The Hindus and Catholics in Bombay’s CWD chawls (and perhaps almost anywhere in India) may as well have lived on different planets. They saw each other daily and greeted each other occasionally, but their paths rarely crossed. Ravan and Eddie too went their separate ways. It was not just a question of different religions and cultures, they shared neither a common colonial heritage nor a common language. India won independence from the British in 1947. The tiny state of Goa, tucked into a pocket of the subcontinent, was a Portuguese colony till 1961. When the Catholics from the CWD chawls went home to Goa, they needed a Portuguese passport. Their children went to ‘English-medium’ schools run by Catholic priests and nuns in Bombay. They learnt Marathi, the local language of the region, under duress for a few years and tried to forget it as quickly as possible thereafter.
At home, they switched unconsciously to Konkani. Their parents, who were educated in Goa, spoke and wrote fluent Portuguese. The Pope and Rome were important to them but the most devout event of their lives was kissing the toe of the miraculously undecaying body of Saint Francis which had rested in the Bom Jesu Church in Panjim, the capital of the colony, for over three hundred years. They celebrated Christmas but they really let their hair down at the Carnival in Goa.
There was prohibition in the state of Bombay, as it was known then. In Goa, wine and booze, both the local and foreign brews, were available dirt cheap. You drank for fun and sang and danced without reason. Goan Catholics were born and bred in India but their umbilical cord stretched all the way to Lisbon. Practically all the Hindus at the CWD chawls spoke Marathi or a dialect of it. Almost all of them went to Marathi municipal schools where the second language was English. English, the language of the former colonizer, was still the key which opened doors and gave you special privileges. But it was taught so badly and feebly in vernacular schools that it retained the status of a perpetual hurdle.
Parallel worlds can only meet in a geometrical Utopia called the horizon. Then where did Eddie learn to speak Marathi like a native? And how did Ravan discover the sin of Cain? How did Hinduism bring those mortal enemies, Eddie and his sister Pieta, closer? What made tae kwon do part of Ravan’s physical vocabulary when hardly anybody in India or the West had heard of the Far Eastern martial arts?
Perhaps the answer lies in subtle undercurrents; in phenomena or vibrations so tenuous that no instrument can record them. If history is the teeter-totter dialectic between heroes or villains and social forces, then chance, the stray remark and the accidental encounter are often the underrated instruments which shape and reshape the contours of individual lives.
In front of Chawl No. 11 were open grounds. On the left were an Indian gymnasium, a small Maruti temple, a sand-pit with three swings and a see-saw. The empty space changed character depending on the season and occasion.
During the Ganapati festival, an icon of the god sat here under a cloth shamiana to the accompaniment of fourteen hours of blaring and cracked film music, with a break at 12 noon and 8 p.m. for aarti and other rituals. Come election time, local leaders gave speeches here. Once in a while the chief minister or a big name from Delhi would come and the grounds would be packed. But most of the time it was a playground. The boys played cricket and games like kho-kho, hu-tu-tu or kabbadi-kabbadi as it’s called now, seven tiles and gilli-danda, games that hardly anyone remembers today. Sometimes the Christian boys got together and played football.
The space in front of the gymnasium, it was generally recognized, belonged to the Sabha, a volunteer organization of Hindu revivalists, of white shirts and flared khaki half-pants fame. ‘All are welcome. Come one, come all,’ Lele Guruji, the head of the Mazagaon branch of the Sabha, told Parvati when she decided to enroll Ravan, as he told every mother who wished to recruit her son in the Sabha brigade. Needless to say, in the all-encompassing ‘all’ of Lele Guruji, there was no room for Muslims.
Parvati had no idea of the political sympathies of the Sabha and it certainly wasn’t Ravan’s idea to save India from non-Hindus. Parvati’s objectives were pragmatic. Keep the boy out of her hair and out of trouble. He had taken a bet of four annas with a boy twice his age that he could break three panes from his own kitchen window with three successive throws of the tennis ball with which they played cricket. He had lost the bet because, when he came to pick up the ball after the second hit, Parvati sliced it open with a knife and was willing to do the same with his head. The older boy had come up to collect his dues but had instead to part with eight annas in damages because, as Parvati said, ‘At your age you should have known better.’
There were barely seventeen members in the Mazagaon branch of the Sabha. Once, when Ravan showed some resistance to attending the Sabha sessions, Parvati hauled him along to Lele Guruji. The Guru looked genuinely puzzled as he listened to Parvati’s plaint. ‘Now why would you want to stay at home when you can help build a great Hindu nation?’ he wondered as he lifted Ravan off the earth by the narrow edge of his ear. It was a stunning experience. Ravan felt he had been shot in the head by a million pin-point pellets that exploded in undreamt-of colours like Republic Day fireworks. He was not overly keen to repeat this exercise in levitation.
Putting on the white shirt and khaki half-pants (never called shorts) was a ritual as complex as a samurai initiation. First, the loincloth. You tie the strings around the waist at the belly button while the tail of the loincloth trails on the ground. Ensure that it’s at the dead centre of the cleavage of the buttocks. Now pick it up, bring it forward between your legs and pass it under the knot at your navel. Heave. Tighter and tighter. Can’t breathe? You’re joking. Looks loose even from this distance. Haul, heave, pull, and then pull some more till your testicles have ascended all the way into your brains. Now pass the band of cloth over your crotch once again and tuck in the remainder as tightly as you can at the back.
Your balls may be pinched, smashed, squashed and crushed but this home-made jock strap will make sure that you’ll never get hernia. Put on your vest and your shirt. Pick up your half-pants. The relationship of the bottom of each leg of the pants to the waist is as precise as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The flare is 7.19378345267 times the waist. Put the left leg through the left khaki pyramid, then the right leg through the other pyramid. Tuck in the shirt, very tight please. Don’t want to see a single crease in it at the waist, do we? Okay, button up and buckle up. All set? Good. Now just before you step out, shove your hand under the pants, get hold of your shirt and pull. Go on, keep at it, the idea is to use your shirt to lever your half-pants up to your rib-cage, preferably all the way to the neck. As soon as you reach the grounds, shove your hand in again and hoist the recalcitrant pants. This is the only way they can defy gravity. Any time there’s a break in the exercises, or your sister-in-law or Lele Guruji himself comes over to talk to you, pull. Even when you grow up and become Shakha Pramukh and are talking to an assembly of distinguished guests, don’t forget, yank up the pants.
‘Attention,’ Lele Guruji barked, and fifteen youngsters, five to a row, came sharply to attention. Each boy stood a precise arm’s length from his neighbour. On the right, resting on the ground beside each child soldier for Hindutva, was his six-foot wooden staff. Time to bring one’s right hand smartly to one’s chest and say Jai Hind before going home. Instead, Lele Guruji said ‘at ease’ and followed it up with a ‘sit down’.
He looked into the distance. The all too solid and numerous CWD chawls obscured his view, but he saw right through them into every boy’s soul.
‘Every day you reiterate your loyalty to our cause. You swear that you have faith in our religion. But faith is a torch. Unless you light torches in the hearts and souls of others, our flame will waste and die. Our Sabha desperately needs new blood.’
This was puzzling. Why was the Sabha bloodthirsty?
‘Hindutva is an infinite ocean. But in the last few years, especially after the death of the great martyr Godse, the ocean is retreating.’ Ravan got the picture now. Hinduism was an ocean of blood but there was a hole at the bottom, so you had to keep filling it. ‘It is your bounden duty, it is your dharma to enroll at least one new member in the next ten days. Anyone who does so will get a magnificent calendar with a picture of the goddess Bhavani presenting her sword to his royal highness, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.
‘But even this is not going to be enough. Our leaders have sent a special message to us. For centuries, Muslims, Catholics and Protestants have converted Hindus. It is time we turned the tide. What we need is a wild bushfire that spreads across the country and brings back the lost souls to Hinduism. Anyone who enrolls a non-Hindu in our Sabha will get a Wilson fountain-pen. And the new member will be given not only a Wilson fountain-pen and ball-point set but also a beautifully illustrated and abridged copy of the Stories from the Mahabharata and Shri Krishna’s Life in Hindi, English or Marathi. Go into the world and light fires, the fires of Hinduism. Jai Hind.’
Did Lele Guruji know what he was doing? That ten- and fifteen-year-olds, like forty- and fifty-year-old adults, may pick only the out-of-context vivid phrase and act upon it? How many of Lele’s pupils became arsonists must remain a matter of conjecture. We must disappoint you and inform you that Ravan didn’t. But the mixed and muddled metaphors of his Guru and the temptation of a Wilson fountain-pen when school would only permit him to use a nib and holder had a fiery effect upon him. He would convert, yes, he would be a missionary such as the world had never seen. Having resolved upon a vocation, the question was: whom was he to convert? What better place to start than home? No point letting go of the calendar. After all, Lele Guruji hadn’t said it was an either/or proposition. He would win both the calendar and the Wilson fountain-pen.
‘Dada, I need to talk to you about an important matter.’ His father was lying on the only bed at home in the living-room with his face to the wall. If anybody had asked Ravan what his father did, he would have said, ‘He lies in bed with his face to the wall.’ He had done that ever since Ravan could remember.
From the occasional outbursts of his mother, Ravan had gathered that there was a time when Shankar-rao Pawar had had a job. He had been a weaving operator in a cloth mill, moved on to an ice-factory as loader, had done a stint as a car mechanic’s helper and then been a dark-room assistant in a photographer’s studio.
‘Why don’t you work like a man?’ Parvati would scream at her husband every few months.
‘What’s the point, I always end up resigning. Mark you, I’ve never been sacked. I’ve always walked out.’
‘Every man I know works. Nobody sits at home.’
‘You should have married them. You know so many of them, God knows how intimately.’
‘You watch your tongue now. My own husband saying such awful things about me.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? You don’t treat me like your husband. You don’t let me come into your bed.’
‘Is this any way to talk in front of a child? Besides, I would if you were a man and earned a living like one.’
Ravan couldn’t figure out why Parvati asked his father to mind his language. He rarely swore. He certainly hadn’t just now. Unless bed was a swear word.
He had the strange sense that when his parents argued about work, or anything else for that matter, they always ended up where they started. No gains, no losses. Back to square one. His father still called him Ram. Parvati called him Ravan. If they called him Ravan in school, it was because Parvati had taken him over for registration. Was he Ram or Ravan? Good or evil? Black or white? He had no idea. He didn’t mind being either. His name was a source of taunts and baiting in school and in the chawls but even good, solid, decent names could be distorted and lent themselves to wit, rhyme and scatology. ‘Eat shit Dixit.’ ‘What the fuck, hard luck Deepak.’ He would have liked to have made everybody happy by calling himself Ram-Ravan or Ravan-Ram, but both his parents found the hyphenated conjoining offensive.
His father wasn’t sleeping, but if you wanted him to respond you had to repeat whatever you said.
‘Dada, I need to talk to you about an important matter.’
‘If it’s fees, talk to your mother. If your school principal’s rusticated you, I’m sure you deserve it. Talk to her but I doubt if it will help. Frankly if it’s anything important, might as well catch her ear. You know I don’t count in this house.’
‘It’s about some work.’
‘Not you too, you brat.’ His father got out of bed with unfamiliar alacrity, but Ravan sprang out of his reach. ‘Don’t you tell me how to lead my life.’
‘Not work work. It’s got to do with the future of the Hindu nation.’
‘Is that what you woke me up for, Ram?’ He was very angry now. ‘Well, you know where you can shove the future of the Hindu nation?’
‘Where?’ Ravan asked not so innocently, for he had a feeling that this was a rare occasion and his father was going to use some choice phrase. But before Shankar-rao could reply, his mother was out of the kitchen.
‘Don’t you dare, don’t you say a word against our Hindu religion.’
No, Ravan had to admit that recruiting his father was not a wise move. How foolish of him. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? There was a candidate, no, a house full of candidates right next door. The Dixits. The mother and four daughters, like his own mother, had to be disregarded unfortunately since the Sabha, at least the Mazagaon branch, didn’t admit any women; but between the Dixit father and sons, the tally was a goodly seven. And there was no doubt that you couldn’t get a more eligible family than the Dixits. They were the only ones apart from the Monteiros who flew the national flag on Independence Day.
Should he talk to the youngest Dixit and then work his way up, or just talk to the boss man and leave the rest of the clan to follow? Caution, he counselled himself, best to talk to Chandrakant who’s my age and my friend but choose a time when the father’s around and casually direct some of the heavy stuff I have to say in his direction.
Ravan chose the occasion astutely. Five of the children and Ravan were playing not-at-home, the most popular game of cards in the CWD chawls, while Mr Dixit read The Times of India.
Chandrakant narrowed his eyes and looked at his older brother like a policeman collaring a thief.
‘All right, Ashutosh, it’s about time you parted with the four aces you’ve been hoarding. Let me have them.’
‘Not-at-home,’ Ashutosh yelled gleefully.
‘Chandrakant, the Hindu nation is in danger. Only you can save it.’
The effect of his words was beyond his wildest expectations. Without looking at Dixit Sr, Ravan knew he had got his full attention. He hadn’t just lowered his newspaper, he was taking off his specs.
‘Me?’ Chandrakant asked in wonder and awe at discovering such unsuspected prowess.
‘Not just you. You and your entire family. The infinite ocean of Hinduism is drying up because Muslims, Christians, and,’ the word Protestant was too difficult and new for him, ‘Parsees are converting Hindus to their religion. We need to light a fire to convert …’
Ravan heard a rumble. He had never before heard or seen a volcano but he knew in his guts that this was it.
‘Sala, you bloody murderers of Mahatma Gandhi, yes, yes, you, don’t pretend to be so surprised, you murdered the Mahatma, you have the gall to come to my house and preach the gospel of the Sabha? Five times I have been to jail. I left school to follow Gandhi and save our nation and now you want to destroy everything that we stood for and built? Out, out.’
The whole building, Mazagaon, Bombay city seemed to resonate with that cry. ‘Don’t you ever, ever step into this house. Chandrakant, if I see you talking to this boy again, I will strangle you with my own hands.’
