Ravan and Eddie

"A chawl is like a tenement. It’s these long, low-slung buildings that really characterized Mumbai at one time. Some had sloping red tile roofs. It’s communal living in a way, these one-room houses, with long corridors and a shared bathroom and toilet at the end, maybe among 20-30 families. So, again, foods are melding when somebody is cooking, going into someone else’s house, children are all intermingled, you don’t know where your child is at the end of the day. Often the design is that there’ll be a courtyard in the middle. Mill workers lived in them and maybe they were made originally for single men, but then later they just bulged with families like you see in this book, 8,10, 12 members of a family living in one single room. They became so characteristic of Mumbai at one point, with all kinds of festivals being celebrated and movies made about living in a chawl. The famous Aesop’s fable of the hare and tortoise, there’s a Hindi movie of it, about these two neighbors living in a chawl. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In Ravan and Eddie , Kiran Nagarkar has used that thread of intertwining communal living to show so many things about Mumbai city. Ravan is a Hindu and Eddie, his neighbor, is a Christian. He shows how their lives are tied together in the most comical, irreverent way, and yet with bits of darkness, tragedy, seriousness. It’s very humorous. We see everything through the lives of these two children, who we see right from birth until they are older and coming of age. They’re intertwined from birth, I’ll tell you how: Ravan, as a baby, had fallen from the window of his chawl onto the father of Eddie who had died when trying to save him. Then the mother is taking him in an ambulance and Eddie is born. So their lives are stuck together forever. It’s very characteristic of Mumbai city where different religions and different languages mix in the most unexpected ways. It is Eddie who joins the Hindu right-wing RSS and it is Ravan who drops out and ends up uninterested in right-wing Hindu nationalism and doing totally different things. It’s very irreverent, very funny and, at the same time, underpinning the comedy is the pathos of living like this, the tragedy of living like this, of families living these outsize lives in this very small space and with very little. It’s set in the 1950s. So there is still a patina to Bombay city, it’s still nice, it still feels a little sanitized, a clean space for ideas, a space for thoughts, which is also what you see in this book. It’s one my favourite books about Bombay, just for its sense of fun and unexpectedness. It’s a great entry point for someone. Although it’s set in the 50s, ultimately it’s about two boys having a wonderful childhood."