This appeared in the Times of India Sunday edition 11th September
Ravan and Eddie, Kiran Nagarkar’s scathingly funny novel of two young boys in the Bombay chawls, began as a screenplay for a Bollywood film. The film (to be directed by Dev Benegal) was never made, instead Ravan and Eddie made their debut in the beginnings of a Marathi novel. Years later, Marathi writer Nagarkar, still grappling with the iniquities of language , rewrote this growing up story in English, a language he describes in the book as a “maha-mantra….an ‘ open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another”.
Ravan and Eddie are both occupants of Central Works Department (CWD) Chawl no 17. ”The Hindus and Catholics in Bombay’s CWD chawls (and perhaps almost anywhere in India) may as well have lived on different planets”, but Ravan and Eddie are connected in a bizarre, almost Rushdie-an way. Nagarkar’s narrative style, however, is anything but . It is casual and conversational and very slice-of-life, lit up occasionally by bitingly ironic authorial insights. The best known of these ( among the delightful asides on Snow the fairness cream , Shammi Kapoor and the Poverty Line ) is of course Nagarkar’s digression on ‘The Great Water Wars’ in the chawl- “ 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...”
For the rest, you follow Ravan and Eddie’s struggle for survival in the packed and proliferating world of the Bombay chawl .It’s a world where babies are space and energy consuming burdens and husbands almost vestigial. Ravan and Eddie’s families survive , like many in India due to the undefeated energies of the woman. Eddie’s father dies Pandu-like in a moment of lust. Ravan’s father Shankar bestirs himself from his bed only to bring in a mistress, leading his mother Parvatibai to obsessive temple visiting anxiety - ”The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house…What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two. All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit.” Meanwhile, Eddie’s widowed mother Violet is considering re-marriage and Eddie is tortured by grim imaginings, ”babies would start rolling in…whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed…So much for his mothers life becoming easier.” And so it goes on. The boys separate struggles and their growing up stories are comic, but also achingly sad. Eddie is inducted into the Hindu Mahasabha, hopelessly won over by his bribe of a Wilson pen and stories from the Mahabharata. Predictably all hell breaks loose when Violet finds out and Eddie is rushed to the Church to save his soul. Ravan, in the meantime, is in trouble with the more liberal Hindus over his earnest drive to recruit new members to the Sabha. Subject to such proxy battles, the two little boys also have to contend with life’s other tribulations – sexually predatory bully Prakash for one, besides poverty and prejudice. Yet there’s joy too – the thrill of a good story, the hit movie ‘Dil Deke Dekho’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, biryani in a Irani Café and kite flying on Sankranti. Nagarkar’s world maybe a poor one , but its not despairingly and hopelessly so. Wit and irony save his characters from becoming relentlessly miserable Rohington Mistry protagonists, many of whom are similarly boxed into tiny spaces, in a Bombay gone to seed.
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