Ravan & Eddie is author Kiran Nagarkar’s funny, insightful 1995 pæan to growing up in a Bombay chawl during the ’50s. The titular twins of fate are forever bound to each other, like Rahu and Ketu, after Ravan accidentally kills Eddie’s father. Eddie the Christian becomes a budding Hindu extremist, Ravan aspires to be a Christian, and the two turn into lifelong rivals.

It’s difficult to discuss Bombay history refracted through yin-yang twins without mentioning violent Shiva and sniveling Saleem from Midnight’s Children. Ravan is quite funny, but of modest ambition: the humor arises out of brilliant situational comedy, not the texture of language. As in Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu, most of the action takes place in a single place. This is a carefully-observed story of locality, not one of panoramic sweep. The protagonist is bumbling and blindered, not omniscient; he has no telepathic connection with others across the subcontinent.

There are few memorable twists of phrase, but many indelible passages of comic absurdity. In this run, Eddie intercepts a potential suitor for his widowed mother and badmouths her so she won’t remarry:

Eddie: ‘Going up to see Mrs. Coutinho?’

Furtado: ‘How do you know so much about me?’ …

Eddie: ‘Everybody knows.’ …

Furtado: ‘Does she have many boyfriends?’ …

Eddie: ‘Lots. Sixty-seven… Drinks, dance, music.’ …

Furtado: ‘Does she also drink?’

Eddie: ‘Like a fish.’ …

Furtado: ‘Then why does she need a husband?’

Eddie: ‘To earn money, what else?’ …

Alarms seemed to go off in Mr. Furtado’s parchment face. His eyes bulged and he became short of breath…

Furtado: ‘What are the children like?’ …

Eddie: ‘The son’s a devil… He has a knife… I saw him stab two people.’ …

Furtado: ‘Thank you. You’ve been so helpful and I don’t even know your name.’

Eddie: [without thinking] ‘Eddie Coutinho.’

Nagarkar also peppers the text with pungent Bombay journalism, like this bit on Goan Christians and the power of knowing English:

English is a mantra, a maha-mantra… it opens new worlds.. English makes you tall… You can become a chef at the Taj Mahal Hotel or a steno at Hindustan Lever, even a purser with Air India or Pan Am… If you know English, you can ask a girl for a dance. You can lean Eileen Alva against the locked door of the terrace and press against her, squeeze her boobs and kiss her on the mouth…

It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that… they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables… had ample reason to convert… As sub-humans they were little better than slaves.

But Goan Catholics were not even Brahmins… And yet… they had English on their tongue. Just like that.

The fact is there is no justice on earth.

Nagarkar’s work has been a target of saffronists in the past:

… Bedtime Story, his long-beleagured play… had a Nazi war criminal retelling four stories from the Mahabharata and… asking them to recognize that “whatever happens, wherever in the world, someone has to pay”. Several groups had tried and failed to stage the play; the Shiv Sena had picketed rehearsals and forced a ban on Bedtime Story; the censor board demanded cuts that would have eviscerated the guts and heart of the play. The first performance of Bedtime Story finally happened 17 years after it had been written. [Link]

His newest novel, God’s Little Soldier, was eviscerated by a member of the author assassin squad:

His protagonist wants to assassinate Rushdie, and Nagarkar himself sounds mostly like he has the one-point aim of parodying the work of Midnight’s Children.

One of the reasons that God’s Little Soldier is so long is that a great deal of the time the narrator appears to be working only for the pleasure of the sound of his own voice… Here is the best analogy Nagarkar can find… “Zia became a rod of uranium-238, inflammable with self-loathing and spite.” Elsewhere Nagarkar provides, “There was a manhole in his soul, and he had fallen into it…”

Nagarkar’s shopworn and tacky language is paralleled by a moral flabbiness… This preening and shabby novel exhausts all negative superlatives, and deserves to be sold with the novel-reader’s equivalent of the kind of warning found on cigarette cartons and whisky bottles. [Link]

Regardless of the merit of his other work, this one’s a beaut. Ravan & Eddie indulges in a long inset about the Portuguese in India, but it’s an interesting chronicle, and the rest of the book moves with alacrity and cheek. Highly recommended.