Ravan spotted him from the balcony. He was ambling along. Come on, come on, how can you drag your feet on your way home? On your way to school, yes, that I can understand. But coming back … You must either hate home or you need to have your head examined.
Now he was climbing the stairs, one step at a time. What’s wrong with this fellow, still at the first landing? My father—and you can’t get older or slower than him—has more spring in his step than our friend here. Okay, here he comes at last. Ravan quickly hid himself in the passage.
‘Eddie, Eddie.’
Eddie stopped and looked for the faceless voice. Who could be calling him from the fourth floor, or from any one of the first four floors, for that matter? As Ravan materialized from the shadows, Eddie froze. So did Ravan. It was the first time he had formed his lips around that name. It felt, tasted, smelt and sounded alien. Had he uttered a forbidden word? Had he ventured beyond the point of no return? The two boys stared at each other. They were neighbours. They had run into each other almost every day for years, but they had never before looked closely at each other’s faces. Eddie’s sharp, straight nose and broad forehead, Ravan’s large, perfect oval eyes, his left ear noticeably lower than the right one. Yet the shock and the surprise of the encounter were such that both boys would be hard put to assemble the separate features into a recognizable persona the next day.
Eddie made the first move. He shot up the remaining stairs to his floor.
‘Eddie, listen.’
‘What?’ Eddie looked down from the security of his own floor.
‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘What?’
‘A brand-new Wilson fountain-pen and ball-point pen. And a story-book with beautiful coloured pictures.’
‘What do you want for them?’
Ravan couldn’t figure that one out. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you want in exchange for them?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you take me for? A fool?’
‘All you’ve got to do is come to our Sabha meeting tomorrow. And our master will give them to you.’
‘Just like that?’ Eddie asked scornfully.
‘Yes. And he’ll give me a Wilson pen too. Will you come?’
Eddie shrugged his shoulders and looked bored. ‘I’ve got better things to do.’
That evening Ravan did the unthinkable. He put on his white shirt and khaki half-pants, left home and didn’t go to the Sabha. He didn’t know where he was going, but it didn’t matter. He kept asking himself a question that philosophers had asked for centuries. ‘What is the point?’ He was disillusioned and disheartened. Where was he going wrong? Was he failing the world? Or were the people around him letting him down? He had given it his best shot and yet he had nothing to show for it.
He had reached the Byculla bridge. A local train swept past without stopping at the station. Like a sponge being squeezed, the people on the platform shrank back. There were commuters hanging from the bars of the carriage windows. Some stood precariously on god alone knows what between compartments. Every once in a while a trousered leg or an arm swung wildly but hurriedly got back to its owner when a signal pole or the support of a bridge rushed past. The sides of the train were bulging with the pressure of the people packed into it. (How many passengers does a Bombay ‘local’ hold anyway? Twenty-five thousand? Thirty? Forty?) Any moment now that speeding solid iron shell was going to split open and thousands upon thousands of bodies were going to be flung all over Bombay, all the way to Borivali and Virar, some falling into the Thane creek, others into the Arabian Sea.
Almost by rote, Ravan had stuck his head into one of the diamond-shaped openings in the gridiron of the bridge. This was, after all, one of the most exciting places in the universe. Besides, the riot act as written, read and practised by his mother said that he was never to go to the bridge alone. But Ravan’s heart was not in it today. His eyes took it all in but there was neither wonder nor mystery in what he saw.
He needed to do a post-mortem on the fiasco of his enrolment drive. He sensed uneasily that he had not used the right words, perhaps he had spoken them at the wrong moment or in the wrong order. Was his tone of voice a little too excitable, not solemn enough? Perhaps his face lacked authority, was he gesticulating too much or too little? Somewhere in the universe there must be a gesture and a set of words that would persuade people to do what he wanted them to do. Every situation, even the most intractable, was poised to go either way; it was always touch and go. But if you had the right combination of pauses, silences, thoughts, animation, stillness, words, you could not only communicate anything you wanted, you could get the results and responses you needed. There were people like that, he was sure about it. He was not one of them, at least not at this point in time.
On his way back home, he stopped at St Sebastian’s School and Church. The light was beginning to fail. In the vast public grounds which the school for all purposes treated as its own, the football players were taking off their shoes but a game of cricket was still in progress.
Ravan watched the batsman take the bowling apart. Then the bowler hit pay dirt. One of his deliveries sang in the air like that fast train under the bridge. Suddenly, just as the batsman lifted his bat to swing at it, it turned an invisible corner and took off all three stumps. That ended the game and Ravan wandered off to a strangely dressed group of people at the other end of the field.
They reminded Ravan of his own Sabha, the way they had spaced themselves. There were about thirty of them, all a little older than him. Must have been between twelve and seventeen. In front of them stood their teacher, just like Lele Guruji. But there the resemblance ended. All of them, including the teacher, were in white. They wore loose white trousers that stopped at the calves and a white jacket tied around the waist, with a white belt knotted on the side. Ravan had never before seen a workout like this. Their arms and legs shot out wildly but always in unison. Their hands chopped the air, described arcs over their heads, they leapt, they kicked in mid-air, but the weirdest part of it was that they accompanied every action with a sound so alien and abrupt, it was like a missile aimed at him. Without meaning to, he tried to dodge it physically.
But if Lele Guruji was strict, unsmiling and a pain in the neck, this teacher was the sourest man he had ever seen. Nothing pleased him. He found fault with everything. He walked in and out of the cluster of boys with a cane that flashed and stung every defaulting limb. But it was not the cane that bothered Ravan, it was the distress and displeasure that the slightest imperfection caused the man.
‘You are at least fifteen to twenty years younger than I am. But all of you are made of plywood. I want willows. You think this is Pee Tee, you clowns, imbeciles, cretins? We are talking about mind control here, the total subservience of the body to the disciplined mind. Instead, what I get is apoplexy, your limbs thrashing around like the severed tails of geckos before they too lose the spark of life. Arseholes, now look and see if you can respond to poetry for an instant. You won’t be able to appreciate it longer than that.’
He rose into the air. Six feet above the ground his body became parallel to the earth. He hung there motionless. Then a shoulder turned, the body crouched in mid-air spun around like a silk veil, a leg seemed to disengage from that body-ball, it became a projectile, there was the sound of air being slit into two perfect halves in Ravan’s ear and the tip of the right toe brushed the seven upright hairs on Ravan’s head. At that very instant the body rose to meet the heavens again, became an arrow that climbed, then split at the crotch as the arms unfurled and let out a howl of damnation on mankind. He landed lightly, his feet eighteen inches apart, arms akimbo in front of Ravan.
‘What do you think you’re doing in my class, ghati? Go back to your Sabha.’
There was going to be hell to pay when he got back, but that didn’t worry Ravan overmuch. He was still distracted. Why had that man, who he was sure could fly, who had done that incredible and glorious trick in the air, been so hostile and offensive?
Ravan tugged hard at his shirt from under his half-pants the next day, and was out of the door when his mother called out.
‘Ravan, come back.’
‘What is it?’
‘Pull my sari down at the back.’
‘I’m running late. Lele Guruji will make me sit in the evening after class and do penance.’
‘Thirty seconds won’t make a difference.’
‘It will.’
‘You’ve already wasted, a minute. Tell that Lele you were straightening out my sari.’
It was a routine that Ravan was familiar with. So were the protestations. The starched sari which his mother wore while going to the temple or on special occasions always stuck awkwardly to the back of her petticoat. It was his job to pry it loose and pat it down.
‘See, how much time did it take?’
‘An hour.’
Was that sari responsible for what happened at the Sabha? If Parvati had delayed Ravan a little more, would his life have been different? Would he have been spared the dreadful discovery that was to haunt and affect his whole life?
‘That’s two penances. One big one for playing truant yesterday. And another for not being on time today. Mussolini, the great leader of the Italians, conquered Abyssinia and many other countries. With his friend Hitler, he nearly won the Second World War. But do you know what is considered his greatest achievement even today by many scholars and historians? He made the trains in Italy run on time. He who knows the value of time will never be left behind. Do you know why the British conquered us and why we will never make any progress? Because like you, Ravan, Indians have never been on time.’
If you were late you were the recipient of this homily, a whack between the cortex and the neck that made you reel like a drunkard, followed by a pinching of the arm that was Lele Guruji’s original contribution to the vocabulary of punishment. He caught a bit of your flesh and a chunk of biceps between his index finger and thumb and dug in till the muscle fibres separated into individual stinging strands of fire that spread in waves and made your earlobes burn and brain wilt. It was always the right arm unless you happened to be left-handed. Corporal chastisement was followed by spiritual disciplinary action. You copied a couple of chapters from the Gita with a hand that shook as if your bloody pumping heart had got trapped in the upper arm.
That was the small penance. What was the big one going to be? Ravan stopped in his tracks. The Mazagaon Sabha was assembled in full strength, with everyone sitting in the lotus position. A makeshift dais had been erected. Appa Achrekar, the elderly firebrand and legendary hero of the Sabha, was there along with three other local Sabha leaders. What was going on? How could he have forgotten it? Today was Founder’s Day, and he was an hour late. Well, might as well beat it, instead of being humiliated in front of all these big shots. Ravan turned his back on the ceremonies and then turned round once again. Who was that boy on whose shoulder Appa Achrekar had laid such a loving and paternal hand? I’ll lie down and die. Eddie.
‘There’s a famous story in the Bible about a father and two sons, both of whom he loved dearly. The older boy was a fine, dutiful and obedient son. A dependable sort, one on whom you could always rely, just like our Dharmaraj. The younger one was lovable and wild. One day the father and sons were in the fields supervising work when the younger son turned to his father and said, “I’m leaving, Father.” “My son, it is not yet eventide. Only at the end of a hard day’s labour are you entitled to rest and relax.” “I’m leaving you, Mother and the farm, Father.” “What has got into you, my son? Where are you going?” “I’m going to see the world, Father. My feet grow smaller working the same field. My eyes are going blind seeing the same old people every day of my life.” Then his brother spoke up. “Go if you must but bear this in mind. Only he who toils is entitled to the fruits of his toil and of this land. If you leave now, do not come back and demand your share.” The younger brother laughed and poked his older brother in the ribs. “Fear not, my brother, I shall not covet your land or your cattle or grain. They bore me fearfully.” “And why will you covet my land,” the brother asked, “when you have already taken half of everything that our parents own?”
‘Years passed without a word from the wandering son. The older son toiled without pause. More and more his parents came to depend upon him. He fulfilled all his obligations as an older son should. And then one day they saw a dot at the very edge of the horizon. “Who could it be?” the mother asked her son. “It is a shadow, Mother, it will pass as a cloud in the sky.” But the shadow grew bigger and bigger and the word spread like fire in yellowing grass. It is the young master, he has returned. And even as the shadow grew bigger, the father ordered a feast such as the town, nay, that part of the world had never seen. And the shadow now was so big and close it fell upon the older brother. “Wherefore do you rejoice, Father, in the return of a son who abandoned you, and prepare unimaginable feasts for him, yet never say a word of thanks to the one who stood steadfast and loyal all these years and looked after you?” “We’ll not just celebrate and feast for the next few weeks my son, but all that we have is his who has come back.” “And what is my reward, Father?” “Duty well done is its own reward, my son. Surely you did not love us for gain and rewards. Thanks be to the Lord. For there is no greater joy for parents than to see their prodigal son return to the fold.” And so saying the father and mother put their arms around the younger son.
‘Eddie Coutinho is our prodigal son. How many centuries have passed since he and his people were converted and left us? I have lost count. But he is back amongst his own and we rejoice at the return of our prodigal.
‘Mark my words. Eddie will not just bring honour to the Sabha with his valour and devotion, in a couple of years he’ll become the Prefect of the Mazagaon branch and before long one of our great national leaders.’
At this point Lele Guruji got up hastily and, handing a packet to Appa Achrekar, whispered something in his ear.
‘To celebrate this occasion, Eddie, the Sabha wishes to give you a Wilson pen and ball-point set, though I must tell you that I do not approve of these pens and ball-points for children. And here’s a fine illustrated book, Stories from the Mahabharata and Shri Krishna’s Life. Give him a hand, my friends.’
Amidst the thunderous applause they failed to see the comet, that had watched the proceedings transfixed, spin into orbit and race straight to the dais. Ravan was behind the chairs now; he put his hand in the rear loop of Lele Guruji’s half-pants, yanked him back, threw him off balance, and stood in front of Appa Achrekar.
‘Where is my prize?’
The closely tonsured, white-haired, gaunt leader who had not feared the might of the British empire, had shot but not killed a particularly vicious deputy police commissioner in pre-Independence times and been sent to the Andaman islands for life-imprisonment, looked at Ravan through glasses made from soda water bottle bottoms but couldn’t make sense of the raging, wild anger shaking before him.
‘Is this another non-Hindu?’ Appa directed the question at no one in particular.
Lele Guruji had regained his balance. He had not eaten children of ten yet but he was about to make a start. He got hold of Ravan’s collar along with the thin flesh at the back of the boy’s neck and began forcing him to retreat.
‘No, Appa. This is a nobody. What do you want, Ravan?’ One flick, a flip of the tail of a whale and Ravan had shrugged him off.
‘My Wilson fountain-pen.’
‘What fountain-pen, you ass? What have you done to deserve it?’
‘I brought Eddie.’
‘Sambhaji Satpude got him. And he’s already been given his reward.’ Lele Guruji’s hand was tightening its grip on Ravan’s neck while dragging him off the stage. But he had underestimated the strength of the boy. Ravan was not fighting for his life, he was fighting for his honour.
‘I talked to Eddie and persuaded him to join us. Ask him,’ Ravan hollered at the top of his voice.
The world stood still. And the two boys were alone on it. Time forgot to tick the seconds off. A voice like an oiled whip cracked across Ravan’s back. The welts would never disappear from his soul.
‘He’s lying. Why would I talk to him? He murdered my father.’
And now Ravan was alone, truly alone, and the loneliness seared and shrivelled him as if the sun had suddenly withdrawn all heat from the earth. Everyone was looking at him. Appa, Lele, the other youngsters, the people on the road, the CWD chawls, the mercury lamps, the men and women in England, the Red Indians his teacher in school had talked of, the stars that you could not see but were there. They looked at him in horror, wonder and dismay. And yet Ravan, son of Parvati and Shankar Pawar, the ten-headed monster and evil incarnate had only one question to ask.
‘When?’
Ah, the moment of truth. What god in his madness and wanton cruelty had ruled that we must confront it?
‘Ask your mother.’ What turned Ravan’s soul to ice was the certainty in Eddie’s voice. He would ask for proof all his life, but the only proof that mattered he had already heard. He wasn’t aware of the tears, but there was acid scooping inch-deep tracks in his face.
‘I didn’t. I swear to you, I didn’t. I’ve never even seen your father.’
But what was the use of protesting when he knew the truth? In the distance he heard Appa Achrekar asking Lele Guruji, ‘What is the boy doing in our Sabha? Get rid of him immediately.’
As if Ravan wanted to continue in the Sabha or be counted among the living.
