Leela's Book (40 page)

Urvashi and the boy picked their way down the muddy street, past several charred houses. She felt the poverty and the malodorousness of this colony touching her hair and dirtying her skin. The rubbish-strewn wasteland was beyond the basti wall and she could smell the open sewer now. The boy beckoned to her impatiently and gestured to an opening. When Urvashi reached the entrance, she gasped at the scene that was laid before her. The stink was overwhelming. Nosing through the rubbish that lined the drain was a large black pig with a litter of piglets. The boy pointed across the concrete footbridge to the slope on the other side. ‘The butcher says they live in the graveyard now,’ he said. ‘You can look for them there. But I have to go.’

After the boy left, Urvashi stood on the edge of this landscape, watching as the pig waded into the sewer water. She considered going home; but that would have been to neglect her responsibilities to Aisha. So she pulled her headscarf around her face in an attempt to keep out the smell, and walked down the path and across the plain of shit and rubbish, over the bridge, and climbed the bank on the other side. She couldn’t face entering the graveyard alone. Hoping to find somebody to guide her, she approached the wispy huts made of plastic sheeting. Sullen-faced mothers were cooking over rubbish-fuelled fires; grubby children were playing barefoot in the dirt. ‘Has anyone seen Tabasum and her daughter Aisha?’ Urvashi asked cautiously. None of the parents answered, but several dirty little children came running up to her with outstretched hands, asking for money. Urvashi refused them, and walked on. ‘Where is Tabasum and her daughter Aisha?’ she asked. Still nobody answered. ‘Please? Can somebody tell me?’ Eventually a man looked up: ‘We don’t know anybody of that name here,’ he said.

‘And the entrance to the graveyard, where is that?’ Urvashi asked, fearing very much to enter that place alone.

‘The gate is over there,’ he said, without offering to show her.

Urvashi walked carefully along the wall of the graveyard in the direction he had indicated, until she saw the green iron gate. A young Muslim man with a wispy beard was just coming out. ‘Where does Tabasum live, and her daughter Aisha?’ Urvashi asked him. The man looked at her in surprise, taking in her fine shawl and glossy hair. Urvashi clutched her handbag to her side, under her pashmina.

‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Next to the watchman’s hut. I’ve just been there myself. But how do you know Tabasum?’

‘Her daughter works in my house,’ said Urvashi.

‘You are Mrs Ahmed?’

Urvashi nodded. ‘I’m looking for Aisha.’

‘Aisha has gone.’

‘Where has she gone?’

‘Humayun and she have disappeared,’ the man said. ‘They must have eloped.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Humayun’s cousin, Iqbal. Salaam aleikum.’

‘Waleikum salaam.’

‘Come with me, I’ll take you there myself.’

She followed him into the graveyard and he pointed to a whitewashed enclosure situated on a piece of high ground. There was a gate, and inside, Urvashi saw, a brick hut with a tent pitched against it. Next to it was a fire site. ‘Aisha and her mother sleep in that tent,’ the man said, and crouched down next to the fire. He pointed out a bundle of clothes, and a pan, in a recess of the wall. At the far end of the enclosure was a small room for washing in and a line where clothes were drying.

But the old chowkidar’s wife came out of the hut to shoo them away. ‘What are you doing here again?’ she said to Iqbal, pulling her scarf over her head. ‘You know we do purdah. My husband will be angry.’

‘I am sorry, auntie,’ he said, and stepped back behind the gate out of sight. ‘This is Mrs Ahmed, her daughter’s employer,’ he called through to her.

‘When she comes back,’ Urvashi said to the old lady, ‘please ask her to come and see me again. She knows where I live. I didn’t understand before. I want to help her.’

She shut the gate behind her and walked down the slope to where Iqbal was waiting. She could scarcely believe that her own maid had lived all this time in this place, in this graveyard, crossing everyday over that hellish sewer. She began to cry. ‘I want to help them,’ she repeated.

He nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said, and his voice became squeaky with emotion and she realised how young he was and yet how solemn. ‘You can help them by giving them work when they return to Delhi. But it is difficult for them now. His mother is angry. Be patient. It is the will of Allah and He does whatever He wills. We should go now.’

Iqbal and Urvashi walked in silence back through the graveyard, across the drain, and out to the road. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Ahmed,’ he said when they reached the kabariwallah settlement on the corner, and he said something in Arabic that resounded, complicated and unknowable, in Urvashi’s ear.

She walked home, her mind moving slowly, as if coagulated into inertia. When she arrived she took off her clothes and soaked them in detergent to remove the smell of the nala. What she had seen today had shocked her, and that night, during dinner, when Feroze praised her cooking, Urvashi remained silent. She was thinking how negligent she had been, not to have enquired where Aisha and her mother lived, not to have understood their trials.

‘Is anything wrong, Uzma?’ he asked eventually.

‘Do you know what
exactly
is DNA?’ she replied.

‘Yes,’ he said in a surprised voice. ‘It’s the matter in our cells that contains our genes, where our hereditary information is encoded.’

‘But what is it used for?’

‘It tells us how humans are constituted. Scientists can tell things about disease from our genes. It is used to show who is the parent of a child.’

‘But what do the police use it for?’

‘Bodily tissue from a crime scene can be analysed and the suspect can be tested and if the two match then the police have their culprit.’

‘For what kind of crimes?’

‘Murders, theft, rape. You should ask Sunita’s husband. He’s a geneticist, isn’t he?’

‘Is he? I don’t know.’

Feroze, reflecting that this esoteric and mystical branch of science had entered the public consciousness as thoroughly as sharbat stirred into a glass of water, and yet his own wife barely understood it, thought to himself as they walked upstairs to bed:
Now that Sunita is living in Nizamuddin we must overcome this family rift
. And he reached out a hand and rested it gently on his wife’s taut belly, feeling soothed by the life that was growing inside her.

After his argument with Leela on the night of the wedding, Hari Sharma had taken his car and driven it as far through the city as he could go. It wasn’t far enough. He wanted to surpass the city’s limits, to reach some wilderness, the mountains, a river – one sublime piece of nature would have done just as well as another. But it was night-time and nothing of that sort was visible; and even in the daytime there was nothing like that near Delhi any more. His headlights lit up the dusty road ahead of him, and all he saw were empty plots of land and great tent cities, and people – he couldn’t get away from the people – more and more people wherever he looked, walking through the dust or sleeping in the dirt or squatting by the road staring aimlessly into the distance. In the end, he parked the car next to a petrol station on the loneliest stretch of road he could find, and sat in the darkness.

He telephoned the house before he started back again for home, but there was no answer. An hour later, when he drew near to Connaught Place, he tried Leela a second time but still there was nothing. And then the anger which the drive had forced out of him resurfaced, and instead of turning onto Kasturba Gandhi Marg he drove up Janpath, pulled into the Imperial Hotel and asked for a room and a bottle of whisky. He walked upstairs with the bottle to sit in his room, motionless in a chair by the window, staring at the bunches of white, heavily perfumed tuberoses that a member of staff had come and arranged in coloured glass vases, and which reminded him so much of Leela. He wouldn’t go home – not if she wasn’t even there to assuage him with her contrition.

But as he sat in his chair he couldn’t help remembering how, on Saturday evening, when she came back from her outing, she had smiled at him and said, ‘The whole city smells of raat-ki-rani blossom, doesn’t it?’ And he had told himself:
Clever Hari, my queen of the night is putting down roots at last, she is coming home
.

He reached out for the bottle of whisky and poured himself a glass and remembered how harshly he had spoken to Leela when they got in from the wedding. Never before in their marriage had he raised his voice in anger. She had seemed to shrink a little in fear; or maybe, he thought, she had drawn herself back, away from him. Being a polite man, he had never questioned her in detail about her family. He knew that the past was painful for her; and he had respected her silence – considered her personal history irrelevant, even. He drank the whisky and poured himself another, and now tears of self-pity came into his eyes. What was it she was keeping from him? He began to weep for his ignorance, for the children they hadn’t had together, for his stubbornness in bringing her back to India, for all that she hadn’t told him.

He glanced up and caught a reflection of himself in the window: a small man, bald, with bags under his eyes.
Please don’t leave me
, he suddenly begged, as if appealing to the city, the sky, the gods. He felt a kind of panic.
Please don’t leave me, Leela
, he said, pressing his fingers against his face. And Hari, who had always spoken directly to Ganesh – for the god had guided his business transactions, his choice of a wife, his move to New York, his return to Delhi – implored him now:
Bring Leela home to me. Don’t let her leave me
.

The next morning, after breakfast – after he realised that they had spent nine hours apart, and that they were the most awful nine hours of his existence – he went out walking in Connaught Place. He didn’t want to ring her again – he didn’t want to pursue her – but he hoped that she might call, or that he might bump into her. He watched women pass with their men, the young ones in crisply ironed bright cotton shirts, the married ones elegant in new saris for Diwali. He sat on a bench in a noisy ice-cream parlour filled with young people, slowly eating a mango kulfi, and watching. He wondered if he had ever done anything so simple and pleasurable with Leela. He would take her to a sweet shop like the ones she was used to from her Calcutta childhood – to buy her rose-flavoured chumchum and pistachio-flecked kulfi, to dress her in delicate cottons and kiss the back of her neck under the wave of her fragrant hair. Memories came to him of those first, early days of their marriage. In his innocence as a husband she had made him think of a woman from the epics, from a wondrous, pre-industrial age. He saw her wavy hair and long eyes reproduced from life a thousand years ago. She made love, he flattered himself, with that same mythical abandon. She would twist herself into any contortion for him; there was something divine about her bearing. But nothing would take root in her womb.

In the afternoon, when he couldn’t bear the separation any longer, he called her and told her he was coming round. She was waiting for him when he arrived back at the house. Until the last minute – until he actually found himself walking down the path to his front door – Hari had hesitated about going home and executing the ultimatum he had given. He wasn’t sure whether he really had it in him. But he found himself turning the key in the lock and pushing the door open – and there she was, standing at the end of the hallway, on the veranda, waiting for him. She was fiddling nervously with her packet of cigarettes and he knew that she was going to tell him something that might shatter them both, and he didn’t know if he could bear it. But he had no time to stop her.

‘Before we were married I had a child.’ She spoke before he was even through the door.

There was a long silence during which he heard nothing but the blood pounding in his head.

‘Who was the father?’

She didn’t answer.

‘
Who
?’ he said, shutting the door and walking down the hall towards her.

‘Vyasa.’

He couldn’t help his sharp intake of breath. ‘Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi?’

The news was so awful he didn’t know what to say. All he could think of to ask was, ‘Is the child alive?’

‘Yes. She is Bharati, his daughter.’

He gave a long low moan.

‘Hari?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I wanted to—’ She stopped. ‘I didn’t want to betray you.’

Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi. It was worse than he had imagined. He looked at her – the expression of remorse perfectly arranged on her lovely face – and felt the first jolt of hatred. ‘How can you have kept something like that from me? And I thought – I thought – you couldn’t have children … Did you deceive me about that too?’

She shook her head. ‘But at first I didn’t want them.’

‘You liar!’ he shouted, clenching his fists. ‘And this child. You must have been thinking of her all the time. All these years. When was she born?’

‘November nineteen seventy-nine.’

‘So her birthday is – when? Now?’

‘In three days.’

He sat down on the veranda steps and put his head in his hands. ‘All this time.’ He looked up at her. ‘Why?’

‘I didn’t tell anyone.’

‘Vyasa?’

‘No. He thinks she is Meera’s child.’

‘Your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘You’re the first person I’ve told in twenty years.’

‘
You gave birth to a child!
’

‘Yes.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then I came to Delhi, and then I met you.’

He got to his feet again and paced up and down the veranda. He stood still and looked at her, his beautiful, perfect, paragon of a wife.

As dusk fell, Hari found himself asking questions – hurtful, damaging questions, to which he didn’t need to know the answer – but they were questions which it was impossible to stop, and she sat there, her head bowed, and answered him as truthfully as she could. She told him how, right from the beginning, she had seen through Vyasa’s cheap lines and easy charm; how she had despised the stories he told to Meera; how Vyasa had boasted of living all over India, of studying in Oxford, of trying this drink and that drug, of coming to Bengal as a man who has been out and seen the world. He had quoted from Darwin and Descartes, Kalidasa and the Kamasutra; had theories on everything from colonialism to economics to women’s sexual emancipation. He had fought revolutions in rural places, he said, and had the scars to prove it, scattered across his skin like flowers. Meera drank in his stories as if they were divine revelations. Soon, she was talking to Leela at night (her hand in Leela’s, her lips to Leela’s cheek) of the old, false bourgeois codes of conduct, of embracing communal ideas of possession, of contravening the code of ethics they had been educated with. ‘Look at the matriarchal clans of southern India,’ Meera would say confusedly, half-echoing Vyasa’s words; ‘look at how we used to live. Why have we inherited this colonial construct, this monogamous two-parent family? Our bodies, our sexual freedoms, are enchained within the missionary model of our colonial masters!’