Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  Eddie hurriedly shoved the books into his school bag, turned his back to his mother, screwed up his eyes and waved his tongue at Pieta.

  ‘Did you see what he did? He’s making faces at me, Mamma.’

  ‘Enough. I don’t want another word out of either of you.’

  Six

  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.