‘What have you gone and done to yourself, son?’ Father Agnello D’Souza crossed himself and asked Eddie the question in alarm.
‘Yes, your son. I haven’t begun to tell you the brave and magnificent deeds of your son yet.’
‘My son?’ Father D’Souza stepped back in even greater alarm. Soft black silk slithered on his skin. Eddie’s father’s eyes were fixed on him. The next moment he would raise his right hand from the coffin and point it at him. I need some clarifications here, Father. Is it true Eddie is your son? Not mine? I need an answer, Father. Now. Unless I get to the bottom of this affair, my soul won’t be able to rest in peace. ‘Lord God, Jesus Christ, you are my witness,’ the tremulous words finally escaped him, ‘Eddie’s not my son. Why do you say such terrible and untrue things? What will people say if they heard you?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Father.’ Violet Coutinho laid a gentle hand on his shoulder to pacify the overexcited priest. Burning coal. Atomic radiation. A leper’s hand. Father Agnello drew back even further. Taken aback by his reaction, Violet opened the floodgates on Eddie.
‘This, it’s this boy who’s ruined my whole life, destroyed my peace of mind. I sent him to get onions last evening at 5.30. He returned at 10.45 without the onions or the money. And in this condition, if you please. Not a word of explanation either.’
‘I tried, but you locked the door on me,’
‘Don’t you dare say a word, shameless boy. God knows what he was up to, Father. Please help me, Father. I don’t think I can bear it any more.’
‘You said that the last time too.’ Father Agnello was going to get his pound of flesh today but Violet was determined to have the last word.
‘That’s because you never straighten him out.’
Violet had not taken Eddie into the house the previous night. And she played the same trick she had when Mr Furtado had dragged him upstairs. She had a heart of stone, this woman who claimed to be his mother. Which mother would torture her son, her very own son, in such a terrible fashion? The same stony silence, except that it weighed on him even more this time. Talk of suffering, what did she know about it? No one had stopped talking to her. Starving him was bad enough but to starve herself, Pieta and Granna, only she could have thought of that. (Correct that. He hoped Pieta would starve herself to death.) She alone could be that diabolical. Why couldn’t she be like any other mother and give him a drubbing? Let both her hands and mouth have free play till she felt better. See, he was not thinking of himself or of his own self-interest. He was concerned about her, he wanted to ease her pain. He had always had her welfare at heart. Why couldn’t she at least occasionally reciprocate? When he couldn’t take his mother’s silence any longer, he did something he knew he shouldn’t, but always did. He spoke to his sister in a whisper through the barred window. ‘What’s the matter with Mamma?’
‘What’s the matter with Mamma?’ The words came back amplified a million times over. ‘You should know. It’s because of you that she’s lost her sleep and peace. She hasn’t eaten and neither have Granna and I. At least they are old. But I’m young and growing and I need all the proteins and vitamins I can get.’
On some other occasion, Eddie would have cut her tongue out with a pair of scissors and thrown it to the crows. Or better still, wrung her neck with his bare hands. But today all he wanted was to become an ant or worm and disappear between the stone tiles of the floor. His sister had declaimed her piece to all of Mazagaon and yet his mother continued to darn the dress she wore to church as if unaware that he had returned, and she had locked him out. All the neighbours opened their doors and inspected Eddie’s condition at this late hour. Their children tried to talk to him but they were told to go back to sleep. He asked Sybil Pereira whether he could sleep at her place but before she could answer, Pieta had once again woken up the dead.
‘Don’t you dare interfere, Sybil. Think of my mother who works night and day to feed this boy. Her eyes have become so weak, she can’t thread a needle any more.’ She found the word she was looking for and raised her decibel level. ‘She’s devastated by his conduct.’
You had to hand it to her. She may have been a parakeet but no mere bird could have matched the tremulous quiver in her voice. When his mother complained, Eddie had no problems going deaf. But, when Pieta reproduced her mother’s speech verbatim, she put so much feeling into it, that even Eddie loathed the boy who put his mother through such agony.
They didn’t eat that night. The kerosene stove was not lit the next morning and nobody got breakfast before going to church.
It finally began to dawn on Eddie that his mother had changed her strategy totally. She was not going to raise her hand against him. A new Violet was in the making. Long-suffering, hardworking, forbearing and selfless, the essence of her personality was going to be extreme martyrdom. He would have to bear her like an ache that would not go away. He was right without knowing it. Nobody can match the sanctimonious cruelty of martyrs.
Father Agnello D’Souza was solemn and dour. He took off his specs to glare at Eddie. ‘Come inside.’
‘Why?’
‘For confession.’
‘I confessed last Thursday, don’t you remember?’
‘Don’t argue. Get in.’
‘Must I?’ Eddie asked his mother. She looked away. Pieta pressed her lips together and said a thin ‘yes’. Eddie’s lips moved soundlessly.
‘Mamma,’ Pieta yelped as if some stranger had unzipped her dress on a crowded road, ‘he called me a bitch.’
‘Shush now,’ Violet shut her up.
‘Go, my child.’ Granna put her hand on Eddie’s head. ‘Tell the priest whatever you did last night and beg forgiveness of God. Both you and your mother will feel lighter and better.’
There was a high, dark and arching quiet in the church. Beams of light descended from the skylights and froze whatever was in their path. An ancient woman sat under one of the spotlights. She had broken out of time and the cycle of life and death. She sat alone with her God. The small shrunken body on its knees was more still than a graven image. Her head was bent forward and the light caught in her silver hair hung over her head like a nimbus. The pomegranate beads in her rosary dripped steadily without her arthritic fingers moving.
Far away, above the altar, Jesus Christ continued to haemorrhage silently. His head hung limply to the right. Eddie understood that this was a clay Christ. But each time he looked at him, he had an intense urge to pry out the nails in his hands and feet and bring him down. Sometimes at night he spent hours struggling with those nails. Exhausted, he would try to pull Jesus off, instead of the nails. One of these days, the nails would stay where they were and Jesus would come crashing down on him.
‘Do you have any idea of the consequences of your actions? You are so young and yet how you’ve hurt your father and mother. Ever thought of that? That was no slip of the tongue, I meant your father. Even if he’s not here, he’s watching you constantly. Let alone your parents, do you realize how you are torturing our Lord Jesus? Even a single sin, a single sinful thought can cause him unbearable pain and open his wounds again. He has to bleed again and again to wash your sins.’ A livid Father D’Souza narrated the far-reaching effects of Eddie’s crimes to him in a hoarse whisper.
Eddie was not particularly disturbed by the pain he was causing his parents. His father was beyond his imagination and hence incapable of feeling pain. He had seen his father’s photograph at home but found it difficult to believe this man was once made of flesh and blood. And even if he was, he could neither relate to him, nor did he want to. If his father had had the slightest feeling or sympathy, he would not have allowed Eddie to starve last night and this morning. As for his mother, they were quits. He was giving her as hard a time as she was giving him. Frankly, he thought she was having a better time of it than he was. But he became terribly restive at the thought that Jesus’s wounds were bleeding again because of him. He wanted to break open the hard crust which had formed over the long and throbbing lesion under his chin by hitting it against the back of the bench in front of him. He would keep on bashing his head till the gash reopened and he washed Jesus clean with his blood.
While Eddie’s motives and intentions were mostly laudable, he was wise enough to appreciate that it is easier to bear someone else’s pain—even if that someone else was God himself—than one’s own. For hundreds of years they had left the Son of God hanging on the cross and now Father D’Souza had the temerity to suggest that he was responsible for Jesus’s sufferings. In a fit of temper, Eddie asked, ‘Then why don’t you bring him down and bandage his wounds?’
The blood receded from Father Agnello’s face. He was speechless. It was such a simple and logical thought, it could only have come from the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer himself.
‘Eddie,’ he thundered. The old woman kneeling at the front of the church looked back at them startled. ‘How dare you blaspheme in the house of the Lord?’ He caught hold of Eddie’s neck and forced him to his knees. ‘Father, please forgive this worthless boy. He’s thoughtless.’ But even as he begged the Lord, that ghastly suggestion Eddie had made entwined itself around his mind. Satan’s coils seemed to feed his anger but he kept a hold on his voice. ‘Where did you go yesterday? Which gang of scoundrels and rascals were you with? Have you seen yourself in the mirror? No decent boy would be seen like this.’
‘I didn’t want to come. Mummy forced me to.’ Eddie was cowed down by now. He didn’t believe his own words. ‘I wasn’t with any gang. Twenty people, no forty, surrounded me and attacked me.’
‘Stop it. What do you take me for, a babe in the woods who’s still being fed milk through a dropper? If you don’t want to tell the truth, at least don’t tell lies.’
Eddie looked at him in despair and amazement. ‘I’m telling you the truth. I swear to you.’
‘Get out. Swearing falsely in the holy of holies, our own Mother Church? Have you no shame? Fifteen or thirty people fell upon you. As if you were carrying gold bricks on your person. I am kind and gentle but not a fool. Leave the church. I can’t bear to see your mother suffer. Otherwise I would not have seen your black face again. Why are you staring at me? I said get out.’
Having decided that Eddie was trying to stare him down, Father D’Souza tried to outstare him. It was an uneven contest. Eddie’s mind had stopped functioning. He continued to gaze blankly at Father D’Souza. Father D’Souza took short, large breaths in an attempt to keep his eyes open. He put pressure on his eye muscles to widen his eyes as much as possible. That made him look more outraged than he was. Am I overreacting? What if he is telling the truth? Is the boy being defiant or am I imagining things? And suppose it is not Lucifer wound round him but Jesus trying to reach him?
The wretched boy was a scoundrel, no two ways about that. Father D’Souza blinked.
Eddie was on the last step leading out of the church when Father D’Souza spoke to him again. ‘If there is a little shame left in your heart, come for confession in the evening and beg the Lord’s forgiveness.’
There were still a few young couples and four or five families talking to each other in the large compound of the church. But Eddie’s mother, sister and Granna were not among them. He felt forsaken. Was it possible that even the woman who had caused him such wordless pain and agony had lost interest in him? He felt dead, formless and empty. Entire galaxies could have traversed through him unhindered. He was touched by the terrible loneliness of the Son of God.
Some blows are such that it takes years for the wounds to appear. There is no greater loneliness on earth than when someone turns his back on you. The loneliness of death, misunderstanding, distance, separation and irreconcilable differences cannot match it. But the aloneness that even Jesus could not bear was the loneliness of being forgotten.
Jesus was Lord God. The only Son of our Father. God sent him down to cleanse the sins of mankind. The nailed Christ broke down once, just once. ‘Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me.’ What was he trying to say? After all Christ was all-knowing and knew God’s plan for him. How could he speak his mind? How could he reveal that God had not deserted him but that he had completely slipped out of God’s mind? How else can you explain a father abandoning his only son to suffer such terrible pain and suffering and loneliness.
‘So, what did Father D’Souza have to say about your unforgivable conduct?’ Since nobody else was willing to ask, Pieta took it upon herself to enquire of Eddie. His mother gripped the primus stove firmly in her left hand and with her right she pumped air rapidly into its brass belly. The chill blue flower above the burner blossomed in a rush. And along with it the flaring hiss that would drill into your brain long after you were asleep, long after you were dead. Violet put the pot of beef stew on the stove. Eddie felt relieved. Granna was grating a coconut. Eddie picked up a pinch of snow-white fluff and put it in his mouth and said softly to Pieta, ‘Father D’Souza said your sister Pieta is such a sweet girl, kick her in the butt at least five times a day without fail.’
He had an innocent and ingenuous smile on his face. Pieta leaned forward to hear his whispered message. She planted her nails in Eddie’s face and tried to scratch him but Eddie wouldn’t hold still. ‘Ma, did you hear what Eddie said? He said that Father Agnello told him Pieta is such a sweet girl, kick her in the butt at least five times a day without fail.’
Violet gave Eddie a searing look and incinerated him. The silence continued. She was not willing to make peace. Granna said, ‘Enough now, Eddie. Get out of those torn clothes and take a bath. And you, Pieta, if you tattle on your brother once more, I’ll not give you that piece of silk I bought for your birthday.’
Pieta was aghast. Here was the criminal standing next to her in person. Instead of banishing him for life, though come to think of it a public hanging in the CWD grounds would have been more apposite, Granna, her very own grandmother, had insulted her. She was sure now that rank injustice and unfairness would be her lot in life.
‘I’m leaving. See if I step into this house ever again.’
Granna and her mother ignored her. Eddie was the only one who was sympathetic and had kind words for her though he mimed rather than spoke them. Go, my pet, go. Leave this instant, his hands and expression suggested, don’t ever come back. These people don’t deserve you. Pieta was in a fix. She certainly did not want to acquiesce in her brother’s wishes. And yet it was a matter of honour, now that she had spoken. Who was worse, her mother and Granna who had taken the news of her impending departure so calmly or her rogue brother who continued to encourage her magnanimously in her proposed course of action? Her resolve, however, was shaken only for an instant. She walked to the door and lifted the latch decisively. She opened the door and looked back. She was not the tallest in the house but she managed to look down on her family. Her gaze passed over her brother, Granna and then Violet.
‘I’m leaving. We’ll not meet again. I’m going to commit suicide. I’m going to leap into the creek. Perhaps I’ll lie across the rail tracks and the local train will make three equal parts of me. One for Eddie, one for Ma and one for Granna. I do not bear a grudge against any of you. It is not your fault. You are incapable of appreciating me. You won’t know my value till I die. You must learn to take care of each other since I’ll no longer be here. If you repent and grieve for me, try not to weep too much. It will be too late.’
Eddie watched his sister in awe. His admiration for her at this moment was boundless. He was not sure that he had followed all the metaphysical ramifications of her speech but he was staggered by the audacity and reach of her imagination. He saw the three parts her body had been cut into. Head and legs on either side, torso in the middle. One for Ma, one for Granna and one for me, she had said. Which one do I get? He was enthralled and overcome by Pieta’s inspired acting. He had not seen the likes of it before. Truth to tell, if you had called it acting, he would have called you a fool. When it’s truer than true, how can you possibly call it acting?
Pieta guessed that she had floored her brother Eddie. Two more heart-rending emotional sentences and the fellow would sob his heart out. When she said her last ‘goodbye’ softly, he would be on his knees, begging her forgiveness and mumbling distractedly, ‘Never, never again will I say such awful things to you, please don’t go, please, I’ll do anything you want, just change your mind.’ But Pieta’s sights were set on greater things, infinitely greater things. She was going to make her mother and Granna cry till they got hiccups. Revenge, sweet revenge. Let mother and daughter break down and plead, let them bring the building down with their tears and sorrow, lesser hearts would crack but not hers, she was not going to pay any heed to them. That train was heading straight for her. The driver saw her. He blew the horn. He put his entire weight on the brakes. Too late. Nothing was going to be of any use now. All she needed to do was take her father’s name. Victor Coutinho. The Papa she had never had or had had only for a year. He was the only one in this world who would understand what she had been through. I’m now going to him forever. That said, her mother would crumble. She would pursue her on peeling, bloody knees and hold Pieta in her arms and rock her till she fell asleep. She knew all the dialogue and action by heart. But before she delivered the fell blow, she would have to prepare the ground a little, draw out the last drop of emotion. ‘You may take my ruler and eraser, Eddie. My doll Cecilia I leave to Aunt Grace’s Ruth. The perfume which John Uncle got me from Madagascar and which I’ve used only twice so far I leave to you, Mamma. Whenever you apply it, even when you merely open the bottle, you’ll remember your one and only daughter, Pieta. And to Granna, I bequeath the polka-dotted red and white silk,’ Pieta was not one to shy from the full weight of irony, ‘with which she was going to make me a dress. Make a blouse in my memory with it and wear it to church every Sunday.’
Not just her audience, Pieta herself was wrung out by the elegiac quality of her peroration. But her shameless and heartless Granna destroyed the tragic effect she had so meticulously and painstakingly built. A stone would have melted and wept. Instead Pieta’s grandmother cracked up. Not a soft snigger or a smile that hovered between the lips and the cheeks, either. A full, immoderate and villainous ha ha ha till the tears flowed from her eyes. And even then she continued to laugh.
Pieta was filled with loathing and disgust. She felt such boundless pity for herself, she forgot her climactic and masterly final stroke. She did not want to spend another minute in this house with its worthless people. She walked out but not without slamming the door hard.
‘Pieta, Pieta I was wrong. Please forgive me. Honestly I am sorry,’ Pieta kept walking down the staircase despite Granna’s words. When she reached the second floor she craned her neck and looked up. She waited till her grandmother was just fifteen steps behind her, then she set out determinedly to die.
Eddie’s sorrows were of a different order. He drew the curtains and sat on the stool with rotting legs in the tiny area in the kitchen where the family bathed. The first mug of cold water on his body and back, and his courage caved in. How was he to face the evening? How was he to present his black face, his black sins and his black soul to Father Agnello D’Souza? And yet, if his problems had ended there; he would have considered himself lucky. His worries and fears were legion. It was no state secret that he had committed horrendous and unmentionable crimes. Why else would Father Agnello be so enraged? But he could not for the life of him guess what they were or give them names. He had tried to speak the truth this morning but it was plain that that was not going to be enough. He was more than willing to confess before God. But he was beginning to understand just how low he had fallen: he did not even know what his crime was.
As he finished his bath, the sizzling blue flame in the primus stove turned yellow and leapt almost to the ceiling. His mother tried to pierce the micron hole at the bottom of the burner with a primus pin, gauge number four. But she couldn’t locate it and, even when she did, the carbon particle or speck of dust that had lodged itself there would not budge. He wondered why the flames did not engulf him and put an end to his misery. The pin went in and the stove began to breathe freely.
He had been fasting since last night. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and he was ravenous. But when he sat at the table, he couldn’t get a single morsel down. Though Pieta’s attempts at suicide had not met with success, the atmosphere at the dining-table was funereal. Granna had caught up with Pieta outside their chawl. Pieta had put up heroic resistance and performed a stunning one-woman show in technicolour and stereophonic sound without the aid of loudspeakers. ‘I will not return, not on my life. Everybody mollycoddles and pampers Eddie. I am a stepdaughter in my own house. Let go my hand or I’ll miss the 12.47. After that there isn’t a fast train till 3.30. And without a fast brain, there won’t be clean cuts and three even parts.’
She said she could hear her father calling her. Her timing was slightly off, her throat was sore and her voice was hoarse with all that screaming and weeping and her mother wasn’t there but she knew that everyone in the CWD chawls was her audience, even that villain Ravan was watching spellbound. She took a deep breath and said that devastating piece about her father, how he alone knew her value and how she was now going to be with him forever. Not just the very old and the womenfolk but strong young men who had not shed tears for many years wept like babes at Pieta’s monstrously sad tale and its tragic end. Not just men and women and children but even the inert and cold brick buildings of the CWD complex cried their hearts out. Suddenly, Pieta’s mother was at the window. A six-syllable streak of lightning without thunder fell to the earth. ‘Pieta, come on up.’ When Pieta came home Violet slapped her. Pieta’s head swivelled a hundred and eighty degrees. Violet repeated the gesture. Pieta’s head returned to its normal position.
It was a red-letter day. A day that would go down in history. A day that Eddie had prayed for fervently for many years. God had answered his prayers with a generosity that would have converted a hardcore atheist. For the first time in living memory, his mother had hit Pieta. But the fates must surely be sourpusses and spoilsports. How else could you explain Eddie’s failure to take an interest in the proceedings? He did not jump for joy. He did not take his friends out for a night on the town. He did not declare the next day a national holiday. Instead, he lay in a state of hopelessness. He was in a tunnel and there was no light at the end of it because there was no end to the tunnel.
For the hundredth time today, he went over all that had transpired between 5.30 p.m. yesterday and 10.30 a.m. this morning. But the voice which should have shrieked in his heart and told him the difference between right and wrong, and which Father D’Souza said was the compass on the ocean of life, had gone dead. Or to be more precise, God’s voice or his conscience was malfunctioning and could not tell him where he had gone wrong. He considered praying, but what was the point? It was clear that God had lost interest in Eddie and forgotten him.
It was a Sunday but Violet’s sewing machine was not idle. There was a bird in it which was condemned to peck mechanically at the same loop of thread all its life. It was a sound that was sewn into the lining of Eddie’s brain. Whether he was in class, in the playing field, in the cinema theatre, the bird was always pecking away at his brain. But it was also a soothing sound. It was the sound of sleep for Eddie. All his living years he had dozed off at night while his mother was still working. Today was one day when that soporific was not going to work. The cares of the world were nothing compared to his problems on this black Sunday.
At a quarter to five Granna woke him up for a cup of tea. He looked at the clock on the wall, checked the time with his grandmother and got into his Sunday clothes and shoes and combed his hair in a frantic hurry. Only a callous sinner like him could have lost consciousness and slept during one of the worst crises of his life.
‘Where are you going in such a rush?’ Granna asked him. His mother had not yet broken her vow of silence.
‘For confession.’ Eddie was out of the door.
‘But I thought you confessed this morning?’
‘Father Agnello wanted me to come in the evening.’
The sinners stood in two rows. There was no knowing which line would end up at Father Agnello’s booth. Seven in one queue, nine in the other. Eddie opted to start his penance before confession. The longer he waited, the longer he would suffer. And if he suffered, Jesus might just possibly take pity on him, and, instead of Father Agnello, he could relate his litany of sins to Father Constantine. He joined the longer queue.
He was second in line. He suddenly had a premonition that this would lead to Father Agnello. He changed queues and went all the way to the back. He was number eleven now. Was it not possible to be absolved before confession?
It was his turn now. He tried to peep through the latticed window behind which the emissary of God sat in his black box. He pressed his nose, he twisted his neck, narrowed his eyes, but the darkness did not yield its secret. He would have disregarded the woman behind who was getting impatient, but the priest inside cleared his throat twice, knocked his elbow against the wooden partition and emitted a ‘huh?’ to nudge the sinner. Eddie’s throat went dry and his tongue became immobile.
The voice of God’s proxy thundered at him in a stage whisper, ‘Stop fidgeting, Eddie, and wasting my time. Start your confession.’
Oh God, I trusted you, I really did. I changed queues, stood that much longer. I suffered and what do I get for all my troubles? Father Agnello. Is there no fair play left in the world? Eddie put his neck on the block.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was on Thursday.’
‘Stop mumbling.’
‘Ma sent me to get onions last evening but I didn’t get them.’
‘Why?’
‘Paul Monteiro asked me to go to Crystal’s home and tell her that his father was seriously ill and was being taken to Masina Hospital.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then? Do you expect me to prompt you after every word?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Speak up. I haven’t got all day.’
‘I went to see Rock Around the Clock.’
‘What?’
‘Rock Around the Clock.’
‘I heard you. How dare you go to see a film that the Church has not approved of yet and may very likely never do?’
‘I didn’t know it was not approved, Father.’
‘Don’t you read the Good Samaritan, our school journal? It says so clearly in it.’
‘Paul gave me the tickets. He should’ve known.’ Got away this time.
‘Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law, Eddie. But we’ll come to that later. What happened then? The truth, Eddie, nothing but the truth. Watching a film won’t deprive you of half your collar and shirt buttons. And make you filthy as a gutter rat.’
‘That Ravan has a gang, Father. They call themselves the Mazagaon Mawalis. Their members always make fun of us. They insult our mothers and sisters. When we go to school they throw orange peels and rotten eggs at us. On Friday night I sent a message to Ravan. I said, “Sala, if you’ve got guts, come and meet us face to face. We’ll have a fight to the death on Saturday evening. Our gangs will meet at the playground next to the Railway Colony.” He said okay. I immediately got our gang ready and prepared for the fight. Santan Almeida is my deputy chief. Roger, Peter, John are the other members.’
‘What’s the name of your gang?’
‘Do or Die Devils. We fought for an hour and a half. They were nine, we were five. But we fought like lions and saved the honour of the top floors. Peter got scared and wanted to run but I stopped him. You see this wound under my chin, Ravan hit me with an iron pipe. He tore my collar too. Then I lost control. I punched him so hard I broke the bridge of his nose. He cried and he cried. He touched my feet and begged me to stop. He said, “Please stop, Eddie. Please. You and your Devils have won, the Mawalis have lost.” But I didn’t listen. I asked him whether they would chase after our women. He said, “Never.” I said if he ever touched our women, I’d break his legs.’
Eddie felt spent after that fight. He wiped his mouth and waited to hear the penance Father Agnello would give him.
‘Huh.’
Eddie didn’t have the courage to disappoint Father Agnello.
‘Then we went to Cafe Light of Iran and ordered five Cokes. I ordered two plates of mutton samosas for the gang. You know where you get the best non-veg samosas in Bombay? Light of Iran. But be there before six or they’re over. Then I ordered two more plates. We polished them off but then I realized I had no money. Boy, did we run for our lives. The waiter and the Irani just stood by and watched us disappear.’
‘Huh.’
More? What more did Father Agnello want? Eddie had already ransacked his memory for plots from all the comic books he had read. Mutt and Jeff, Archie, Roy Rogers. He added whatever tit-bits he remembered from the conversations of older boys and his friends but even that was not enough. He had to fall back on his own resources and imagination now and concoct his own masala. How many more terrible things could he have done in just one evening? But there was no end to Father Agnello’s appetite. Nothing was going to satisfy him and Eddie feared he would still be here when the church reopened for six o’clock mass the next morning.
‘We slipped into the railway quarters. Lots of Anglo girls decked in nylons and jewellery and solid high heels were going to meet their boyfriends because it was Saturday evening. We watched them.’
Over and out. Eddie stopped. But Father Agnello was not going to give up till he had got to the bottom of Eddie’s dirty mind. His silence lay there with its jaws open.
‘The staircases in the Railway Colony have fretted wooden lattices from which you can see everything.’
‘See what?’
Kiss me again. What does he think people look at from under a staircase? Eddie explained the mysteries of staircase watching patiently.
‘See what they’re wearing.’
‘You don’t have to stand under a staircase to see what dresses they’re wearing.’
Give me a break.
‘Not dresses. To see what they’re wearing under them. Two of the girls had flowers on their panties. They were twins. Do you know how fantastic white daisies look on blue? Sala, Peter has no taste. He preferred the sister with the yellow daisies on red. He was really hot. Those girls were standing at the stairwell two storeys above us and he was stretching his hand to touch their panties. What would have happened if their boyfriends had seen us? Can you imagine? They would have peeled our hides off. We are not going to take Peter out again with us. The bugger gets excited and it’s difficult to control him. As it is, half the fun’s gone these days. Hardly anybody goes out without panties any more. What’s the point of craning your neck for hours and getting a terrible crick, all for nothing? It’s become boring since Mr Johnson was transferred to Bhusaval.’
‘What about Mr Johnson?’
Father Agnello was really dumb. You had to explain every single thing to him. ‘What about him? The trouble was that Mrs Johnson had to go with him to Bhusaval. Sometimes, when she wanted to get cigarettes from the shop at the corner and she was wearing a thick dress, she wouldn’t wear a slip or anything else. That was too much. We would scramble on top of each other to peer inside.’ Eddie sighed.
‘Verily, Eddie, you have sinned.’ The volcano in Father Agnello now began to erupt with a vengeance. Wave upon hot wave of lava engulfed Eddie. ‘You are so young and yet look at the number of your sins. It is conceivable, at least theoretically, to forgive all those sins after the person who has committed them repents from the heart. But you have such a criminal mind, you’ve fallen so low and your soul is so warped that you’ve been reciting this interminable litany of sins with a great sense of pride. There’s not an iota of regret or repentance in your mind, heart or soul. Instead of feeling ashamed, you have been waxing eloquent and showing of. I do not know if you are the son of man or the son of Satan.’
Oh, what relief. Eddie’s labours had finally borne fruit. Father Agnello was no longer asking for more details. Eddie’s crimes had been identified and he was about to be punished. He was beside himself with joy. He could not believe his luck. He tore the dark velvet burgundy curtain behind the confessional and rolled at Father Agnello’s feet.
Eddie’s violent reaction caught both Father Agnello and the people queuing up for confession off guard. Father Agnello did not know what Eddie was up to. The others, those just beginning to gather for six o’clock mass, watched Eddie with apprehension. One of them rushed forward and tried to pick Eddie up. ‘Someone call a doctor. The boy’s having an epileptic fit.’ Father Agnello waved him away.
‘I was wrong, Father Agnello, I’ve sinned most terribly. As God is my witness, I’ll never again do what I did in the past. Punish me, Father, punish me any way you want.’
What was Father Agnello D’Souza to make of Eddie’s unorthodox repentance? Was the boy up to one of his usual tricks? Perhaps. But it was also possible that God had smitten the child and his grief was real. If that was the case, he, Father Agnello D’Souza, would be committing the sin of presumption. Who was he to question the ways and wisdom of God? ‘Save me, Father. Save me. I am caught in the quicksands of sin. Give me your hand and help me up, Father. I beg you, Father.’
That Sunday would be etched forever on Father D’Souza’s soul. When he was next sinking in the slough of despond, he would remind himself of the golden Sunday when God wrought a sea-change in a wicked and incorrigible sinner. He suspected that God had chosen Eddie deliberately to warn him of the sin of arrogance. No one, but no one, was beyond the pale of forgiveness. No man was so fallen that he could not be raised to heaven and the embrace of God Almighty. How he had gone astray, he, who should have known better. His pride had prevented him from seeing the work of God in this child. How else could he explain what the boy had said about Jesus? It was still a highly explosive thought and he wouldn’t mention it to anyone but praise be to the Lord God and his son Jesus. How shall I thank you Lord for retrieving this prostrate child from the claws of Satan and for chastising me?
The prostrate child was having a field day. The dams of repentance had burst and there was no staunching them. All his pent-up anger and grief and grievances against his mother, all the terrors of the previous night and of this afternoon were being washed clean in this deluge of weeping.
‘Get up, Eddie, get up, my son.’ Weeping tears of gratitude, Father D’Souza bent down and ran his fingers through Eddie’s curly hair.
‘Not unless you forgive me, Father.’
‘My forgiveness is of little import, Eddie.’ Father Agnello smiled. ‘I myself would not put too much faith in it. But God has forgiven you, Eddie. I know that His heart is filled with joy to see your great sorrow and repentance. For a sinner who exerts himself and disowns the devil is dearer to our Lord than a man to whom virtue comes easily. Rise, my son.’
‘Not until you tell me what penance I must do.’
‘Say twenty Hail Marys every day and pray that you will always walk in the shadow of God.’
At this, all the men and women who had watched the transformation of Eddie that evening fell to their knees and said: ‘Amen’. The next Sunday Eddie asked Father Agnello’s permission to pass the plate after mass. Father Agnello was delighted.
‘Of course, you may. You must help me in the work of the Church from now on.’
During the Eucharist, Eddie passed the golden plate on either side of the nave. It was a full house. The Sunday morning nine o’clock mass always was. On the collection plate, coins made a racket. Notes landed without a sound. Saint Sebastian’s was a poor parish. Mostly the plate rang out. Four- or eight-anna coins at the most. Two eight-anna coins so far. One from Mr Figuereido and another from Mrs Pereira. In the second row from the rear, Mr Rodrigues, the sole owner of the Happy Family Chemist, sat with his eyes closed in prayer. Eddie had to rattle the coins twice to break his reverie. Mr Rodrigues opened his eyes. He drew back his jacket and took out his wallet from the rear pocket of his trousers. He picked out a five-rupee note and set it on the plate.
‘I don’t have that much change.’
‘I don’t want any,’ Mr Rodrigues said and went back to his prayers.
On the Tuesday after he had borrowed Mr Rodrigues’ fiver, Eddie skipped school after lunch. He had done his homework. Advance bookings for the following week at cinema houses in Bombay started on Tuesdays. It took him four hours to get to the window. He got three one-rupee-five-anna tickets for the one o’clock show the following Monday. The Monday after, he was back at the Strand. He sold two of the tickets in the black market for five rupees each. With the third ticket he saw Rock Around the Clock. This time, nobody tore his shirt collar.
He was back next Tuesday with ten rupees. He bought three tickets for the following Friday, three for Monday and one for Tuesday, all for the one o’clock show. On Friday and Monday he saw the film again and sold the extras. On Tuesday, he booked for the coming week and saw the film yet again.
On Saturday morning Eddie was back at church. He prayed to God and thanked him from his heart. He got up and went to the charity box. He caught hold of the lock and pulled at it a couple of times.
‘What are you doing?’ Father D’Souza’s voice caught him redhanded. Eddie looked back quietly and met Father Agnello’s eyes. ‘Giving God what belongs to God.’ He turned and coaxed seven one-rupee notes down the slit of the charity box. Father D’Souza suspected that Eddie had said something profound, but he didn’t quite know what it was, and he didn’t want to let on that it had gone over his head.
Eddie discovered that he had a scalper’s mind. He was good at arithmetic and had a feel for what the market would bear. On two occasions he got ten rupees per ticket. Young men who wanted to impress their girlfriends but hadn’t stood in queues for the advance booking were always more desperate to see the film than others. He also had an instinctive sense of when the market was falling and cut his losses quickly. Perhaps the black market was Eddie’s metier. From scalping he could have graduated to smuggling. The sky was the limit here. Silver, gold, transistor radios, nylon and polyester saris and dress materials, cameras, record players, TVs, the market was wide open and growing. But there were two problems. The first was that Eddie believed rock’n’ roll was his vocation and not illicit trafficking. The other was a minor mishap.
