Leela's Book (3 page)

The following morning was a Saturday, and (ever the tactician) Hari took the opportunity to drive down to his office in South Delhi – supposedly to make sure everything was in order, but really to give his wife the chance to unpack and get acquainted with her new surroundings. ‘Will you be all right?’ he said as he left. ‘Do you need anything? The driver is here. The cook will leave at seven. The maid should be done by then too. There’s—’

‘I’ll be just fine,’ she said, blowing cigarette smoke into the air and smiling.

He watched her as she stood in the middle of the garden. Smoking was a new habit; Hari had yet to voice his disapproval.

It being so near Diwali, there was a festive spirit in Delhi’s exhaust-filled air, and Hari’s Saturday excursion took longer than he meant it to. When he arrived home at six, the house was empty. ‘Where is Mrs Sharma?’ he asked the cook, who was making curd in the kitchen.

‘She went out,’ the cook said.

Hari walked through to the high-ceilinged drawing room, which overlooked the garden, mixed himself a gin and tonic, and settled back into one of his newly upholstered pale khadi silk chairs. The familiar warmth of alcohol would settle his nerves. He felt tense sitting here, like a shy young groom awaiting his bride.

The maid had lit only two of the silk-shaded lamps, and the light they cast in the early-evening shadow, across the faded Persian carpets and embroidered settee, was pleasantly dappled; it reminded Hari of the sal forests outside the village he grew up in, where his father had taken him every Sunday morning, explaining about the mahua tree and how this land was sacred to its indigenous inhabitants who had lived there since time began. Hari was pleased with the effect he had created in this house, with its amalgamation of different epochs of his marriage – the paintings from their modern art-daubed apartment in New York, the Mexican ethnic artefacts gathered during a trip across the border, the bits and pieces collected from travels to London, Geneva, Venice, and transplanted to New Delhi. Things had moved on considerably since that morning three years ago in New York, when Leela revealed that her father had left her the Delhi property.

Hari had been taken aback. ‘But your father died, what, in nineteen eighty-five? Almost twenty years ago.’

Leela stirred brown sugar into her porridge. ‘There were tenants in the building till just now. The issue has only just been resolved.’ She unfolded the crisp, lawyer’s letter, and passed it over.

Leela said nothing more, and during the next fifty trips to Delhi, Hari stayed as usual in the Imperial Hotel. But it was the house that set him thinking. Does a house represent a root? he wondered, late at night, lying on his side in New York, in the enormous double bed they still shared. Was a house enough to bring his wife back home?

The night Hari met Leela he was at a crowded garden party thrown by the company he worked for. He had been in a strangely febrile mood. For the past few months he had been obsessed by the idea of setting up his own business. As he approached his boss (soon to be his rival), bearing a small box of sweets tied with a ribbon, Hari’s attention was drawn to a young woman. It was Leela. Hari’s boss and his wife, who was Leela’s colleague, were listening attentively as she told a story. Hari took in her dark, sardonic eyes, her dignified bearing, wrapped so elegantly in a simple cotton sari, and he told himself with a defiant pang that with a woman like
that
at his side, he could take on the world. That evening, when Hari offered Leela a lift home, to his surprise she ended up staying at his place. They continued to see each in the weeks that followed. Two months later, he had started his own import-export cotton clothing company, Harry Couture (he thought of calling it Dharma or Karma or even Bharata but Leela persuaded him this was more personable). Soon after that they were married, and on their way to New York. Leela’s father blessed their union with his approval but not his presence. Leela explained to Hari that she was adopted, that her mother had died when she was at college, that her father loved her, but his grief kept him in Calcutta. The intimate disclosure affected Hari deeply; he promised himself that he would protect her. This feeling was reinforced some five years later, when her father died. She was all alone in the world, with nobody to look after her except Hariprasad Sharma. The sacred duty made him proud.

Happily, Leela more than made up for her negative equity in the area of family. She was an excellent investment: loving and supportive, constantly feeding his commercial instinct with money-making plans. As she set up house in New York, Hari instructed his workers back home to sew see-through frills of shiny polyester into slippery shifts and lacy slips – replicating designs Leela brought home from Macy’s. In 1982, he opened a second line, Namaste India, selling ethnic chic to American teenagers. In 1984, their wealth was assured with the purchase of a riot-stripped dried fruits shop belonging to an Old Delhi Sikh; Hari took over the ailing godown – the man was emigrating to America to run one of those 7-
11s
– expanded the line to include pistachios and Kullu apricots, Leela designed the packaging in black and gold, and he sold his product to all the smartest grocery stores in New York, cresting a wave of interest in Indian cuisine. As the eighties stretched profitably into the liberalised nineties, Hari became a gem king, making the emerald his corporation’s niche. Cut in Rajasthan, designed in Karol Bagh, set by a team of Bangladeshis on the top floor of a workshop behind Chandni Chowk, destined for Manhattan, the margins were wide, the profits divine. Finally, in 1994, Hari agreed to put money into a new English-language newspaper, a tabloid jauntily named the
Delhi Star
, twenty-four per cent of which was owned by a foreign media conglomerate. It was an exciting departure for India. Hari never dreamt of the trouble that would ensue.

The ‘trouble’ concerned Hari’s elder brother, Shiva Prasad, who threatened never to speak to him again if he persisted in this money-grabbing, foreign-funded, English-language venture. He shouted that his little brother’s trade was demeaning for a Brahmin; that it was unpatriotic to promote the colonial language through his media venture; that it was wicked to do business with immoral global corporations. For Hari, whose patriotism was as mild as his personal politics were vague, Shiva Prasad’s vehemence was perplexing, irritating and economically irrelevant. ‘He’s out of date,’ Hari protested to Leela. ‘And besides, even his own party is in bed with the multinationals.’

‘He’s jealous of your success, that’s all,’ she replied. Shiva Prasad had always been a bully; and Hari refused to give up his new endeavour. For a time, the brothers seemed destined to go their separate ways.

But Hari missed his brother. Though they hadn’t been close as children, Shiva Prasad was part of his life. It was all right for Westerners to behave in that detached way, Hari reflected, but it wasn’t possible for Indians. And he wondered, late one night, whether he had spent rather too much time in super-charged, family-lite America. Then he hit on a plan. It wasn’t revenge. Far from that. It was a way of reconnecting with family.

Soon after they were married, Hari and Leela had agreed to wait a few years before having children. A few years turned to six; by now Hari was amply rich; he expected a child. They copulated scientifically. Leela turned thirty, his mother rang him from India to explain about gurus and practices, and Hari began going to the temple on the other side of town. He would enter the sanctum quietly, aware of where the idol stood, a black stone, dabbed orange at its base: Ganesh with his long curved trunk, ears alert and wide apart, listening. Hari felt comfort in this place.

But he began to see that he had wanted too much from Leela Bose. He was proud of his graceful, atheist, modern wife. But he had other expectations, too, of a kind of womanhood that came to seem impossible. Too late, he understood that he had wanted a virgin on his wedding night; that he had expected a religious wife. Hari never discussed religion with Leela. In the early years, she went through the motions of pious belief, bowing her head to the puja fire his mother lit on her visits to New York, buying the appropriate sweets for the proper people on every propitious date. But he felt there was something missing – a critical lack of fervour – and that for his wife, the fathomless space, which his mother filled with voluminous gods, remained empty. It was but a matter of time before Hari sought the solace of the supernatural. But even that couldn’t help when it came to reproduction. So in the end, Hari fell back on the resources of family.

On one of his many visits back to India, Hari arranged a secret meeting with his brother’s son Ram. Uncle and nephew – united by a mutual love of capital – had always got on, and Hari, who kept a careful eye on his brother’s finances (dented by a self-published book in Hindi on the ‘Indigenous Origins of the Indo-Arya’), guessed that Shiva Prasad had nothing to offer the market-oriented Ram which he could possibly desire. This was Hari’s moment. Like a fairy godmother in a smartly tailored Western suit, he stepped neatly into the financial breach, waving a dollar-coloured wand.

Hari was philosophical. He knew that he mustn’t, under any circumstances, make it too easy for his heir. Ram would have to work, he would have to sing for his supper, he would have to prove that, despite his father’s Arya posturing,
he
was worthy of being his uncle’s heir. Ram did exactly as Hari asked. He took a degree in Economics. He studied for an MBA. He even did time on the garment-factory floor. Having done all this, he was ready to move into Hari’s office as his understudy, and thence into Hari’s house. But there was one major obstacle to this plan: Hari’s relationship with his brother.

Shiva Prasad’s beloved eldest daughter, Urvashi, meanwhile, had made an unsuitable marriage. She eloped with a Muslim, which in the context of her father’s position as a pillar of Hindu society, was a near disaster. She was already twenty-three, and the Muslim boy, Hari discovered, came from an upper-middle-class family of printers, now settled in South Delhi. With rewarding prescience, Urvashi’s husband had shifted the printing press from the site of his father’s works near Kashmiri Gate to a modern complex in Okhla, easily accessible to the South Delhi businesses; while his father printed a respected Urdu daily, the son switched to English; and so the business boomed.

Shiva Prasad responded to his favourite daughter’s Muslim marriage with characteristic zeal, banishing his Urvashi from the house. Childless himself, Hari was at pains to understand his brother’s trenchant attitude to his offspring. What he did comprehend was that while the loss of a daughter was one thing (she was bound to leave in the end), the loss of a son would have been sacrilege beyond repair.

But then Sunita, Urvashi’s little sister, got herself engaged – a surprise love match, all her own initiative – to the son of India’s most celebrated Sanskrit scholar. The Sharmas hailed from a small town in the middle of India. The Chaturvedis belonged to Delhi’s urban elite. It was a glittering alliance: far beyond the prospects of Sunita’s family and friends. Her father, a sucker – like anyone with political ambitions – for celebrity, power and connections, was overwhelmed. According to Ram, Shiva Prasad considered, only briefly, the awkward fact that
he
, father of the bride, was ideologically opposed to
him
, father of the groom. He briskly set aside in his mind the hours he had spent ranting with fellow party members about Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi’s heinous views on Hindu mythology, the gods, the Vedas. He became amnesiac about the curses he had shouted against liberal academics, anti-national atheists, and other persons of Chaturvedi’s ilk. There were, finally, greater issues at stake than national and religious morality.

But this chance for his own and his family’s social promotion did not come without its worries. As Ram told Hari, Shiva Prasad was in financial despair. The expense of putting on a wedding with a guest list of politicians, TV figures and newspaper editors was astronomical. Shiva Prasad had already cashed in his Provident Fund – and that barely covered the basic catering arrangements. It still left the venue, the invitations, the pandal, the pandit, his daughter’s trousseau and a modern-era dowry of assorted electronic items.

Hari saw his chance. Without letting on to his wife what he was up to, he rang Manoj, his brother’s assistant, early one morning from New York, to discuss a donation to the ‘wedding account’. ‘Would fifty lakhs cover some of the more vital costs?’ Hari asked. And from the next room, Shiva Prasad intimated that fifty lakh rupees would just about do. So brother Hari bankrolled the wedding party. But there is no such thing as a free lunch – at least, not when it is on a wedding menu. Now that he was back in Delhi, Hari planned to visit his brother’s house and suggest a revision of family affairs. But he had to do it delicately. It wasn’t just that Shiva Prasad might feel inadequate for failing to provide for Ram’s material ambitions; he would also object to the taint of merchants, money and foreign influence that came from associating with – profiting from – his brother Hari’s world.

What Hari most wanted to achieve, however, was something that went beyond a convenient family business arrangement. He wanted a reconciliation. He wanted his brother to welcome him back, so that the Sharmas could be a family again. That was his plan.

Hari put down his gin and tonic and moved to the old record player under the garden window. Wonderful things were in the offing, and yet, despite everything, he still worried about Leela. He took one of her LPs from its torn and faded sleeve, and placed it on the turntable. ‘This is my only dowry,’ Leela had told him as she put the thirteen records in his arms. In the early days, she listened to them again and again – she could sing each film song by heart – and the thin sweet music still made Hari thirst for dreams of that early married time. Back then, he had imagined tiny pattering feet and plump infant limbs; he had thought he would see her dressed in a cotton sari, frying parathas for their son; or on the terrace of a Delhi barsaati, rocking their daughter in her arms. He had visions of himself, the perfect father, lighting Diwali diyas with his daughter, or teaching his son to be a man.