Evenings were the quietest time in Ravan’s home. His father went out at 5 o’clock after a long siesta, three hours at the minimum. Teatime was 4.30 and at five he walked to the corner to pick up the evening rag, Bittambatmi. He knew his priorities. Work was anathema; as for the rest, he was willing to make adjustments. People may have sniggered at him because Parvati wore the pants in the family but who had gifted her the pants anyway? In return, he got three meals daily, tea, snacks, clothes, betel nut to chew, pocket money for the evening paper, two movies a month and, most important of all, peace.
Sex was a grey area. Parvati was not just a fine-looking woman, there was a sexual charge in her, an animal magnetism, to use the current popular magazine phrase, that she was completely unconscious of and that drove some men insane and others to asceticism and flagellation.
It was this innocence that women never forgave her. Manu, the ancient law-giver and misogynist was right, they told themselves. Women were a curse but Parvati was a catastrophe. How could she be so ignorant of the effect she had on others? It was a crime. You had to merely look at their husbands, somewhere in the middle distance, to see their members rise in outrageous rebellion, and sunder their jock straps. How their dicks howled, shrieked and bellowed at the sight of her. Tarts were better. At least they did it for a living.
Time and circumstances had taken their toll on Parvati. Besides, she hardly ever stepped out. But she was still a pain in the groin when she was not sweating. Fortunately for Shankar, she sweated. Incessantly. She was a non-stop, squelching, slushy mess. Her hair sweated, her neck, ears, hands, arms, breasts, the small of her back, her buttocks, her thighs, her heels and toes sweated. She wiped herself with the end of her sari and, when that was dripping, with the middle, back and sides of her sari and petticoat. If she stood in one place, in front of the three jumbo stoves in her kitchen, for instance, the sweat dripped from her thighs and calves and formed puddles under her. Time and again she wrung out her clothes but it was a losing battle. She was so wet all day long, everything became transparent. All that remained impenetrable was the shape of her bra and the line of her home-made panties.
And yet, on some nights when she was not thawing feverishly, Shankar-rao would be beside himself and on top of her. Once in a while she let him. Mostly, however, she turned over and lay on her breasts and face. This made him furious but it also drove him crazy. When she stood to put the string of flowers on the miniature gods in the tiny altar in the kitchen, he could see her arse from where he lay in bed and couldn’t decide between her breasts and her buttocks. All he wanted to do was assault her, mount her from behind as she lay motionless for fear of waking up Ravan. But she had a way of tensing her back, buttocks and thigh muscles that gave him no purchase, and if he persisted, all he could show for his efforts was a battered and bruised limb. He would quietly get up, open the tin in which his wife stored papads, pick up the notes hidden at the bottom and walk out of the house.
A man who had little use for time, Shankar was nevertheless obsessively conscious of it. He might as well have been a nail on the wall as far as Parvati was concerned, and she often took him for granted or forgot that he was a member of her household; but come 4.25, and she knew it was wise to make him his cup of tea. Because if it wasn’t on his bed at 4.30, he became vile and vicious and reminded her of all the goods and artefacts her parents still owed him. After he had pronounced that her father and mother were mother-fuckers, he couldn’t think of anything which would top that observation and kept repeating it till Parvati lost all control over herself and threatened to jump from the window. Poor Parvati, it never occurred to her to tell him that she would throw him out of the window instead. Or more to the point—out of the house, physically and literally.
A Harangue on Poverty
For have you not wondered why Ravan’s home did not fold in on itself many years ago? How do you think Parvati fed her son, husband and herself? Where did she get the money to buy food, pay the rent, send Ravan to school, replace the panes in the windows that Ravan broke, buy clothes? Who paid the electricity bills? Maybe she was born with a gigantic silver ladle in her mouth, maybe Shankar’s grand-uncle had left him real estate in South Bombay, maybe Parvati ran a numbers’ racket. Who knows? Life goes on. You have to take the good with the bad. Everything that happens, happens for the best. No need to be superior and look down on platitudes and cliches. What would we do without them? How else would we bear with such admirable fortitude the trials and travails of others?
In India, as in other poor countries, we have a line that is invisible and abstract and yet more powerful and pervasive than anything the West or the Japanese have invented. It is called the poverty line. Above the poverty line are three meals a day. Below it is a spectrum that stretches all the way from 2.99 to zero meals. As familiar as a clothes-line, most people in India spend their entire lives trying to reach out beyond it. It is their greatest aspiration. If you are fortunate, if the gods smile and you are lucky, you may get a glimpse of it. You can’t see the line, you can’t touch it, and five hundred million people are trying to get to it. But if you brush against it, sink your teeth into it, grow your nails, scratch at it as if you were trying to gouge out the eyes of a man who had tried to rape you, take a breath, deep but quick, and hoist your right leg. No grip, no toehold, no thin end of the wedge, no chink in the armour, just the transparent give of air, what patent nonsense, you knew that all along, you twit, get that leg out, flail, rage, fume, fight, you’ve torn your right thigh, it’s a bleeding, gurgling and bubbly mess, whole chunks of it are flapping red and merry in the air, that’s fantastic, that’s glorious just so long as your leg is pinned and pierced into the barbed wire of that line to the big time. You’ve made it. Because, if one is to believe what they tell us, there are houris and TVs and videos and musk and the seven heavens, not to mention full bellies, on the other side of that line.
As for the rest of the five hundred million, maybe the poverty line is so far away and so high they never get to see it. Or if they do, they tell themselves it is a mirage.
What in god’s name was the matter with Parvati? Why did she sweat so obscenely and voluminously? A hormonal problem, an endocrinological imbalance, a hyperactive sweat system, maybe she drank too much water, maybe she was just a nervous person? Why not come right out and say what her neighbours assumed: her sweating was a direct consequence of being oversexed. What do you expect, all that garlic and onion are bound to send the libido through the roof.
Those, of course, are the facts, the true scientific causes behind Parvati’s excesses. It may however also be mentioned in passing that after Shankar gave up work for higher pursuits, Parvati spent twelve hours a day in front of three monster kerosene-stoves, cooking lunch and dinner for fifty bachelors or at least quasi-bachelors. They had left their wives, farms and homes behind in the coastal villages and hinterlands of Maharashtra and come to Bombay in search of work. Some stayed four to a room, some shared the same space with ten or twelve others. Still others occupied a room in shifts. Parvati supplied them meals. The food was not the greatest, many complained incessantly about it and swore to terminate the arrangement at the end of the month. Parvati’s answer to them was, ‘We eat what you eat.’ The food was hot when it was filled into the tiffin boxes at nine in the mornings and six in the evenings, but tepid or cold by the time it got to the mills, factories and workshops where Parvati’s clientele worked.
You paid for a month’s meals in advance. You missed your payment on the 30th (27th for February), and your tiffin box didn’t turn up the next day. Every once in a while someone who had not got his box came over and threw a tantrum, made a scene or cried his heart out at Parvati’s door promising to pay within two days or a week. Often Shankar intervened on behalf of the defaulter. ‘I know him. We worked together at the Sapna Leather Works (or The Royal Cotton Mills or Graphix Printers). He’s a good man, he’ll pay. Send him his food tomorrow.’ Parvati always acquiesced in her husband’s wishes. ‘I will,’ she said, ‘if you start working from tomorrow.’ That seemed to end the argument, at least as far as Shankar was concerned.
If the client grew abusive and violent, Parvati would look to her husband for help. That was in the old days, but her foolishness became obvious to her soon enough. She understood that there was always help at hand. Its beginning, middle and end was herself, Parvati.
After the tiffin carrier man picked up the dinner boxes at six, the house would quieten down. Parvati would then go shopping for vegetables to the Byculla wholesale market. You couldn’t get fresh vegetables cheaper anywhere else. She could have sent the elderly woman whom she had hired the previous year to help with the peeling and chopping. But there was a fine line between economical and rotten and the old woman invariably transgressed it. The tomatoes she bought were either overripe and squashed or had fungus turning both the seed and red flesh black. She seemed to pick cauliflowers that had more stem and leaves than flower. And she had a predilection for okra, one of Parvati’s specialities, that were so tumid and dry they wouldn’t cook even in her brass pressure cooker.
Besides, there was one other factor. Any minion was bound to come to an understanding with the vendors about prices and margins. There were slim profits in Parvati’s business and the key to them lay in the shopping.
They called her the mother of fisherwomen at the vegetable market. When it came to bargaining or a squabble, you could cross words with a Bombay Koli woman only at the gravest risk not just to your self-esteem but to your person. Parvati did not supply fish to her clientele, but she had mastered the technique of Koli women and made some radical improvements on it. The vendors at the market loved and hated her. She knew everybody by name. Something about her, not just her looks or sex, made them confide unwisely in her about women troubles, troubles at home, good times, who was cheating whom, who had got into debt, who was planning to run off with the neighbour’s daughter, who was paying exorbitant interest. They asked for Parvati’s advice and she gave it freely. Often it turned out to be sound counsel, but it meant that she knew your little secrets and would not hesitate to use them if you gave her cause.
If Parvati came into her own, it was in the market. She chatted with the vendors, asked after their wives, children, parents and second cousins, got spicy bhakarwadis for them, she humoured them, she scolded them. For coughs and colds she brewed home-made concoctions that tasted of green grass mixed with horse-manure. The vendors’ taste buds revolted and their stomachs retched in dry paroxysms, but the phlegm came unstuck and they told her that she was the guardian witch of the Byculla market.
Parvati was born to be Superintendent of the Byculla vegetable market, if not the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India or the Finance Minister of the country. She could make two ends meet and have a bit left over. There was nothing underhand about her. But she was a wheeler-dealer at heart. Bargaining was in her blood. She instinctively knew how to give in on small matters and gain the big advantage. Anybody who dealt with her came out feeling cleansed, heroic and on top. She could scream but you could always out-scream her. She made the vendor taste victory and that made him generous. When both parties feel good after striking a deal, the prospects for future business are bright.
Parvati took Ravan to the Byculla market a couple of times, but he hated it. Lorries were parked three deep and stretched to the end of one’s vision and beyond. Hundreds of bent men, parallel to the ground from the waist upwards, carried loads of vegetables that were bigger than those on the trucks. They wobbled and tottered and couldn’t walk in a straight line. When one of them hobbled past him, Ravan hugged Parvati and sank his head into the folds of her sari. The floor of the market was filthy and slippery with vegetable debris. Parvati told him to watch his step, but a banana peel was stuck to the sole of his right sandal. Every time Ravan moved, his foot slithered and he would have broken a couple of bones if Parvati hadn’t held his hand tightly.
The vendors sat on raised platforms with stack upon stack upon stack of brinjals, cabbages, spinach, potatoes, onions, beans, pumpkins, melons, bananas, carrots, green beans and cucumbers on either side of them. But there was life under the platforms too, where the reserve stock was kept. Ravan was transfixed by a dwarf at eye level who was burrowing in a hole underneath. No, not a dwarf but a man on his haunches whose duck feet paddled him in and out of the dungeon. On his way out he brought forth an oversized, tumescent jackfruit in his hands. Ravan had never seen anything so large and malevolent. It was breathing, you could see its pregnant belly swell up and deflate. The man on his haunches raised the living, deformed fruit and yelled, ‘How many more?’
Scores of shoppers with overloaded bags and their coolies with big, flat baskets piled high with the day’s shopping collided with each other in the narrow passages between the rows of open shops. They were unaffected by the subterranean drama. The vendor on the platform grabbed the fruit. It was so heavy he nearly fell over. ‘Another fifty,’ he shouted and stood up on a stool and balanced the jackfruit on a pile that seemed to reach the ceiling. They were all breathing, those jackfruits. The pile expanded, Ravan could hear them inhaling. Then slowly they shrank back. The stench of the ripened jackfruit was buzzing in his head. It made him feel faint. He didn’t know what he hated more, their stink or their yellow-green prickly texture. They were hard and misshapen and made of stone. Any moment now they were going to come crashing down and he would be buried under them. Parvati was going to look for him for days but wouldn’t recognize him because his skin would become hard and yellow-green and spiky and his insides would be pale gold and smell sickeningly sweet.
Parvati cut him open with a butcher’s knife. It was her favourite fruit. It reminded her of her childhood and her mother’s home and carefree days. The suppurating yellow smell made her sigh in ecstasy. She gouged out his soft, pale, voluptuous, gold fruit-flesh. She gorged herself to her eyes all day long and dug in for more. Then she threw him up. She vomited for days and weeks and months till she became nothing but a transparent collapsible shell. She was pale and lay dying in her own filth. The men and women who were shopping crowded around her and looked down, way down into the well where she lay. It was her last breath but she was trying to say something. They couldn’t make out what she was saying but Ravan understood her. ‘More. Just a little more jackfruit.’
Ravan’s father Shankar knew only two postures, the foetal position and a prostrate one in which he stretched out on his back. He practised the first for about eighteen hours a day, when he lay curled on his side in bed, with his face to the wall. Over the years the bed had begun to resemble a hammock. The web of steel springs that stretched under it from end to end was about six inches from the floor in the middle. The slightest variation in pressure and position made the bed squeal anxiously. Shankar had no problems living with the creaking. Every nine or ten months when the springs began to sound like cats in heat, Parvati poured coconut oil into a cup and oiled them. Then for a few months the bed’s protestations were muted.
Ravan thought that his father was born in striped shorts and a short half-sleeved vest which he rolled halfway up his chest because of the heat.
When he was not in bed, he was sprawled on a grandfather armchair. It had a cane back and the length of the arms could be doubled by extending the flat boards under them. Shankar lay on the chair, his legs resting on the lengthened arms, his head collapsed to one side and the newspaper held in front of him. It was an effort to read the paper but this was one task which he did not shirk. He read the tabloid with the concentration, unease and intensity of people who have to pick out letters to form the harder words and are not too sure of their meaning.
Bittambatmi was the highest-selling paper in Bombay. The name Bittambatmi meant every bit of news and that’s what it had, so long as it was sensational, gaudy and mostly fabricated. The schematics, if anyone bothered to study them, were always the same. Three rapes or near rapes, one of which was a confession by the rapist, the second an emotionally charged and suggestive account from the victim and the third a mere news item. Murders, contraband hauls and gang wars were headline stuff. The second page was the police beat, the third a review of the criminal cases in the courts and excerpts from the memoirs of police inspectors, customs officials and lawyers. The fourth was devoted to astrology, miracles, rebirths, two-headed babies, triplets with one conjoined set of lungs, and a column where Auntie Lalan sternly answered or deflected readers’ queries on every conceivable weakness, failing and sexual aberration. Of late, the paper had been taking a high moral stand on wife-burnings and abuse but managed to spend the greater part of its time and space instructing its readers on exactly how to proceed in such matters.
While his father read about a man who lured women to his home, kept them chained for months and raped them repeatedly, Ravan did his homework on the floor. There were eleven problems in arithmetic that he had to solve and after almost an hour he was still on the first. He did not really have any difficulty with them; it was just that he had not even looked at them. Were memories dreams or dreams memories? And were there memories that the mind did not remember? Was it possible to do something while one slept and not recall it? Then how come Eddie, who was younger than him, remembered something he did not? Was it possible to access someone else’s memory without that person’s knowledge? When had he killed Eddie’s father? And how? And why? Was he leading two lives and did the one not know of the other? Did his parents know that he was a murderer? Were they keeping mum because he was their son? And it wasn’t as though this was a solitary accident. He seemed to be adept at killing though he couldn’t recall the second murder either. Mr Dixit obviously had very clear memories of his killing Gandhi. Did he kill Eddie’s father first or Mahatma Gandhi? Or did he commit both crimes on the same day? It was all very puzzling. Lele Guruji said that Nathuram Godse killed Gandhi and had become one of the great heroes and martyrs of the Hindu cause. They had hanged Godse. What about Ravan? Would they be coming to get him one of these nights? Are you hanged twice if you commit two murders? If they hanged him, would he too become a hero and martyr? Or was it something more complex than that, since he had killed Eddie’s father which both Lele Guruji and Appa Achrekar disapproved of? Had his father’s paper Bittambatmi carried the news, a blow-by-blow account of how he had done it? Done them? Did Godse fire the first shot? Or did he? Where was the gun? And Eddie’s father, had Ravan shot him or stabbed him with a knife? And what if his parents didn’t know anything about his past either? What would happen when they discovered it? Would they throw him out? What a question. Who would harbour a murderer?
The previous year Parvati had bought a ceiling fan and had it installed in their living-cum-bedroom. When she got back from the temple and after the meal boxes had been dispatched, she brought out the vegetables that needed to be cut for the next day and sat under the fan next to Ravan. As she sliced the long green beans, she hummed a song from Baazi, a film she had seen a couple of years earlier. Usually, Ravan interrupted her to tell her that the words she sang were not in the song she was trying to sing and could she possibly refrain from singing because there were limits to tunelessness and she was breaking every one of them? She thought he was bloody cheeky but in this one instance she loved it. Because if you sang badly, Ravan couldn’t resist telling you and would instantly show you how the tune went and what the words were. And he never sang a couple of lines but the whole song.
What Ravan meant to her, Parvati would never be able to say and would not want to either. But when he broke into song, she sat agape in wonder, amazement and pleasure. Did you hear his voice? Would you believe he was just a child? He held nothing back, he put everything he had into it. It was a voice as open, as guileless as he was. It reminded her of the blue sky in her village. It was blue blue, it was dense, it was higher than the sun and it danced. It reminded her of the wind on the hill in her village and the green that stretched forever. It brought back the river to her, the big, vast and deep river that flowed so quietly, you thought its waters were still. Where did he get that voice from? And how did he learn the words when they had no radio (she was going to buy him one as soon as she had collected enough money), and how did he hold a tune, every nuance of it and how come he was utterly, utterly unselfconscious?
She deliberately hummed some more but there was no response from him today. She had been watching him for a while now. He did his homework regularly and she was not one to bawl him out because his mind had wandered. But something was amiss today. She had not seen him so unnaturally still before. It was as if he wasn’t there.
‘What’s the matter, son?’
She had touched a mansion eaten through by termites. The whole edifice of Ravan Pawar (eight years and two hundred and thirty-seven days old, black hair, widow’s peak, trusting eyes) crumbled before Parvati. There was no sound to his tears.
‘You never told me I killed Eddie’s father.’
Parvati was speechless. He didn’t need reconfirmation but there it was—her silence, the sudden throb of memory in her eyes, the flash of rage that ignited her tongue.
‘Has that Violet woman been talking to you?’ So his mother knew and so did Eddie’s mother. They had an understanding, a pact of silence.
‘You didn’t kill him. He almost killed you.’ He had never seen her so angry. But he was not deceived.
‘How come I’m alive and he’s dead?’
Parvati’s hand flew out and hit Ravan hard on the cheek.
‘Don’t you ever say something so terrible.’ She drew him to her. He resisted but she wasn’t aware of it. She clasped him to her breast and kissed him all over his face as if this was the last time she was going to see him. ‘May all your ill-wishers die this minute. I got you back from death. No other mother has been as fortunate as I. I don’t intend losing you now.’
