, sir.’
Ravan locked up and gave the keys to Mr Billimoria. He pretended to walk away but after Mr Billimoria had disappeared, he went back and sat on the steps of the tae kwon do gym. It was dark. The lights in the surrounding buildings had come on at least an hour and a half ago. The vast grounds of St Theresa’s School were empty. The stumps and the bails on the cricket field had been removed and the netting used for practice sessions looked like a prison abandoned by its jailbirds.
Ravan recalled his physics teacher enunciating the laws of thermodynamics. It seemed that whether you converted matter to heat, or heat or electricity to another form of energy, the equations stayed constant. There may be loss of energy or heat in the process of conversion but everything remained within the universe. What did that mean? Were the waves that Mr Billimoria had created when he was demonstrating the poetry of tae kwon do on Ravan’s first encounter with that martial art form still dispersing, reacting and ricocheting against other previous or newer waves in the atmosphere? What had happened to the energy and sound-waves of the ‘ghati’ with which Mr Billimoria had addressed him? Had they left an impress on the air that would last to the end of time? Could it be recovered? Was there really no history to energy? Were the past and the future in the present? Was death a passage of one form of energy into another? He had no idea where these thoughts were leading or what he was trying to get at. He wasn’t quite sure why he was hovering at the edge of questions about the nature and purpose of life.
He could not decipher the hieroglyphics of the events of late noon that day in his house. Why should a single night turn his world upside down? What was the bond between a son and his father? Ravan felt he was as attached to the chair or fan in his house as he was to his father. That back which he had turned upon the world and Ravan many, many years ago did not give any purchase to Ravan. What had they done with his mother? Had they driven her out? Was he finally an orphan? If aloneness was the same as being on your own and shut out, then despite the rock and citadel and strength of his mother, he had always been an orphan. It was not an alien sensation, certainly nothing to get worked up about. It was like being born with a bodily defect. Either you combated it and got around it or you ignored it as Shobhan did. So why did he think that the earth had slipped from under his feet and he was marooned in space?
Who was going to look after his mother? There were no rewards in life for doing a good job, supporting your family single-handed, bringing up your healthy husband and school-going son and working close to sixteen hours a day. You could be thrown out at any moment. Were the roles of husband and wife spelt out when two people got married? When two parties came together was it mandatory that one was subordinate to the other?
Even between a victimizer and victim there was always a sense of belonging, need and bonding. What last night or that leg which rowed across his father’s body like a paddle in water made plain to him was that he was no longer marginal or peripheral to the scheme of things; he was irrelevant. When it was possible at some future date to retrieve the past by unscrambling the air, there would be no trace of him.
Where was he planning to go? Why was he always asking questions when he did not have the answer to anything. He had heard of boys who ran away from home and joined the circus. There were stories of mendicants who lured runaways or lost children to some distant place and trained them to pick pockets or beg or shine shoes. He could always take a train and go to Delhi, Madras or Hyderabad. But what was the use? If the police caught him wandering around at night, they would worm his address out of him and take him back to his father and the new tenant. Someone tapped him on his shoulder.
‘Let’s go home, Ravan.
‘Can’t we go some place else, Ma? Take a room and supply food to your customers from there?’
‘We could but we need to pay a big pagdee, fifteen or twenty thousand rupees before anyone will rent a room to us.’
His mother held his hand in hers, something she rarely did these days. ‘Besides why should we look for another place when we already have a home. That place is yours and mine, Ravan. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.’
‘Ma, the second button on my shirt’s gone.’
‘Give it to me.’ His aunt caught hold of his shirt-tail as he was going to the kitchen. ‘I’ll stitch it for you.’ He tried to pull it away from her. She didn’t let go.
‘You would like it to tear, wouldn’t you, so you won’t have to go to school?’
‘That’s not true. I like school.’
‘Sure. That’s why you fail in every test.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You have only red marks in your notebooks.’
‘I still like to go to school.’
‘Lots of girls waiting for you there, is it?’ His father’s sister had slowly drawn the shirt out as if she were pulling in a line with a fish at the end of it.
‘Chhhya. No girls in our school.’ She pulled out the sewing box from under the bed. ‘Sit down, don’t hover over me and make me nervous while I thread the needle.’
He looked at her while she sewed the button. She was a source of endless wonder to him. After tea in the mornings she put several plastic clips in her hair. When she took them out, believe it or not, her hair had waves running through it. Often she left a comb in her hair. She took a bath late and wandered around with just a blouse and petticoat.
‘Please wear a sari,’ Parvati had told her. ‘There’s a young boy in the house.’ What he had to do with his aunt’s sari was a mystery to him. She had laughed at his mother. ‘And ruin the crease of my sari? You’ve got to be joking. Besides, don’t shelter your son so much, Parvatibai. It’s time he was exposed to the facts of life.’
‘Let me be the judge of that,’ his mother said sharply. ‘Everything in due time.’
Come evening, his father’s sister powdered her face, wore an ironed sari and then put on lipstick. Her lips were thin but she made them look wide and full painting them broadly and reshaping them. She had a wooden vanity case that was inlaid with exquisite brass vines, leaves, flowers and fruits. If she wanted to get at coloured powders and pastes, rouge, mascara, eyeshadow, kohl, Snow, foundation and cold creams stored in tiny compartments and boxes in the inner recesses, she lifted the whole lid and laid it back. But if she wanted to look at herself or put the red tika on her forehead, she flipped half the lid back and stood the mirror on the inside at an angle. She spent hours squeezing blackheads from her face, plucking her eyebrows or just gazing at herself.
She gave him his shirt.
‘Do you know my name, Ravan?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t you want to know?’ She had a way of thrusting her chest out from time to time which left him confused and a little uncomfortable though he couldn’t say why.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, I would like to know your name.’
She caught hold of his hand. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
She pricked his index finger with the needle in her hand.
‘Ouch,’ Ravan yelled in surprise. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘To tell you my name.’
She pressed the tip of his finger hard till a big drop of blood gathered on it. His yelp had brought Parvatibai out. She stood in the door to the kitchen. He tried to withdraw his hand but his aunt held it fast. He had the odd feeling that she was doing it deliberately to provoke his mother.
‘The name’s Lalee. I’m the red running in your veins. I’m the red of the lipstick and the red of the paan I chew. I’m the red in the sky at the Gateway of India as night is about to fall.’ She put his finger in her mouth and sucked it.
He squirmed with an embarrassment that was mixed with a strange undercurrent of pleasure.
‘Let go of my hand.’ He was sure his mother was watching him.
‘I’m Lalee,’ his aunt whispered, ‘and you are my lal. Do you know the meaning of lal?’
‘It means red.’
‘Yes but in Hindi it also means son.’
Ravan jerked his finger away and slipped into his shirt with an excessive show of haste.
‘See? You are Lalee’s lal.’
‘I’m not your son.’
She squeezed his finger again, much harder this time. The drop of blood returned.
‘I need money,’ Shankar-rao came into the kitchen one day and told Parvati. ‘My expenses have gone up. I have a sister to look after. I’ll need at least ten rupees a day.’
Parvati Pawar. It had crossed her mind since that Thursday over a month ago when her husband had brought home his sister, to break Shankar-rao’s left leg, then the right; the left hand, then the right; to rip open his stomach, remove his intestines and use them as a rope for her and Ravan to climb out of the window and down to the bottom of CWD Chawl No. 17 and never to return; to pick up the wooden bat with which the maid beat the dirt and the life out of clothes and split open Shankar-rao’s head, no, change that, she would have liked to treat her husband’s head as her sari, or Ravan’s shirt and shorts or any piece of cloth and work on it all day and all night for weeks till there was no wood left in the bat. She had had other thoughts, some less violent but more malevolent than others. She had always known that she had two children and of the two Ravan was the older.
She did not have high or low expectations of life; she did not think of her lot as a good, bad or indifferent hand that fate had dealt her. Life was a given, you did your best which in Parvati’s case meant her damnedest best and that was that. She would not admit it because the honesty of admission could often mean that you had given up, but sometimes in the middle of her recent sleepless nights she was unable to lift her hand or turn on her side or sit up because her husband’s last move had broken her spine and spirit. Was it because Shankar-rao had thrown down a card that she had never seen before? Yes and no. It certainly had not occurred to her that her husband would wilfully destroy his home and so wantonly confuse their son. She had no truck with what Shankar-rao did outside his home but what was Ravan going to tell his friends or anyone who asked about the visitor? That she was his aunt? Chawl No. 17 and every other chawl in the CWD complex knew by now of Shankar-rao’s sister. Parvati’s own customers would enquire after her, start a conversation with her and linger at the door. All the neighbours starting from the children sniggered and smirked when they referred to the aunt and the women gloated over what they considered Parvati’s much-deserved comeuppance. That was all right with her. She could take it and like all scandals, this one too would lose its novelty and be forgotten.
Men and women carry on with each other. They always have and are not about to discontinue one-night stands, flings and affairs. Their neighbours might be incensed, their sense of morality deeply offended but that was natural. If you lived in a chawl, maybe it was the same almost anywhere else, you had to reinforce each other’s hypocrisy. It was bound to rile them that Shankar-rao, and not they, had got himself a companion and was brazen enough to install her at home. You had to hand it to Shankar-rao. He had been prone to disappear at night occasionally, and sometimes when he had gone to pick up the newspaper, he had stayed away for an hour or so. But that was the extent of his contact with the outside world. He didn’t have a job and he was not flush with money. Parvati didn’t remember too clearly what he looked like but never mind who his sister was, or where she came from, he had got her and the other men in the neighbourhood were envious that they hadn’t. But what was Ravan going to make of the woman, his father and his mother? Most of all, himself? She believed that like it or not, children inherit the sins and practices of their parents. Mind you, she was not even touching upon the nocturnal shenanigans of her husband and the woman.
Parvatibai had no imagination or rather she had no time to indulge the flights and options that a febrile imagination offers. The words surprise or astonishment are of course inadequate to describe her reaction to the newcomer but that was not what got her down. If she felt defeated before she had a chance to retaliate, it was because she had no idea how to react. Like Ravan and all the other pigheaded optimists of this earth she suspected that there was a right and effective response to any situation but it continued to elude her. Without breast-beating or self-pity, she had asked herself what she could do. She had not considered physical disfigurement of her husband as a deterrent in a raffish moment of light-heartedness. She knew that she would do almost anything to protect and save her home and her son, within what she considered reasonable limits. What did she consider reasonable? Shankar-rao was physically stronger than her but she could take him unawares. As a consequence she could be thrown into jail and Ravan would very likely be out on the street. Violence was no solution just as taking her case to the courts wasn’t. She didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer. Besides she didn’t think men, which is what judges were, would listen favourably to her dilemma. Appeal to the finer instincts of the sister? She didn’t think that there was much fineness there anyway. And she was never in two minds about one fact: the intruder was blameless. If Shankar-rao was so hell-bent on being made a sucker, who but a saint or a fool would resist taking advantage of him? Would someone please tell her, she was willing to pay him or her for the advice, how to get that woman out of the house? Her husband wanted ten rupees a day, that was three hundred rupees a month. Give or take some, that was about the size of her monthly profit margin.
Parvati answered her husband in her usual level voice. ‘We don’t make that kind of money. If you need more money, the only alternative is to take up a job.’
Parvatibai was much mistaken. There were other alternatives.
Two mothers? One for bread and butter and one for jam? Lalee’s lal, he liked the sound of that phrase. I too am red, Ravan thought. Red as the stop signal at the traffic lights. Red as the loincloths of the boys in the Sabha gymnasium, red as a parrot’s beak, red as, red as … he ran out of reds. He hated going out every night for a walk but that was because of his mother, not his aunt. He had not heard his father and aunt fight after that first day.
‘Lal’ his aunt called him. There was something funny about the way she sat. It made him feel furtive and he had to turn his eyes away. She always sat with her legs spread apart. But it was not just that. He would not have said this aloud or even to himself but there was something about the way she carried herself, stood with her hands on her hips, talked, pulled up her sari, walked or just looked at you that made him feel uncomfortable. He recalled how Shobhan’s sister, Tara, adjusted her body-movements, the lilt of her behind, the tension in her neck, the way she threw her pallu over her shoulder or flicked her tongue over her lips when she was eating sherbet or ice-cream but it was always for the benefit of her boyfriend, Shahaji Kadam. It was the same with the girls from the top floors, their come-ons were directed at specific people. With his Aunt Lalee almost anything that moved got the same treatment. She was never really relaxed. Even her involuntary habits had a studied element to them. You were always aware that she knew that you were watching, and was doing whatever she was to provoke you or to make it a point to tell you that she was not doing it for you but for somebody else.
‘How’s your finger, Lal?’
‘Which finger?’
‘You’ve already forgotten? The one that was bleeding.’
‘Oh that? That was weeks ago. It’s fine.’
‘What a shame. If it was bleeding, I could have sucked it and painted my mouth red.’
‘Yuck, I can’t stand the smell of blood.’
‘I love it. I’m a vampire. Come here.’
‘Not if you are going to pierce a needle into my finger.’
‘Can’t bear just a little pain for your Lalee, Lal?’
Red as, red as what that song said, lal lal gal. Red as cheeks.
‘Come here, you beastly little boy.’
He loved the names she called him and all the nonsensical epithets she used. He sat down next to her on the floor. In the daytime she sat on the durry while Shankar-rao got the bed, but at night it was the reverse. He didn’t feel shy or awkward because his mother wasn’t around. She was out very often these days. What she did was fill the tiffin boxes by four o’clock, leave them just inside the door, serve tea to his father, aunt and him and then stay out till 8 o’clock at night.
‘What?’
‘I’ve got something for you but if you don’t want it, forget it.’
‘For me?’
‘Haven’t you got a present ever before?’
‘Sure. Ma buys me my school uniform at the start of the year. When I was a good boy she used to buy me all my schoolbooks. And she buys me clothes for Diwali.’
‘Those things are not presents, silly. Books and uniforms are things you need. Presents are given just like that. For no reason at all except that it may be someone’s birthday or marriage. Or because you love someone and feel like showing that love.’
She pulled out a box wrapped in brown paper from the space she had appropriated for herself under the bed and handed it to him.
‘I can’t take it.’
‘Why?’ She almost screamed at him. ‘Why?’
He was cowed down by the anger in her voice. He stared at the floor and answered softly.
‘I’ve got nothing to give you.’
That elicited an even more unexpected response. She drew him close and kissed him on the cheek. She was delighted that he looked more surprised and pleased than she had expected. She kissed him on the lips. He went red.
‘Lal lal gal. Look how red your cheeks are. Maybe you’ve got red wine in them. Gifts are not a tit-for-tat competition. Open your present. Quick.’
He tried to peel the tape off carefully so that the brown paper would not tear. Aunt Lalee was not so patient. She stuck her nail into the paper and ripped it. He opened the box. He had never seen, heard of or imagined a shirt so red. And yet right there in front of his eyes folded immaculately inside the box was a red so beautiful he wouldn’t dare to wear it for fear of creasing or dirtying it.
‘For me?’
‘No. Your Aunt Lalee’s going to wear it. Stop wasting time. Let’s see how it looks on you.’
She made Ravan take off his school shirt and wear the new one. Oh, the smell of a new shirt. He kept sniffing at it.
‘Only dogs do that, Ravan. Smell their armpits, their coats, between their legs. Stand up straight and let me button you up. Look at you, you look like a red prince. Ravishing. All the women in the chawls are going to leave their husbands and throw themselves at your feet. You can’t afford to reject a single one because she’ll instantly commit suicide.’
‘What absolute nonsense.’ Ravan smiled shyly. He had not got so much attention from his mother as far back as he could remember.
‘You call it nonsense? If the sight of you drives your Aunt Lalee plain crazy, can you imagine what must happen to mere mortals like the women in these chawls? Star material, Ravan, sheer star material. One of these days a film director’s going to be passing this way and he’s going to spot you by chance. That’s the end. We’ll never get to see you again. You’ll be the new Shammi Kapoor, Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Rajendra Kumar. You won’t look at us. People will mob you. The only way we’ll get to see you is on the screen.’
‘Take off that shirt.’ His mother was at the door.
Ravan wasn’t quite sure how, but he knew he had betrayed his mother. Why couldn’t she have come a little later and allowed him to enjoy his moment of glory. She was such a spoilsport. How long had she been standing there watching him? Had she heard everything? His Aunt Lalee had such a way with words. She made even the most far-fetched things seem real. But when she talked about Shammi Kapoor, she touched something deep within him, a sacred and devout spot where the flame of adoration burnt eternally. Shammi Kapoor, his hero from Dil Deke Dekho, the man, he could even be a god, for whose sake he had committed a theft that had deprived him of his schoolbooks and earned him his mother’s rage and thrashings.
Just a couple of minutes before, his Aunt Lalee had conjured up a vision of him, Ravan, as the greatest star of all. His movie was being premiered, there were hundreds of thousands of people mobbing him outside the Broadway theatre (he would have preferred Liberty but he had not seen it, not even from outside and couldn’t incorporate it into his vision), people from the CWD chawls were screaming his name but he couldn’t hear them because there was nobody in that crowd who wasn’t chanting Ravan, Ravan. He saw his Aunt Lalee for a second but the mob was cradling him on the tips of their raised hands and passing him on straight into the theatre. Shammi Kapoor and Asha Parekh were waiting inside. They touched his feet and then hugged him. ‘Ravan,’ they said, ‘we were big stars and we had swollen heads. But you’ve brought us to our senses. You are the greatest. You are our master and we are your slaves.’ He would have liked to exchange a few words with them but the audience was clapping and hollering for him. As he was propelled into the auditorium, Shammi Kapoor called out to him, ‘Ravan, one request, one request from your greatest fan. Please honour it. I’ll be indebted to you all my life. Your red shirt.’
Ravan started to unbutton his shirt. He stopped and said, ‘No, I won’t take it off. You are jealous of my friendship with Aunt Lalee. In all these years you’ve never given me a gift. Aunt Lalee’s been here for barely three or four months and already she’s given me a shirt. Not an ordinary shirt but a red one, the colour of Aunt Lalee.
His mother went into the kitchen. If she was angry, disappointed or let down by her one and only son, she did not show it. Aunt Lalee drew out a small ball of cotton from her vanity case and then a brocade purse whose plastic gold thread was tarnished to a dirty black. Inside were ranged ten tiny glass bottles with glass stoppers. Aunt Lalee examined each bottle individually and then opened one. A heavy, stupefying perfume emanated from it. His aunt tilted the bottle gently and wet the cotton. A relentless wave of nausea started to build inside Ravan. His head reeled and his legs felt like butter on a hot day. The vapours from the bottle filled his head and glazed his eyes. Lalee rubbed the cotton swab on Ravan’s wrist and then behind the ears. Ravan blacked out. He was hit by a tidal wave. A 400 m.p.h. sneeze threw Ravan up in the air. His head jerked and his limbs were flung in all directions.
Aunt Lalee’s purse shot up in slow motion. Ravan was still dancing up there in mid-air. A series of rapid-fire sneezes would not allow him to touch the ground. The purse started to lose height. With the precision of a practiced football player, Ravan headed the purse once more into space. It rose, it lurched, it emptied its contents. The bottles disengaged themselves. They tinkled like crystal in a chandelier and splintered on the floor. Ravan’s red shirt was now wet with ten overpowering perfumes. The fit of sneezing was, if such a thing was possible, much worse than before.
‘You … you … you,’ it took a while for his father’s sister to find her rhythm, ‘you shit, you arsehole, fool.’ She lit into Ravan with the flat of her hand, her fist and knee. ‘Do you know how much those attars cost? And those priceless bottles?’
‘Don’t raise your hand against my son again,’ Parvatibai interrupted Ravan’s dismemberment, ‘ever.’
‘Can you see what your stupid son has done? Is your bloody father going to replace the perfumes or the perfume bottles?’
‘The poor man’s long dead. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. As for my son I wonder why you were trying to win him over. A little too young for you, I would think.’
Parvatibai had to admit that that was uncalled for. She could not quite fathom Shankar-rao’s sister’s relationship with Ravan. Of course she was playing him against his mother, but there was more to it. Ravan, Parvatibai sometimes got the feeling, was her only human spot.
Parvatibai unbuttoned Ravan’s shirt and got him out of it. ‘Put on your shoes and sweep the floor. Make sure you collect even the tiniest fragment. Then mop the floor and have a bath.’ She turned her attention to her husband who was wearing his latest acquisition: an expression of false bravado on his face. ‘I want to have a word with you. Inside.’
‘She and I have no secrets,’ Shankar-rao parried and looked at his sister for approval. ‘Say what you want in front of her.’
‘You may share all you have with her but I don’t think I care to humiliate you in front of her.’
Shankar-rao’s face fell. He went into the kitchen.
‘Where is the stove?’
‘What stove?’
‘The third primus stove.’
‘Oh that.’
‘Yes, oh that.’ Parvati did not lose her patience.
‘We wanted to eat some fish and she wanted to buy Ravan a gift but there was no money in the tin under the papads.’
‘So you sold that stove I bought just two months ago?’ There was a crack of disbelief running through Parvati’s voice. ‘Do you know how much these industrial stoves cost? How do you expect me to cook for fifty people without it?’
‘Don’t make a drama of it. Besides we didn’t sell it, we just pawned it.’
‘How am I going to get it redeemed?’
‘You’ll think of something.’ Shankar-rao was pleased with his sense of sarcasm. ‘You always do.’
‘You sell one more thing from this house,’ Parvati walked to the other stove on which the lentils were bubbling, removed the steaming lid with her bare fingers and dipped the big ladle in it, ‘and I’ll throw this dal at you.’
‘Like hell you will.’
‘Try me. Try me now.’
Shankar-rao stopped smiling.
In the past five or six weeks, Parvatibai had taken to going to the temple regularly. She prayed with an intensity that must have intimidated the gods. In mythical times they were often caught in a bind. Overwhelmed by the unswerving and relentless force of an ardent disciple’s devotion, they were compelled to part with boons. Soon a time came when the devotee’s powers posed a threat to the world order and the gods themselves. Desperate and fighting for survival, the gods resorted to dubious, unorthodox and underhand methods—subterfuges, sex, not to mention foul play—to regain the upper hand. Parvati’s was a strange and perhaps misplaced prayer. She appealed to the goodness, reason and sense of fair-play in the gods. She forgot her surroundings and would not have returned home in time but for the fact that the temple-doors shut at 7.30 at night.
There were a couple of things preying on her mind: she had to get her husband’s sister out once and for all, at almost any cost. The reasons were obvious enough. Her son was at extreme risk. The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house. The outsider’s presence also made Parvati realize something about herself. Parvati discovered to her surprise that she actually resented the loss of her independence and freedom. She earned her living. She had, she thought, earned the right to make her own decisions. But there was something which was even more pressing than these matters. What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two? All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit. She had nothing against the unborn child. But she didn’t want him in her house and she didn’t want to support him. It really boiled down to one thing: the woman had to go, she had no idea how, though. If she did, why was she having to importune the gods? The folks up there, however, seemed a little unresponsive. Perhaps they had finally learnt a lesson. Mankind was nothing but trouble. Let them sort out their own affairs. Frankly, gods though they might be, they had enough problems of their own.
Someone she met at the temple told her about an Ananta Baba, a holy man of such powers that he could alter destiny and fate. Parvati was by nature and belief down to earth. She was not favourably disposed towards middlemen and intermediaries. God was a personal matter. The greatest of saints like Dnyaneshwar, Kabir and Tukaram had always maintained that when you could approach the top guy, there was little point in going to the underlings.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. Despite her reservations, Parvatibai visited Ananta Baba on four or five occasions. He was a good man, at least he did not ask for money or payment in kind. He listened patiently to her, gave her a black thread which was blessed and did not say whether things would improve or not.
What was the framework in which the celestials functioned? Wasn’t there a time-frame within which alone intervention and aid had meaning? After all what was the point of succour if the person was beyond help? Was it possible that the gods who lived outside time did not comprehend the concept of time and its finality for mortals? One thing was certain: far from any help or assistance coming Parvati’s way, matters had deteriorated to a point where her livelihood was threatened. Shankar-rao was a fool and that was that. It was his sister who was a conundrum. Parvatibai was of the belief that the key to human beings was self-interest. She was beginning to realize that she was wrong. Self-interest would have dictated that the least the new woman would do was preserve the status quo. Where else in Bombay could she get a roof over her head, three meals and non-stop service, all of them for free? And yet all that Shankar-rao’s sister seemed interested in doing was destroying Parvati’s home. Where would that leave her? She too would be out on the road but that obvious consideration did not figure in her thinking.
Parvatibai had heard that the gods visit trials and travails upon mankind to test them. Test what? Their faith, their loyalty, their fortitude, their capacity for suffering? She thought that this was what rotten parents did: they did not know how to handle their impotence and rage against their partners, fate or the world and so beat their children and said it was for their own good. She had no idea what good ensued from piling hardship upon hardship, evil and torture. If watching people lose heart, break down and squirm, gave the gods pleasure, then they were stranger than men and women. Whatever the truth of the matter, Parvatibai knew that she could not afford to leave the house for such long periods from now onwards. If she had had any choice, she would not have left home even to go shopping for vegetables, rice and other necessities.
The next morning Parvati got up an hour earlier than usual since she had to make do with two stoves instead of three. She went out after the lunch boxes had been collected. One earring was already with the pawnbroker. She gave him the second one and redeemed the stove. On her way back she tried to wrestle with a marketing dilemma: should she raise the price of her lunches and dinners by two rupees a month? Just a month before Shankar-rao had brought his sister home, her clients had raised hell and threatened to take their business to somebody else when she had increased the price of the meals. Would the traffic bear the strain of one more price-hike? It was dicey. At the very minimum, anywhere between five to ten customers would abandon her. Would the gains offset losses? Even if they did, which she doubted very much, she would not get to see the money. As soon as Shankar-rao and his sister heard Parvatibai telling her customers that their meal-ticket was going to cost more, they were bound to want to buy an imported American car like the winged one in which she had seen Raj Kapoor drive past, or a bungalow on Juhu beach. No, she would either have to say goodbye to her earrings or wait for a windfall to repossess them.
