Leela's Book (10 page)

Neither Hari nor Leela spoke during the long drive home to Connaught Place and Ram, who was used to constant bustle in the small, humdrum home he had grown up in, with his father shouting at everybody and his sisters creating their own type of commotion and his mother standing in the middle of it all, calmly dispensing tea and paratha and advice about which gods to propitiate according to which requirement, found the silence distinguished by comparison. It pleased him. They were driving north, and after half an hour they passed the turning to Nizamuddin West, where Urvashi lived. Ram thought of his elder sister with fondness. She, at least, had manifested genuine surprise and enjoyment when he told her about becoming Uncle Hari’s heir, and he was half-tempted to ask the driver to let him out so that he could walk to Urvashi’s house and regale her with a rendition of the evening’s successes: of how it had gone off so very much to the visiting party’s satisfaction; of how generous Hari’s offer was; of how a reconciliation between the brothers was immediately effected; of how the heir arrangement was received without so much as a murmur; of how Hari, Ram and Leela fled back to their tank-like vehicle at half past nine, full of Ram’s mother’s food, glad of the gin they drank earlier.

But Ram had an appointment to keep, and so he said nothing, and the car sped silently onwards through the city.

Suddenly Auntie Leela spoke from the back seat. ‘Can you stop the car?’ she said. ‘I want to get a cigarette.’

Ram leapt into action. They had just reached India Gate. ‘When we get to the house I’ll walk up to N-block,’ he said, craning round to speak to his uncle and aunt. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

In fact, Ram had a packet of cigarettes in his pocket; but he didn’t want Uncle Hari to know that he smoked. He wasn’t sure which Uncle Hari approved of less: wives who smoked or nephews who did. How odd Auntie Leela was, Ram reflected, as he watched the car turn into the driveway. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. This afternoon he had arrived at the house to find his uncle’s taciturn wife waiting outside the front door, clutching a bag of fruit, and dressed in such a plain cotton sari that for a moment he mistook her for the maid.

‘Auntie … may I help you?’ Ram had asked, and leant over to take the bag out of her hands. Then he bent down to touch her feet – an automatic gesture of submission to one’s elders drummed into him by his authoritarian father. But she moved her feet away from his outstretched hands, and said, ‘No need for that.’

‘Did you take a round of Delhi?’ Ram persisted. ‘Are you liking the new car? Did you try the music system?’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I took the bus.’ The bus. His uncle’s crazy spouse used public transport. He hated to think that the lovely white car that Uncle Hari had caused to be purchased for her exclusive use was not being appreciated as much as it deserved.

Ram shook his head in disapproval as he reached Connaught Place. Being November, the chill of winter had already set in, and a forlorn, deserted air had descended like a damp mist on the wide, colonial-era arcades and shabby shopfronts of this place his uncle loved so much. Tonight there was hardly anybody about at all: the smart people were at home in their south Delhi residences. But Ram was too preoccupied to be affected in any lasting way by this isolation. By now it was half past eleven – only thirty minutes to go. He bought the cigarettes for his aunt and walked quickly back down the long, ill-lit street. When he reached the house, he ran up the path in some excitement, unlocked the front door, and strode into the hallway.

Ever since Ram had been allocated, by Uncle Hari, the task of renovating Auntie Leela’s house, he had the feeling of walking straight back into the past. Everything about the property was dusty and old-fashioned, from the location to the architecture to the cracked marble-chip floors that Ram had urged Uncle Hari – fruitlessly, as it happened – to replace with something modern. Despite his best efforts, the place still looked antique. This evening, typically, an old Indian film song, crackly with age, was drifting through the house from the record player Auntie Leela had brought with her all the way from America.

But the place had potential. Walking across the hall, Ram caught a reassuring glimpse of his dashingly curved nose and long, black-lashed eyes in the heavy carved wooden mirror opposite (that new pink and green silk tie suited his complexion) and when he entered the lounge area (referred to by Uncle Hari as the ‘drawing room’, and which he himself thought of as a space for massive and spectacular parties) he found his uncle standing by the drinks table under the window, pouring whisky into tumblers, his bald head glowing. Leela, who had been sitting on the settee reading a newspaper, got to her feet when she saw Ram, took the cigarettes from him with a quick, grateful smile, and walked out into the garden to smoke one, her face turned up to the darkened sky.

Hari held out a whisky to his nephew, and although Ram preferred something less classical himself – the new vodka mixes were more exciting – he sat down with the glass, and picked up the newspaper that Leela had been reading, flipping over the pages as he took a sip. It was the paper his uncle financed, the one that his father so despised: the
Delhi Star
. The gossip column was on the back page with yet another paragraph about the deceased society beauty, Meera, late mother of Sunita’s future husband, who also wrote poems.

‘Listen to this naughty poem that Professor Chaturvedi’s wife wrote before she died,’ Ram said, and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper read out some lines: ‘
They dispatch a servant / In their place, dressed in royal robes, Who caresses and kisses him / And charms him with her ardent moans
.’ He looked up: ‘These Bengalis!’

His levity had the desired effect. Finally, at last – as needed to happen – the two men laughed.

But then Uncle Hari sat down opposite him, and Ram saw that the elder man’s smile had vanished. His uncle turned the drink slowly in his hand and took a sip. ‘Did my brother ever hold a position in the Party?’ he asked at last.

Ram shook his head. His father’s expectation – continually disappointed – at being favoured by the party was one of the themes of his childhood. He distinctly remembered, as a ten-year-old, vowing that he would never grow up to be a man like his father: constantly waiting on the Party for favours and promotions that never materialised, forever leading his family with him up false avenues of hope, telling stories that infected their mother, too, so that she whispered to her children that their father was just about to be asked to stand for election to the Lower House, and had only to decide where to contest from: a constituency in Madhya Pradesh (where he hailed from) or Delhi, where the family was now settled. Ram alone, it seemed, understood the truth: that his father was far too ideological to be a politician; that he had no real sense of how things worked; that his school-going son knew better what made the wheels of the world turn than he did. As a teenager, taken along to Party meetings (and the Party was then in its infancy as a political force in India), Ram saw with a jab of humiliation how the big bosses smiled condescendingly on Shiva Prasad for his passionate pronouncements, and humoured him in his vision of himself as a political actor, but that when it came to actually getting things done, there were other, more pragmatic people that they turned to. Shiva Prasad was disappointed time and again, and nobody else in the family saw it for what it was. Neither Ram’s mother nor his sisters dared to look each other in the eye and speak the truth: that their father had spent his entire life waiting for something to happen that never would.

Ram had not spoken of this to anybody before, but now it all came out, and Uncle Hari listened, not with a gleam of satisfaction, but with a sad look of sympathy, that of a younger brother mourning the mortification of the elder.

‘You must not forget him, Ram,’ said Hari. ‘You must still visit.’

It was nearing midnight by the time Hari and Leela said goodnight to Ram and walked across the hallway to their bedroom. As the hand of his watch moved northwards Ram became impatient; but he didn’t move from the couch until the bedroom door had shut behind his aunt and uncle and he was sure that they had turned in for the night. He waited a minute further, and then he ran outside and up the steps to his special suite of rooms along the roofline, pushed open the door to his bedroom and switched on his new laptop, brought over by Uncle Hari from America, which was waiting for him on the bedside table. Uncle and Auntie slept one floor down at the other end of the house. Nevertheless, Ram took the precaution of locking the door.

Ram dialled up the Internet connection, logged onto Delhiwallah’s House of Sin, entered the prebooked cyber room, and waited. Fifteen seconds elapsed. Then a message: ‘Are you there, Man-God? It’s me, Manhattan Mania.’

Ram had had boyfriends ever since he was six years old, and he had been having sex since the sultry afternoon of Gandhi-ji’s birthday (it was a school holiday) when he did it with the son of his parents’ mali. But this one – this shy Internet lover whom he had never met in person – was special. They had come across each other in the House of Sin six months ago: ‘Let me touch you,’
Man-God
(Ram) had written, and
Manhattan Mania
, who had clearly never done anything like this before, typed back: ‘Gently then.’

It had begun like that. They would meet at midnight in their chatroom twice a week to stroll around their virtual Delhi, unzip each other’s trousers – and faster than it is possible to type with one hand, reach yet another monumental climax. It worked every time.

‘Your name, naam batao!’ Ram would gasp into the computer, and Manhattan Mania, who was a lot less proficient than Ram at typing quickly, would reply: ‘I CANT DON@T ASK.’

In the first few months, Manhattan Mania was cautious – afraid, Ram surmised, of being found out. ‘Where in Delhi do you live?’ Ram wrote one evening. ‘Can we meet?’

‘No,’ Manhattan Mania replied, and terminated the connection.

Ram remembered all too well how upset Manhattan Mania’s ensuing absence from the House of Sin had made him. His Internet partners were usually more brazen. There was none of Manhattan Mania’s reticence, his unfamiliarity with the language men use together. Every night for a week Ram logged on only to be met by nothing. Silence.

Then, ten days later, Manhattan Mania reappeared as usual, as if nothing was wrong: ‘We walk down Rajpath, arm in arm …’ he typed, and Ram added, ‘When we get to India Gate I pull you down onto the ground and …’

Via the ether of their top-floor chatroom, they fondled each other on a boat on the Yamuna (‘But the river is disgusting, yaar,’ protested Manhattan Mania realistically), on the lawns of the Purana Qila, on the dance floor of the Zed Bar, and went even further when sprawled across the bonnet of a dusty white car parked outside the Income Tax Office. Ram had a taste for the illicit: the Jama Masjid, the Hanuman Temple. Manhattan Mania revealed his more homely streak: Nirula’s ice-cream parlour (of course), the INA Market, the Pelican Pond in the Zoological Park.

Later, in broad daylight, Ram would occasionally revisit these places, haunting the sites of their verbal-virtual trysts, trying to catch the eye of passers-by, and wondering. Who
was
Manhattan Mania, really? People told each other such lies over the Internet. He knew that they assumed new identities, personas, even genders, in their Internet avatars. But he himself was just as much Man-God in his real life as during his midnight dates. Was it the same with Manhattan Mania?

Ram looked up from the computer and stared round him at his bedroom. He would like to bring Manhattan Mania here, to show him the trappings of his new life as Uncle Hari’s son. The screen was flashing. A message had appeared: ‘Do you remember the place we went to first?’

Manhattan Mania was certainly in a nostalgic mood tonight. He wanted to linger on Rajpath longer than usual. He kept asking Ram if he could remember what they had done where. ‘What’s wrong?’ Ram typed at last, and waited patiently for the reply to appear.

‘Man-God, if I don’t come back, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Then why might you not come back?’

No answer came. The fear jabbed at him, a premonition.

‘Answer me!’ Ram typed.

‘I’m getting married.’

‘NO!’

‘Isn’t that what people like us do, in India?’

Ram felt, for almost the first time in his life, the hot, maddening throb of jealousy. ‘No!’ he replied, ‘it’s not what we do. Not in this day and age!’ His hands were shaking. ‘It’s a brand-new era. Don’t you understand?’

He waited again, trying to resist the impulse to discover the worst. But he couldn’t resist, and finally, he wrote: ‘WHEN are you getting married?’

There was a moment of flickering emptiness, and Ram held his breath as he waited. Then the single word appeared on his screen, and Ram hit the keyboard and turned his head upwards and screamed. But the word was impervious to his troubles; it remained there, suspended before him:
Tomorrow
.

On the morning of Sunita Sharma’s marriage to Ash Chaturvedi, Humayun (son of Mohd Hamid, deceased) said goodbye to his cousin Aisha at the Ahmeds’ house in Nizamuddin West where they both worked – he as a driver, she as a maid – and pulled the door softly to behind him. Before he left, she had handed him two pails, one for the milk that he would buy in the market, and the other a tiffin of Mrs Ahmed’s chapli kebabs for his mother, and he swung these jauntily now, as he walked down the side alley of the house and opened the gate. The route from Mrs Ahmed’s house to his mother’s home beyond the shrine ran along the far western edge of the housing colony, parallel with the drain. He loved this daily journey, crossing from the large, tranquil place where he worked, into the hectic, densely packed, and much more antiquated settlement where he had grown up. He liked the peace and order of the planned colony; but the familiar people and the places around the Sufi shrine were part of him too: it was like walking from a peaceful riverbank into a forest noisy with birds, he thought, and he was pleased with himself for thriving so well in both places.