If you want to know the people of the CWD chawls and how their minds work, you must first understand the floor-plan of the chawls and the amenities it offers.
Think of a plus sign, now extend its horizontal arms ten times on either side. This is the main passage or corridor on each floor. On either side of the corridor arm are ten rooms. That’s twenty rooms to the left of the vertical stroke of the plus sign and twenty on the right. The short vertical houses the staircase and a balcony with a concrete parapet where Parvati stood the day Ravan took his first leap into the world.
Each room was twelve feet wide and twenty-four feet deep with a wooden partition separating the drawing-room-cum-bedroom-cum-study, library, playpen or whatever from the kitchen which doubled as dining-room, bedroom, dressing-room, and bathroom (a tiny four-foot x four-foot washing space with a tap was cordoned off on one side with a two-foot wall on which were stacked pots of water). Each room was home to one family, nuclear or extended. It is uncommon to have only two people staying in the one long but partitioned room. The average is between six to eight. Patriarch and wife, sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
Forty families shared the corridor and did much of their living there. In the afternoons the women cleaned the rice or wheat, combed their daughters’ hair or left the papads to dry on a thin piece of cloth; some evenings you’d see a game of cricket in progress here; this was the venue for the annual carrom tournaments and at nights the corridor became a dormitory for many of the children and adults from the floor.
But we are straying away from our floor-plan. At the end of the long arms were the mini dhobi-ghats, the place where the women or the help would beat, bully and wash clothes on a pitted black stone. Beyond this washing area were the common toilets.
There were solid old British brass taps above the flat black stone which decades of washing had almost worn smooth. Every once in three or four months some housewife who couldn’t bear to look at the dull and unwashed brass, scrubbed them with tamarind. Within minutes the glint and gold would be back in them. In the toilets there were neither water cisterns nor chains. The flushing arrangement was a push button one. You pressed a brass knob, the springs were rusty and you had to lean hard on it, and even then there was no guarantee that a jet of water would leap out into the toilet pan. The giant cast-iron water-storage tanks, both for the homes and the toilets, were all stockpiled on the terrace of each chawl. The British engineers who had designed the water supply set-up some seventy years ago had done a good job. Despite heavy use and maltreatment, the system still worked. All that the tenants had to do was to wait and pray for water.
The Great Water Wars
They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person’s skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump.
One of these days they may get around to it but so far Ravan, Eddie, their mothers and the tenants at the CWD chawls haven’t committed murder in the name of water. Though God knows there have been times when they were close to it. There have been words, nasty, bitter, venomous, corrosive words; genealogies have been traced, incestuous sexual acts involving mothers, brothers and sisters invoked in swear-words; hostilities have been declared, words have led to physical fights. Frictions have festered; attitudes hardened and prejudices led to Pavlovian reflexes of bellicosity and at times it’s been touch and go.
The causes have almost always been the same: supply cannot meet demand. Planning and execution have met the needs of the population figures of a decade or two earlier. Rains are an act of God in India. And God as we know is a law unto himself. He is not responsible, neither is He accountable. That is the essence of God: He gives with two hands and takes away with eight more. Why else would Indian gods and goddesses have several pairs of hands?
The nature of the municipal water tap is feudal and bureaucratic. It replicates and clones the Almighty’s manners and moodiness but never his generosity since its power is entirely derivative. It is a middleman, its patronage disburses what does not belong to it. The only way it can experience and feel power is to exert it erratically and often. Hence it is not enough that it calls the shots, it must perforce leave you in the dark. You are at its mercy. You are grateful for its bounties and contrite for its seasons of drought.
The unstable tyrant of the family in the CWD chawls is the man of the manor. Drunk, sober, employed, jobless, taciturn or gibbering, his word is law. His wife sustains and not infrequently supports the family and is more than happy to give her husband all the credit if only he will allow her to carry on with her work. But despite the boss-man’s pretensions and the wife’s sacrifice and self-effacement, the prime mover of life is water. You snapped out of anaesthesia, interrupted coitus, stopped your prayers, postponed your son’s engagement, developed incontinence, took casual leave to go down and stand at the common tap, cancelled going to church because water, present and absent, is more powerful than the Almighty.
You left the tap open before you went to sleep. When the water sputtered and splattered at three, four or five a.m. and sometimes not at all, was when your day began. You cursed and cribbed and filled up every vessel in sight and tried to zip through a bath and if there was still a trickle left, woke up the children and gave them a speed bath that was more an act of the imagination than an exercise in cleansing. If it wasn’t already six, you stumbled back to a twilight sleep where nameless fears and forebodings, all of them waterlogged, crawled and rose in phantasmagoric shapes from the floor of your subconscious and left you tepid and perspiring.
There’s a water tap in the bathroom of every house in the CWD chawls, in the four toilets at the end of the left and right wing of each floor and the two common wash-areas opposite.
If the tanks on the terrace run out of water—two or three days at a time is not unusual—you are forced to troop down to the public tap. There’s one for every two chawls. There’s no law on the subject but the idea is to share the water amongst the four hundred and eighty families who live in the two adjoining buildings. There is no court of appeal but by and large almost everybody adheres to the unwritten protocol.
‘Those people’ as the people on the ground floor were called in the CWD chawls, the three hundred or so families whose very shadows polluted the others had a couple of separate taps just as six taps were reserved for all the Catholics. When the water was short or if the papers gave notice that there was going to be a water-cut the next day, the untouchables were shooed away from their taps and water filled from them after the first woman in the queue perfunctorily threw a few drops in the direction of the brass nozzle of the faucet to make it clean and usable.
The municipal tap is the original cornucopia. It is plugged into the mains and supplies water twenty-four hours of the day. Twenty-four hours, as you know, is a flexi-time concept in our country, and can stretch anywhere between three to four hours. That’s on the good days. The timings are fixed. When the water comes, you know it’s come.
On any given day, there were anywhere between a hundred to two hundred and fifty pots waiting in queue. What a sight it was. Two thousand years of brass and copper craftsmanship. Long, slender necks, wide bodies, broad butts, svelte torsos, short-chinned stodgy tankers, tightly corseted, narrow-bottomed, prissy mouthed, there was no end to their shapes and sizes. Despite the perpetual water shortage, they shone like flares from newly sunk oil wells. That was thirty years ago. The brass and the copper have been replaced by cheap, exuberant plastics which the sun denudes of all colour and turns grey and anaemic within three or four months.
The women came down, stood by their pots and buckets, chatted, compared notes on which ration shops had sugar and kerosene, went back to their homes to feed their babies and send their children to school, returned, untied their hair and knotted it tightly at the back with effortless and casual grace, adjusted their saris and waited.
Hours passed.
The lead pipe went into a spasm, recoiled and kicked and threw an epileptic tantrum as if it were made not of lead but rubber. It made threatening noises, coughed and cleared a thirty-metre-long throat, vomited seventeen drops of brown tepid goo, withdrew, brooded, went dry. Wring the neck and length of the pipe all the way back to Tansa lake and it won’t yield a drop of water for the next fifty years. It shuddered. A quake, 7.5 on the Richter scale, shook it. It lashed out, the jet of water a venomous fist of fury that sent the copper pot under it skittering for shelter.
The response to the sight of flowing water is desperation, a frenzy of pointless activity and loss of sanity.
There were fights every day over water, but that didn’t make them any the less interesting. A good scrap was liberating, especially when someone else was doing the fighting. It always made you feel mature, objective and wiser. How foolish people were. What utterly ridiculous and petty things they fought about. It took all your self-control sometimes not to egg them on and join them and see some blood spill. No question about it, it was a great spectator sport, so long as you weren’t at the centre of it. And frankly, sometimes it felt great letting go, standing there arms akimbo, saying the most God-awful things and believing that you were alone against the world, after all, look how your adversary for whom you had done so much, put her up for the nights when her husband had pulverized her and she had nowhere else to go, was repaying you. Well here goes, you kicked her water-pot, it keeled over and all the water drained away, she would have to go and stand at the end of the queue all over again. Look out, she had pulled your head down and thrown you back till you were sitting on your butt, you were not going to take it lying down, besides for some reason best known to them, a few other women had joined the fracas, you didn’t know who was on whose side but that didn’t matter, hell, this was a free-for-all, if you didn’t take the offensive, you were dead.
One of these days, it may be tomorrow or twenty years from now, the municipal tap in the CWD chawls is going to run dry while the forty-seventh woman is still filling her pot. The remaining two hundred and nineteen women will complain as usual and go back with empty pots hoping that they can stretch the water in the drums in their kitchens till the next day. But on that day Mrs Rele, Mrs Pathare and Mrs Ghatge saw the knife-grinder walking into the CWD chawls compound with his unwieldy grinding wheel slung over his shoulder and brought their knives down to be sharpened. Did the sun shine in Mrs Ghatge’s eyes or did a fly buzz too insistently around Mrs Rele’s face or was it that Mrs Pathare didn’t like the colour of Mrs Rele’s eyes? All we know is that Mrs Pathare plunged her yet-to-be-sharpened knife between Mrs Ghatge’s third and fourth ribs. Mrs Ghatge was thrown off balance but managed to bring down her meat-cleaver on Prabha Salunke’s head and open it up as if it were a coconut. It was Prabha’s engagement tomorrow. More knives appeared, all you had to do was scamper up to your kitchen and rush down. That day blood flowed freely in the CWD chawls.
Water. Blood. Is there a difference?
The water wars had started. It had taken a long time but the CWD chawl women had finally begun to understand the value of water.
Ravan had nothing to do. He was discovering what it meant to have time on his hands. He was irritable, edgy and resentful. He had a grievance against the world though he didn’t know what it was. He wanted to get even with total strangers, passers-by he had never seen or met before. He wished to pick a quarrel and beat up someone. Anyone. He realized this was unreasonable and also not very wise. It might turn out badly. They may end up beating the shit out of him. As he stood at the entrance of his building, his hands stuck deep in his pockets, he could see his old and ex-closest friend Chandrakant Dixit playing gilli-danda with six or seven other boys. Chandrakant lifted the gilli in the air with a wooden stick and bounced it up and down with effortless dexterity as if it was a ping-pong ball rather than a piece of wood. He could have gone up to Chandrakant and asked to be included but he knew what his response would be. He could have approached some other boys who were playing a local version of cricket where you pitched a tennis ball at the batsman instead of the stone-hard, skull-breaking cricket ball, and bowled under-arm and not over-arm as adults did, for fear of shattering the glass windows in the chawls. But the game was already in progress and had the feel of a closed circle.
He had to bite someone soon, sink in his teeth viciously and tear off an arm or a head before this bottled-up and unfocused dissatisfaction exploded in him and he went out of his mind. Maybe it was too late. Maybe he had already gone mad. He remembered Shambhoonath Pissat.
Shambhoonath had run away from his village because he had heard that in Bombay there were double-decker buses, buildings that were over ten storeys high and an everlasting sheet of water that stretched all the way to the sky. Shyamjeebhai Valji Patel Grocers and General Merchants in Chawl No. 11 had employed him on a temporary basis. ‘We’ll try you for a week and see how you shape up,’ Shyamjeebhai had told him over two years ago but the probation period showed signs of being like the sea that Shambhoonath visited every Monday at Chowpatty, his only day of rest in the week: it seemed to go on forever. ‘When will you make me permanent?’ Shambhoonath had asked Shyamjeebhai several months ago. Shyamjeebhai had whacked him under the ear and in return asked him a question to silence all future questions on the subject. ‘Do you want to keep the job or not?’
Shambhoonath’s hours were not fixed. He worked weekdays from seven in the morning till Shyamjeebhai put his pen down after writing up his accounts at night. That could be at nine or eleven at night or one in the morning. Shambhoonath was not unhappy. The question of happiness had not crossed his mind. He was given two cotton shirts and khaki shorts during Diwali. The shirts were always ill-fitting and he had to tie a string around his waist or leave the buttons above his fly open, depending on whether the shorts were loose or tight. He got a bar of washing soap now and then and it sufficed to wash himself and his clothes. He was given breakfast and two meals every day and a salary of ten rupees a month.
Shambhoonath had one friend, the cobbler’s dog, Tiger. On his day off, Shambhoonath often took Tiger for a walk around the block. When his master was not looking—this was rarely the case except when Shyamjeebhai went to the toilet—he would pick up the lid of one of the fat glass bottles and throw a biscuit to the dog. A few months ago Ravan’s neighbour, Mr Dixit, noticed that Tiger was behaving strangely. He was restless and irritable. He was foaming at the mouth and he could neither eat nor drink.
Mr Dixit was a conscientious man. He called the Ward Officer in charge of infectious diseases at Mazagaon and informed him that there was a rabid dog loose in the CWD chawls. When the Ward Officer did not turn up the next day, Mr Dixit went over in person to the municipal office.
That Sunday afternoon, two men came by in a closed municipal van and got out with iron muzzles and gunny sacks. They were thin and weedy, the younger one smoked a beedi while the older man chewed tobacco. Their untucked shirts almost completely concealed their shorts. They were scraps of human beings and should have looked harmless. But even the children knew that they were the gods of death, Yama senior and junior. They asked street-vendors and shopkeepers to close shop and told mothers to take their children home and lock the doors.
Ravan watched from the kitchen window. It was amazing how many stray dogs there were despite the fact that the vendors had shooed their favourites away. The two men separated. The older man had a funny, sideways gait, it was impossible to tell he was moving. He was next to a dog before the creature knew it and had clapped the muzzle with the long handle over its mouth. The younger one pulled the jute sack over the animal. The surprise and the sudden darkness made the dog immobile for a moment. They walked back to the van, the older man opened the rear door for an instant while the other let the dog slip out and into the van. In about an hour and a half they had rounded up nine strays. But the sick dog was nowhere to be seen.
The two men waited. They sat on their haunches. They were in no hurry. They knew the dog was around. Silence stretched like a brittle trampoline across the chawls. There were parents and children peering out of every window. The dogs in the van had sensed that something was amiss. They stood up on their hind legs and watched through the tiny grill without barking. Someone started to play a record on a gramophone but it was instantly switched off.
Ravan got restless and asked his mother if he could go out. She didn’t bother to answer him. He persisted. ‘Sure, you want to be bitten and become a rabid dog? They’ll put a sack over your head and take you away.’
There was a bark, a ragged, scrawny bark that amplified the silence. The men did not move. Tiger slunk in from the corner of Chawl No. 21. His sense of balance was precarious, his hind legs looked ready to give, his eyes had a mindless anger in them. He saw a pool of water overflowing from one of the gutters and he froze and reared. It wasn’t clear if he had seen his reflection or was terrified of water. He bit sharply into his flank and drew blood. The older man was beside him. His arm telescoped out and the muzzle docked into the dog’s face. His companion was slipping the gunny sack over Tiger when Shambhoonath called, ‘Run, Tiger, run.’ The dog faltered and sank on his hind legs. His head slipped out of the muzzle. He rose unsteadily. Perhaps his mind cleared and he remembered his friend. ‘Run, Tiger, run,’ Shambhoonath yelled with renewed urgency. Tiger looked mean and vicious and full of an insane anger. He leapt at the younger man and toppled him over. The dog was almost atop the sprawled man and going for his throat when the back of the steel muzzle made contact with Tiger’s head. There was a sound of bone cracking and the dog flopped. The young man lay screaming even after the dog was removed and thrown into the van.
Shambhoonath missed Tiger and talked about him to all the customers who would listen.
‘There was nothing wrong with him. If Mr Dixit had not reported him, he would be fine and right here with us. Do you think they killed him? He was such a nice dog. He never asked for anything.’
‘Shut up and go back to work,’ Shyamjeebhai snapped at him.
Five weeks later Shambhoonath’s moods began to swing unpredictably. He was running a fever and he was either depressed or manically talkative. He answered back, told Shyamjeebhai that he was leaving if he didn’t get a raise immediately and an hour later apologized abjectly. He became delirious.
Once again it was Mr Dixit who diagnosed the symptoms as rabies when he was at the grocer’s to buy betel nut on his way home from the office. Shambhoonath yelled that he was dying of thirst but when he tried to drink water, his throat muscles went into a violent spasm and he couldn’t swallow.
Mr Dixit spoke to Shyamjeebhai and told him of the danger and threat that Shambhoonath posed to everybody in the chawls.
‘How can it be rabies?’ Shyamjeebhai queried Mr Dixit. ‘Tiger never bit Shambhoonath.’
‘It’s not the rabid dog’s bite but his saliva which carries the virus,’ Mr Dixit explained to the grocer patiently. ‘You must take him to the doctor now and admit him to the Haffkine Institute. This is urgent, Shyamjeebhai. It’s more than that, it’s a matter of life and death.’
‘No need to get agitated, Dixitbhai,’ the grocer assured Mr Dixit. ‘I will ask my son to take Shambhoonath to Doctor Atre right away. You go home and rest your mind in peace. Everything, you’ll see, will turn out for the best.’ That night Shyamjeebhai threw Shambhoonath out and locked the doors of his shop.
Two days later Shambhoonath returned from wherever he had disappeared. Shyamjeebhai locked him in the storeroom behind his shop for fear that Mr Dixit would see him. The grocer needn’t have worried. Mr Dixit had gone off on a seven-day tour of duty inspecting mofussil schools. Shambhoonath Pissat screamed for food, screamed for water, screamed to be let out, and screamed for pity and help. Ravan waited for the two men to return.
‘Will they kill him?’ he asked Parvatibai as he lay in bed.
‘Of course not.’ Parvatibai patted him a little too hard on his head in an attempt to convince herself and put Ravan to sleep.
On the fourth day, there were no words to Shambhoonath’s scream but it had become much louder.
‘Why don’t they kill him?’ Ravan asked his mother that night. She didn’t try to answer.
It was late afternoon the next day. Shambhoonath bit through the cords tied around his hands and feet, unlocked the door at the rear of the storeroom and began running wildly in the CWD grounds. His eyes were red and his lower jaw hung unnaturally open. He made odd noises and his movements were erratic. There was nothing human about him. He had become some strange animal that was full of hate and fear and would never be brought under control. Young men, women and children ran helter-skelter and screamed louder than him. Shambhoonath’s jaws snapped at the empty air with a force that could have bitten off heads. Suddenly the grounds were empty. There was not a sound but Shambhoonath’s breathless panting. He scanned the buildings and the sky. His head moved jerkily. There was a rage in him and he did not know what to do with it.
Ravan sensed something was wrong as he walked in from the road between Chawl Nos. 3 and 4. His school bag fell down but he was not aware of it. He was fascinated by Shambhoonath to the point of being paralysed. Shambhoonath watched Ravan with hooded eyes, wondering if he was going to move. He looked away pretending he had lost interest, and then charged at Ravan. Ravan was struck by the reaction of the various dogs which hung around the CWD chawls. They were all petrified and had their tails between their legs, as if they too were trying to disown Shambhoonath. Ravan thought that he heard his mother yelling his name. There was a note of demented urgency in her voice. Shambhoonath too seemed to have heard it. He stopped still and gazed at Ravan. Ravan felt an overwhelming wave of pity for Shambhoonath. He was so terrified and alone. Parvatibai was screaming at Ravan now, telling him to run, run. Shambhoonath stood undecided, panting and snapping his mouth. The two Yamas were now standing behind him. They threw a fishing net on Shambhoonath. Shambhoonath fought for his life, fought for air and fought, Ravan thought, so that he could be overpowered and put out of his misery. The old man and his companion dragged Shambhoonath for fifty yards and bundled him into the same van that had transported Tiger. Shambhoonath stared out from the grill of the window in the van. He could see Ravan. His jaw snapped one last time before he disappeared.
‘Will you play with me, Ravan?’ Shobhan Sarang asked Ravan as he stood indecisively, wondering how he could break up the gilli-danda game Chandrakant and his friends were playing. He was ready to bite her. Those two men would have to come and throw the fishing net on her and take her away. She had a soft, uncertain smile. Did she know? Know about him and the murders? It didn’t matter whether it was a child, cat or the help in the house who crossed Ravan’s path. Everything boiled down to those two questions. Talk to me. Tell me. Look me in the eye. Do you know? What do you know?
Was Shobhan Sarang taking pity on him? Was she putting him on or trying to inveigle the details of his infamy from him? Why else would she want to play with him? She was at least ten years older than him. She had always been friendly, but there was something distinctly suspect about the timing of her invitation. And what could she play with that club-foot of hers? She tried to cover it up by wearing her sari long but that didn’t fool anybody.
‘Why should I play with you?’
‘Be … be … because I am alone and not doing anything.’ She did not have a stammer but she sometimes tripped over the simplest words. It was as if the stutter was meant to divert attention from the limp.
‘Do you know I can bowl over-arm?’
‘Really, that’s something, isn’t it?’
‘I can get all those fellows playing there out within two overs. And score a century.’
‘You must be a real asset to your school cricket team.’
Was she making fun of him? No, she seemed genuinely impressed.
‘What game could you play with your …’ Ravan stopped himself in time but Shobhan completed the sentence for him.
‘With my club-foot?’
Ravan looked away. Why was he behaving so crassly? Was she going to cry now?
‘I can play hop-scotch.’
‘I’ll give you a handicap. I don’t want you to think I’m unfair.’
After half an hour it looked as if it was Ravan who needed a handicap.
‘Shall we go to my place now? I’m a little tired.’
‘If you want to. I was just about to turn the game around and beat you.’
‘I know.’ Shobhan smiled gently. ‘I made shankarpalya this morning. Do you like them?’
‘They’re all right.’ Ravan tried to sound offhand. He was sweating after all that exertion. He pushed the hair back from his forehead and involuntarily put his hand under his shorts and pulled his shirt down. Shobhan was not sweating, the hair from her long and thick plait had not come undone, and it looked as if she was wearing a newly starched and ironed sari. But her cool composure and reserve could not conceal the club of her foot. It was encased in a black leather pouch with laces and a heel. It was like a fist instead of a foot, but she could put her weight on it as easily as Ravan could on his.
They climbed the stairs. She had to clutch at the banister to bring the defective foot up. Ravan made it a point to stay ahead of her. He was intent on proving to Shobhan that he could get the better of her.
Shobhan produced a wicker stool from under the bed and asked Ravan to sit. Ravan wondered how the Sarang clan fit into the place. They had the same amount of space he and his family had. Maybe they took turns sleeping, or perhaps all of them slept standing up. They were, not counting the parents and grandmother, nine sisters, that’s excluding the sister who had died some years ago and one brother who had left home four years ago and not bothered to come back.
Shobhan went into the kitchen to get the sweets. Her sister Tara, Ravan had no idea where she figured in the chronology of the Sarang family tree, was standing in front of a small mirror on the wall and applying Afghan Snow on her face. Didn’t she remember what had happened a couple of nights ago? How could she not? Some of the sisters were sewing, two were cleaning rice and dal, one was reading a mystery novel. Tara caught Ravan staring at her and turned around to put big daubs of the Snow on his cheeks. Before he could protest she had rubbed it all over his face. ‘There,’ she said, ‘you look like a film star now.’ He was revolted by its gooey texture. Poor Ravan. It would take him half a dozen years before he grew up and learnt of the magical properties of that pearly and glutinous unguent. Perhaps he never would be enlightened.
A Short Digression on Snow
To be fair is to be God’s chosen. Fairness was more precious than immortality, nirvana or moksha. It was on a par with virginity. It was more desirable than all the treasures of the Mughal emperors and the inspiration of the poets. Admittedly, not more sought after than wealth and power, but just as potent and indispensable. For truly what are wealth and power without a fair skin?
There is no doubt about it. There is justice on earth. Justice and a sense of fair play are at the root of reincarnation. Those who walk the righteous path in their previous life are born fair. It mattered little if you were plain as whitewash and had a sick haemoglobin count of 2.7. If you were fair, it was obvious you were beautiful. The rest of humanity was condemned. To be dark was to have committed original sin. (Even our gods had to undergo colour shifts. Since black would not do for humans, how could Lord Krishna be permitted to be dark? They turned him blue.)
Then the House of Patanwala invented Afghan Snow. A patina of Afghan Snow could never never substitute or pass for fairness but for those of us who are deprived, discriminated against and desperate, Afghan Snow was till the early 1960s the next best thing to being fair. It was second skin and second nature. It was inconceivable to leave the house without smearing it on your face. It filled craters and levelled the mounts of acne. It stood out like barium in an X-ray plate of the lower abdomen. It was so effective and noticeable, even the fair of complexion would not dream of being seen without it. It was every man and woman’s Phantom of the Opera, the Kathakali mask that made you larger than life. It was your public persona. Without it you merged and disappeared in a grey mass. It gave you presence. It was society’s stamp of approval. But, most important of all, it made you acceptable to yourself. Truly, artifice alone could now vouch for the real thing.
Nobody knew what the secret of Afghan Snow was. It had a glittery sheen on it and it transcended the gender-gap long before unisex came into fashion. It cut across caste and class barriers. Men and women, young and old, sank their index and middle fingers into a bottle of Snow (the label outside showed perennial snow-capped mountains supposedly from the Hindukush ranges in Afghanistan) and returned with a gob of the silvery butter and rubbed it into their faces. Having prepared the ground, it was time to overlay it, as Tara was doing just now, with Himalaya Bouquet, or if you could afford it, Cuticura toilet powder.
Ravan tried to wipe the Snow away with his hands. His face still felt sticky. He pulled out his shirt and scrubbed his cheeks hard with it. Tara was laughing at him. Had she really forgotten their last encounter? It was barely a fortnight ago. Maybe it was nothing special at all and he was making too much of it. But he remembered the surprise on her face. It was as if she had wanted him to be struck blind at that moment.
He had got up in the middle of the night with diarrhoea. The alarms to wake up the chawls’ men and women to fill up water hadn’t gone off yet and it was a long time before the milk vans would come. ‘Didn’t I warn you not to eat so many shrimps? Did you listen?’ His mother woke up briefly, delivered her routine remark on such occasions and went back to sleep. Ravan stumbled out grumpily and walked towards the end of the corridor where the toilets were clumped together. Suddenly Tara and that boy from the ground floor of Chawl No. 22, who was doing a mechanic’s training course, the one they called Shahaji Kadam, unlatched the door of one of the toilets and stepped out. Why were they using the toilets on Ravan’s floor and not on their own? What was she doing with that man anyway? Didn’t she know nobody spoke with the people from the ground floors of Chawl Nos. 7, 11, 22, 23 and 29, neither the Hindus nor the Catholics? It wasn’t a taboo or anything of the sort, you just didn’t. Full stop. You gave them as wide a berth as you could.
Two people in the same toilet at the same time, it didn’t make sense. He was obviously three-quarters asleep and hallucinating. But Ravan realized that the expression in Shahaji Kadam’s eyes could not be a figment of his imagination. It was not that of a thief caught in the act, or of a pariah dog cornered by the squad from the municipality. It was that of a man relieved to find that his days of fear and terror were over. He stood there waiting for summary judgement and execution of the sentence. Both he and Ravan waited in an agony of indecision until Tara pulled Shahaji away with a laugh. ‘He’s sleepwalking. He won’t remember a thing.’
‘Don’t you want to be a film star? Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Premnath and now Ravan Kumar?’ What was it about Tara’s laughter that made him feel uneasy? He did not know how to respond to her. He wanted to be in her company and touch her but didn’t know whether or not his hand would be singed.
‘I hate you. I hate you,’ Ravan told her venomously.
‘I think your boyfriend wants to snap my head off, Shobhan,’ Tara said.
‘Has she been teasing you, Ravan?’ Shobhan was quick to come to his rescue. ‘Stop it Tara.’ She put the plate of shankarpalya on the floor next to him and held out a glass of milk. ‘Take your time. Tara’s going out. Drink your milk after you’ve had the sweets.’
Tara put vermilion on her middle finger and drew a perfect circle in the centre of her forehead without looking into the mirror.
‘How do I look Ravan?’ Would she never stop laughing? ‘Won’t I make a lovely bride?’
‘If only someone will marry you.’ Mr Sarang walked in. ‘You or any one of the women in this house. Frankly, I don’t mind if a single man takes the lot of you and opens a zenana just so long as you are off my hands.’
‘I do mind.’ Mrs Sarang stood in the door of the partition between the kitchen and the front room.
‘Then I’ll leave it to you to find them husbands. We can start with Ravan here.’
Ravan knew Mr Sarang well. He was often the conductor of the BEST electric tram which took him to his municipal school. When the tramcar service was discontinued he was shifted to a bus on the same route. He was an absent-minded man whom the children from Ravan’s school harried and harassed till he started to scream and rave. They crowded him, all fifty or a hundred who had boarded the tram and clamoured for tickets while preventing him from moving. That way half of them could get off without paying their fares. Ravan never managed to do this because Mr Sarang knew him by name and they stayed in the same chawl. ‘Nine and a half?’ he would ask Ravan. ‘But you were nine and a half yesterday too and the day before. You should be at least eleven today. Didn’t they teach you how to count? You’ll be a grown man with children and you’ll still tell me I’m ten and demand a half ticket.’
‘And pray where are you going, Miss Tara?’
‘To see Albela. Sandhyarani’s bought a ticket for me.’
‘Are you sure this Sandhyarani whose name you’ve been quoting rather often in the last few weeks is a respectable girl and not a man?’
‘Yes it’s a boy and I intend to elope with him.’
‘Just don’t come back, that’s my only request.’
Tara left.
‘So, Master Ravan have you got a ticket? You can’t expect to get a free ride in the Sarang household while I’m around. Shobhan, has he bought a ticket?’
‘Oh, Father, stop it.’
Ravan couldn’t figure out how Mr Sarang could joke and laugh. One of his earliest memories was of Mr Sarang standing in the open space of the chawls with his daughter Meena in his arms at six in the morning. Parvatibai had pulled Ravan back from the kitchen window before he could see Meena’s limp form but Mr Sarang’s words rang out loud and clear. He was crying uncontrollably and saying, ‘Why did you take her away? My innocent, sweet Meena? Don’t you have a heart? I’ll never forgive you. Never. I’m washing my hands of you. You are of no use to me.’ Mr Sarang’s outpourings subsided. Ravan was confused. Was Mr Sarang talking to his dead daughter? If her death had upset him so much, why did he say he would have no truck with her? ‘Why is he angry with Meena?’ he asked his mother.
‘He’s not. He’s angry with God.’
‘Why?’
‘Because God took her away.’
‘Will he take you away too?’
‘Better me than you,’ Parvati said with grim determination. Mr Sarang was off again.
‘Oh, Meena, where have you gone? I could do nothing for you. The doctors said it was late, too late by the time they found out. What kind of doctors are they? Why are they doctors if they don’t know their job? What if it had been their own child? How can I live without you, Meena? Every breath I take will remind me of you.’
Ravan never forgave Mr Sarang for crying and frightening him so badly. His pain and loss stuck in Ravan’s belly like shrapnel that no surgery could remove. Did he have to bring the dead Meena home from the hospital and make a show of his grief? Thanks to Meena, he and every other child in the chawls had to have an anti-diphtheria injection. He was five and he was sure he was going to die just like Meena. It was Shobhan who took him to the municipal dispensary and buried his head in her breasts because he didn’t want to look at the injection and kissed his arm where the doctor had given him the shot so that it would not hurt.
Mr Sarang was a liar. He had forgotten Meena and forgiven God because even now he was garlanding the portraits of Shankar, Rama, Krishna and Dutta on the wall.
‘How come you’re the only son, Ravan? As a matter of fact the only child?’ Mr Sarang peered closely at Ravan as if the question had been bothering him a long while. Ravan looked nonplussed.
‘Is your father planning to have any more or not?’
Mr Sarang waited for an answer.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Odd. Your mother is obviously not barren since she begot you. And your father looks like a man in good health and you are living proof that he’s a capable man. Then how is it that you don’t have any more siblings? Most puzzling.’
‘Leave him be, Father,’ Shobhan interrupted her father. ‘The poor child doesn’t know what you are talking about.’
‘It’s unfair, that’s what I say. People who have less children should pay a sur-tax to support the excess children of others. What sin have I committed that I have so many? Just look at them, no room to move. Can’t get a single one married. Sharada was the only exception. See Suman there, she’s thirty-three. Who’s going to marry her? Savitri’s thirty-one, maybe thirty-two. A few more years and her menopause will start and she’ll require full dentures. Yamuna, twenty-nine but not a sign of a husband. All of them darkies, who’s going to look at them? All that Snow they slap on can’t make them fair or attractive. Your ticket, Master Ravan? Kindly buy your ticket. There are no free rides in the world. I can barely feed this brood on my salary. Where am I supposed to get the money for their dowry? It’s a vicious circle.’
‘That’s enough, Father.’ Shobhan had a soothing effect on her father. ‘Go and wash your feet and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Tell me, Master Ravan, do you have any ideas on the subject? My Mrs and I produced one beauty, one really fair and lovely girl but she’s even more of a problem than the others. Don’t know who begot her, the misshapen, club-footed wretch. See my feet, is there any defect in them? None, right? Mrs, come here.’
‘Let it be now,’ Mrs Sarang spoke from inside the kitchen. ‘I’m cooking.’
‘I said come out this instant. We have an impartial observer here. Let him be the judge.’
Mrs Sarang came out wiping her hands on her sari. She looked resentful but could not deny her husband his catharsis.
‘Pick up your sari.’
Mrs Sarang shook her head.
‘Only up to your ankle.’ She did. She had done it a hundred times before.
‘The best pair of ankles in the CWD chawls. Walk.’
‘He’s seen me walk.’
‘Walk. He’s young, he may have forgotten.’
Mrs Sarang walked back into the kitchen.
‘Perfect equilibrium, wouldn’t you agree, Master Ravan? Vision 20:20; 20:20 feet and legs. And then look at this gargoyle.’
Shobhan stood still.
‘Show him,’ Mr Sarang screamed. Suman, Yamuna, Savitri and the rest of the sisters did whatever they were doing a little more intently.
Shobhan picked up her sari and showed her pouch-bound right foot.
‘Take that bloody sack off, the one that costs me half a month’s salary and show him the whole fucking mess, the twisted bones and the knotted, revolting skin around it. Let him see the beauty and the beast all in one and let him tell me how I’m supposed to marry off such a loathsome creature. Show him, I said show.’
‘I don’t want to see, I don’t want to.’ Ravan ran and clung to Shobhan.
Mr Sarang started to bash his head on the bars of the window. ‘What kind of father am I? I can’t get my daughters married, so I humiliate them to hide my shame. I am going to kill myself. Yes, I am. They’ll stay spinsters but at least they won’t be tortured and disgraced by their own father.’
He was bleeding now, the blood from his forehead was flowing freely. Mrs Sarang came out and drew him away. She made him sit on the bed and applied cold compresses to his head.
Ravan became a regular at the Sarang home. Shobhan and he played hop-scotch and marbles. He taught her and her sisters how to spin a top and use a catapult. Shobhan taught him noughts and crosses, a game that he lost 239 times out of 240 on an average day. The last one was usually a draw. Ravan’s grades improved. Shobhan sat with him while he did his homework and helped him out when he was foxed by a sum in arithmetic or a question in geography. They played cards: not-at-home, bluff and rummy.
He introduced them to carrom. They bought a carrom board. In the summer holidays, they played non-stop. Sometimes Mr Sarang would join them. Even Mrs Sarang who was busy in the kitchen the whole day tried her hand at it. Ravan fought vehemently with Tara when she surreptitiously picked up a card from the discards piled up in the middle or innocently dispatched her own pieces down the pockets of the carrom board with some delicate fingerwork when no one was watching. She would burst into fake tears rather than admit to finagling. She and Ravan often came to blows.
Tara was Ravan’s area of darkness. She confused him. His feelings about her were in a state of constant flux. She teased and needled him unceasingly, mussed his hair, asked him whether he would have her as his girlfriend and when he said ‘no’, she told him she would commit suicide by leaping off the two bottom steps of Chawl No. 17 because he was the one and only man in her life and if he didn’t care for her, there was no point living. She hid his shoes. When he asked for a glass of water, she poured it down the back of his shirt and shook her head sorrowfully. ‘How could you, Ravan? You are a grown-up young man. How can you still wet your pants.’ He would pray that she would not be at home when he visited the Sarangs and yet if she was not there, he would be restless and ask a dozen times when she would be back.
She was his secret passion, his puppy love, his infatuation and he was her go-between, messenger and alibi. He took her messages to the twilight zone, the ground floor of Chawl No. 22, and occasionally tramped up to the garage at Byculla, where Shahaji Kadam trained and worked, for last-minute changes of plans.
Shahaji Kadam, now there was an enigma. Ravan had checked him out surreptitiously and sometimes frontally. He had scrutinized his face, his legs, his feet, his hands, his ears, his back. He was often black with grease but so were most of the mechanics at the Byculla Automobile Repairs and Maintenance Works. But when he had cleaned up and shaved and went to a movie with Tara he looked like any other man; actually he looked better than a lot of the lean and hungry specimens from the CWD chawls because he worked out at the Telang Gym every morning. It was true he sweated a lot but so did Ravan’s mother. Then why did almost everybody avoid him and his people? He would have liked to have asked his mother but she was not exactly the fount of knowledge, and her view of the world was rooted in commerce. Does he want meals? Noons and nights or both? Can he pay?
Who and what and why were Shahaji and his people untouchable? It had taken a lot of doing but Ravan had touched Shahaji when he took him for a long ride on a motorcycle. Ravan had put his arms around his waist just as Tara did. He was for real all right, a solid wall of muscle. He always had a different car or bike when he and Tara went out to the movies or to Malabar Hill, the Gateway of India or anywhere else for a ride. She never met him anywhere near the chawls, at least not in daylight. They fixed the location of an assignation in advance and trysted there. Did Shobhan know about Shahaji and Tara? Tara said it was their secret, Ravan’s, Tara’s and Shahaji’s.
