Leela's Book (28 page)

She had been taught to drive four years ago by Feroze, when they were classfellows, and courting. Feroze would borrow his father’s car – a long white Cortina – and they would drive south together, out of Delhi, past the towering, curving sharpness of the Qutb Minar, past the familiar squat outlines of the Chhattarpur Mandir, and over the border, into Haryana. It was like eloping. Only after they were married, and Feroze took over the family business and no longer had any time to devote to obtaining his wife’s licence, did his father insist on her hiring a driver; his Hindu daughter-in-law was far too scatterbrained to drive a car. But she had been good at driving once and had always enjoyed it. Urvashi felt a rush of excitement as she led Aisha outside to where the car was parked next to the house, pulled off the cover as if she was a magician performing a really clever trick, and clicked the electronic button that pushed up all the locks.

Holding her breath, Urvashi sat in the driving seat and switched on the ignition. Carefully, slowly, she reversed the car out from under the tree, straightened it up, changed gear, and moved away down the lane that skirted the edge of F-Block. It was as easy now, she found to her relief, as it always had been – it was such a pleasure, after such a long time. What freedom. It felt like flying.

She hadn’t yet decided which chemist was best; the one in Nizamuddin was out of the question, obviously. She considered going to Sunder Nagar but as the car took them up over the flyover, she realised that they were on the wrong road, and at the last minute before the turning, decided on Khan Market. She veered left through the traffic and when they reached the market, turned right without indicating, so that the guard waved his stick and shouted at her. But she was unperturbed, and parked on the edge of the road in the middle of the taxi rank; and although the drivers honked at her angrily she remained serene, getting out of the car without trapping her gauzy headscarf in the door, and taking her handbag and Aisha with her.

At the chemist’s shop the girl refused to go in, waiting for Urvashi on the pavement with lowered eyes. There was a crowd of women inside but the pharmacist handed over a paper cup of water, along with the pill, and Urvashi bustled importantly out again and made Aisha swallow it then and there without delay.

‘Would you like an ice cream? Or some cake?’ she asked, feeling quite overcome with the scale of the expedition and her heroic role in it, and it was only then that she glanced down and saw the tears on Aisha’s face.

‘I am so sorry,’ she whispered, and repeated, in a tone she had heard in many Bollywood films, ‘I am
so
sorry, Aisha.’

She hurried her back through the market, past all the smart ladies with their fragrant hair and lipstick smiles, clutching the hand of the sobbing girl. A policeman was standing by their car but Urvashi pulled out her purse and shoved some money at him and bundled Aisha into the car without anybody stopping her. She drove all the way down the Lodhi Road, and only as she reached the roundabout near the basti, did she remember that she was supposed to have taken Aisha into the police station to give a statement.

Urvashi parked lopsidedly in front of the police station, gave the keys to a parking attendant, and led Aisha inside. They waited for a long time. Eventually, they were shown into a small room where a constable took down Aisha’s version of events. ‘Do you know who raped you?’ they asked several times. ‘Did you recognise him?’ And when Aisha repeatedly shook her head, they at last got angry and said, ‘What about this man Humayun?’ Aisha began crying, and Urvashi spoke up: ‘He is her cousin, our driver, why are you asking all these questions?’

The inspector wrote out a note for Urvashi, telling her to return with Aisha tomorrow for a meeting with the clinical psychologist. Then he took Urvashi aside, so that Aisha wouldn’t hear, and said to her: ‘Madam, she is underage. We need her family’s permission to make a full physical examination and to lodge an FIR.’

‘FIR?’ asked Urvashi.

‘First Information Report,’ said the inspector in English. ‘After that,’ he resumed in Hindi, ‘we take the victim to a government hospital for a medical check-up.’ His voice became more hushed. ‘Usually hymen based.’ He wiggled his finger. ‘Doctor judges whether hymen is intact or ruptured. Presence of semen, abrasions, state of genital area, mental distress, condition of apparel – often difficult to judge so long after the event. If there is semen, maybe a DNA test is possible.’

‘You’ll find out his genes?’

He nodded approvingly. ‘Ninety days elapse. Case goes to Lower Court. Rape is a state case, victim will be granted government lawyer. After first hearing, with deposition of witness list, et cetera, process can take three years. Accused if under trial and not on bail, goes to Tihar Jail. Victim is a minor: any type of intercourse is an offence. If girl’s family decides to file a case they will have to do it quickly. But bear in mind trauma for the girl. Such things are a dishonour. I don’t need to tell you about comments being cast on girl’s character by unfortunate mishaps such as these. Very rare for victims to receive compensation.’

Urvashi, standing in the doorway, held her stomach protectively with one hand.

The inspector went over the basic facts again. ‘First lodge FIR. To do that, speak to the family. She is minor. Parental assent to effect that case can go to court – essential. Provide doctor’s medical examination, and check-up and all from gynaecologist. Then get statement from the girl. That is most important.’

Urvashi put a hand to her forehead.

‘And hurry,’ he went on, ‘we have a suspect.’

‘You do?’

He ushered both women out: ‘Strictly confidential police information.’

At first, Ash Chaturvedi didn’t notice that his wife’s parents hadn’t come to the wedding lunch. He stood in the Rose Garden at the India International Centre, dressed in the embroidered white kurta pyjama that Sunita had selected for him, holding a glass of beer – and trying to keep it together.

In the midday sunshine, the Rose Garden was crammed with people: all the professors and activists and teachers and writers and visual artists and documentary filmmakers of his father’s acquaintance whom Ash had grown up with. Dressed in colourful cotton khadhi, drinking beer, eating ruddy chunks of chicken tikka, they chattered nonstop, ruefully praising their one-maximum-two children, ruefully complaining of their two-maximum-three servants, eagerly exchanging notes on the small coterie of private schools to which they sent their offspring, passionately denouncing the Hindu-right government, generally expounding on minority religious culture, and specifically disavowing adherence to any faith bar the socialist-feminist-atheism of their own milieu. Not one of them, in short, was crassly middle class; nobody’s English diction was lacking; there was not a soul here who believed all the flimflam about Lord Ram’s temple at Ayodhya needing to be rebuilt over the demolished mosque, a view that the Hindu-led government was endorsing. Ash had already talked to three of his father’s colleagues from the university and exchanged pleasantries with a range of cousins and aunties, and was now being lectured to by an acquaintance of his father’s – an old man with a thick grey beard who ran a charity monitoring educational facilities in the slums of Delhi – on the dangers of the current government’s attitude to Muslims and other minorities, and the monstrous things that they might try to do, legislatively or otherwise, under cover of the hysteria emanating from America. And thus, had he stopped to think about it, Ash would have understood entirely why Sunita’s parents had not put in an appearance at such a godless gathering.

But he had no time to think of it. He had just witnessed the arrival of the one other person – aside from Sunita – who didn’t belong here: her brother Ram. He saw Ram making his way slowly across the lawns towards him and tried to correct the stricken, fearful expression on his face. But it was no good. The look had taken possession of his features since the early hours of the morning.

It would be fair to say that all Ash Chaturvedi’s hyperactivity, the exuberance of his wedding night, had disappeared at dawn: the moment he awoke and found himself sharing a bed with his wife’s elder brother. He had hidden his face in his arms for a moment and then – praying that Ram wouldn’t wake – stumbled out of the door, pulling on his crumpled groom’s attire as he ran, not forgetting to grab his glasses, and arrived at the bridal suite where he found, to his great relief, that Sunita was still asleep.

Standing by the bed, Ash had looked down at his wife and wondered if he had made a huge mistake, marrying this innocent young woman whose opinions he had helped to form – but whose kisses he barely knew. He hoped that the strange ethereal gasps he had heard himself uttering in the arms of her brother were some kind of trick played by the body on the mind, that his marriage was the truth. He hoped that the fearsome, exhilarating feeling he had felt last night with Ram – of something fluttering inside him trying to get out (a bird, he had thought, a bird flying higher and higher through a dark space, soaring optimistically upwards to where the air was thinner but the light hovered) – he hoped that those thoughts and feelings were a sham. But he wasn’t sure.

Despairing at himself, he had walked over to the hotel window and pulled back the curtain. From this angle, at this height, Delhi was a mass of green trees and gardens, with only some tower blocks in the very far distance. He breathed deeply, soothed by the sight. It was as if he and his wife were sleeping in the middle of a forest.

His wife. Now that he thought about it, everything to do with this marriage had been to avoid one thing – to cleanse himself of this Internet romance, and the illegal, concomitant desires that had troubled him so much. Sunita had provided the solution. She had mentioned marriage in her innocence: and suddenly he saw the way.
This
was how he would exorcise his inappropriate obsession with the sweet chatroom friend who called himself Man-God.

Ash closed the curtain and returned to the bed, watching Sunita as she slept, the breaths she took dilating her nostrils slightly, her eyelashes fluttering. After a moment, he undressed, pulled back the sheet and got into bed beside her. She made a slight, protesting noise in her sleep, but he inched forward nevertheless until his body was cradling hers. She was soft, and smelt faintly of something foreign and flowery. He put an arm over her, feeling her naked skin touching his, and wondered how he had been foolish enough to get himself into this situation.

Ash had been embarking on his Ph.D. in Genetics when his father first introduced him to Sunita. ‘What do you think of her?’ his father had asked that evening; and Ash had to admit that the librarian was very nice. ‘She seems to enjoy your company,’ his father commented the following week at dinner, ‘more than mine, at least’; and Ash looked up in surprise: he wasn’t used to girls enjoying his company. But the concept pleased him; and in the weeks that followed, he began to notice that this neat, quiet girl did seem to listen when he spoke; she looked up when he came home from the lab; she brought him tea on the terrace, preparing it herself (she said the maid didn’t do it right); and he, in his turn, began to appreciate Sunita. With her quietness and sincerity, she was quite unlike the other young women he had known in his life – the sharp-tongued girls from school, his witty cousins, his dazzlingly confident sister. And he began to notice a certain feeling in the air when they were in the room together; he felt with no lessening of surprise how sensitively she continued to respond to his most mundane statements. He began to sense that here was a mind that he could shape, even. Obliquely, he sounded out her politics; asked questions designed to reveal her cerebral acuity; gently examined her on culture (Indian and foreign), on religion (Hinduism and the rest), on her role as a wife and mother. After some months passed, he was gratified to notice that the opinions Sunita espoused were becoming more sophisticated; that the books she now read were of a higher grade than those she had talked of when they first met. He came to think of her as the original innocent; a mythical Sita to his imperfect Ram.

On the day when Ash went to ask for Sunita’s hand in marriage, Mr Sharma brought up the question of locating an ‘Aryan gene in India’s upper-caste population’. The way he phrased it, Ash reflected afterwards, sounded very much like a requirement.

‘There has been very little work done on it as yet,’ Ash said, trying not to look ignorant. He racked his brain for whatever it was they were taught in the first year about early genetic studies of population; ‘In the nineteen thirties, of course, Haldane was looking at the prehistoric migration out of India. He proved it by looking at blood groups.’

Mr Sharma had thumped the desk. ‘Fantastic!’ he exclaimed.

‘But since that work was done so long ago,’ Ash went on, feeling rather surprised at how delighted this prospective father-in-law seemed with his credentials – didn’t they generally want you to be a doctor or an engineer rather than an ill-paid researcher? – ‘obviously it would need updating—’

‘Wonderful!’ said Mr Sharma; and he began talking about the historical references to the Aryans in India’s ancient Sanskrit texts. ‘If you just prove this Arya gene with science,’ he said, pacing around the room, ‘I can secure you funding for further—’

‘Oh, no,’ Ash had interrupted, ‘I can conduct all the necessary research as an adjunct to my Ph.D.’

But Mr Sharma was no longer listening. He was shaking Ash’s hand, patting him on the back, and sitting down again in something of a flurry. Then he exclaimed, in clear English, ‘Absolutely marvellous! Bravo!’

Ash had already chosen two of his Ph.D. topics. There was to be a chapter on gene defects as a cause of disease: he was looking at the degenerative eye condition, Retinitis Pigmentosa; another chapter using Short Tandem Repeats for rapid forensic applications – the identification of individuals – which he was doing in association with a lab in west Delhi; and meanwhile everyone at CBT was talking about a new national ‘mapping project’ in which institutions across the country were collaborating on a countrywide database of genotypes. If he pursued a line of enquiry related to this in a third chapter, Ash thought, it would give him plenty of material for publications. And so he began to consider exploring whether there was a marker on the genome that could be traced back to an ancient Aryan people.