Leela's Book (29 page)

Mr Sharma was very happy with the tentative steps Ash was taking in this direction. Whenever the two men met, the elder would talk enthusiatically to the younger about Vedic references to fair skin-colour and intelligence – in Sanskrit, ‘arya’ meant ‘noble’. He argued that Ash only had to identify a
nobility
gene in him, Shiva Prasad, to hit on the elusive question of who in India was Arya and who wasn’t. He said that the Sharma family’s fair skin colour (the women always made good marriages because of it) proved that they were Aryas as distinct from the dark-skinned Dravidian population (mercifully confined mostly to the south of India) but Shiva Prasad was well-read enough to know that skin-colour alone wasn’t enough: he needed the genes to prove it.

Much as Ash wanted to please Shiva Prasad, his research didn’t provide such easy answers. To gain some elucidation on the matter he tried to broach the subject with his father. His father, however, answered in professorial mode – saying something complicated and incomprehensible about the Indo-European language group and the names of rivers common to Iran and India. So Ash brought up the subject with his schoolfriend, Pablo, who had returned to Delhi from Bangalore four years ago, absolutely brimming over with history and sociology and innumerable abstruse theories about India and its place in the world.

Unfortunately, Pablo wasn’t at all impressed by the parameters of Ash’s gene proposal. ‘I don’t understand. Are you looking at an Aryan migration into India or out? Where do you think the Aryans came from?’

‘You tell me,’ said Ash, feeling confused, and pushing his glasses back onto his nose with his finger.

‘Some people say Iran, others the Caspian sea, or the Middle East,’ said Pablo. ‘But as far as I can gather from my reading, the evidence is highly contested either way, which is why it is so easy for people of one particular persuasion to hijack the debate. The problem with your contribution is that in order to prove which way this so-called Aryan people went, you’ll have to look at the DNA of population groups from Europe to India at least as far east as Bengal – wherever the Indo-European language group stretches, in fact. Whereas you are telling me that your study will focus on a maximum of ten Indian individuals. What this will prove I have no idea.’

‘I am trying to identify an historic people,’ Ash said in a tiny voice.

‘Why?’ asked Pablo.

‘For intellectual interest,’ Ash said, his face growing hot with displeasure and unhappiness.

‘All that will happen,’ Pablo replied, ‘is your research will play into the hands of the nutcases currently running the country.’

‘But isn’t it worth finding out for sure? Sunita’s father thinks he is a pure Indian Aryan.’

Pablo laughed. ‘What has he got to do with it?’

‘He’s really interested in my research.’

‘Ash,’ Pablo tapped his head with his hand. ‘Sunita is very nice – but believe me, her father is a crackpot. You know the kind of unscientific rubbish those people speak, surely. They condemn as anti-Indian anyone who thinks the Aryans might not have been indigenous to this country.’

‘You just told me the evidence goes either way,’ Ash said.

‘I also said that there are groups in this country who use that extreme complexity to befuddle people and tell them that the debate is cut and dried when it’s not. Shiva Prasad is linked to—’

But Ash, feeling defensive about his betrothed and her family, was no longer listening. To his own relief, after months of confusion and internal debate, things were made very simple one warm afternoon when he broached the issue with his supervisor at the lab. Instead of throwing up his hands in horror, as Pablo had done, the man sat back, unwrapped a boiled sweet and sucked on it for a while. ‘Interesting, very interesting,’ he murmured at last. ‘I suppose you could try to prove the Aryan migration by examining data from, say, east India, Pakistan, Russia, Germany … Though if you find nothing conclusive – and given your expansive canvas, such a thing is not unlikely – the right-wingers will use it to prove that this Aryan gene is indigenous, of course—’

The statements petered out, and Ash realised that the man was thinking. They sat together in silence, and finally his supervisor said: ‘I like it. Go ahead with this Aryan idea. If you find something juicy, we’ll send it to one of the journals.’

Ash was pleased – relieved – and he threw himself into the work. To his father-in-law’s delight, Ash took blood samples from each member of the Sharma family, subjecting the samples to routine forensic analysis, and adding them to his population database for the Aryan chapter. From then on, whenever Mr Sharma asked him what he was up to, and how the research was going, Ash murmured something equivocal about history and something specific about genetics – imitating to perfection the manner of his own supervisor – and this kept Sunita’s father happy. No spanners were thrown into the works of the wedding preparations.

‘Ash!’ said two voices at once, and Ash saw two people converging on him at the same time from the other side of the Rose Garden – Bharati, dressed in a heavily embroidered pink and red salwar kameez, her eyes made up with kohl, and Ram, looking sexy and nonchalant, clad all in white but for a long indigo cotton scarf draped over one shoulder.

‘Hello,’ Ash said to both of them at once and neither in particular, hoping that his consternation didn’t show, presuming – praying – that Ram, who had caressed him so lovingly that night, would know how to behave with him in public. He thought to himself, as he had thought during the night,
This is Man-God in the flesh
, and the idea that the mystery man he had Internet-chatted with almost every evening for a year was here in front of him gave him a whoozy, disorientated feeling. He wished he could get away from this party, he longed for it to be over, he felt incapable of making chitchat. He had no idea how he was going to get through the next four days until he and Sunita left for their honeymoon in Goa – a departure that had been delayed until after his birthday, so that they could attend the opening of the Living Sanskrit Akademi, which was a major event for his father. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. But Bharati was saying something to him with all her usual intensity.

‘Ash!’ she repeated. ‘I’ve got to speak to you. Privately.’ And she smiled sweetly at the old man with the beard, and glared at Ram, clearly expecting them both to get the message and disappear.

The old man obediently melted away. Ram, however, was not to be put off by the rudeness of his lover’s sister.

‘Namaskar,’ he said to her, placing his hands together respectfully – and also pursing his lips, so that Ash couldn’t help but remember the pleasures and traumas those very lips had so recently unleashed in his being. ‘It’s so good to meet you finally. Sunita has told me you are living in London, that you have fled our despicable city. I imagine you living in a large house in … Chelsea.’ He smiled at her, knowing full well that such a vision was impossible. ‘Or Mayfair, or Hampstead—’

‘Please give us a moment,’ Bharati said, no longer smiling. ‘I need to speak to my brother in private, it’s important.’

‘
Oh
,’ Ram said, ‘of course.’ But he wasn’t taking her seriously.

‘I mean it,’ Bharati said, uncompromising in her rudeness.

‘Yes, madam,’ Ram said, sounding put out for a moment, but he immediately recovered his poise. ‘Shall I fetch us all some drinks?’ And he pointed to the bar at the other end of the garden, where three waiters in turbans were presiding over a display of wine bottles, beer and whisky, and gave Ash a wink as he departed.

‘
Oh my god
,’ Bharati said, taking Ash by the arm and steering him over to the far end of the garden, ‘that boy is dreadful, poor you. But whatever are you thinking? What are these rumours?’

Ash’s face went hot, and inside he felt sick and cold, as if icy hands were gripping his entrails. So she had found out. Did everybody know?

‘It’s not like that,’ he began miserably, staring at the drink in his hand. ‘It’s nothing. We were just fooling around. It’s no harm. Have you told Sunita?’

‘I don’t give a fuck about Sunita,’ Bharati said. ‘These people are dangerous, Ash, and this is
history
– or the perception of history. How can you compromise your work by having any dealings with them? Isn’t science supposed to be above politics?’

Ash looked at his twin, puzzled.

‘Surely Father has taught you that,’ she went on. ‘You can’t meddle with this pseudo-stuff. Indigenous Aryan genes – that’s what Pablo says. What are you researching this nonsense for? Did Sunita make you?’

‘Oh,’ Ash said, relieved, and smiled.

‘What are you smiling at?’ she demanded. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Pablo’s got the wrong idea. Actually, my research is looking at it from the other direction – I just haven’t got round to explaining that to Sunita’s father yet.’

She looked up at him through narrowed eyes. ‘I hope to God you are telling the truth.’

‘Of course I am.’ He felt such relief that her anger was directed at the silly project about Aryan genes, and not at his friendship with his bride’s brother, that he smiled again and pinched her arm.

‘You great big deceiver,’ she said. ‘How badly you’ve misled Sunita’s father! It’s really quite funny. Anyway, where is he? Didn’t he show? I can’t see him.’ And then, before Ash had time to answer, she said, ‘And where’s our father anyhow?’

‘Baba? I don’t know.’

‘Ash?’ she said, suddenly all serious.

‘Yes?’

‘Did you know that Ma’s sister was in Delhi?’

Ash could feel a headache coming on. The twists and turns of his sister’s conversation were making him feel vertiginous – and all the while, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ram chatting up one of the waiters. He was trying to think who on earth Bharati might be talking about when she exclaimed again. ‘There he is, the bastard,’ she said. ‘I’m going to fetch him.’ And she pointed over to the far side of the garden where their father was talking to a young woman – one of his students, probably – who was looking up at him adoringly. Bharati shook her head in disgust. ‘These women get younger and younger. He’s such a bloody flirt.’ And without waiting for a response from Ash, she made her way purposefully, scornfully, across the garden towards their parent.

Ash, left alone at last, felt miserable again. Though he was pleased to have his twin back in Delhi, he wondered why she always had to exaggerate minor things. It was
his
wedding and here she was making dramatic pronouncements about their mother’s sister. Presumably she meant the adopted village sister that their mother was supposed to have fallen out with before they were born. Ash thought of his long-dead mother, whom he knew of exclusively from photographs: smiling out at him from the black-and-white print that hung on the stairs at home. He wished that she was here, by his side, so that he had somebody in his family to discuss his problems with. He couldn’t tell Bharati, who would laugh at him for loving a man like Ram, the type she considered ‘dreadful’. He couldn’t tell his father about the deception he was practising on Sunita. But he had to decide this thing with Ram, one way or the other. It couldn’t go on as it was. And how was he to decide on his own? His mother, he thought sadly to himself, would have been the one to confide in.

Ash looked round the garden for his wife and caught sight of her, standing talking to a man whom Ash knew painted enormous male nudes for a living. She had dressed herself up so carefully this morning: in a bridal-red silk sari, with red colour on her lips and special thick red bangles all up her hennaed forearms, and the sight of her marital attire touched him. A sudden rush of tenderness flowed through him. He pushed his glasses back on his nose. The very sight of her made him feel calm and relaxed, whereas the sight of her brother made him shiver with excitement. Which feeling was right? Which one was better?

He walked over to join her. ‘Where’s your father?’ he asked, after greeting the painter (who had been telling her his theory about the predominance of the lingam in Hindu iconography; ‘Lord Shiva’s phallus has prevailed,’ he said, ‘over the rest of the body’). Sunita looked like she was about to cry. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, and again he felt the same tenderness, and taking her hand in his own, said, in his kindest voice, ‘Shall we go and ring them? Most probably they are stuck at home. Some emergency may have happened.’

Vyasa returned, exhausted, from his son’s wedding lunch. He settled his mother in her favourite chair by the garden window, dismissed the former ayah who had come round to ask him to attend, today of all days, to some insignificant business of hers, and then, to soothe his nerves (and because the coffee they served at IIC was undrinkable), he took the packet of expensive, imported coffee beans out of the fridge, ground some in the machine, and when the silver pot was coughing its delicious aroma into the air, carried it upstairs, so that the whole house was strewn with fragrance. He pushed open the library door to the terrace, sat down at his low stone table and sighed. It wasn’t meant to be like this – surely he didn’t deserve
this
fate – being cross-questioned by his own daughter on the subject of Leela Bose.

But Bharati had been ruthless. She took no heed of social decorum. She had pushed her way through the party to where he was standing (discussing something important with one of the prettier MA students from the faculty), and said, straight off, without even introducing herself, ‘Guess what I learnt this morning?’

‘What?’ he said, and smiled apologetically at the student for this rude interruption.

‘That one of Ash’s new aunties, Sunita’s uncle’s wife, is our mother’s sister!’ And she looked up at him with disingenuous frankness. ‘Did you know that?’

So, the moment had come – and Vyasa wasn’t prepared for it. For several seconds he was lost for words.

After Meera died, both he and his mother knew – without ever discussing it – that they shouldn’t hide from the children the fact that Meera had a sister, but that it would be better not to tell them anything about her, either. Concealing her existence completely would have created its own drama: Ash and Bharati were bound to find out from a schoolfriend of their mother’s, or a cousin in Calcutta. The much wiser policy was to let them know of her in a vague way, but to give them to understand that the estrangement was permanent, as unfortunately occurred sometimes (not uncommonly) in families, even in ones as loving as theirs. Of course, Vyasa had steeled himself for questions and curiosity. But somehow they had never come. The twins had bought the story – which, after all, wasn’t in itself a lie – and that was that. They had more than enough to ask, and dream about, concerning their dead mother. They had no interest in her long-lost sister.