‘Ravan.’
Ravan rose. The disembodied voice came from behind him. He would recognize it long after he was dead. Prakash. Tyrant, terror and a youth of prodigious powers. Prakash was sixteen. He had plugged the fifth grade six times and finally caught up with Ravan’s class. There was only one way to stay out of his orbit. Go and live on another planet, not the closer ones but Saturn or Jupiter. Or better still, pick another galactic system. Even the teachers left Prakash alone.
He wasn’t particularly large or tall but to Ravan and his peers he appeared a colossus. They did his homework, bought cigarettes for him and wiped his four-by-two inch mirror on the seat of their shorts when he wished to comb his hair. He was the only one in the school who had a pair of closed shoes. They were made of buffalo hide but had the sheen of patent leather. Ravan (or whoever else was summoned first thing in the morning) wiped the dust off the top of his shoes, applied daubs of Kiwi shoe polish with his fingers, brushed them steadily for seven minutes—‘lightly, you arsehole, this is delicate stuff, not your coarse hide—and then polished them again till the leather shone blindingly in the sunlight.
The fifth-grade students had no difficulty rendering these services willingly and with dispatch. The world, as Ravan well knew, was divided into slaves and slave-drivers. And then there were those who owned the slave-drivers. He was intelligent enough to realize that he would never be located on the same side of the fence as Prakash. But the source of Ravan’s and his colleagues’ awe lay elsewhere.
‘Watch this,’ Prakash had said six months back to seven of his slaves after class. The school building was deserted. Prakash presided sitting at the head of the staircase while the bonded labourers sat on the steps below. The boys fell silent. His eyes passed over and took in each individual face. What was he going to do? Swallow a sword? Ask them to rob a bank? He undid his fly and exposed his penis. There was nothing spectacular about it. Just like mine and Chandrakant’s and everybody else’s in class, thought Ravan. Prakash Sonavane began to stroke it gently. Is he trying to pee, I can do it without all this show.
It was odd. As Prakash stroked the length of his member, it grew in length. How did he do it? Ravan was mesmerized. It took a little time for him to register that it had also grown in body and width, frankly it had swollen monstrously as if Prakash was pumping air into it. Suddenly it went rigid. Its head looked dopey like the pictures of whales he had seen except that this thing had a vertical slit instead of a horizontal one. ‘It’s going to burst,’ Ravan blurted in panic.
‘It’s a gun. See that hole, that’s where the bullets come from.’ He swung it wildly, then pointed it at Naresh. ‘Shall I shoot?’ Naresh cringed and shrank back. ‘Does anybody have the guts to challenge me?’ Ravan thought it was an absurd question. Not even in his most megalomaniacal dream would it occur to him to cross Prakash.
‘You smirking, Ravan, you smirking at me?’ Prakash grabbed hold of Ravan’s hair and yanked him down. Ravan fought shy of the barrel of the gun but Prakash held him firmly. ‘Open your mouth, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your brains out.’
Ravan opened his mouth. Before he knew it, the gun had rammed into the back of his throat. It pressed into his windpipe and choked him. His gullet reacted violently to the presence of a foreign body and tried to regurgitate it but Prakash’s hand continued to press his head forward. Ravan’s knees began to give and his eyes bulged out dangerously. He heard Prakash’s irritated voice. It seemed strangely muted. ‘Close your mouth, asshole, close it.’ Despite his fast-ebbing consciousness Ravan responded to the instructions and snapped his mouth shut. Prakash let out a cry of such intensity and urgency, it slapped Ravan out of the darkness descending upon him.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck you, you son of a bitch, you bit my cock off.’ Prakash was nursing his genitals as if they were the last of a rare and fragile species while performing a frenetic dance. Ravan’s classmates were in an uproar, rolling down the stairs. Ravan never forgave them.
The general mirth got to Ravan and he began to smile. Prakash looked at him. Ravan knew he was in trouble. Prakash brought Ravan’s head down sharply and shoved his penis back into his mouth. ‘All right, wise guy.’ The place had fallen so silent, Ravan could hear the words like coins ringing on a metal floor. ‘Close your mouth. Gently. And suck.’ He pulled Ravan’s head back and pushed it forward. ‘In-Out. In-Out. In-Out.’ The minutes passed. Ravan was close to tears. His jaw ached and his head was ready to split for lack of oxygen. He was discovering a whole new geography of pain down his spinal column. There was a skyward crick in his neck and it sang and zinged spottily across his back.
‘Exhausted, asshole? Go on. Go on. Up. Down. And don’t vary the pace.’
What was Prakash talking about? His head was in a fog which was emanating from between his eyes. What would the bullet do? Was there one bullet or many? Would it explode in his head? Would it traverse through and leave a hole with burnt edges and lodge itself into the rear wall?
Ravan felt Prakash’s grip on his head slacken while his body tautened. His hands and legs twitched and jerked in an uncoordinated fashion. He leaned back, his thighs caught Ravan’s head and squeezed it hard, went lax and then tightened again. Ravan surmised that Prakash was having a fit. Gangadhar Thate from the third floor in CWD Chawl No. 14 suffered from them. He would get them anywhere, on the staircase, in the toilet, on the playground. They came without warning and he collapsed on the spot. You had to rush and insert a stick or Yo-Yo between his teeth and hold a smashed onion, the sole of a shoe or an ammonia bottle over his nose.
Prakash was moaning now. Deep, long sighs. He was obviously in pain. Ravan tried to pull his head away. He wanted to put a notebook between Prakash’s teeth but Prakash wouldn’t let go of his hair. As a matter of fact he was pulling back and forth in a frenzied fashion. Suddenly he became inert and something leaked into Ravan’s mouth. It was thick and sticky and sweet with an acidic after-taste. Sala, jerk, the swine had peed in his mouth. He spat it out. It was white and cloudy like gum and not even a mouthful. Couldn’t be pee, what the hell was it?
‘You shit. You spat it out?’ Prakash was not only awake and wide alert, he was beside himself with rage. ‘Don’t you dare. Ever. Lick it. Lick it.’
Ravan stared at Prakash uncomprehendingly. He was willing to do almost anything for him but why drink pee. His line of thought was cut midway as Prakash caught him by the neck and pressed his head to the grey tiled floor.
‘Lick, you asshole, lick. It’s precious stuff, my seed. Within nine months you are going to have a baby. Everyone in our class is going to bear my sons. The girls from the Lady Sirur School will bear my daughters. Naresh, it’s your turn tomorrow. You watched Ravan, so I won’t have to teach you again.’
‘Ravan.’
Was it his turn to service Prakash today? No, as far as he could remember, it was next Tuesday. So what did he want? You never could tell. His shoes were shimmering but that wouldn’t dissuade Prakash from asking him to shine them again. Besides, there were times when he wanted to be sucked six or seven times a day.
He could ask for anything, just about anything, so long as it wasn’t about the baby. As far as he was aware, and admittedly his knowledge in these matters was limited, only women delivered babies. But Prakash was no ordinary mortal. Did you see what he could do with his cock? Amazing, nobody but nobody he knew could pull that off. And anyway, whether men and boys could bear babies or not, he knew he was pregnant. He felt a heaviness in his belly, in the first four months he had thrown up frequently. There were days when his stomach stood out a mile and a half and Prakash himself had put his ear a little below his ribcage and felt and heard the baby turn.
‘Where will it come from?’ Ravan had asked him. ‘From your navel, where else? It will tear open your stomach as the god Narasimha did. Your intestines will be flung on the floor, all two hundred and twenty yards of them. Wind them neatly the way your mother winds wool and put them back carefully. You’ll bleed a lot, the whole floor will be wet, drink it up quickly and then breastfeed the baby. If I hear that you’ve been starving my child, I’ll kill you.’
When was the baby coming? It was way past nine months.
Why, you may well ask, didn’t Ravan spearhead a revolt against Prakash? He could have tossed Prakash with a flick of his wrist, made him turn seven continuous cartwheels in the air, broken his back, shoved his toe in his crotch and unmanned him for life. He could have … but the truth was a little less flamboyant. In time Ravan would become highly accomplished in tae kwon do. But right now it was only an academic discipline. You practised in class, at home, in the open playgrounds in the CWD chawls but it had nothing to do with real life. Even later when he understood that tae kwon do could be used defensively against bullies, local dadas and toughs, he would find it difficult, if not impossible, to translate his skills into an instant physical response. But that’s still missing the point altogether. Ravan was not even twelve yet while Prakash was not just older but brutish, aggressive and vindictive. Whatever his physical dimensions he was a malevolent colossus.
Prakash ran towards Ravan and put his hand on Ravan’s shoulder. What was wrong? Prakash never even walked up to anyone. He called, you ran. He had an odd look in his eyes. ‘Is it true you killed Eddie Coutinho’s father?’
This is the end. The absolute end. The final end. The last final end. There was no point asking how he’d found out. Obviously Eddie had told him. Prakash was going to make him pay for it, with his life, what else.
‘And Gandhi? Mahatma Gandhi?’ Ravan still didn’t answer. ‘Look at me. I heard Godse and you killed him.’
Chandrakant, Chandrakant Dixit, you were my friend, my closest friend. How could you do this to me?
‘Boy, you’re some guy. A real chhupa Rustum.’ So, he was a murderer. The whole world but he knew about it. Ravan couldn’t and wouldn’t look at Prakash.
‘I want you to kill my stepmother. I’ll give you twenty rupees.’
It was now over two months since Prakash had made his request. It had not thrown Ravan. He wasn’t even flabbergasted. He simply blanked it out of his mind. You could call it his best career move to date. It was also one of his most important lessons in life and commerce. Like the kernel of a fable or parable, it would stay buried in his mind but affect his actions. Perhaps even when he grew up he wouldn’t be able to articulate the moral of the experience, but it wouldn’t be the less potent or real for that. He understood that many things, if not everything in life, were for sale and had a price on them, especially the illicit, the immoral and evil. He also began to realize that tides can change, tables can turn, roles switch and those in power become supplicants.
Prakash misunderstood his silence. He raised the ante from twenty to fifty, then to seventy-five.
‘Hundred and twenty-five,’ he said, ‘that’s all the money I have.’ More than the escalating price on Prakash’s stepmother’s head, Ravan was struck by the change in his voice. It was uncertain and insistent.
‘I’ll think about it.’
Ravan tried to avoid Prakash. He could feel his eyes on him from across the classroom during the next few weeks. Occasionally he came over and lingered politely.
‘When are you going to do it?’ He finally got hold of Ravan while they were on their way to the physical-training class in the school courtyard.
‘I haven’t said yes yet.’
‘Please Ravan, I know the money’s not enough but I’ll get more, even if I have to steal it and pay you later.’
That was the first time Ravan looked Prakash in the face. His teeth were beginning to stain with the tobacco he chewed and smoked. The lock of hair he had trained so carefully to curl upon itself on his forehead had come undone. What had made Ravan think of him as a giant? He was taller and he shaved and he had a moustache, but he no longer loomed over Ravan like a calamity and there was not much in him to hold in awe. Ravan wouldn’t dare say it to himself even now, but with the lower lip of his mouth perpetually hanging slack, Prakash looked a mutt. He had to concentrate hard and long to get the drift of the simplest things. He had room for only a couple of thoughts in his head at a time and any new idea made him ill-humoured and suspicious. Ravan wondered why it had taken him so many weeks since the day Prakash had broached the subject of his stepmother to feel a sense of release and relief. He was a little confused. Did the source of the power that Prakash had exercised reside in Prakash or in Ravan himself?
Life, that most hackneyed of teachers, but also the freshest, was about to teach Ravan another lesson. If you did not show curiosity and were patient, human beings would tell you their entire life-stories, spew out every single sour and rancid detail.
‘You don’t know my stepmother. I was a king before she came. My mother died two years after I was born and it’s six or seven years since my sister got married. My father lived for me. What I said was law. Anything I wanted I got. The headmaster complained about my attendance and performance in school. My father didn’t believe a word of what he said. I could do no wrong. The headmaster threatened to throw me out. My father said he would talk to the minister. I guess you don’t know that my father works at the Secretariat. He’s a peon in the Ministry of Education. I was the apple of my father’s eye. Until she came into our lives.
‘It was my mother’s mother who arranged the whole thing. For years my father had refused to remarry. God knows they tried a dozen times every year. Then out of the blue this nineteen-year-old tart turns up, she’s a third or fourth cousin of mine, flashes her teeth and makes eyes at my father and my father suddenly insists I need a new mother. She’s done some black magic, I swear to you, I can’t recognize my father. He puts dye in his hair and takes her to the movies at least twice a week, this man who couldn’t bear to watch a film. As for me, he doesn’t even remember he has a son. Hemlata this and Hemlata that, it’s Hemlata morning, noon and night. Can’t wait for me to go to sleep. Before it’s ten-thirty he’s busy picking up her sari. Doesn’t get enough of it at night, so he’s begun to take days off from work. A man who never in his entire career took a day off, not even when my mother died. Just cremated her, took a shower and went straight to work, the minister won’t know where the files are, he said. Now the same man says the minister can look for the files himself if he needs them that badly, or the country can come to a standstill, he doesn’t give a damn. Nobody’s been as conscientious as I’ve been, he says, and all I’ve got to show for it is one measly watch they gave me after twenty-five years of service and that too stopped working a long time ago. High time I took it easy, he says, and you, you Prakash, get off your bloody arse. I’m not going to support you all your life, you fail this year and you’re out, out of school and out of this house too. I know that bitch has been whispering in his ear, that’s the reason he’s been giving me a hard time. He says to me, you can take up a job and find a place of your own. And if you don’t fancy that, too bad, four months is all you’ve got to shape up. And don’t look at your mother, I’ll smash your bloody face if I ever catch you eyeing her that way. Hemlata was telling me that you talk back to her and call her Lata. You watch your mouth, boy, if you want any teeth left in it. You’ll call her Mother and touch her feet every morning. And the bitch stands there plaiting her hair and nodding her head and smiling sweetly at me.
‘Do you understand the hell I must be going through? No child I know has ever been put through such torture. Save me, Ravan. Snuff that woman out.’
It was about a week after this overwrought confession that Rajeev Borade slipped a dirty crumpled envelope into Ravan’s hand during the geography class. Ravan excused himself and went down to pee.
My dear Ravan,
Please cut off my father’s left hand. He’s a leftie. He hit me yesterday because I stole eight annas to go thrice on the merry-go-round and to buy ice-fruit at the Mahashivratri fair. Once he has no left hand, all he’ll be able to do is wave his stub in the air when he wants to bash me up. And he’ll lose his job too.
Am enclosing three rupees and seventy paise.
Yours gratefully,
Rajeev
Ravan buttoned up his shorts, left the lavatory and sat down on the lowest step of the staircase. He felt drained by the first intimations of the power of evil. It would be the source of his ethical ambivalence at many critical moments in later years. He had never been so confused in his life. Nothing had given him as much pain and as many nightmares as the discovery that he was a murderer. He had lost his sleep and he had lost weight. He was ashamed to walk among human beings for fear that they would recognize him for what he was: a parricide. A killer of not just an unborn baby’s father but the killer, albeit part-killer, of the father of the nation.
Now all of a sudden everybody knew his past and instead of spitting on him and running away from his very shadow, they were seeking him out, asking him to commit the most terrible crimes and paying him cash, not on delivery but in advance. He felt a delirious sense of power. He also felt like throwing up.
Was this his vocation? Was he born with a career which he was too opaque to recognize? Should he give up school? There was clearly a lot of money in this business. His mother Parvati wouldn’t have to slave all day and half the night. He could buy her a nice bed and place it on the other side of the room, opposite his father’s.
The next morning when he was going home, Sudhir Salunke accosted him. He was a little incoherent and took a good deal of time to come to the point but the gist of what he said was clear enough. The landlord of Sudhir’s chawl was threatening to evict his family because they hadn’t been able to pay rent for the last seven months. Sudhir’s father had told the landlord that he was about to get his job back but the landlord was adamant. Would Ravan please dispatch the man, name and address—Mr J.V. Sardesai, 49, Jamshedji Road, Nana Chowk. They could negotiate a price to be paid half in advance, half after commission of services.
The most memorable day in Ravan’s new-found calling occurred a fortnight later. When he returned home from school, his mother rushed him into the kitchen and said in a hushed voice, ‘There’s a letter for you.’
‘For me?’ There was as much awe in Ravan’s voice as in Parvati’s. She handed him an envelope.
‘I didn’t want it to fall into his hands,’ she said pointing in the direction of his father’s bed.
Parvati gave him a knife to open the envelope but he decided to have his cup of tea and the snacks his mother always served him after school, first. He had not felt so important even when Prakash had approached him with his momentous request.
He wiped his hands on his shorts and sliding the knife into the sealed flap of the envelope, sliced it open.
‘What does it say?’ his mother asked before he unfolded the lined notepaper on which the letter was written.
‘It’s private.’ Ravan had yet to read it. Parvati was taken aback by this unexpected answer. She looked at Ravan with new respect.
My dear Ravan,
My father beats my mother, me and my nine brothers and sisters every night. Yesterday he hit my mother with my cricket bat and broke open her forehead. We had to take her to hospital. The doctors gave her seven stitches and have kept her under observation.
Will you please help me and my family? God won’t. He never hears any of my prayers. All of us will owe you an everlasting debt of gratitude if you get rid of our father. I would not ask you to do this if he thrashed just me and my brothers but I can’t bear to see him hitting my mother. If we don’t stop him now, he’ll kill all of us. Last night he threatened to do just that when we said we wanted to take my mother to the hospital. He was in a bad temper this morning and bashed my oldest sister and stopped only when she fainted.
You need not fear about what will happen to all of us after his death. Half the time, my father does not go to work. When he does, he spends most of his money on drink. I’ll take up a job somewhere. My two older sisters are already working as servants. We’ll manage.
Please do something soon. You are a real saint.
Yours gratefully,
Ashok
P.S. Do not worry about money. My brothers and I will pay you every month all your life.
Subtly over the next few weeks, the centre of power in school shifted. Nobody kowtowed to Prakash any longer. He didn’t seem to demand it either. He was now one of the boys. But while people began to treat Ravan with deference, it was all covert and never spelled out. Even when they came to ask him for favours, there was something furtive and clandestine about their requests. Most of them like Ashok Sane preferred to write.
‘Ravan.’ It was Prakash.
‘Are you going to kill my stepmother or not? Or are you just so much hot air? And all those tales about your earlier murders nothing but lies?’
‘Yelling won’t get you anywhere. Neither will your impatience.’
‘No more talk. Give me a fixed date.’
‘Your stepmother, you yourself admitted, is doing black magic. The only antidote for black magic is stronger black magic. The stars have to be right and you have to perform very expensive rituals and ceremonies. All you’ve got is a piddling hundred and twenty-five rupees. One false move and her ghost will sit on your neck and drink your blood every night. If you are unhappy with the way I’m handling things, go and get somebody else to get rid of your stepmother.’
‘I’m sorry, really sorry. I thought you were going to kill her with a knife or shoot her with bullets, the way you killed Gandhi. Now I understand, but please do it fast. I can’t take it any more.’
Damn. He had escaped for the moment but what was he going to do? Couldn’t God make him disappear? How was he going to face all these people? If he didn’t deliver fast, they would turn on him and maybe lynch him. Every day for the past two months he had avoided confronting the two questions that needed urgent answers. How was he going to live up to all these people’s expectations of him? How was he going to commit these dire acts? He couldn’t for the life of him recall how he had terminated his first two victims.
‘Run, Ravan, run.’ Ashok Sane almost knocked Ravan down as he ran the length of the school corridor in search of him during the recess. Prakash’s looking for you and …’
Too late. The rest of Ravan’s class watched silently as Prakash Sonavane got his hands around Ravan’s neck.
‘I told you to kill my stepmother, not my father, you bastard.’ He was crying like a child. His nose was running and he couldn’t make up his mind whether to wipe it or throttle Ravan first. He wanted to speak. He had perforce to take his hanky out and blow his nose. ‘I’m going to kill you. Give my father back to me. Or I’ll kill you.’ His hands were back at Ravan’s throat.
‘Do you want the black magic to kill you too?’ Prakash withdrew his hands as if he had touched live electric wires. Ravan may not have known what black magic was or how it operated but he had no doubt in his mind that there was black magic in the world and that he was an old hand at it. How else could you explain the words that had escaped his lips just now? He certainly hadn’t spoken them. He had never wished Prakash’s father ill, let alone dead. He had never even wished any harm to Prakash’s stepmother. And yet Prakash’s old man was dead. All because of him. Did he need any more proof that he was a murderer?
