Rock Around the Clock ran at the Strand for seventeen or maybe nineteen weeks. Eddie should have seen it over fifty times if he had averaged three shows a week. But due to certain unforeseen circumstances he saw it only fourteen times. On Tuesday, he was doing his routine, sidling up behind men who looked lost and were asking for extras. He chanted his mantra in quick short bursts: ‘One-rupee-five-anna tickets for five rupees. One-rupee-five-anna tickets for five rupees.’ The latter half of that last word was to prove prophetic. A midnight blue shadow fell across the road and a hard, calloused hand clamped down on Eddie’s arm. The intention was not to cut off the flow of blood, it was to break the arm. It belonged to a policeman. The only presence of mind that Eddie could muster in that moment of crisis was to pee in his pants.
The other scalpers continued to work undisturbed. With a little experience Eddie could have resolved matters on the spot. The policeman too realized his mistake a little too late. The criminal’s wet pants and the combination of ‘Sorry, sorry’ with ‘I didn’t do anything, I swear, I didn’t do anything’ had gathered a substantial crowd. One or two people half-heartedly said, ‘Let him go, he’s still a child,’ but Eddie’s dripping shorts changed the focus and made everybody laugh. It became, unfortunately, a matter of the policeman’s honour and professional dignity.
It was 2.45 p.m. by the time the policeman and Eddie reached St Sebastian’s School. The peon sensed the gravity of the occasion. He got Father Agnello out of his eleventh grade algebra class.
‘What is it?’ Father Agnello asked him impatiently.
The peon was cryptic. ‘Come and see for yourself.’
Father Agnello made a sour face but followed the peon obediently.
‘You want a kick in your butt? You trying to make an ass of me?’ The policeman asked Eddie when he saw Father D’Souza.
Eddie didn’t look up.
‘Is this the man?’ There was horror and a glimmer of prurient recognition on the policeman’s face. Eddie nodded his head.
‘This boy says you are his father.’
‘That’s true. Everybody calls me Father.’
‘Real father or that kind of father?’ The policeman directed the question at Eddie. He was leering and his voice had become offensively familiar. He had always known that these priests were not to be trusted. Pretending to be celibates all their lives. Sure, so long as they could have as many flings as they wanted on the side.
Eddie looked a long time at Father Agnello D’Souza but wouldn’t speak.
‘Eddie, behave yourself. What seems to be the problem, havaldar? What’s the meaning of a policeman bringing you to me in the middle of a class, Eddie? And what’s that evil smell coming from you?’
‘Take charge of your son. Call yourself a priest and yet fathering children all over the place. Should be ashamed of yourself. Like father, like son. No wonder your brat was selling tickets in the black at Strand.’
‘Whose son, whose father?’ A vein in Father Agnello’s temple was throbbing dangerously and his face had gone red. His voice was thinner than a screech. ‘What did you tell this policeman?’ It was Father Agnello’s turn to grab Eddie’s arm now even as he made a superhuman effort not to do violence to the boy-Satan in front of him.
‘I told him what Ma said that Sunday. You are my father.’
Poor Father Agnello. He was beginning to fear this boy. What was his purpose, meaning and role in life? Was he the eye God kept on him? Or was he the living and breathing flesh and blood of the devil?
This time instead of Violet calling upon Father Agnello, the priest summoned her.
‘Mrs Coutinho, I’m at my wit’s end. He’s selling film tickets on the black market and telling the police that I’m his father. What should I do with him?’
‘Don’t ask me, Father,’ Violet told Father D’Souza while pointedly ignoring her son, ‘I’m only a woman and his mother.’
‘What does that mean?’ Father D’Souza was greatly perplexed by Violet’s answer. Had the woman lost her senses or had he lost touch with reality altogether?
‘Starve him. Break his legs. Drown him.’
There was, the priest had to admit, much merit in Violet’s suggestions but as a man of God, Father Agnello D’Souza could not take such extreme measures against Eddie. Instead he caned Eddie and had him report to him at every recess between classes. But the adamantine rigour had gone out of Father D’Souza’s wrath and punishments. His spirit was broken. Had the boy been telling the truth the first time when he said that he had gone to see Rock Around the Clock? Then what about Ravan and the Mazagaon Mawalis and the rest of his confession?
Was there no longer such a thing as truth?
After the Rock Around the Clock episode, Father Agnello and Eddie crossed swords only once before Eddie left school. Eddie had just learnt to masturbate. Some of his friends had taken to the practice with the diligence, devotion and single-mindedness needed to fulfil the most difficult and exhausting of vows. At times they would waste their manhood six or seven times running. Of course they were aware that playing with oneself was not just the despoiling of the body but a cardinal sin. It is open to debate whether the boys would have indulged indefatigably in such handiwork if their elders had not proscribed it. Like hundreds of thousands of their peers, they compared the width, length and peak flows of their dicks and ranked their manhood on a daily basis.
It would take another fifteen to twenty years for the Spanish word ‘macho’ to become a commonplace in English. Till that time, English had not taken cognizance of two factors about sex: the public nature or aspect of intercourse and its innate competitiveness. The people from the lower storeys of the CWD chawls did not feel this inadequacy. They understood that there are always dimensions of valour to the male principle. Men are brave and courageous even when they merely lie in bed. Which is why in Sanskrit, Marathi and the other local tongues, man’s sticky emanations and seed are called virya or ‘heroism’. Men are heroic inside the vagina, in wet dreams, quickies or in love.
That day Joachim Correa had got a page from Playboy. In those days, Playboy, too, had a strong sense of shame. It may have been a sex magazine but it knew what was decent and what was obscene. It was Hugh Hefner who established the law—which he himself would break later—that the region around the female organ is as unblemished as a mirror.
It is impossible to guess how many normal and healthy repressed Indians (there aren’t any other kind, or at least weren’t in British and early post-colonial India) went into shock when they discovered that their women had hair in places other than their heads.
Perhaps Eddie too would be traumatized later in life at the sight of the real thing. For the moment, he merely raised his right pinky in class, and the geography teacher, Mr Sequeira, who believed that physical needs took precedence over intellectual edification, granted him permission to evacuate his bladder. There was a titter among Eddie’s friends but Eddie kept a straight face and walked to the toilets. He latched the door and faced it since the sun was streaming in from the window at the back. He took out the picture from Playboy from his right pocket while unbuttoning his shorts and roughly pushing aside his briefs with his left hand. He unfolded the page with both hands. He was careful not to damage it, many others were to get their pleasure yet. Bloody hell, instead of naked female flesh, there were three columns of printed matter. That bastard Errol, he had played the same trick on him two weeks earlier and passed on a page from some trigonometry book. He would fix the bugger after school. Or was it Joachim’s idea this time? He unlatched the door and was about to leave when he saw the black and white picture on the other side.
The name in a delicate black typeface under the right hand corner of the picture read Anita Ekberg. A vertical fold ran over her left breast and a horizontal one bisected her navel. Since she had turned her head sharply to the left you could see only her right profile. She sat a little cramped, her right leg folded under her left. Her belly-button was a soft blur on her stark white complexion. She had drawn her shoulders and hands tightly behind her, and the tension between the breasts and her body was so finely distributed that there wasn’t a millimetre of slack. Her left nipple stood out like a faded doorbell. On the taut column of her neck stood the solitary flower of her ear. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail. There was not a shadow of self-consciousness on her body or face. But she refused to raise her head and look at Eddie.
Eddie had heard of Anita Ekberg because of her stupendous breasts. But he did not feel any sexual attraction for her now that she was seated before him. He stared at the picture for a little over five minutes. He had held the pictures of many nude women in his hands during the last few months, but the reaction this picture evoked in him was a little strange. Even though his body refused to respond to Ekberg, watching her gave him a quiet sense of happiness and pleasure. His eyes felt good. The undercurrent of guilt that laced his bouts of sexual turbulence was absent today. A stillness and peace descended upon him.
The dirty toilet bowl, the rusty chain of the flush tank, the walls with graffiti effaced by the censoring hand of the Father Prefect, the smell of ammonia that had accrued over decades … he forgot his environs. Like a star that was turning to ashes, the light from Anita Ekberg flowed soft and unfocused. She looked insubstantial. He guessed intuitively that the mystery of her beauty lay in that light. Not just in the picture, even if she had been sitting in front of him in person he would not have dared touch her. In the deepest recesses of her beauty there was the chill of an iceberg. She was made of flint or marble. The breath of life could never touch her. She was only a stone sculpture.
Eddie folded the picture and put Anita Ekberg in his pocket. He was about to button up his fly when he heard Joachim’s voice from the next toilet. ‘How’s it going Eddie? Isn’t Anita something else? I’ve broken all records today. Jerked off eight, I swear to you, eight times with Anita today. Soon as you are through, I’ll start again.’
Eddie felt a sudden rush of envy. What the hell, why am I wasting my life?
‘Joachim,’ he hollered loudly.
Joachim was terrified. ‘Eddie, talk softly, you bastard.’ But Eddie was not to be stopped and sang out, ‘Little boy, little boy, what are you holding in your hand? Is it a bat and ball, or your cock standing tall?’
Joachim threw all caution to the winds. ‘Yes sir, yes sir, my prick is for one and for all. It’s at your beck and call.’
Eddie looked up a few moments after the door opened. His eyes were locked into Father Agnello’s. Damn, he had forgotten to relatch the door.
‘What are you doing, Eddie?’
It maddened Eddie when Father Agnello refused to see what was in front of his eyes and pretended ignorance.
‘As if you didn’t do it.’
The blood drained out of Father Agnello’s face.
Eddie tore the picture in a rush and pulled the chain several times. A part of Anita Ekberg’s thigh stuck to the wall of the toilet bowl and would not be flushed down.
