Leela's Book (30 page)

How ridiculous then that, even though the inevitable meeting between the twins and their aunt was of his own making, Vyasa was still caught without a ready retort when his daughter looked up at him and said – something in her face betraying that she knew more than she was letting on – ‘And, what’s more, Ma wasn’t the only author of her poems; she wrote them with her sister. Did you know that, too?’

Vyasa pulled himself together. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I didn’t. But, Bharati, is this really the time—’

She took no notice, however. Instead of listening to her father, she scanned the garden full of guests. ‘It’s that woman who fainted last night at the wedding,’ she said. ‘I can’t see her here now but she’s married to Hari Sharma. You must have known that, Baba?’

He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, I recognised her,’ he said.

‘And you must have taught her at Santiniketan?’ she said, frowning up at him. ‘Did you?’

‘I must have. Very likely.’ Their father took a long gulp of beer. ‘It’s hot here,’ he said. ‘Shall we move into the shade?’

The pretty MA student, who had been standing there all this time, listening to this awkward exchange, smiled sympathetically at Vyasa, and said, ‘Shall I get you another drink?’

‘No, no,’ Vyasa answered. ‘I’ll just have a word with my daughter.’ And he drew Bharati aside. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, ‘this isn’t the right moment to have this particular conversation. It’s very difficult for all of us that Leela Sharma is now related to us through marriage. Your mother fell out with her before we were married.’

‘Why did they fall out?’

‘I’ll tell you another time. I can’t tell you now.’

‘When will you tell me?’ she asked childishly, pouting.

‘Later.’

But Bharati refused to give up. She had carried on so relentlessly in this injurious vein that in the end Vyasa used a deliberately derogatory word to describe Meera’s sister, a word that had angered him when he heard his mother use it: he called her a
foundling
. On top of that, since he did not want Bharati to realise that the poem published in the
Delhi Star
linked him and the two sisters, nor that he himself considered that he had married the
wrong
sister, he steered the conversation in a different direction entirely by criticising his daughter for her own sexual behaviour, something he had always sworn he would never do. He had only meant to criticise her for the undue worry she had caused them by leaving the wedding yesterday without telling anyone. But instead he enquired coldly, ‘Who was it you disappeared with last night?’; and Bharati looked up at him as if he had slapped her. She left soon afterwards and he went home with his mother.

But why was she stirring things up like this? he wondered as he sat on his terrace, sipping his coffee. Didn’t she realise, didn’t she feel grateful, that the family that could have come apart with Meera’s death had been kept intact by him and his mother? The children had been given the best, the most loving upbringing possible; nothing was lacking, nothing was amiss. And yet here she was, misbehaving because of Leela Bose. And guiltily Vyasa blamed his daughter for seizing on the one thing in his life that most distracted and dismayed him.

Seeing Meera’s sister at the wedding, Vyasa had at first felt only a youthful, amorous delight:
Leela, home in India
. The beauty and candour of the time he had spent at Santiniketan swept over him with the freshness not of memory, but of reality itself – as if he was still that bold young man, and she that alluring aloof young woman. He could easily have dropped then and there at her feet and pledged her his love, swooning with the intensity of it. Instead, it was she who fainted, and the ecstatic moment of their meeting was cut rudely short by her departure.

Since then, Vyasa had barely been able to think of anything else; and even though this was what he had planned and schemed for, he felt utterly thrown by Leela’s precipitous re-entry into his life. During the wedding lunch, for example, he had felt thankful that Leela and her husband had stayed away, but he had worried that she might turn up late, and then when she didn’t, he worried about what her absence meant. Vyasa hadn’t felt this lovesick for years – for his career, yes; for his children and their ambitions; but not for a woman. Women seemed to come and go in Vyasa’s life with superb tact. Young or middle aged, sexy or outwardly chaste; it didn’t matter. Somehow they seemed to intuit the delicateness of his position as a widower father, and however hastily he brushed them off, they acquiesced without complaint. Yes, until Leela’s return to Delhi, Vyasa had been managing things – his life, his legacy, his lovers, his children’s lives – superbly.

Even when the poem suddenly appeared in the
Delhi Star
, he had not surrendered. He had kept his cool. He saw straightaway that it was the only poem he had withheld from the published collection,
The Lalita Series
. It was clear that Leela had sent it to the paper, and as he winced at the angry feminism of the verses, he knew there was a strong possibility that the whole history of the poems, and the events surrounding their composition, would be exposed to the public. Delhi was a city that loved a mystery about one of its own. There would be an inevitable juggernaut of gossip trampling over Meera’s reputation – and his.

Vyasa was determined to stop this destructive force in its tracks. When the journalist responsible for the article called him for a comment, Vyasa pointed out that Meera was never a nationally acclaimed poet; that her output was small. ‘She only became known for her poems after her death,’ he said, ‘and if somebody is imitating her now, what can I do?’ The journalist had been a little incredulous. ‘Everybody has heard of Meera,’ he countered. But Vyasa was unfazed. The poet Lalita – so he told the inquisitive young man – had written Bengali-besprinkled verses in English. The early poems had whole lines in Bengali script; subsequently she threw in the occasional Bengali word; and the latter poems were entirely in English. But what this meant was that ‘Lalita’ was really read by only a
very
small coterie of English-speaking Indians, and Bengali-conversant ones at that. That such people had a political and cultural standing in the capital far surpassing their numerical presence in the country, and that a sentimental Bengali professor at Delhi University had put her poems on his reading list, created a false sense of her importance. But the President hadn’t heard of her. The book pirates didn’t bother to distribute her work at traffic crossings. And Vyasa didn’t say this out loud, but he thought it to himself: his wife’s poetry was only really loved by those who had known her personally, or had wished they were her lover, or had felt socially honoured to be invited to her raucous parties, notorious, above all, for the voluptuous beauty of the hostess.

Vyasa had been pleased, until now, with how he had handled things. But sitting upstairs with his coffee, he realised that he hadn’t given sufficient thought to how to manage any crisis that might be precipitated in his daughter, who was actually studying the
Lalita
poems. He got to his feet, went back into his library, and retrieved the offending copy of the
Delhi Star
from where he had left it on his desk. Meera’s face stared out at him mockingly. She would have laughed to see how badly he was coping. And what about Leela? What would she think? From the pile of daily papers that he had flicked through this morning, Vyasa found and re-examined the spread of wedding photos in the society pages of the
Delhi Star
, illustrating last night’s festivities. There was only one of Leela. It was a group shot – he was there too – and it must have been taken moments before she fainted. He studied it carefully. There was a sadness in her eyes, a kind of wisdom, perhaps; and he remembered the calm, self-contained expression that had attracted him so in Santiniketan. And he, had he acquired wisdom? He thought of his youthful arrogance and winced.

Vyasa had grown up hearing tales of his namesake, Vyasa of the Mahabharata, and there was one story in particular he had always admired. It was a tale of male potency; an ancient example of his namesake’s virility; a legend, moreover, which was the key to the epic. The story told of Vyasa’s triple insemination of two sisters and a servant. By sleeping with these women, the Mahabharata’s author had brought forth children and grandchildren – the cousins who waged war on each other – and in this way engendered the cast of his epic. Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi had never revealed to anybody else the extent to which, at one youthful, egomaniacal epoch of his life, he had allowed himself to be guided by this legend. He generally tried not to over-analyse the meaning of that long-ago carnal autumn and self-indulgent spring. And yet what he had done at that time was, in its own way, life-changing.

Vyasa’s infatuation with the legend took its final shape at Santiniketan, his first teaching post. He loved transmitting knowledge to young minds; and when two beautiful sisters appeared in his class, every aspect of his personality – and physique – leapt outwards in response.

Meera, the more vocal of the two, was easily won over. She responded in all the usual ways to his looks, to his words, and, eventually, to his caresses. But it was the other sister, Leela, whom Vyasa yearned for. Leela was tougher. She appeared not to notice Vyasa. This made him reckless, and he dallied ever more frequently with her sister, not leaving the room until Leela returned, filling the space with his smell of sweat and maleness. Leela took no notice.

In the midst of this frustrated courtship, Vyasa developed an embarrassing genital itch, and one afternoon when classes were over, he walked three kilometres out of Santiniketan, on the Ilam Bazaar road, to the new mission hospital in the neighbouring village, run by Methodists. Like all these places, it was designed as a way of making conversions among the local Santhal tribals. But it also served those local people who were too poor to pay the university hospital fees – or who didn’t trust the sub-district hospital in Bolpur. For Vyasa’s purposes the mission hospital was anonymous and clean – and he even found the earnest evangelism charming (given how doomed it was).

Sitting there in the waiting room, along with fifteen poor villagers, Vyasa took out a paper from the pocket of his waistcoat and unfolded it. Meera had given it to him that morning, following a class assignment to write some verse with a mythological theme. Perhaps inspired by Meera’s name, Vyasa had taught a class earlier that term on her namesake, Meerabai, the medieval Rajasthani princess who had renounced her husband and the royal court, to travel the desert singing hymns in praise of the blue-faced boy-god, Krishna. Meerabai took with her a handmaiden, Lalita, and it was she, so the story went, who edited Meerabai’s verses, collecting together these exquisite productions of divine ecstasy and ordering them into a coherent body of work. Every Indian poet needed a pen-name and it was this one – Lalita – that Meera had chosen as hers. It was a clever touch, for the lines wove a story of love and obsession. The last stanza even mentioned him by name:

O saffron-hued woman,

In your previous birth you were a cowherding girl.

Once, you sang of your love for Krishna.

Renounce now those childish things,

Hold out your hand to me, Meera.

Just as Ganesh wrote the epic for Vyasa,

So proclaim in these verses your love for Lalita.

Vyasa laughed out loud in pleasure. The rewriting of Meerabai’s love-songs – the winding in of a theme from the Mahabharata – was exquisite.

Just at that moment, the nurse opened the door and called out to him. The voice was English, unmistakably, and young. Vyasa looked up. She was slight, slim and blonde, barely out of her teens, with her hair tied behind her head in a bunch and tucked away in front under the white nurse’s cap she wore. As he followed her into the room, sat on a wooden chair and explained his problem, desire made him lightheaded. She was pulling on her gloves. ‘Please, show it to me,’ she said, avoiding his eyes as a slight blush came up on her cheekbones.

He took it out, she took it between her gloved fingers, and then it seemed to come alive, moving upwards in a slow and stately procession that Vyasa was unable to control. They both stared at it for a moment as it swayed there, as if with some kind of crass confidence in its own beauty. Her hands fluttered backwards; her face was now flushed red. But she turned away, pulled off her gloves – and by the time she was ready to face him again, Vyasa had pushed it down into his trousers where it strained, painfully, against the fabric.

‘There’s nothing seriously wrong with you that I can see,’ she said. ‘It looks like a bit of dermatitis. Use a moisturising cream, and if it hasn’t cleared up, come back after a week.’

When he returned as ordered, a week later, the nurse was still blushing. By now, though, he felt sure. And inside her room again, when he slipped one arm around her waist, and bent his head and kissed her, she turned her face up to his and he tasted the peppermint of her clean, nurse’s mouth. Her skin was so smooth, so white, every emotion was reflected on its surface; and when Vyasa laid her down on the bed where she examined her patients, and ran a hand up her thigh, even ran a finger inside her, she sighed and didn’t stop him. Her blush remained as he jabbed at her carefully, moving this way and that, so that she turned away her head, not quite moaning.

The third time he went back to the hospital, however, he found that the young English nurse had gone, and her replacement, a much older and sturdier woman, wouldn’t say where, or tell Vyasa her name. He mourned her privately for some days, remembering the look in her eyes as he pushed his way in; but the sharpness of the loss was quick to fade. By now Meera had spoken to Leela – and thanks to her efforts, the second of the sisters, the silent, dismissive, alluring one, was his, at last.

Women didn’t usually say no to Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi; he had learnt very early on that persistence was generally all that was required – that and an absolute confidence in one’s own desirability. The unique and maddening thing about Leela Bose was that she said no, the first time, the second, throughout his wooing of Meera, said no even at the point when, to please her increasingly unhinged sibling, she finally gave herself to him. She said no even when Vyasa begged her to set aside her fight with Meera, and come to Calcutta for their wedding.