Ravan and Eddie

by Kiran Nagarkar

  Ravan nodded. There was a smile on Mr Billimoria’s face. ‘What were you yelling when you opened your arms in the field?’

  Ravan kept mum.

  ‘I know you were defying the emissaries of death but I couldn’t catch the words.’

  Ravan looked positively embarrassed.

  ‘I prayed to God not to kill me because my mother’s going to make my favourite dish, puranpolis, today.’

  ‘Do you realize you would be dead if I hadn’t knocked you flat when I did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like puranpolis too. Get me some tomorrow.’

  Ravan nodded his head again.

  ‘Now that you are here, we might as well start classes. You will come here every day at 5.15, not at 5.23 or 5.25 as you’ve been doing. Change into this suit and do warming-up exercises till 5.30. Classes are held every day barring Saturdays and Sundays and go on till 6.30. You will not be absent except for a month in summer. My class is not free. Tell your mother to pay me whatever she can afford every month.

  ‘I know Hindi but I will speak to you in English. That way you will pick up the language and the other boys in the class won’t act superior.’

  You could count the number of black belts in India on the fingers of one hand in those days. It was a long time before the Bruce Lee craze would hit the world and karate become a household word. There were few institutions in the country which taught the Far Eastern martial arts in India. Mr Billimoria had done a bit of judo at Fergusson College in Poona when studying there. Later he went to Hong Kong to develop contacts in the region for his father’s business and switched to tae kwon do. His Korean masters taught him that tae kwon do was like a Zen discipline, a matter of mind dominating the body.

  Ravan was to win many prizes in tae kwon do competitions over the years, but as his master often pointed out, that was not of much consequence. He grasped the message of tae kwon do intuitively. It entered his bloodstream. Perhaps it steadied him in later life so that, however much he was rocked, he always regained his centre of gravity. Perhaps.

  Ravan’s mind did not always triumph over matter. His hit-rate would have averaged the same as most people trying to muddle along in life. But for the first time he felt a sense of belonging. He believed in his master. At a time when the guru tradition was on its last legs in India, he had found his guru and his guru had found the ideal pupil.

  Ravan would have done almost anything for Mr Billimoria. That Mr Billimoria did not ask him for the moon, sexual favours or to smuggle contraband is not relevant. If he had wanted any or all of them, he would have taken them as the guru’s prerogative. It was the guru’s mind that took precedence over the pupil’s mind and matter. What it did for Ravan was to make him aware of perfection and to hunger for it. Whether that consciousness would make him a master-craftsman or an artist is a grey area. One thing was certain. A journeyman he would not be.

  He practised. Not night and day but as often as he could. The neighbours in the chawl had always kept their distance from Parvati. Now they were convinced that she was either possessed or doing black magic. Ha! Ha! Ha! It was half a derogatory laugh and half a hiccup. Obviously, her voice had turned hoarse and masculine as she blew hard and gustily into a brass pot over the years, inviting the Goddess Amba, who rode a tiger and brandished a sword in her hand, to take charge of her mind, body and soul and do with them as she would.

  Ravan drove his mother up the wall. On more than one occasion she would have liked to stab him, strangle him or throw him out of the window.

  Ravan’s aim was not always very good, at least not in the early years. On one occasion his foot went straight into the rice that was cooking on the kerosene stove. The bubble on it was the size of a decent balloon. Parvati could not contain her joy. She was a great believer in deterrence. He lay there writhing in pain and sizzling agony while she delivered her homily. ‘That will teach you a lesson you will never forget,’ she told him without making any attempt to commiserate with him. She was wrong. The boy was undeterred.

  When his foot healed, he almost succeeded where his mother had failed all these years. He nearly ejected his father from the house. Ravan’s contention was that if you moved when he was in action, you not only begged to be hurt but, more to the point, upset his timing.

  It started out innocuously enough. Ravan asked his father to stand still, just stand still, okay, while Shankar-rao was transferring himself from his armchair to the bed. Shankar-rao must have been thinking of the news in Bittambatmi that day: about the man who pickled the fingers and toes and other limbs of his victims and stored them in the fridge, because how else could you explain his tacitly acceding to Ravan’s request? Ravan circled his father, his hands aiming, unfolding, doing figures of eight over his father’s head and all the while continuing to stalk him; he then flung himself sideways into the air as he let out a piercing scream. Did his father move, dodge his head, step back half a centimetre, blink his eyelids? These are academic issues. Shankar-rao’s specs were lying smashed on the ground and he was bent over double. He didn’t say a word because he couldn’t. His diaphragm had climbed up and stuck to his throat. His testicles had grown so big, it was a wonder he wasn’t floating into Eddie’s house.

  The weight of the silence in the outside room finally bore down on Parvati. She came out of the kitchen. She went back. She returned with a glass of water with sugar in it and tried to feed it to Shankar-rao. He flung it away with his left hand but brought the hand back to his groin in a hurry.

  ‘I told him not to move. He moved. What do you expect?’

  Ravan was as usual keeping a clear line of defence but there wasn’t much conviction in it.

  Shankar-rao spoke after forty-five minutes. They were his last words on this planet. At least they sounded that way. ‘Either he goes or I go.’

  That put an end to Ravan’s war-games at home. For once he had penetrated his father’s habitual torpor and for a while, it was chancy for him. He couldn’t risk it again. From now on he decided to go to his gym after school and practise there.

  Later on, much later when Eddie and Ravan were grown-up men, Eddie would ask: What happened to us in school? Were we border-line average students? Even they pass, maybe we were just dullards? Or were we stupid? Why did we fare so badly?

  There were other questions that gnawed at Eddie’s peace of mind from time to time and exasperated him because he had no answers. But today was not such a day. Today he was not an underachiever.

  It was the twentieth anniversary of the Mazagaon Sabha. Leaders from all parts of Bombay and a couple from the Central Committee were gathered to celebrate the occasion. They were seated on a raised platform under a festive shamiana. As Lele Guruji would have put it, everything was going like clockwork. The loudspeakers crackled occasionally but at least this time the man from whom they had hired the electrical equipment was making sure that there was no dog-whistle feedback from the amplifier interrupting the speeches.

  After Vande Mataram, the Sabha anthem and welcoming speeches, there were various competitions: running, yoga, wrestling, malkhamb (they had dug a deep hole in the ground and fixed the tapering ten-foot wooden pole in it with concrete), the fights with the wooden staff, the lezhim dance. There wasn’t an item in which Eddie did not participate. The loudspeakers called out his name to pick up a prize in almost every category.

  It was time for the elocution competition. Two boys spoke about Veer Savarkar and his exploits; another about Nathuram Godse and his last thoughts before he was hanged and martyred in the noble cause of Hinduism. One of the older boys recited a soliloquy from the play Manapaman. As usual there were three or four boys who dealt with Shivaji and how he founded a Hindu kingdom in Maharashtra and his great escape from Agra where the mighty Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, had kept him under house arrest.

  It was Eddie’s turn. He looked far and wide so long that even Lele Guruji began to get worried about his favourite student. Just as the audience’s restiveness was about
to become a murmur, Eddie said in a quiet and natural voice as if he was speaking to a friend on the phone, ‘This is Sanjay speaking.’ Eddie was thirty seconds into his speech before the elders or anybody else understood that this was the Sanjay from the Mahabharata, telling Dhritarashtra, the blind father of the hundred Kaurava princes, how the father and mother of all wars was shaping up.

  Eddie’s strategy was simple and one with which every Indian could identify. He was the commentator of a cricket match. He observed the ultimate game, the game of life and death itself and told it as it was. His voice was a supple instrument. It reflected the tensions, the speed, the sudden drama, the heroism, the betrayal and the sorrow of the war. One minute he was with Arjun’s son Abhimanyu, the teenager who knew the secret of penetrating a military maze so complex that even the greatest warriors did not know how to negotiate it. Then he was with the Kauravas, struggling with Karna to heft his chariot wheel out of the churning mud in the battlefield. Even from the great distance that separated him from his arch rival Arjun, Karna could tell that Lord Krishna was urging Arjun to shoot, to shoot now, before Karna’s deadly arrow pierced his heart and the battle went to the enemy.

  And now Eddie was back with Abhimanyu who had reached where no man had, the very core of the convoluted circular formation; but here he was trapped by his own incredible skill, for while he knew how to penetrate the human maze he had no idea of how to get out. And the arrows fell upon him like sheet upon sheet of rain till there was not a millimetre of unpierced skin left in his youthful body.

  The bell rang and Eddie withdrew from the mike. There was such a tense silence, he thought something had gone wrong. Had he hurt their sentiments, had he gone too fast, had he lost them because they were bored? He looked at his peers, the young boys with whom he exercised and wrestled and laughed and competed. Had they heard the bell or not? He saw their mouths open. All right, so he had messed up, but what were they waiting for? For him to say sorry? He realized how tense he was. His palms and feet were cold, something that had not happened even when he was on the malkhamb or trying to flip his opponent so that he would land with his back on the floor.

  It was a strange sensation this, his blood seemed to be racing while everything around him had slowed down. He saw Appa Achrekar take forever to get up. Was he going to denounce Eddie? Appa brought his hands together, he was clapping ever so slowly, then the others on the stage were on their feet and so was the audience and everyone was clapping. Appa smiled and said, ‘And then?’

  Lele Guruji was beside him now. Eddie was his prodigal son and he loved him dearly. Ravan would not have believed the change this one pupil had wrought in Lele Guruji. Lele’s wife and children, who had been trained by Lele to be almost bereft of all emotion in personal dealings and who had become as dry and desiccated as cinder over the years, were a little ashamed of the warmth and friendliness that seemed to glow from the man now. He put his arm around Eddie’s shoulder and said, ‘I am going to ask our beloved chief guest, Appa Achrekar, to address us now.’

  ‘Two years ago, I had predicted that Eddie Coutinho would be the star pupil in the locality. I was wrong.’

  Just by itself Appa’s rabble-rouser voice would have echoed in the four corners of the CWD chawls. With the mike and speakers, it resounded like the voice of God Himself calling man to heed Him while there was still time.

  ‘Eddie Coutinho is the finest pupil of the Sabha in the whole of Bombay state. Nobody in the past, not a single student, has got the grades he has got in every single subject. Gym, drill, physical exercises, martial arts, spiritual singing, lezhim, he’s got the highest scores ever. As if all this were not enough, just a few minutes ago, he gave us a rendering of the Mahabharata, the likes of which I have never heard before. And all this in a language, our dearly beloved Marathi Maiboli, that he had not spoken till he joined our Sabha. When I heard him talk of Abhimanyu and the rain of arrows that fell upon that great hero in the very flower of youth, I said to myself, Eddie Coutinho is Abhimanyu brought back to life. There is no doubt in my mind that Eddie Coutinho is the reincarnation of not just Abhimanyu but of all our glorious Hindu traditions.

  ‘In my seventy-five years of life I have not, I have to admit, ever been so moved. I had goose-flesh on my body.

  ‘Eddie Coutinho, mark my words, for my prophecies have always come true, will be one of the great leaders of the Sabha. Our tradition and our future are safe in the hands of people like Eddie Coutinho.’

  There was thunderous applause. In the distance, Eddie saw a dot. Actually, it was two dots, a big dot accompanied by a small one. The big dot seemed to cast a shadow on Eddie even from that distance. The shadow grew bigger by the second just as it had in the story of the prodigal son that Appa had told two years ago.

  There’s a time to dawdle and a time to run. Eddie knew that it was time to run for his life. He shot out but Lele Guruji’s hand clamped him firmly on the shoulder.

  ‘In appreciation of the extraordinary work Eddie Coutinho has done, we have had to create a special new award for him.’

  The big dot was running now. The little dot had difficulty keeping up with it.

  ‘He is our first Star of Hindustan.’

  Even now there was time to escape. He jerked his shoulder and tried to push Lele Guruji’s hand away. There she stood life-size, his mother Violet, and panting behind her was his sister, Pieta. As Lele Guruji steered him to Appa, Eddie caught a glimpse of Pieta trying to pull his mother away. There was dismay and sympathy in Pieta’s eyes. Eddie loved her then as he had never loved anybody before. He knew that Pieta’s gesture was futile and he loved her all the more for it.

  ‘Strange, I thought I heard the words Eddie Coutinho reverberate in our chawl. Sewing night and day makes me feel giddy at times. I must be imagining things, I said. Then I heard it again and again and again. I looked out of the window trying to trace the source of the loudspeaker. How can it be, I said, it’s a Hindu gathering.’

  Appa’s hand was not as steady as his voice. He was having trouble pinning the 22-carat gold medal on Eddie’s shirt.

  ‘I should have known better. That woman downstairs has performed black magic on him and sold him to Satan. But I won’t rest till I’ve exorcized the devil even if it means taking him apart, limb from limb.’

  Hurry, please hurry. What was the point, she was already on the dais, she was pushing people aside, now she had the medal in her hands and it was on a parabolic flight over the heads of the audience who watched it as if it were a wondrous talisman. And so it was. It was Lord Krishna’s sudershan chakra flashing through the cosmos on an intergalactic mission. But Eddie knew that it had lost its homing instincts and would never come back.

  And now Violet was hauling her prodigal son down the dais. Eddie’s foot slipped, got caught in the jute matting that covered the steps and twisted, but that didn’t stop her, she marched into the crowd and past them on to the road, her strides had become gargantuan, she seemed to be in a terrible rush, Eddie was no longer trying to keep pace with her, she had him by the wrist and she was never going to let go, passers-by and people in buses and cars and cabs stared at them and the girl running after them, with tears the size of the Kohinoor diamond, sobbing, ‘Let him go, Mamma, please.’ She turned the corner and was in the compound of St Sebastian’s Church, another set of steps and they were inside, Father D’Souza was in the nave talking to some elderly woman, and Eddie was flung at the foot of the altar.

  If he could have, Father D’Souza would have asked, ‘What now?’ Instead he said, ‘What can I do for you, Mrs Coutinho?’

  ‘Please carry on, Father. I do not wish to interrupt.’ Violet folded her arms and stood intrusively, pointedly ignoring Father D’Souza’s companion.

  ‘It was nothing of consequence, really,’ the elderly woman said a little too eagerly and backed away.

  ‘Exorcize him,’ Violet commanded the priest. The elderly woman left in a hurry. ‘He’s joined the people downstairs and become an idol
worshipper.’

  Everybody can excuse herself or himself and get away. Not me though. Why does she always come to me? She behaves as if there isn’t any other priest in the parish. Father D’Souza sometimes wondered whether Violet Coutinho thought he was Eddie’s father merely because he had been present at his birth. For every little thing—unfortunately for every big thing too—she marched into the church with her son. If he was not there, she came over to the school. And if he was not there either, she sent a peon to fetch him from his room in the priests’ quarters. It didn’t matter whether he was taking a class, talking to some other parent, hearing a confession or lying stone dead with overwork, she stood her ground. She stood politely enough. She had dignity and presence. But there was no way you could ignore her. As always, he knew she was on the premises long before he saw her. That strong palpable bouquet of unspoken grief and grievance preceded her. She was like a fine fish bone stuck between your teeth. There was no relief, you couldn’t pay attention to anything else until you had attended to her.

  What was it with her boy, always getting into trouble, doing things he wasn’t supposed to do, asking questions to which he, Father D’Souza, had no answers. But the problem didn’t end there. It was an odd sensation chastising Eddie, for he often made Father D’Souza feel as if he had victimized an innocent.

  Father D’Souza listened to Violet’s tale with growing alarm. He had to admit that the matter was more serious than life and death, for it was obvious that Eddie’s immortal soul was in jeopardy. You had to give Violet credit. She was seized of the gravity of the situation and had acted with admirable dispatch to contain the damage.

  ‘Are you telling me that your mother is lying? That you never said Hindu prayers?’ The anger rose in him like red steam but again he had the impression that Eddie had forced a reversal of roles, leaving him with a sense of guilt.