Aunt Lalee and Ravan had long since made up. Ravan was not going to hold it against her that she had lost her temper and thrashed him. After all, he had to admit that he had gone overboard with that tae kwon do demonstration on the attar bottles. Besides it was not possible to nurse a grudge against this aunt who was so worldly-wise and knew so much more about life than either of his parents or anybody in the chawls. She had a host of rich friends. She had been driven around in cars, stayed in palatial houses where the beds were round and the size of his home. She had smoked cigarettes, been to a film studio where she had watched Raj Kapoor shooting with Nargis for some film called Aah and had been asked by the dance director whether she would take part in a dance sequence. She had politely refused. She had standards, she said. Ravan didn’t quite know what she meant. Did Raj Kapoor, the dance director and Hindi films not have standards? Were her standards better or theirs? But he had said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and nodded his head vigorously.
‘If I had taken that role, I would have been a heroine today, with my smile, my musical voice, my looks and, needless to say, my exceptional figure.’ Ravan was not about to dispute such fundamental truths though he had some reservations about the gaps in Aunt Lalee’s teeth and her voice which tended to be a trifle affected and high-pitched but maybe that was the way women in high circles spoke. As to looks, she certainly stood out, with that trick of her hips which seemed to tell you to follow her, the angled elbow and the hand at her waist and the sari pallu always falling down, but he had to confess that while his mother was not his favourite person these past few months, his father’s sister was not in the same league as Parvatibai. Aunt Lalee certainly was more casual about her figure. There was an invitation and challenge in her eyes to check out the goods. Ravan was getting curious about female anatomy of late and tended to linger in the kitchen when his aunt was having a bath because she didn’t draw the curtain all the way and came out with a wet sari draped lazily around her but his mother always yelled at him and asked him to get the hell out before he was able to get a clear picture of the Red One’s topography.
Was he expected to affirm what Aunt Lalee was saying or comment or improve upon it? That was one good thing about her. She was not really interested in anybody else except when she wanted something. Ravan was struck by the curious observation he had just made. He had not meant to be unkind but if there was any truth in his perception, he would have to find out how he could possibly satisfy any of his aunt’s needs. Sure he was at her beck and call but so was his father. He too ran down to get paan and betel nut for her, have her saris pressed by the man in Chawl No. 21, buy a Roger’s carbonated ginger for her when she had indigestion or see her off at the bus-stop on Thursdays which was the day she visited her mother whom no one had seen.
What did she want of him? Why was she cultivating him? A month ago she had taken him to the Gateway of India for a boat ride. Ravan had dipped his hand in the water. If they kept going in a straight line, the wake of their boat could reach all the way to America. His history teacher had said that the Elephanta island which the boatman was pointing to must have been a thriving Hindu outpost and had some very fine caves and rock-carvings. The Portuguese had come there four or five hundred years ago across four thousand miles. Imagine touching the same water and being in the same sea as them. Was Vasco da Gama in that lot? What clothes had they worn? They were Catholics just like Eddie. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could take over the wheel and pay a return visit to Portugal? They wouldn’t believe their eyes. ‘Indian boy-captain lands on Portuguese coast’ the headlines would scream. If he hadn’t already decided to follow in the footsteps of Raju from Dil Deke Dekho, he would have joined the navy and travelled all over the world like Vasco da Gama and Columbus.
In Praise of Audacities or The Shortest Survey Ever of the Portuguese Adventure in the Old World
(Skip it if you want and move on with the story.)
Mario de Lima Leitao. Henrique de Meneses. Jorge de Almeida. Alfonso Lopes de Sequeira. Garcia de Noronha. Francisco Antonio da Veiga Cabral da Camara Pimentel. Bernando Jose Maria da Silveira e Lorena. Luis de Mendonca Furtado e Albuquerque. Wake up at four in the morning, finish your ablutions, face the east and chant these marvellous names. Their wondrous sonority is as elevating as that of a Sanskrit shloka. Open the Bombay or Goa telephone directory and you’ll find that the names have got drastically shortened. The poetry of chains of names and place-names has been severely cut down to D’Sa, Da Cunha, Saldanha and Mascarenhas. And yet they are among the last reminders and vestiges of a civilization that has left the shores of India. Whatever the injustices of colonial conquest and rule, fortunately one can still be beguiled and entranced by the beauty and lilt of an alien language and its culture. Who were these strange men—and they were almost all only men—with strange names who dared to cross unknown and unmapped seas, voyage for months over four thousand miles of dangerous and stormy oceans to come to India?
In 1494, John II of Portugal and Ferdinand of Spain signed the treaty of Tordesillas under the aegis of Pope Alexander VI, one of the most dubious Borgias and popes in history. Their rapacity, greed and avarice were no more and no less than that of any other European or Asian potentate of the 15th century. What was staggering was the sweep, megalomania and intemperateness of their appetites. Columbus had just crossed the Atlantic and discovered America for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, though to his dying day he did not give up his obstinate belief that he had found a new sea-route to Asia. (It would take another 200 years, 1726 to be precise, for the West to realize that Asia and America were not joined together in the region of the Bering Straits.) The two kings, however, did not aspire merely to the ‘new world’, they wanted the whole world. There was not much of a difference between the earth and a cake. They divided it. The earth was still Ptolemaic and flat then. Portugal took all lands and, even more critically, all the seas east of a line running between longitude 30 and 20, 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. Whatever was west of that line went to Spain.
The Portuguese half of the earth was a happy but academic concept until Vasco da Gama went round the Cape of Good Hope and landed in India in 1498. The division of the abstract spoils then began to have concrete implications. Immediately after the discovery of the sea passage to India, Dom Manuel I of Portugal appropriated the title ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and of India’. The Portuguese Crown had encapsulated its aims with astonishing clarity and articulation.
If the Portuguese king was the self-proclaimed Lord of the Sea in Asia, it followed logically that he was entitled to control all sea trade in Asia, and for that purpose police the coastline and the seas as well. In Europe as in Asia until then, the seas and oceans were free-trade zones open to all. It may have come as a bit of a surprise to Middle Eastern, Indian and East Asian sovereigns, seafarers and merchants that the Portuguese had walked away with the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese were among the first empire builders to teach us that it is always prudent not to consult those whose interests are likely to be damaged the most by your actions, a lesson that was learnt well over the centuries by Hitler and Stalin when they divided Poland or when America enunciated the Monroe Doctrine.
Talk of audacities, talk of originality of thought, talk of sheer gall, no one could beat the Portuguese. They reinvented the ancient concept that the right of ownership belonged to the one who made the first claim. It was a marvellous idea. Only the Portuguese Crown could trade in spice to Europe or between eastern ports within Asia. No one except those licensed by the Portuguese could ply the waters. No private trade even by the Portuguese, at least that was the official position.
The procedure was this: a trading ship got a pass or cartaz for a small fee from the Portuguese which stated the destination, nature of the cargo, name of the captain and crew strength. The money, however, was in the customs duties. A ship was under obligation to call at a Portuguese port both on its way to and back from its destination. No cartaz meant that the ship could be confiscated and its crew killed or sent to the galleys. Even a cartaz was not enough if the conditions were not fully met. You could not build or maintain a fort as the Sultan of Gujarat was to discover at Surat, unless it was approved by the Portuguese Viceroy. In return your ships were given protection against piracy. When the threat from the freebooters became more serious, the Portuguese organized convoys of trading ships guarded by an official fleet. The customs duties in Goa on an average amounted to 60 per cent of Goa’s total revenue collection in the 16th century. In the rest of the empire it was close to 65 per cent.
We have jumped the gun. Commerce was the last stage of the Portuguese King’s title. What preceded it was conquest and navigation. By 1511, the Portuguese had taken Malacca in southeast Asia. Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf followed in 1515. At various points in time the Portuguese had outposts in Mombassa and Mozambique in Africa, Macao, Macassar in the South China Sea and as far as Nagasaki in Japan, not to mention Brazil in the Americas, to name only a few. On the western littoral of India they had forts at Diu, Surat, Daman, Bassein, Bombay, Goa, Honavar, Bhatkal, Mangalore, Cannanore, Calicut, Cochin, Quilon and in Colombo in Ceylon. A remarkable spread by any standards, but extraordinary considering the times and the fact that Portugal was such a poor and small country and that its exchequer was almost always broke.
There could of course be no exploration or conquest without navigation. Portuguese ships were among the finest in the world. In the early 1640s, John Chandler, the British Consul at Lisbon wrote: ‘As for the nine Portuguese galleons they are well appointed ships, as hardly cannot be seen better, the less of them about 800 tons, and three of them about 1,000—all exceedingly well mounted with artillery.’ Both Lisbon and Goa, as also Bassein and Cochin, were major shipbuilding centres. King John IV of Portugal was so impressed with ships built in Indo-Portuguese shipyards, he considered using the Sao Laurenco as the flagship of the High Seas Fleet. While the master shipwrights were Portuguese, the carpenters, dock-workers and ordinary shipwrights were all Indian.
The Portuguese landed in Bombay in 1509. Like many an invader they felt compelled to make a show of strength at the outset. ‘Our men captured many cows and some blacks who were hiding among the bushes, and of whom the good were kept and the rest were killed.’ What happened to these good black Bombayites? Were they kept as indentured labourers or turned into slaves? The second seems unlikely but the question is not irrelevant. In 1434, the Portuguese imported the first African slaves to Lisbon. By 1448, they had grasped the economic dimensions of this branch of trade and set up a slaving centre on the African coast. But it was only in the 18th century that the slave-trade became a major growth industry. By then the initiative had passed from the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch to the French and English.
But to get back to India: In the sixteenth century, the seven islands of Bombay were nominally under the Sultans of Gujarat. It was Sultan Bahadur Shah who made over the islands, and Bassein on the mainland, to the Portuguese king in return for Portuguese aid against the Mughals. It is suspected that the only help he may have received was a push off a Portuguese ship at Surat that drowned him.
You could rent an island in Bombay from the King of Portugal for eighty-five pounds per year. The first man to rent an island in Bombay from the King of Portugal was a fine botanist and honorary court physician called Garcia da Orta. Mazagaon, where Ravan and Eddie were born, was one of the seven islands acquired by the Portuguese. Mazagaon, scholars would have us believe, is a mutation of ‘machha-gram’ or fishing village. Try thinking of an island that does not go in for fishing. Perhaps the simple Marathi translation of Mazagaon tells us more about the pride that the early inhabitants felt for the place: my village. As a Portuguese settlement, Mazagaon was famed for its mango orchards. They must have been truly magic trees for they bore fruit twice a year, once at the height of summer in May which is the normal mango season on the west coast of India, and once in late December. In 1572, the King of Portugal gifted the district of Mazagaon in perpetuity to the de Souza e Lima family who built a house known in its various incarnations as Belvedere, Mazagaon House or Mark House. White-washed regularly, the house served as a landmark for vessels coming into the harbour.
Bombay remained a Portuguese colony for over a hundred years. Then, in 1662, hoping for a major political and military alliance, the Portuguese royal house arranged the marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II of England. Part of her dowry was Bombay, which the British East India Company had been eyeing for a while. The contract notwithstanding, the Portuguese in India were loath to let go of Bombay. A month before it was finally ceded to the British, the Viceroy of Goa, Antonio de Mello de Castro wrote to the Portuguese monarch in astonishingly clairvoyant words: ‘I confess at the feet of your majesty that only the obedience I owe to your majesty as a vassal could have forced me to this deed.… I foresee the great trouble that from this neighbourhood will result to the Portuguese and that India will be lost on the same day on which the English nation is settled in Bombay.’
It is difficult to keep nostalgia and yearning at bay when talking of Bombay a bare twenty or thirty years ago. Extend that to fifty or seventy years and one has entered a time-warp when the romance and beauty of Bombay were at par with that of any city that has grown up next to the sea. If you looked east from Mazagaon Hill where Ravan sat listening to Prakash’s tirade against his father, you could have seen Portuguese merchantmen from a hundred and fifty years ago proceeding in a leisurely fashion to Elephanta island. (The Portuguese named the island after the stone elephant outside the caves. They also indulged in some exuberant target practice on the magnificent Maheshmurti and other carvings inside.) Mazagaon Hill itself is said to be the site where the first Portuguese to settle in Mazagaon, the Jesuits, built a chapel and a monastery. Perhaps that is the reason why the Mazagaon-Byculla belt has a heavier concentration of Roman Catholics and more parochial schools per square foot than anywhere.else in Bombay.
The green and the woods of Mazagaon have long since disappeared. The rich and the chic abandoned Mazagaon close to a hundred years ago and moved to Peddar Road, Breach Candy and to Malabar Hill, a sibling of the hills at Mazagaon and Cumballa. The port and the docks of Bombay have crowded out both the land and the easy and leisurely pace of Mazagaon. You can glimpse the older island culture in some of the by-lanes but the Mazagaon of Eddie and Ravan was a dusty, hectic and grey place of warehouses, shipping godowns and round-the-clock trucks moving newly arrived cargo into the hinterland. Mazagaon Hill was partially knocked down in 1864 by British railway engineers to make room for the harbour railway line, the fish market and the Electricity Board.
In 1530, Goa was formally declared the capital of not just Portuguese India but of its entire eastern empire, and became the focal point for Portuguese commercial, political and missionary forays into the East. On paper and by letters-patent the Viceroy of ‘Golden Goa’ was omnipotent, second only to the King himself. He had the power to make war and peace with ‘the kings and rulers of India and of other regions outside it’. The King promised ‘to confirm and fulfil exactly’ any truce or peace treaty the Viceroy may negotiate ‘as if it had been done by myself in person, and agreed and signed in my presence’. The Viceroy however was aware that, notwithstanding the royal sanction for all his acts, the Crown was capable of overruling him and there was, in theory at least, the possibility of a judicial investigation at the end of his tenure.
Apart from monetary, commercial and territorial gains, colonial India and the empire had other uses. Illegitimate sons and second, third, fourth and fifth sons whom primogeniture made redundant and jobless saw a future and a fortune in the colonies. Poor relations, needy friends and servants all tagged along with viceroys, governors and other overseas officials in the hope of a government post. The only ones who got left behind were wives. From 1505 to 1961, Portuguese India had 128 governors and viceroys. Of these only a handful brought their wives with them. There was as a matter of fact a good deal of intermarrying between the colonizers and the conquered.
Rivalry between those who married and stayed in India and those who returned to Portugal was often sharp and acrimonious. The former, known as Indiaticos, came lower than the latter, called Reinos, in the pecking order in the colonies. Barring some exceptions, most governors and viceroys were chosen from Portuguese nobility in Portugal.
The rivalry between Reinos and Indiaticos was just as strongly operative in the religious orders as in the laity. Dom Alfonso Mendes of the Society of Jesus was of the view that ‘very few individuals should be admitted to the Society here, because all our ills originate with this rabble, since they have very little learning and a great deal of envy and hatred against those of us who come from Europe.’ The sentiment, needless to say, was strongly reciprocated.
Everybody starting from the viceroy to the lowliest Portuguese official traded on the side or openly. Their salaries could not support them and there were often fortunes to be made by overseas as well as interport trade. The goods and destinations changed, what remained constant was commerce. Textiles, beads, pepper, cinnamon, saltpetre, rice and other foodstuffs from India were exchanged for ivory, gold-dust, ebony, hardwoods, silver, seed-pearls, horses, dates and anything for which there was a market. Often the Portuguese went into partnership with local merchants. The Goa economy, it is said, was dominated by Gujarati vanias and Saraswat brahmins.
The history of Portuguese settlements, it is often remarked, is the history of Jesuit settlements. This is obviously an exaggeration—there were other dedicated orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans, besides the Jesuits, not to mention the work of fine and intrepid sailors, admirals and great governors and bureaucrats—but there is a grain of truth in the statement. The Church Militant did not just battle and convert the heretic Hindu, Muslim and pagan countries and peoples which it colonized, it helped preserve Portuguese authority in India when it was seriously threatened.
God and Mammon were, if not the same, at least interchangeable. The brotherhood of Jesuits often interpreted the care of souls to mean an engagement with the full spectrum of life to promote the faith. They were custodians of Crown funds, ran the Royal Hospital in Goa, became moneylenders, supervised the minting of coins and looked after the fortifications at Diu, Chaul and other places, traded in sugar, slaves, livestock from their own plantations in Brazil, and even cast cannons at a pinch. To quote C.R. Boxer: ‘Their economic activities were therefore far greater than those of either the Dutch or the English East India Companies, which are sometimes termed the first multinationals.’
The Portuguese left India many years ago. But one of their legacies continues to be among the most powerful agents moulding young minds in the country: the hundreds of schools and colleges run by Jesuits, Franciscans and other clerical orders, including the school Eddie went to.
Within two hundred years of their arrival, the Portuguese had lost most of their colonies in Asia and Africa to the Dutch and the British. There were numerous reasons for this but the most important was that the Portuguese were hopelessly overextended. The wonder is not that such a far-flung empire petered out, but that it survived for so long when at no time were there more than 10,000 Portuguese in the colonies, including Brazil. Why did the British not throw out the Portuguese from Goa and the French from Pondicherry? Was there much profit left for the Portuguese in staying on in Goa? Salazar, the Portuguese strong man and dictator, must have seen the writing on the wall in 1947 when the British left India. But he hung on to Goa and painted Nehru into a villain when the Indian Prime Minister decided to liberate it.
Strange word, liberation. Did the majority of the people of Goa want to be liberated? They had not asked the Portuguese to occupy their land and rule over them 400 years ago. But they were realists and they had invested three to four centuries in the service of the new masters. A great many had converted to the colonizer’s religion and married Portuguese soldiers, bureaucrats, traders and professionals. The Portuguese were ‘family’. The language of business and the medium of instruction in schools was Portuguese. Now overnight they were being asked to disown family, sever connections with their patrons, give up their distinctive identity and lose themselves in a landmass a hundred times the size of Portugal and among 350 million Hindus and Muslims, and were told that this was liberation. They felt a sense of loss, nostalgia, upheaval … something that the rest of India was oblivious of.
And yet there were many staunch freedom fighters, both Catholic and Hindu, in the colonies of Goa, Diu and Daman. They wanted to be united with their motherland and often went to jail for it. In 1961 they got what they had fought for.
Now, thirty-five years after the departure of the Portuguese, there’s talk of setting up a Portuguese TV channel in Goa. The new colonizers, as we are all learning, are not countries but multinationals and satellite TV.
‘Will you take me to Elephanta?’
‘Now?’ Ravan’s aunt asked a bit alarmed.
‘No, one of these days, to see the carvings in the caves.’
‘I don’t care for carvings and such stuff. I have a better idea. Let’s have a picnic there.’
‘Really?’ Wasn’t his aunt amazing?
‘What’s so special about a picnic? Stick with me, Mr Ravan Pawar, and I’ll take you to Kashmir on a fifteen-day picnic.’
‘Kashmir,’ Ravan gasped and almost fell into the water. All the boys from the chawls including the ones from the top floors went to their ‘native place’ in the summer holidays. All except Ravan, that is, since he did not have grandparents. Of course, any other relatives would have done too. Parvati had a sister and a couple of cousins whom they could have visited. She refused to have anything to do with them. She did not want her sister and cousins to know that she had a good-for-nothing husband and secondly, once you visited someone, they had the right to pay you a return visit and Parvati had neither the money nor the time to look after them. When Ravan was young, one of the cousins had written to say that he and his family of seven were planning to come across to Bombay during the Diwali vacation and could they stay with Shankar-rao and her? She had written back in some haste to say that it would have been wonderful to have them but what a pity they hadn’t come during the last Diwali holidays as next week they were moving to Jamshedpur since her husband Shankar-rao had got a job there.
‘Sure. I’ve been to Kashmir. Dal Lake and Nishat Baag in Jammu and Pahalgam. What’s Kashmir, we’ll travel all over India.’
Ravan looked at his aunt with awe. Two men were staring at her with eyes that seemed to be unbuttoning her blouse. She smiled back, Ravan wasn’t quite sure whether it was at them or at him. He didn’t care. He was going to make up for all those years of deprivation. And he was not about to go to some piddling town like Sawantwadi or Roha or even Poona but to that paradise which they called the Switzerland of India.
Aunt Lalee might want a hundred things from him but he had nothing to give her. So there was nothing to worry about. And yet he was ill at ease in her presence. He could not get rid of the feeling that he had become the battleground where the two women in his home fought a pitched but silent war.
‘I would like to have either mutton or fish from tomorrow at least once a day,’ Aunt Lalee told his mother. It had escaped him that the two women had hardly exchanged a word till now. His mother had not even realized that Aunt Lalee was addressing her. ‘I said I would like to have mutton or fish at meals from tomorrow.’
‘You talking to me?’ Parvati asked bewildered.
‘Who else? Does that dolt of a husband of yours do the cooking here that I should ask him?’
Parvatibai smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘We would all like to eat mutton and fish once in a while but where’s the money to come from?’
This time around Parvatibai took care not to advise her husband to take up a job to keep his sister happy nor did she tell Ravan to stay where he was when Aunt Lalee got up in a huff and said, ‘Let’s go, Ravan. We’ll go and have an omelette at the Light of Iran Cafe.’
The same thought seemed to have struck mother and son: had another stove disappeared from the home or was it the fan? It couldn’t be Parvatibai’s eight gold bangles or her grandmother’s gold necklace which for reasons unknown to her was traditionally called a garland of shoes in Marathi, since she had left both these items with one of her most trusted friends at the Byculla market. The fan was whirring away and all three stoves were cooking the evening meal.
‘Are you coming, Ravan Pawar, or shall I go and eat the omelette on my own?’
Ravan had seen the Light of Iran Cafe almost since the day he first opened his eyes but had never been inside. How could he? You needed money to enter these places and he never had any, not even to go to the dingy fish place called Kal Bhairav. Seeing a place from outside and sitting inside ordering some preternatural delicacy were experiences that had nothing in common. It was an exquisite moment of heightened superciliousness. Within seconds Ravan had become a cad and a snob. He looked at people walking past on the road and felt infinite pity for them.
The tables had heavy wooden legs and marble tops yellowed from the tannin of millions of cups of tea. The wooden chairs had spindly legs and backs and plywood bottoms painted deep black going on chocolate. The walls were covered with glass paintings interspersed with mirrors. A morose king of Iran with heavy moustaches and even heavier crown and a cape that reached to his ankles sat on a throne while his plump queen stood behind him with a thin smile, one hand resting on the back of the throne and the other on the shoulder of the erect and prissily sour-faced crown prince. There were sylvan scenes of harrowingly beautiful damsels with fair complexions and flowing robes filling pitchers of water at the stream; forests with gentle waterfalls and peacocks; finally a princess with long golden tresses leaning over to kiss the forehead of a scantily dressed prince lying either dead or unconscious. The paint behind the glass in some of the paintings had begun to peel and it was disconcerting to see a hole in the queen’s fur or the discoloration in the princess’s hair, which made it look as if rats had been nibbling at it. Under the mirrors were instructions to the customers in English. They were arranged in pairs. ‘Don’t put feet on chair or table. Trust in God.’; ‘Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t comb hair in front of mirror.’; ‘Beware of pickpockets. No outside eatables allowed.’; ‘I lent money and made a friend, I asked for it back and won an enemy. No credit.’ But Ravan was not about to quibble about strange juxtapositions or a little worn paint when the place was magnificent.
The waiter brought two masala omelettes and a plate heaped with neatly cut slices of bread. The oil was still fizzing over the yellow surface and the aroma filled Ravan with a heady sense of expectation. He was grateful that he was not born a cripple, without a nose and a stomach and was able to enjoy these celestial aromas. A pronged instrument and knife had been placed next to the plates. Aunt Lalee struggled to cut the omelette with that strange spoon and knife but it jumped out. Ravan tore at his with his fingers and ate in a daze. The omelette was as thin as crepe, the oil a trifle rancid and his mother’s omelettes were fatter and far more tasty but they could not compete with the thought, thrill and ambience of eating out. As if all this were not very heaven, Aunt Lalee ordered a Coca Cola for him and a cup of tea for herself. The Coke bottle was sweating on the outside and cold as liquid ice inside.
He felt his throat turn transparent as he sucked up the frozen fluid. It was sweet and bitter and he hoped that the bottle was bottomless and he could keep drinking from it till the breath went out of his body. He made a racket sucking the bottle dry and then the straw till its sides collapsed upon themselves.
‘Why don’t you wring the bottle, there’s bound to be some drops left in it,’ Aunt Lalee suggested to him. He was about to when he realized that she had got up.
Shankar-rao sat up to drink the tea that Parvatibai brought him.
‘I’ll go to the market and be back within an hour and a half,’ Parvatibai told him. He had no idea why she was volunteering this information when all these years she had left without a word. She took the large, folded tote bags from the hook on the back of the door, then stopped and put her foot on the chair.
‘This anklet’s a nuisance,’ she muttered almost to herself. ‘The sari keeps getting caught in it.’
She placed the bags down on the floor and bent down to adjust the anklet. The sari must have got deeply entangled for it took her some time to free it. The delicacy of her fingers and the curve of the anklet around her firmly moulded ankle bone were all the more appealing because she was so unconscious of the grace and sensuousness of her gestures. Look at her, she was stooping down, those two lifebuoys at her breast bobbing up and down ever so gently and yet her sari had not drifted off her shoulder.
She looked up and saw her husband staring at her. She picked up the tote bags and left.
When she got back the doors were locked. That was unusual. Everybody in the chawls left the doors open for cross ventilation. She knocked. Nobody answered. She knocked again. The silence continued. Were brother and sister engaged in intimate converse? If so, where was Ravan? She relaxed when she saw that the window into the common corridor was open. How naive could she be? As if those two gave a damn or could be trusted to behave themselves just because the window was open or Ravan was in the house. She walked over to the barred window and drew the curtain aside. Shankar-rao, his sister and Ravan were smirking and trying to suppress their laughter.
‘Ravan, open the door.’
‘Stay where you are, Ravan,’ Aunt Lalee said.
‘Ravan, please open the door. I need to make preparations for tomorrow’s meal.’
Ravan fidgeted. Surely a red shirt, a trip to Elephanta and an omelette and Coke could not, he thought, make him betray his mother. He was wrong. Even without the prospect of a visit to the blue mountains and the shimmering lakes of Kashmir, he would have turned his back on his mother. There are, he would find out, few thrills greater than stabbing someone you had loved without thought and without restraint all your living years. He stole a glance at his mother and then sat with his head between his knees. A hot wind of guilt singed the back of his neck.
‘Even your son has abandoned you, Parvatibai.’ Aunt Lalee sliced betel nut into micro-fine slivers with her nut-cracker, put three quarters of them in her mouth and slipped the rest into Ravan’s hand. She picked up her pallu and held it uncertainly, not quite knowing what to do with it and then flung it over her shoulder. She walked over to the window. ‘Have you come to some kind of decision about non-vegetarian dishes for your husband’s sister?’
‘I would be happy to, if I had that kind of money.’
‘Do you want to starve the baby that’s growing inside me?’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Why don’t you take on some more customers, raise the price of the meals, take up some extra work.’
‘You can’t get customers overnight. But even if I could, I can’t handle any more single-handed. And we’ll need to buy more vessels and more stoves. Will you help?’
‘While I’m in the family way?’ Lalee seemed deeply offended.
‘All the women in the chawls work till the day they deliver. They say it makes the delivery easy.’
‘I’m not one of your women from the chawls. I’m used to a better lifestyle than this wretched place offers. Anyway it’s up to you. You want to come in, you have to do what I tell you.’
Parvatibai took a long time to answer. ‘I’ll do as you say.’
There was mutton, fish or shrimps for lunch in Shankar-rao’s sister’s plate twice a week. Parvatibai took care to cook Lalee’s special food when Ravan was at school. Shankar-rao was the one who suffered the most. The smell of the non-vegetarian food was overpowering and his stomach rumbled and rioted. He asked Parvati to give him just a little bit, a mere taste of it. She said, ‘Ask your sister.’
‘May I?’ he asked Lalee.
‘What for? Are you pregnant?’
One afternoon when Ravan came back from school, he hung around the kitchen as if he had something on his mind. In the good old days Parvati would have administered a straightforward emetic like, ‘Out with it. What’s the problem?’ or a deliberately distorted one, ‘So, your teacher’s asked you to stand outside the class for the next seven days because you didn’t do your homework?’
‘What rubbish, you don’t know a damn thing.’
Either way, the effect would be the same. Ravan would unburden himself for half an hour or so while Parvati pottered around. Most of the time the absolution would be in the confession itself, but sometimes Ravan would get angry and ask her, ‘What’s the point of my going into this long spiel if all you’ve got to say is “huh, huh” every five minutes.’
‘If I give you advice, are you going to follow it?’ That would shut Ravan up till the next occasion when he had something urgent to impart.
Their relationship was a little strained now, at least from the son’s side, but Parvati was certain that if she carried on in a business-as-usual manner, things were bound to come to a boil and her son would spill whatever was bothering him. Ravan went through his routine. He stuck his hand in the sliced cabbage. Parvati said, ‘Stop it.’ Soon he was playing with the uncooked rice soaking in water in a pan. She cracked his knuckles with the rolling pin.
‘Can’t you sit still?’
‘Where are Dada and Aunt Lalee?’
‘They didn’t tell me but they were talking about seeing some filim.’
‘Ma …’ He seemed to be having trouble getting to the point today. ‘Ma …’
‘I’m here Ravan.’ Parvati smiled. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to be here whether I’m wanted or not.’
‘Am I going to have a sister, Ma?’
‘I don’t know. It could be a brother.’
‘Who is the father?’
‘Your father.’
‘No, it’s not, it’s not,’ Ravan yelled lunatically. ‘You are lying. I know you are. I hate you. I hate you.’
‘That’s enough, Ravan.’
Why was he screaming? A tantrum wasn’t going to change anything. There was a bad taste in his mouth. It had, he was sure, something to do with growing up. He hadn’t just lied to others, he was willing to practise deceit and prevarication upon himself. Hadn’t he known from day one that his father and Aunt Lalee were carrying on? He found it puzzling that he had gone to such lengths to sustain the pretence when the concerned parties hadn’t given a hoot.
‘I would prefer a sister. Eddie has one. What shall we call her?’
‘That’s up to them, your father and his sister.’
‘I wish they would ask me. I would call her Neeta like the heroine in Dil Deke Dekho.’
Ravan seemed to have run out of steam. Parvati had the feeling that Ravan’s long preamble had nothing to do with the intent of his visit.
‘Shall I get rid of her?’
Parvatibai looked uncomprehending.
‘Not the baby. Aunt Lalee.’
Shankar-rao and Lalee got back by seven o’clock.
‘Where’s Master Ravan?’ Lalee asked Parvatibai.
‘Practising tae lando or whatever they call it, with his teacher, I guess.’
Lalee switched on the ceiling fan. ‘How come there’s no breeze? Is the electricity off?’ She looked up and saw a hook on the ceiling instead of the fan. ‘Where the fuck is the fan? Parvati!’ She was screaming now. ‘Parvati.’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t say yes. What did you do with the fan, you bitch?’
‘Sold it.’
‘What?’ Lalee asked hysterically. ‘Whatever for, you stupid woman?’
‘You said you wanted mutton and fish.’
‘What’s that got to do with the fan?’
‘It paid for the food.’
‘Look what you’ve gone and done.’ Shankar-rao was beside himself with rage. ‘We’ll have to suffer because you wanted some fancy stuff for yourself.’
‘Don’t you worry, I’ll make that bitch get the fan back if it’s the last thing I do. Get it back, you hear, get it back.’
‘I’ll try,’ Parvati said meekly, ‘but then you won’t get your fish and mutton.’
‘Fuck the mutton and fish.’ There was a nasty edge to her voice. ‘Have the fan fixed.’
On Thursday after Lalee left around 11 o’clock, Parvati took a bath and was fastening her blouse, one hook at a time, when Shankar-rao came in to have a glass of water. Parvati turned her back on her husband and tried to get the remaining two top hooks into their loops. Shankar-rao put his glass on the floor, went over to where his wife stood, and put his arms around Parvatibai. He had his hands full.
‘What will your sister say?’ Parvatibai asked gently.
Shankar-rao went to the copper pot in which the drinking water was stored. He drank half a glass and stopped. He seemed to have resolved something of importance and urgency in his mind. He put the glass down and came back to Parvatibai. He held her tight. This time his wife did not resist.
War. Not the make-believe, playful variety that Shankar-rao and his sister had indulged in on the night that woman moved into Parvatibai’s home but the real thing. Parvati was clear in her mind that there would be no quarter, no mercy, and she would take no casualties. No holds barred and it would be a fight until one of the parties was routed. She knew that she didn’t stand a chance in a head-on confrontation. She would fight a war of attrition, employ guile, deceit and guerrilla tactics. She would retreat, admit defeat, cringe, grovel, collapse, beg, suffer any ignominy her enemy was pleased to inflict upon her. But she would not give up.
What then was the difference between her and the other women? None. Except that she had not started this war. It had been thrust upon her. She was fighting for her home, her son and for herself. She had discovered that when you are ranged against devious and evil people who will stoop to anything and stop at nothing, you must be willing to confront the injustice and evil in you. You may pretend or even believe in high-mindedness and the victory of light over darkness but there is no escaping the fact that you too will soil your hands, be brutalized, debased and demeaned. Was it worth it? It is a valid and relevant question but you may ask it only after you’ve won.
Winning itself was going to be a complex and fraught affair for she could not vanquish the enemy without winning one of them over. And here was the trickiest part: which enemy had ever been asked to restore, perhaps even invent, her husband and rival’s self-esteem and confidence?
Shankar-rao was a hungry tiger. He had no time for foreplay. He took possession of the room, annexed the chawls, ascended the walls and paced the ceiling impatiently, leapt down, mauled and pushed aside whatever stood in his way. He was ravenous and he would brook no delay. He would rip his prey and eat her flesh, bones and all. Then suddenly without prior notice, the very intensity of his rage and lust seemed to sap his energies. He looked distraught and distressed and in need of help. Parvatibai invoked the name of the god of war, the one with the third eye who destroys to create a new order. Har Har Mahadev. Shiv, Shankar, Mahadev, they were all names of the same god, her own husband’s namesake. It was an irony that did not escape her. Even when she was warring with Shankar, she had to take his name before battle could be joined. Unlike her rival, there was no soundtrack to Parvati’s combat. She was a frogwoman, a commando who had to slip into enemy territory, lodge the explosive charges carefully, check the contact, start the clock ticking and then run for cover. Without stealth and guile, frantic excitement and impatience would get the better of Shankar-rao. Even now he was raring to go. If she couldn’t slow him down, Parvatibai was certain, all would be lost. He tried to tear her blouse open. Fortunately all that overwrought haste made him clumsy.
‘Easy, easy. We’ve got the whole day ahead of us,’ Parvatibai told her husband.
‘Have we?’
‘Ravan comes back from school at four.’
Parvati had taken off her blouse now. Shankar-rao was trying desperately to swallow his wife’s right breast in one gulp while undoing the knot of her petticoat. She took hold of his hand firmly, exhaled and pulled her stomach in and slipped it inside her petticoat. Shankar-rao’s hand was trapped between her belly and the string of her petticoat. If only she could distract him for a while, maybe, just maybe … But he was in no mood to listen. He had to enter her now, now before it was all over. She guided his hand to the crevice. It gave him pause. She let him explore her. A strange thought entered his mind: could it be possible that giving pleasure was one of the most erotic things a human being was capable of?
Even then, they had a long way to go. If he had his way he would have forced his fist inside her. She undid her petticoat and put her palm on the back of his wrist. She stroked his hand slowly, very slowly till he calmed down and echoed her rhythms.
Suddenly he was in a hurry again. He was out of his trousers and beating at the gates. She was sure he was not going to make it. She took his member in her hand and almost broke it in two.
‘What are you doing?’ Shankar-rao screamed.
‘Trust me.’
He cooled down then though he was wary of her. She led him inside her. He was growing frisky again. Parvatibai clamped down on him, the muscles of her vagina held him in a vice. He could neither move forward nor withdraw. He felt trapped and became frenetic. It was as if someone had caught hold of his throat and was squeezing it till the life had ebbed out of him. He was gasping. What was she doing? He had suspected foul play earlier but like a fool had not done anything about it. He was going to pay dearly for being such a credulous, trusting idiot. She was going to mutilate him. She was going to shut off the blood supply. His thing would go blue, then black, atrophy and fall off altogether, never to rise again.
‘Please,’ he was sobbing now, ‘let go of it. Please, I beg you. It’s the only one I have. Not replaceable, you know. Please. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll get rid of her. Tomorrow, tonight, now, as soon as she returns.’
Parvatibai did not reduce the pressure for a long time. Slowly, he quietened down. Parvati relaxed. Shankar-rao was pleased to find that he had become the bobbin shuttling back and forth, back and forth, in a power loom. He kept going at an even pace. Afterwards he lay next to her for a long time. He would never know how tense Parvatibai had been and how much she had riding on this single event.
When she got back, Lalee sat down on the floor with Parvatibai, peeled off the tough strands from the sides of the green beans and threw them into a large brass vessel. ‘That was clever, very clever, Parvatibai.’
Parvati looked up in alarm. Oh God, had that stupid husband of hers told this woman that he had exercised his conjugal rights thrice today. How could he have, he hadn’t had a moment alone with his sister since she had returned. ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Parvati. You’ve got spunk. You had me fooled with that business of the fan. Your delightful husband Shankar was only too happy to jump down my throat since he didn’t get to taste the meat and the fish you cooked for me. I didn’t pursue the matter because I didn’t want Shankar-rao’s or Ravan’s evil eye to fall on the food they couldn’t have and on my baby.’ She clutched her stomach protectively and paused for effect. ‘But I owe it to you to give you a word of warning. Nobody humiliates me and gets away with it. See this talisman? My mother and I went to a tantric and he gave it to me. He said that it will, come what may, drive you and your s …’ she checked herself since Ravan was listening intently, ‘you certainly, out of this house before my son is born. This place is going to be mine. I’m going to employ a few cooks who’ll make food for hundreds of people. I’m going to be rich, Parvati, filthy rich. When you want a job, come and ask me. I might think about it, though considering the quality of the food you cook, I wouldn’t give you a job even in an orphanage.’
There were times when Ravan suspected that Aunt Lalee was genuinely fond of him. Every once in a while she took him out to Malabar Hill or for a meal as she was doing today. He wasn’t quite sure why he had gone off her. Was it the comments of the boys in the chawls? They cracked the same third-rate joke every day. Whose turn is it today with Aunt Lalee? Your father’s or yours? He had been foolish enough to suggest once that it was their father’s turn. Hooray, that will make our father’s day. Can we join in too? Mr Tamhane, the clerk from the Metropolitan Court, smiled his thin sticky smile and asked Ravan how his father’s whore was. He had looked it up in the dictionary and was pleased that dirty Mr Tamhane was wrong. His aunt was certainly not ‘proffering sexual favours for monetary considerations’. There was something, about dictionaries, at least the Marathi ones that he knew of, which intimidated and put off Ravan. You went to look up a difficult word and they usually explained it with ten other difficult ones, especially if it had anything to do with sex. Mr Tamhane had of course not stopped there. Is your father the pimp and your mother the madam? Are they planning to expand the business, get a whole stableful of girls to keep young Miss Lalee company? Or is your mother going to turn tricks. I’ll bet she’ll attract more business than your Aunt Lalee. But I must insert a word of caution here. These are, as you are well aware, residential premises. Carrying on corporal commerce here is against the law. I’m afraid one of these days I’ll perforce have to inform the police department of Lalee’s red-light activities.’ Mr Tamhane must have found his own words hilarious for he cackled dryly and then began to cough. Ravan thought he was finished but Tamhane said after he had stopped coughing, ‘Are they married?’
‘Who?’
‘Lalee and your father? Because if they are, there’s very likely a case for bigamy there.’
‘Don’t be absurd, they are brother and sister.’
‘That would make it incest.’
Most of the families in Chawl No. 17 though had forbidden their children to have anything to do with the Pawar household on the fourth floor. Ravan’s home was invariably referred to as that House of Sin.
Ravan was used to people saying nasty things behind his back and to his face. But this was different. He was acutely embarrassed by the things they were saying about his aunt and yet he also knew that whoever spoke disparagingly about her, and almost everybody did, also exhibited an obsessive and prurient curiosity about her. He thought this was the first time people were jealous of his father. ‘What’s the bugger got that I haven’t?’ A man, whom he had never spoken to, from Chawl No. 3 asked him, ‘Women must find good-for-nothings far more attractive than simple people who have to work for a living.’
Aunt Lalee was no longer news. She had been with them for close to ten months now, but he also knew that just the fact of her going down the stairs or standing at the bus-stop created waves. He liked that. Aunt Lalee was a circus. There was always excitement wherever she was. He knew she was unreliable and would disown anyone without a moment’s thought so long as there was something to be gained from the act or simply because she was bored. He thought he had used the word ‘disown’ by chance. Maybe not. It was a word that would never occur to his mother. He had blithely disowned her but that didn’t make any difference to her. She may have been disappointed and hurt but once she had accepted you, there was no going back. She would speak her mind in no uncertain terms but she would stand by you. Look at his father, she should have thrown the man out years ago. In the past few months, Ravan had a difficult time stopping himself from wringing his father’s neck. He was so patently thoughtless, childish and selfish. Ravan could not understand why his mother didn’t poison him. But the answer was always clear: you don’t disown people, come what may. Ravan had a strange insight about himself then. He could be bought, his price was not very high either. Yet he had to be able to live with himself. When Aunt Lalee humiliated his mother, he could not. Besides he was sure he understood his aunt’s game plan now. She was certainly planning to throw his mother and him out of the house. It wouldn’t be long before his father too was evicted and Aunt Lalee took over the place.
Something big must be in the offing. No omelette and Coke today. The bribe was a full-fledged deluxe biryani with curd and salad. Ravan went at it systematically. No hurry, Ravan, no hurry at all.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Aunt Lalee,’ Ravan stumbled over his words in a dither of embarrassment and guilt.
‘Speak up man. There are no secrets between us. Vomit it all out. Don’t hold back anything. That’s the secret of life. Anything you want to do, might as well do it full-bloodedly. I always say, you want to fart, go ahead and do it loudly. Get pleasure out of it. Why else should you do it.’
Despite so much encouragement, Ravan was slow and diffident to start. ‘I know black magic.’
‘No kidding.’
Ravan nodded his head to stress and affirm what he had just said. He realized that Aunt Lalee didn’t know whether to believe him or not, more likely not, and she was just indulging him.
‘What kind of black magic?’
‘You know Eddie, the one who told my friends that Ravan’s Aunt Lalee is a whore? I killed his father.’
‘Good for him and bully for you, Ravan. I’m glad nobody can call Lalee names in front of you. Is that all?’
‘I killed Prakash’s father, the boy who used to terrorize our school students and teachers, I killed his father.’
‘Why?’
‘He asked me to.’
‘And why did you kill Eddie’s father?’
‘He was making eyes at my mother.’
‘And pray when did you kill him? Last week?’ She was getting into the spirit of things now, ribbing him, making an ass of him and enjoying it hugely though something about his face and manner bothered her. He couldn’t seem to see how ridiculous he was, telling such bizarre tales. He had an expressionless face and his voice was deadpan as if not he but someone else was talking through him.
‘I killed him when I was eleven months old and Eddie was still in his mother’s womb.’
‘What marvellous stories you invent, Ravan. I’m impressed, really I am.’
‘You can ask Eddie’s mother.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’ Aunt Lalee looked a trifle disturbed by Ravan’s monotonous persistence.
‘Just to make sure that I’m not lying.’
‘What difference does it make whether you are or not?’
Ravan shrugged his shoulders. He would leave it to his aunt to decide. ‘Here are letters from the boys from my school asking me to do black magic on people who had been bothering them. They also talk about payment, how much cash down and how much they would pay on completion of the job.’
The smile had disappeared from Aunt Lalee’s face. Ravan untied the string of the packet and carefully took out the notes and letters. There were at least fifteen of them. They had aged with the passage of time and had an authentic look to them. Ravan pushed them towards his aunt.
‘You read them.’
Ravan ate his biryani with a spoon and through mouthfuls of fried Basmati rice, mutton cooked just right, crisp, burnt onions sprinkled on top, lightly fried raisins and cashewnuts, he read from the letters without a trace of feeling for the writers, for the payments offered, or their victims.
Aunt Lalee became progressively more restless. After the seventh letter she asked him to stop. ‘What are you trying to tell me? That you’ll bump your mother off if I pay the right price?’ Ravan shook his head. ‘What’s the right price?’ Aunt Lalee had missed the movement of his head. Ravan stared at the food and again shook his head. ‘You won’t charge me or you won’t kill your mother?’
‘Neither,’ Ravan said slowly, almost reluctantly.
‘So why the hell are you telling me all this?’
She was suddenly silent, her eyes narrowed in an effort to sort out the tangle in her mind, then they opened in horror, perhaps even a little bit of fear.
‘Why, you little twerp, are you trying to tell me while eating biryani at my expense,’ she flung the stainless steel plate at him, fortunately he had almost finished, ‘that you are going to do black magic on me and kill me?’ Ravan nodded. The plate was on the floor and Aunt Lalee had him by the throat. ‘And to think that I brought you here to break the good news to you first. I’ll kill you, you shit.’ She would have too but the Irani owner and the waiter rushed to separate them.
‘How can you do that to a young, defenceless boy?’ the old fat Irani, wearing pyjamas that didn’t reach his ankles, asked Lalee.
‘No child this, he is a bloody murderer. He wants to kill me.’
‘Talk sense, how can a boy his age do that?’
‘Ask him. He says he committed his first murder when he was one year old.’
‘And you believe him? I don’t care if he killed someone when he was in your womb.…’
‘This shit is not my son.’
‘Then what are you doing with him? Have you kidnapped him?’ Before Ravan could say yes, Aunt Lalee paid the bill and got out. She had one last question for Ravan as they headed back home. ‘If you are going to kill me with your black magic, why not do it instead of telling me about it?’
‘I thought I owed it to you,’ he echoed his aunt’s words to his mother.
‘Listen you jerk, listen carefully. You touch one hair of mine and I’ll make you a cripple but won’t let you die. You follow, you toad, I’m talking to you. Did you hear?’
Ravan nodded his head and then said gloomily, ‘But you’ll be dead before that.’
‘Don’t say it, you evil boy. And to think that I bought you the shirt you are wearing, took you to Apollo Bunder and bought you omelette and biryani with my own money.’
‘My mother’s money.’
When they got to the house, Lalee went inside and changed her sari. If she took pains and painted her face with half the things from her vanity case, she looked like the disgruntled queen of a tiny kingdom who’s fallen out of favour but is a queen nevertheless. All that make-up couldn’t cover the fine lines stretching from her eyes to the temples and the slackness around her mouth but she was wearing one of Parvatibai’s rich Narayanpethi saris in traditional peacock blue with a border and pallu of a vibrant and violent yellow and that seemed to make her look old-world and aristocratic. Ravan saw his father standing at the mirror trying to figure out how to knot his tie. He was wearing his one and only suit. It was a little crumpled and outdated but Shankar-rao hadn’t gained any weight despite his sybaritic lifestyle and it didn’t fit him too badly. He was beaming and followed Lalee everywhere with his eyes. What were they up to? Were they going to Kashmir or leaving India for ever?
Lalee was in a great mood. She held Shankar-rao’s hand and said, ‘Don’t we look like a picture? Parvatibai you must take out our nazar. Don’t want the evil eye to fall upon us today of all days. Ravan, wear your party clothes. The shirt’s fine but change into those swank white trousers I bought for you. Parvatibai, we need you to look good too. You are, after all, the elder wife. Change and then I’ll touch your feet and ask for your blessings.’
Ravan marvelled at all this finery and festivity. Were these the same people he had known for years? Look at the jewellery Aunt Lalee was wearing and Shankar-rao’s parrot green suit, white shoes and the red tie that was held in place by the same kind of knot with which he tied his striped underwear.
‘What’s the occasion? Where are we going?’
Lalee’s mood had undergone a transformation. She had forgotten Ravan’s dark threat and her own grip around his neck. She was smiling and the gold of her triple chain flashed in his eyes. ‘Oh, look at us. We were so excited, we forgot to tell you both. We are getting married. Right here. A nice private wedding. The bhatjee should be here any minute. Tomorrow we’ll leave for a honeymoon. Won’t that be nice? Mother and son can have a little quiet time while we are away.’
Parvati knew when she was beaten. All of the sister’s ploys had one thing in common. She liked to keep everybody off balance. Parvatibai had tried hard to guess her moves in advance but she had missed the most obvious one. She had been outmanoeuvred and all counter-moves were now futile. The game was over.
‘How long will you be gone?’ Ravan asked.
‘Three weeks, four weeks, who knows? The world’s a big place. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Kashmir though. On that trip it’ll be just you and me, nobody else.’
The priest knocked and entered. He made preparations for the sacred fire.
‘Only four people? Why? A wedding is a celebration, not a secret. Who is the young man?’
‘That’s Ravan,’ Lalee told him.
‘A trifle young, wouldn’t you say, to be getting married to you even if it’s one of those new-fangled things called a love marriage.’
‘Please put on your spectacles instead of making a fool of yourself. This is my groom.’ Lalee was sharp with the priest. ‘Not that silly boy.’
‘Ah good, now you look like the right age for a bride and bridegroom.’ He was a friendly, loquacious priest. He didn’t take offence at Lalee’s tone and he was not put out by his own muddling. He worked quickly like someone who enjoyed what he was doing and had had lots of practice.
‘And who’s the lady and the boy whom I mistook for someone else?’
‘He’s my son.’ Parvati intervened and let her husband’s sister off the hook.
‘And where’s his father?’
‘He’s out of …’ Lalee started to say but Ravan was pointing to Shankar-rao.
‘So that’s your father and you are his son. So you must be a widower,’ the priest said in his bemused way. ‘Very progressive of you Laleebai to marry a widower.’
Lalee smiled with all her twenty-six teeth. In the synthetic and ersatz genre of smiles, this was certainly one of the most disarming and friendly. ‘Shouldn’t we get down to business?’
‘Yes of course, I like a bride who’s in a hurry. They are so much more lively. And how did your first wife die, Shankar-rao? Cancer, TB, a woman’s illness? I hope you didn’t set fire to her because she didn’t bring you enough money and a scooter and fridge.’ He laughed heartily. ‘No offence meant. It’s just that we come across more and more of these cases as the years pass. You still haven’t told me who the beautiful young woman standing shyly next to the boy is?’
Lalee said, ‘A guest’ and Shankar-rao, ‘My wife.’
It was a bit confusing for the bhatjee but he was a patient man with a sunny temperament.
‘Shouldn’t we hurry or we’ll miss the auspicious time of the muhurat.’
‘You leave that to me. Once I unravel these crossed signals, we’ll be sailing along. I’ll explain every word and especially all the major concepts that are so integral to the way our religion looks at marriage in plain Marathi, even if I recite in Sanskrit first.’
Seven minutes later he had packed his bag. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. And if you are not worried about criminal consequences, what about me? The police would certainly haul me to jail for aiding and abetting a crime. And what’s wrong with your first wife? She is surely far more lovely than this new one. She is certainly far more cultured. And you, madam, why are you being party to this crime instead of speaking up.’
‘They are not in a frame of mind to listen to me.’
‘You can get the police.’ He thought that over. ‘Maybe not. You still a need a place to stay?’
‘Get out. We’ll get another bhatjee who’ll be more sensible.’
Lalee, as always, had the last word.
The marriage was postponed. It shouldn’t have been difficult to locate an indigent priest in a city like Bombay who would marry two people in a hurry. Frankly you could get anyone you wanted just so long as you made sure that Parvati and Ravan were not around.
On Sunday morning Eddie and his family were returning from church when ‘that woman from Ravan’s house’ accosted Violet.
‘Madam,’ she said in Marathi, ‘may I have a word with you?’
Between sewing and house-keeping, Violet did not have time to keep abreast of events or gossip and hence, unlike Eddie, did not know whom she was talking to.
‘Please excuse me,’ Violet told Lalee in her uncertain vernacular, ‘but my charity is reserved for my home, and when I can afford it, the church.’
‘I have not come for charity.’ Lalee was aggrieved that anyone should think that she lived off charity.
Violet was thrown off balance. Surely she should have been more observant and realized that a woman who wore lipstick would not be begging.
‘Please make it brief. I have to cut and sew an engagement dress for a client by this afternoon.’
‘I wanted to make enquiries about a certain Master Ravan who I believe …’
‘I do not wish to sully my tongue with that abominable name. Do you know him? Because if you do, I will not have any converse with you.’
What a question, Eddie thought. Only his mother would not know that Lalee was Ravan’s aunt. He shook his head frantically but Violet was not aware of him.
‘No friend of mine, I assure you.’
‘Beware of him. He killed my husband. But there are worse things in life than that evil boy. If he doesn’t get you, his mother surely will.’
A few weeks later, Parvatibai and Ravan were returning from one of their nocturnal walks. Parvatibai had begun to enjoy them. It was the only peaceful time of the day and walking made her feel well and whether anyone would give it credence or not, it gave her a sense of freedom, a time she could call her own. Usually Ravan raced her up the stairs but today one of his classmates from the third floor wanted a carrom partner.
‘May I, Ma?’
‘Twenty minutes, not more.’
‘Thirty.’
‘You heard me the first time. You have school tomorrow.’
She was glad she was alone when she arrived at her house. Shankar-rao and his sister were engaged in a dialogue that seemed to strain the limits of imagination.
‘Now get into bed and give me a good time.’ Lalee’s voice was honey and soft fire.
There was no response from Shankar-rao. ‘Come baby. If you won’t give me a good time, I’ll give you one. Not just a good time, the time of your life. I’ll do things you wouldn’t dream of. Once I do them, you’ll never be able to sleep again.’
‘Parvati and Ravan will be back. Let me sleep.’
‘You come here,’ she screamed at him, ‘did you hear what I said. Come here and fuck me. I want that child.’
Shankar-rao’s reply was curt. ‘Go fuck yourself. You are never going to be pregnant.’
Parvati knocked and entered and put off the lights.
Had she brought all those troubles upon herself and her innocent child? Getting to be a young man now and hardly innocent after his meeting with Aunt Lalee. She excused herself in the middle of the act, went into the kitchen and brought out the willi with which she had been cutting cabbage on the day Shankar-rao had brought his sister home. She sat astride her husband. He had been too engrossed in foreplay to react to Parvati’s sudden departure. He tried to grasp Parvati’s breasts in the palms of his hands. It was sheer torture. His eyes closed and he mooed at his good fortune. Lalee was lascivious and her face, manners and posture suggested undiscovered worlds of lechery and pleasure but she was mostly a cock-teaser and nothing more except on the rare days when she needed urgent satisfaction. He increasingly had the feeling that at heart she was bored with sex. In the last few months except that one occasion when Parvati had walked in, it was always, you want it, go ahead, work at it, just so long as you don’t expect me to stop combing my hair, or chewing aniseed or just plain sleeping. He would get so frantic wanting her, he usually mistimed and that made her nasty and bitchy. Besides she had loose, semi-solid boobs. Even the slightest movement and they tended to become unstable and go in the most unexpected directions. Didn’t even qualify as medium-sized. Now look at these. These weren’t pomegranates, they weren’t giant watermelons, they were cannon balls. No, what he had in his hands was the earth, one in each hand. Stupendous, his hands couldn’t support them for more than a minute. They got exhausted holding up the crystal globes and dropped them. Mom, Dad just come and look at these monster jackfruits from my personal garden. Yeaaaaahhhhhh, if this isn’t paradise.…
He felt something sharp at his Adam’s apple. For some stupid reason, Parvati had decided to blabber in the midst of his sacred trance, nothing short of a profound mystical experience. But he was Shankar, the Lord of Destruction, he was going to open his third eye and burn her tongue to ashes; just the tongue, no no no no no no no, not those two wonders of the world. Never, what did you take him for? A fool? Wouldn’t allow that third eye to touch the bells of heaven. Nothing could match them, they were priceless. He opened his eyes and his magnificent erection collapsed. It was not even semi-solid, it was a vanishing species, it evaporated, there was a void where it had stood so magnificently. Nothing, the primal emptiness. But there were even more urgent calamities and crises to be dealt with. The crescent blade of the willi had settled like the thin fine line of a thread on his neck. Parvati held the wooden handle casually with her whip hand.
‘Please,’ tears rolled down from Shankar-rao’s eyes, ‘please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you want, anything. I’ll go back to work. I beg of you. Spare me. I was wrong. I should never have got her. I’ll get Lalee to pay for her stay and meals and the stoves.’
‘Will you shut up and listen to me?’
He shut up.
‘You may have sex with me, once or twice a week. But only when Ravan is in school or at his lai tando classes.’
Does she need to slit my throat to tell me this? ‘Will you please take the willi away?’
‘I’m not finished. If your sister ever shows up here, I’ll kill you.’ She pressed the blade down a little with her thumb. A red crescent began welling up all around his throat. ‘If you bring another woman to this house, I’ll kill you.’ She pressed the knife edge down a little further. ‘If you ever sell any of the goods in our house, stoves, fans, beds, vessels, anything, I’ll kill you.’
‘It’s hurting.’ A tear slid down his left cheek. Several others followed. ‘Please don’t kill me. I’m your husband.’
‘Then behave like one. And like the father of a boy who needs to be set a good example. Don’t get your tarts and mistresses here. This is our home, not a whore-house. Do I make myself clear?’
He was crying now, oddly enough only from his left eye.
‘I want an answer: a yes or a no.’
‘Yes. Anything you say.’
‘You may finish making love to me.’
Life is not a victory, Parvati thought, it’s a hard-won compromise. She picked up Shankar-rao’s lifeless hands and placed them where they had been.
