What had made Eddie join the Sabha? There were of course mercenary considerations, no denying that. A Wilson pen and ballpoint laid out on purple velvet and anchored in an ebony black plastic box with thin black elastic bands was no mean temptation. Had he known the contents of the stories, the book alone would have sufficed. But when the offer was made, he had no idea what the Mahabharata was, nor could he guess that he would continue to flip through its pages almost every day long after he knew the stories by heart.
The fact is, Eddie, born of Catholic parents and a confirmed and practising believer in the sacrament of our Lord Jesus Christ (granted, he would have been as devout a Muslim, Sikh, Jew, Zoroastrian, Buddhist or Hindu had he been born in any other sect or denomination), was favourably disposed to joining the Sabha. He would have been surprised if you had told him that its inspiration was Hinduism. He would have been completely befuddled if you had added that while Muslims were suspect and unwanted in the Sabha’s paradigm of India, minorities like Christians and Parsees were welcome so long as they subscribed to Hindu pre-eminence. Like most other Catholics, he would have found it enlightening to learn that the Sabha was meant to be a group dedicated to the service of the nation.
The Sabha was of considerable interest to him because of the six-foot wooden staff and what could be done with it. He had seen them wield the staff, especially the teacher, with such dexterity, fluidity and prowess, that he had stayed glued, watching them for hours from the window of his kitchen, the balcony on the landing and on his way back from school. The Sabha boys would be locked in deadly combat, one wooden staff crossed and pressing down upon the other, when suddenly, as if at a predetermined signal, they would disengage, whirl around, throw their staffs into the air, catch them and swing them with such speed that you could barely see them till they were once again sparring, whipping, connecting and clashing.
Eddie grasped the principles of the wooden staff within a couple of months. Technique took longer, but he practised for long hours by himself and with his colleagues. The objective was clear enough. You fielded the assault of your opponent by presenting the broadside of your staff, recoiling and then taking the offensive. But how did you anticipate which way he would swing and bring down the staff? A slight miscalculation and your flank was exposed and ribs cracked. Or if you didn’t leap aside in time, your head was split open. Ironically enough, the secret of the staff and its attraction lay in the suggestion, but conscious absence, of violence. It was like a dance fraught with danger. It was physical chess. The better you anticipated your opponent’s game plan and were also conscious that he was changing it in response to your own moves, and the more swift and alert and seized of the dynamics of the combat you were, the greater the likelihood of your being safe.
There was no denying the discrimination at the Mazagaon Sabha branch. Lele Guruji was more attentive to Eddie, he watched and coached him continually. Only the older boys were allowed to exercise and practise with the staff but Eddie was adamant about learning to use it. Rather than lose him, Lele Guruji spent time teaching him after class. Eddie too put in much more effort than the other students. He was like a dog. He wanted Lele Guruji’s approval and encomiums daily, so he worked harder than all the other boys, not just at the staff but at everything else.
He was fascinated by the traditional Indian-style gymnasium. Its centrepiece was a sandpit in which stood a ten-foot high wooden pole called the malkhamb. It was a foot across at the bottom and tapered to a mere four inches at the top. Young men and boys with well-oiled bodies gripped it and glided up effortlessly. Months and years after Eddie mastered the art, he couldn’t get over the wonder of the strange chemistry between the column and the human body. Technically, you cupped your feet and hands around the pole and pushed yourself up. But it was like rising out of the deep. With just a flip of the toes and a little fingerwork you shot up. En route you did some incredible acrobatics. Head down or sideways, you twisted and wrapped yourself around the pole. You let go of your hands, your body arched out, your legs zipped through the air and came full circle. Atop, you stretched out parallel to the earth, wheeled around and almost disproved the laws of gravity.
The accent was never on building muscles for their own sake or pumping iron. Muscle tone, suppleness, deep-breathing were all that mattered. Eddie did surya-namaskars, the stunted and utterly inadequate version of which the West calls push-ups. He did baithaks in which you rapidly squatted on your haunches and stood up. They looked easy—all those exercises did—but do them twenty times and you were flat out for the next week or two. He did pranayam, the system of breathing that is at the heart of yoga, and he practised on the parallel bars.
Outside he worked on the lezhim with his new-found peers. Lezhim was the part of the exercises Eddie enjoyed the most. It was nothing but a wooden stick and a chain with steel discs on it. But if you held it right in both your hands and performed in unison with the other members, it created its own compelling percussive patterns and the rhythms meshed into a heady dance that gradually turned hectic without losing its sinuous grace or exhilaration. At the end of the session, he sat down with the others for a fifteen-minute bowdhik. This should have been the most tedious part of the class, but Eddie’s arrival had transformed the guru as much as the pupil. Lele Guruji’s sermons had always bored his class but that had never bothered him. But let Eddie’s attention wander and the master was in a panic. If Eddie stopped coming, Lele would be in hot water with the authorities. But in fairness to Lele, it must be said that he didn’t just want the boy to stay, he wanted to inspire him. The battle was not for Eddie’s body, it was for his soul. And Eddie’s attention, he discovered by chance, was up for grabs if you could spin a tale.
A kind of intellection had always been a key part of the Sabha dogma and doctrine. The teacher dwelt on abstractions, theory and cerebral rigour and, alas, more often than not succeeded in alienating his youthful audience. The dropout rate was directly in proportion to the dryness of the bowdhik.
Lele Guruji’s stories, to his amazement, had turned all his pupils into avid listeners. Attendance and numbers, albeit only Hindu, swelled. Lele Guruji ransacked his mind for stories and when he had scraped the bottom, discovered the Central Library.
History was stories, literature was stories, the Puranas were stories, biographies were stories and so were the Mahabharata and Ramayana. One day, almost accidentally, Lele stumbled upon the trick of turning geography and philosophy into stories and vice versa. Without knowing it, Lele, the tyrant and bore, had become magician and pied piper.
‘What is the hurry, Ravan-rao?’ Mr Tamhane’s voice struck like a fist-sized hook in Ravan’s back.
You don’t need an afterlife to pay for your sins. You pay for them here and now. Ravan had been in no hurry till he heard his name being called out. Did he really think that he would get away with what he had done to Mr Tamhane’s son? He could hear Mr Tamhane closing in on him.
Ravan remembered the manic glee he had felt seven days ago, maybe it was ten. He was standing at the balcony on his floor, watching the world go by: Chandrakant Dixit was pretending to be Shivaji and embracing Sanjay Rawate, whom he had persuaded to impersonate the great Afzal Khan, and was dismembering him just as the Maratha king had done with steel claws. Shambhoonath’s replacement Narottam was whipping up a blizzard of dust beating the doormat at the grocer’s with a stick borrowed from one of the Sabha boys. Mr Sawant who had retired from his job at the Municipal Corporation twenty years ago was taking his evening constitutional, and the unattainably beautiful and serene princess, Eddie’s sister, Pieta Coutinho, was returning home. Wait a minute, that head peering out from the balcony on the second floor, wasn’t it Anant Tamhane’s, no, couldn’t be, what would he be doing in Chawl No. 17, damn, I’ll cut my heart out and lay the bloody, palpitating thing in front of the next petrol tanker, it is the one and only Anant Tamhane rolling the spittle in his mouth and taking aim at Pieta. It was Anant Tamhane’s favourite game. He would stand in the balcony of his own chawl and spit on unwary passers-by. Ravan had been one of his victims and was willing to do almost anything to get back at him.
Ravan mustered all the saliva in his mouth and dropped the spit bomb. It landed and splintered on Anant Tamhane’s thin, long head. He was screaming shrilly, summoning his father and mother from Chawl No. 23 and craning his neck up to see who had dared pay him back in his own coin.
Ravan thought he had escaped detection by hurriedly pulling his head back but the long and skinny arm of the law had caught up with him.
Sadashiv Raghunath Tamhane was five feet five inches tall but looked much shorter because of his stooping shoulders. He had high cheekbones, darting fish-eyes and a pinched straight nose that gave the impression of being hooked. His skin was sallow and his face sagged. Even when his mouth was closed he seemed to be cackling with his thin, crisp lungs. Ravan saw him sitting on the topmost bough of a leafless banyan tree looking down disapprovingly at the world below.
Mr Tamhane was a man of infinite faith in the depravity and crookedness of his fellow man. He suspected everybody of the very worst and refused to be disappointed when he was proven wrong. All goodness was a front, a feint, an expedient retreat before a person showed his true colours. He couldn’t have chosen a more fulfilling career. It confirmed his worst fears about the human race. He was a clerk at the Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court at Marine Lines. Every day there passed in front of his eyes an endless procession of petty thieves, hit-and-run drivers, indigent blackmailers, violent drunks, unsuccessful kidnappers, wife-beaters, extortionists, closet sodomites, pimps and prostitutes, down-and-out racketeers, forgers and counterfeiters, greenhorn delinquents, vernacular pornopeddlers, quacks, babas, hoaxers and spiritual swindlers with wandering hands, false prophets and fraudulent water-diviners, exhibitionists, peeping toms, failed suicides, shoplifters and con men. He enumerated their offences and dilated upon their criminal psychographics at such length and with such sour pleasure, his lips stayed open at all times in a rictus of distaste.
Under Indian Penal Code Section 407, Clause 3C, Your Honour, the defendant was caught red-handed spitting on the head of a mere innocent. The defendant may be of the same age as the plaintiff but I urge you, Your Lordship, to look at his previous record. In the annals of the most heinous crimes, you will not come across a criminal so hardened and beyond redemption as this child of the devil himself. He first killed an unborn son’s father in the prime of his life and widowed a wife and orphaned a lovely girl barely one year old, and then with Nathuram Godse, he shot and murdered Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a.k.a. the Mahatma. There is no punishment on our planet, nay, in our universe, which is commensurate with his unmentionable deeds and yet we must make do with what we have. I beseech you My Lord, think not of Anant Tamhane as my son but as the flower and future of India and the trauma he has suffered at the hands of this nasty, short and brutish Ravan, King of Ceylon and evil incarnate. Jail him your honour, not just for life and without parole but put him behind bars, and do not release his bones even after he is dead and gone, for his crimes are such that an eternity of incarceration is not enough.
Ravan waited to be handcuffed. Mr Tamhane was prosecutor, judge, jury and executor, and he was about to take Ravan into custody. Running away wasn’t going to help. It would only confirm his guilt and besides Mr Tamhane’s posse of policemen would drive up in their blue-black vans, comb the CWD chawls and pin him down to the ground with bayonets.
‘Ah, Master Ravan Pawar, do tell us of your assignations with Tara Sarang.’
As always he had got it all wrong. Mr Tamhane didn’t know or didn’t care about the blob of spit fizzing on his son Anant’s sparse head of hair. He was after bigger game. Oh God, how did he know that Ravan had touched an untouchable, not just once but thirty, maybe eighty times and … and, Ravan couldn’t get himself to say the words, and hadn’t washed himself clean after each occasion. He knew Mr Tamhane did, though if one is to be absolutely factual, he screamed his meagre lungs out warning untouchables and their shadows to steer clear of him and so did Mrs Tamhane and Anant. What did he do, Ravan wondered, when he travelled by the local Harbour branch of the railways to office daily and discovered that an untouchable was not casting a shadow but was standing and sweating copiously next to him? Did he jump from the train, or did he throw the offending body out and then excuse himself from his Lordship’s presence and go and have a bucket bath in the court premises? Incidentally, were there bathrooms in court houses and did they have water all day long? Come to think of it, nobody else in the chawls made such a song and dance about an untouchable shadow. Oh sure, the old-timers shrank into themselves but it was a covert, surreptitious act, the same as when you happened to pass by a leper.
‘Who would have thought that the notorious Ravan, ten-headed abductor of the beautiful consort of Shri Rama, Princess Sita herself, is a closet Shri Krishna?’ Ravan could feel Mr Tamhane’s leer stick to his back like black tar.
Had the man lost his marbles? Had the Court clerk gone completely bananas? Ravan had no doubt about it. Mr Tamhane had obviously taken leave of his senses.
‘I know the gopis beckon,’ Mr Tamhane had caught up with Ravan, ‘but can you not delay the dalliance in the groves of Brindavan a little, Lord Shri Krishna? Tarry a while and share with us poor mortals, lascivious tales of your thousand and one nights at the Sarang household. And pray, do tell us which of the nine hundred and ninety-nine positions invented and expounded by the great master of concupiscence, Vatsayan in his all-time classic, Kama Sutra, have you been practising?’
‘My name’s Ravan, not Shri Krishna and what gopis are you talking about?’
‘You can no longer fool us, you’ve been discovered, you are the blue god, Shri Krishna, under the guise and name of Ravan. As to the gopis, the dear shepherdesses, there are at least nine of them in the Sarang household. Doubtless a trifle overripe but luscious and full of juice, nevertheless.’
He had been called all kinds of names, he had long since been resigned to that, what do you expect with a name like Ravan. He had heard them all, good and bad, mostly bad, there was nothing, absolutely nothing new that anybody could say to him, nothing that would hurt or surprise him. And yet here was this disagreeable and dried-up old man whose prurient insinuations and strange revelations made Ravan feel dirty and left him speechless. He was sure Mr Tamhane was mocking him despite his straight face but he was hard put to understand the nature of the joke and the lewd suggestions in his words.
‘Mighty tales of your insatiable sexual appetite, of all-night gambolling and cavorting, of endless lascivious adventures and frolicsome lechery have reached the four corners of the world. Will you marry all nine of the Sarang girls on the same day or will it be on consecutive nights? I have heard that good old Sarang, the girl-making machine, is heaving a sigh of relief. Are you going to take over from where he left off? Will you have a dozen, make it a double dozen daughters from each of the Sarang beauties?’ Mr Tamhane shook his head sadly. ‘We’ll all have to vacate the CWD chawls to make room for your brood.’
Ravan tucked the peacock feather in his head-band, tied the yellow silk sash around his waist and scampered out with his flute. He was the first one up and he wanted to wake up the whole world. He reached the grassy knoll where he and his friends played. The river was a swollen dark welt on the land. Not a cow mooed or moved. His friends the cowherds were lying haphazardly, still asleep. He closed his eyes and formed a hole with his lips which he fitted over the one in his flute.
This is what he liked most, waking up a still life. He breathed softly into the flute. The air grazed and rubbed its back against the walls of the reed and a deep, hollow sound like wind in a cavern came forth. The first tentative notes grew in number and strength and became a song of creation that echoed from mountain top to mountain top. The birds in the trees shook their feathers, cleaned themselves and trilled. The river Yamuna slipped out of the vice of night and caught silver fire from the sun as it flowed down boisterously. The wind yawed and yawned and bumped into the cowherds. They woke up with goose pimples and found newborn calves sucking frantically at their mothers’ teats. Where were the milkmaids, they wondered, as they tried to drag the young ones away. If they didn’t come soon the whole of Brindavan would have to go without milk today. But they underestimated the power of Ravan’s song. You could hear the bells on their anklets long before you saw them. There they were, Savitri, Shobhan and Tara, Kausalya and Ragini and the other sisters. Their hips swayed and their skirts swirled. But instead of milking the cows, they formed a circle around Ravan and began to do the ras-leela dance.
‘Stop it, Krishna, stop playing,’ the boys swore at Ravan. ‘If you don’t, the girls won’t milk the cows.’
‘That’s between you and them.’ The rising sun shone over Ravan’s blue skin naked to the belly button till it matched the turquoise blue of the peacock feather in his head-band.
‘No one will marry you once you are seen with this philanderer, Krishna,’ the boys warned the girls. ‘Your parents will skin you alive. Come away and milk the cows. You know very well who will complain about you if he doesn’t get curd for dinner this evening, the very same Krishna for whom you are willing to risk your name and your honour.’
Those foolish boys might as well have asked the Sarang girls to stop breathing. Of course they didn’t listen. Ravan could barely conceal his joy. He accelerated the pace of his song. The cows were standing ten deep watching the duet between Ravan’s flute and the girls’ feverish dancing. The birds came and sat on the branches of the trees. Those who couldn’t get a place sat on the horns of the cows and watched bewitched. Even the simple cowherds forgot to crib and bitch and wondered what the results of the mad competition would be. Faster and faster the girls pirouetted around Ravan. It was a giddy sight, all those bright coloured skirts swirling madly, long plaits flying in the air and the clipped accelerating beat of the wooden sticks striking each other. Which of the Sarang sisters would fall in a dead faint first?
Ravan seemed to have forgotten the world, his eyes were closed and his flute was a song that would never cease. And yet with infinite grace and care, he brought his song as well as the girls to a stop.
Savitri was the first to garland him. ‘You are mine today and forever,’ she said. It was only when Kausalya, Ragini and Sumitra put strings of mogra flowers around his neck that he realized he was married to the girls. It was Tara’s turn. She pulled him close to her with her garland and whispered, ‘You are mine, Krishna, only mine, today and forever.’ Shobhan was last. ‘How did you dance, Shobhan? Nobody would have suspected that you have a club-foot.’ Shobhan’s answer was simple. ‘I can do anything for you. I’m yours, Krishna, for now and for always.’
That night Ravan took his wives home.
‘Your father can’t support one woman and you think you can look after nine, you polygamist?’ Parvatibai asked him.
‘What’s a polygamist? And you don’t have to worry. I don’t have to do a thing. They married me, they are going to support me, Ma.’
‘Over my dead body. No son of mine is going to live off his wives.’ Parvatibai slammed the door in Ravan’s face.
He took his wives to the Sarang place. Mr and Mrs Sarang were waiting for him at the door. Mrs Sarang was wearing a green nine-yard sari and the diamonds in her big nose ring sparked like silent flashbulbs. She lit a lamp, circled it in front of Ravan’s face and put a dot of crimson powder on his forehead. Mr Sarang embraced him. He handed him a package, gift-wrapped in red foil.
‘Open it, open it,’ he beamed. Ravan pulled the ribbon gently and the knot came undone. Inside were BEST bus tickets of every denomination. ‘You and your new family can travel a whole year anywhere in Bombay with them.’
Ravan was overwhelmed. He touched his father-in-law’s feet and tried to enter the room.
‘What are you doing?’ Mr Sarang asked him sharply.
‘Coming home.’
‘Do you think I got rid of my daughters so that you could bring them back to stay with me? Don’t you ever show your face to me.’
Just for one night, Ravan thought in desperation, we’ll stay in the toilets for one night and look for another place tomorrow. He tried to make his wives comfortable but all night long they were disturbed by men and women who wanted to use the facilities urgently. It was as if everybody in Chawl No. 17 had eaten shrimps and had got the runs. It was odd but even the people from the Catholic floor were coming down in droves.
At 2.30 a.m. there was a cryptic knock on the door.
‘Tara,’ a voice whispered, ‘Tara, open the door, it is me, Shahaji Kadam.’
Ravan looked at Tara. Even a blind man could have seen that she was in two minds and the mind wanting to go to Shahaji was far stronger. Ravan bolted the door and told Tara to stay where she was. Shahaji kept knocking and begging for another half-hour, the pest, but Ravan was unmoved.
He was woken by a twittering and cheeping of birds. There were at least a hundred babies clambering all over him.
‘Whose are these?’ he asked in a panic.
A chorus of voices answered him, ‘Yours.’
He looked at his wives in disbelief. ‘Who’ll look after them?’
‘God gave them to us. He’ll look after them,’ they said.
He saw them clearly for the first time. They were an odd lot. If they had not been his own, he would have said they were a horrid combination of chicks and dwarfs. They craned their necks to look at him and they kept saying the same thing over and over.
‘Daddy food. Daddy biscuits. Daddy bread. Daddy basundi.’
‘Why are they making such a racket?’ Ravan asked his wives.
‘They want to be fed.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘Try feeding all hundred of them.’
Tara undid her blouse. Before she had exposed her bosom, the babies were all over her. They fought furiously for her nipple. One managed to get to it. There was a terrible cracking sound. His beak broke and hung limp. Her breasts were made of stone.
In the morning the rent collector handed Ravan a notice. It was curt.
‘You are illegal tenants. Get out or by tomorrow you’ll be charged with unlawful occupancy.’ It was signed: Mr Tamhane.
The next day when Mr Tamhane came to evict him, Ravan was crouched in the far corner of the toilet. He didn’t know what he was doing wrong but those bird-children seemed to have increased exponentially.
‘Open the door, Shri Krishna,’ Mr Tamhane ordered him.
Ravan would have liked to obey the court’s orders but stepping down would have meant trampling at least fifty or sixty of his children.
‘Daddy food, Daddy food, Daddy food.’
The cacophony got on Mr Tamhane’s nerves. He was incensed by Ravan’s recalcitrance. He ordered the bailiff to pull down the door. It was a mistake. Thousands of little babies, wave upon wave of them, burst out and inundated the passage and the corridors. Mr Tamhane was flung back and submerged within seconds. Nobody heard from him again.
There was an exodus the next day. Ravan saw his mother leaving. She was carrying a mattress and a primus stove. There were thousands of others with her. The Dixits, the Monteiros, the Ghatges, the Labdes and the Bhoirs, Eddie and his family, they were all running for their lives pursued by his hordes. Whoever stumbled did not stand a chance. His children ate him or her.
When the last of the tenants had disappeared, they turned upon Ravan.
‘Where have you been, Ravan?’ There was no accusation in the voice, just concern. ‘You haven’t come home for over a month now. I have been up twice and left a message with your mother. Didn’t she tell you?’
Ravan would not look at Shobhan.
‘Didn’t she?’ Shobhan was perplexed.
‘She did.’
‘You don’t feel like coming any more to our place?’
Didn’t Shobhan ever get hurt? How come she was always calm and caring and just a fraction distant so you never knew what went on in her mind?
‘I’ve missed you and so has everyone else. We haven’t got the carrom board out since you disappeared,’
‘They call me names and say nasty things to me.’
‘Who calls you names?’
‘Mr Raikar and his wife, Mr Lele, especially Mr Tamhane. And all the boys in the chawls. Even Eddie from the top floor.’
‘What do they say?
‘That I am Shri Krishna and the Sarang sisters are my harem of gopis. They ask me where my peacock feather is. Mr Tamhane’s son Anant wanted to know whether I had stolen your clothes while you were bathing. Eddie Coutinho told one of his Sabha friends to ask me how long you and I had been married.’
‘They are jealous of our friendship and they want to break it. You’ll ignore them, won’t you?’ Ravan nodded his head eagerly. The Sarang sisters were the only friends he had left. ‘Come tomorrow and have dinner with us. I’ll cook something special for you.’
Ravan was feeling a trifle uncomfortable but he had no regrets. He had overeaten and he wasn’t sure when the buttons at his waist would pop out and fly. How could he have stayed away from them so long? They were his family. Parvatibai was his mother and she protected him like a tigress protecting her cubs. But she was always busy, cooking, marketing, cutting vegetables, keeping accounts. She tried to make conversation with Ravan, ask him what had happened at school, what the new teacher was like, she washed his clothes and carefully put them under his father’s mattress so they were creased just right, but no conversation of theirs lasted more than a couple of minutes. As for his father, there were times when Ravan forgot that there was such a person. There were no dramatic ups and downs in their lives, no laughter and crying and reconciliations. Mr Sarang was wrong. It was terrific to have so many children. A large family was a world by itself. If you had one, you didn’t need anybody else.
The game of bluff was in full swing. Everybody, even Mrs Sarang had joined in. There were loud cries and hysterical laughter. Mr Sarang was a little low-key but he had been caught out twice and was sure to be planning some new strategy. Ravan was chewing the fat paan Shobhan had got for him. His mother never allowed him to eat one.
‘Just for today,’ Shobhan had said and smiled, ‘because you are back among us.’
‘The lings of sharks,’ Ravan announced with his mouth full of betel leaf, saliva and loads of masala: cardamom, freshly grated coconut, finely cut betel nut, fennel and rose-petal preserves, the whole concoction dipped in some cloyingly sweet yellow syrup.
‘What?’ Mrs Sarang asked him. ‘What did you say?’
‘Re bings of larts.’ Ravan enunciated each word lucidly.
‘Ma, forget him.’ Tara shook her head in disgust. ‘He’s sozzled. He’s eaten so much and now his darling Shobhan’s given him a paan, he’s out for the count.’
‘He’s not. I can follow every word he said.’
‘Is that so, Shobhan? Well, what did the Prince of Darkness say?’ Tara asked Shobhan.
‘Three kings of hearts. Ravan swallow the juice. You can’t hold it forever.’
‘Shall I play?’ Savitri asked tentatively.
Tara interrupted her. ‘No, it’s my turn.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Mr Sarang’s voice was unusually shrill and querulous.
‘It is, Father,’ Yamuna tried to reason with him.
‘Four kings of hearts.’ Tara looked around defiantly daring someone to contradict her.
‘She’s lying. The bitch is always lying.’
‘That’s the idea, Father.’ Yamuna was exasperated at her father’s obtuseness. ‘You can always call her bluff.’
‘I am calling her bluff.’ His voice was a manic screech now. He knocked the cards out of Tara’s hands. ‘Pretending to go and see movies with Sandhyarani. As if I don’t know who Sandhyarani is. Shall I tell them, shall I tell them, you bitch?’
‘Not today, Father.’ Shobhan held Mr Sarang’s hand gently. ‘Not today. It’s my birthday.’
‘The izzat of our family is at stake and you talk of your bloody birthday, you cloven-hoofed goat. Do you know who she has been seeing on the sly?’
‘I know. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’
The old man went berserk after that. ‘You knew, you knew she was seeing Shahaji Kadam, that untouchable slime from the ground floor and you kept quiet? Oh you bitch, how could I have fathered such a traitor?’
‘Shall we discuss this later, Father? We have a guest with us, little Ravan.’
‘Some guest. I’m going to take little Ravan’s hide off. He’s been stabbing his hosts in the back all these months.’ Mr Sarang pulled Ravan up by his collar. ‘Tell them, tell them, you bastard, how you’ve been running back and forth carrying messages for them.’
Mr Sarang’s hand came down like a wrecking ball but it fell on Shobhan. She had her arms protectively around Ravan.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, you slut?’ Mr Sarang’s attention flitted from one person to the other.
‘Because of all your nine unmarried daughters, she alone had found a man and I rejoiced for her.’
‘Do you want her to go around with a bhangi?’
‘Wouldn’t make a difference to me whether he’s a sweeper or a mechanic, so long as she’s happy.’
‘I know your game. Nobody will look at you, so you want to ruin the lives of your other sisters.’
‘That’s not true. She’s never wished anyone ill.’ Tara had finally found her voice. ‘I met him on my own. I love him.’
‘Love? Love? Is that what’s made you three months pregnant?’
‘He wants to marry me, Father, and I want to marry him and have his baby.’
‘And what happens to my other daughters? Who will marry them once they discover that we have a Mahar, an untouchable, sorry, a neo-Buddhist, isn’t that what one calls them now, among us?’
‘We are all going to die spinsters, Father, because there are just too many of us and you haven’t got the money to bribe a caste-Hindu to take us off your hands.’
Mr Sarang’s leg rose in the air. It slammed into Tara’s belly. It was a powerful kick. Tara staggered and then fell back.
‘Don’t please.’ Ravan crumbled. ‘I want to marry Tara.’
‘No daughter of mine is going to live with an untouchable: Never.’ He kicked her again, a little harder, if that was possible. When Shobhan tried to pull him away, he threw her against the wall. A slow, red pool was forming under Tara.
