Leela's Book (45 page)

Bharati held up her hands. ‘Father’s lecture at the old fort tomorrow.’

‘Shall I see you there?’

Bharati shrugged. ‘Goodbye, Leela,’ she said, before the woman tried to hug her or extract any further promises. She began to walk away, but Leela called after her. ‘It’s your birthday tomorrow.’

‘I
know
it is,’ Bharati said, turning. ‘At least, I’ve always believed I was born on that day. Maybe now you’re going to tell me something different. That you gave birth to me in March, in a temple ashram, that my name was originally—’ She broke off, disgusted with the way her words were coming out.

‘You were born on November fifteenth, like your brother.’

‘Right. Fine. Great. So. See you tomorrow then,’ Bharati said, and before Leela could say anything else, she walked away towards the archway.

Only when she reached the steps did she feel the unfamiliar wrench of loneliness and fear, and turning again, she looked back at the woman who claimed to be her mother. Leela was still standing alone on the grass, gazing after Bharati – with that hair, and those long eyes, and those lips set in that way that seemed so much part of her, and that wrinkle of worry on her forehead. The strange unwanted ache of recognition made Bharati flinch as if in pain, and she hurried away to meet her father, thinking,
That woman is my mother
.

Ash Chaturvedi spent Diwali in his lab on Mall Road, at the edge of the university campus. This was, indisputably, the finest scientific institution in Delhi – one of the finest in India – a huge, imposing grey concrete structure, ultra-modern, the hallways haphazardly lined with red marble: a pristine bubble of progress set apart from the rest of the country. Wherever life took him in the future, Ash would always value the time he had spent here in this sequestered intellectual community. But he sighed as he walked down the corridor from the lab to his office. He had been on his feet from early that morning: collecting human gene samples from a doctor’s surgery in Bhogal, taking them in a taxi all the way to CBT, processing them there alone in his lab – isolating the DNA, amplifying it, and then running it through the automated sequencer – and now that the data had been generated, transferring it onto the main server, where it would be slotted neatly in with the others in his gene library. And
all this
he had done at his sister-in-law’s express request.

The telephone call he had received early in the morning was highly unexpected. He knew of Urvashi’s existence, of course, and had long urged Sunita to introduce her sister to his family: after all, they were neighbours. But he was taken aback to find it was her when his grandmother called him to the phone before breakfast. ‘It’s Uzma Ahmed,’ she said as he came downstairs. ‘Please hurry. She has been waiting all this time just for you to finish flossing.’ He had been in the bathroom when the phone rang and Sunita was still there, taking a bath. He took the phone from his grandmother, trying to remember if he had heard of someone called Uzma Ahmed. Maybe she was ringing from the travel agency with news of their honeymoon hotel in Goa? ‘Hello?’ he said.

There then ensued a very unexpected conversation. Uzma Ahmed was actually Urvashi Sharma, and she wished that Ash should analyse the DNA of the man who had raped her maid on the night of his wedding. ‘I believe she is your maid, too?’ Urvashi said as she finished her speech. She spoke politely but firmly. Her voice had cadences of her Hindi medium education and upbringing, as Sunita’s did, but overlaid with something different and more recent and more urgent.

‘You will have to collect the samples from the doctor,’ Urvashi said. ‘He won’t give them to me.’

‘No, of course not,’ Ash said, and thought about it. ‘I’ll need permission from my head of lab. It might be difficult on Diwali. Isn’t there a normal police procedure you can follow?’

‘No,’ Urvashi said firmly. ‘The police are not motivated by the right considerations. You know they beat up Humayun and that now he’s disappeared?’

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said, trying to sound understanding, ‘you’ve had your wedding and all. You’ve been busy.’

‘I’ll speak to my head of lab,’ Ash said. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult. Each new sample is useful for my forensics identification protocol.’ The constricted feeling he had woken up with – a whole day alone with Sunita on Diwali – disappeared. This gave him the perfect excuse to get out of the house. She would be fine on her own – she was using the time between now and Friday, when they left for their honeymoon, to train the cook up in all her favourite recipes, and to find a place in the house for each and every one of her brand-new possessions.

‘Do you have the number of the doctor?’ he asked Urvashi. ‘I’ll go round there right away.’

In his office, Ash brought up the details of the DNA analysis. For the purpose of his forensics chapter he looked at nine markers on the autosome, and every time he processed a new sample it gave him a little thrill. The doctor had provided him with an uncontaminated sample of the maid’s DNA – a cheek swab – and with it a vaginal swab, which would presumably contain her DNA and that of the rapist. There were just three sets of coloured peaks on his chromatogram, including the control, and it would barely take thirty minutes or so for the software to remove the maid’s verified genetic fingerprint from the tangle of DNA produced by the vaginal swab, and isolate the culprit’s. This he would print out, and take straight over to Urvashi Ahmed’s house, as proof that he had done what she had asked for. He had to hurry, because he was due home to Nizamuddin soon in order to pick up Sunita and drive her south to her parents’ house for Diwali dinner.

Ash left the software running, and went downstairs to see if he could find a tea stall open on Diwali. Half an hour later, when he returned, he sat at his computer, brought up the Excel spreadsheet, and was about to press print, when he saw a message on his screen that made him push his glasses back onto his nose and peer in confusion at the computer.

The software had automatically searched for duplication between the new information he had added and data already on the system – and it had found a match. Ash blinked and stared. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. He was confused. His computer was telling him something that couldn’t possibly be true.

In his mind he went slowly and mechanically through every viable explanation for the result the computer had thrown up – that the doctor’s samples were contaminated; that the software was malfunctioning; that his eyes weren’t working properly. Then he shut down the program, restarted the computer, ran the software a second time and waited. Ten minutes later the match appeared as before, and at last Ash was forced to confront the possibility that … But he couldn’t.

There was a telephone by the door and he walked to it slowly, steadying himself as he went. He dialled his sister-in-law’s number.

She answered immediately and recognised his voice. ‘You’ve done the test?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have anything?’ She sounded excited.

Ash looked back across the room towards the computer. ‘I think we should speak about it,’ he said. ‘I’ll come round to your house. Don’t mention this to anyone.’

Urvashi Ahmed was not alone when Ash arrived at the house in Nizamuddin. A tall man in a white shirt and jeans, whom she introduced to him as her husband, came to the door with her to greet him.

‘So we are family,’ the man, whose name was Feroze, said with a cautious smile, and put out a hand to Ash. ‘Welcome.’

Ash crossed the threshold and stood in the hallway of his sister-in-law’s house. He looked shyly at Urvashi. She seemed very different from her sister. She was wearing dangling seed-pearl earrings and a loose green printed salwar kameez. He looked at her huge swathes of hair, her healthy glow and happy plumpness. He felt a great relief to be meeting her at last.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ Feroze said, showing Ash to the seats under the window. Ash nodded and asked for a beer. As Feroze went out into the kitchen, his wife’s sister smiled at him. So this was the woman her father had rejected.

‘Does Sunita know you are here?’ she said suddenly, as if she could see what he was thinking, and Ash shook his head.

‘I will tell her, though, as soon as I get back. I am sorry—’ he began, and stopped.

She looked at him questioningly.

‘That you weren’t able to come to the wedding reception,’ he finished – and wished that he had stood up to Sunita’s father on this issue too.

She shook her head and said nothing, and as soon as Feroze returned with the beer she got quickly to her feet and walked out of the room. She was clearly upset. Ash sighed, and looked around him. The house was very large for such a young couple; her husband’s business must be doing well. Or maybe there were other family members living here too. He took the beer from Feroze and asked him, ‘Do you live here alone?’

‘For the moment,’ Feroze said, and a smile appeared on his face. ‘But as of next year, in May …’ He paused, waiting for Ash to finish his sentence for him.

‘Is she expecting?’

‘Yes!’ Feroze said. ‘Sunita hasn’t told you? She will become a mother in under six months.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Ash shook his head. Sunita had never mentioned it.

When Urvashi returned, carrying some snacks on a tray, she had recovered her composure, and Ash was able to congratulate her on her forthcoming joy without the tears springing into her eyes again. He felt glad to be sitting with his wife’s sister and her husband, and again he wished that he had done something more about the family divisions before he married Sunita … But he couldn’t bring himself to examine the damage he himself was inflicting on Sunita through his secret relationship with her brother, let alone the traumatic revelation that he held in his pocket in the form of his DNA analysis.

He took a sip of beer and said nothing for a moment, unable to think how to describe his confusion about what he had discovered.

‘You are a geneticist?’

Ash looked up. It was Feroze who had spoken.

‘Yes,’ Ash said, ‘that is why I am here. It’s to do with the rape of the maid.’ He put down the beer bottle on the table.

He realised that an awkward silence had developed in the room. They were waiting for him to speak. He sighed, and said to Urvashi, ‘Please. I have something very difficult to tell you. Should I say it here, or is there somewhere we can go in private?’

She cast an anxious glance at her husband, but he merely nodded. ‘Why don’t you have your conversation in my study?’

Urvashi nodded, and Ash followed her into the room next door. There were books on the shelves, and a computer on the desk, and next to it a large colour wedding photograph of Urvashi, dressed in red silk with a heavy gold tikka in her hair, and standing behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder, Feroze, a serious expression on his face, dressed in a dark sherwani.

Ash and Urvashi sat opposite each other across the desk. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘what have you discovered?’

Ash unfolded the print-outs and offered them to her. She took them from him and studied them for a moment in silence.

‘The first thing to say,’ he began by way of disclaimer, ‘is that the PCR I did to get the STRs is only a rough analysis. It proves something is true but it has no legal application. CBT is not a forensic institute and to check that you will have to—’

‘I don’t understand,’ she interrupted. ‘What do they show? What is PCR? STR?’

Ash sighed. ‘Polymerase Chain Reaction. Short Tandem Repeats. It’s a way of—’ But he broke off when he saw the blank look on her face. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. Then he put them back on again, smiled understandingly at his sister-in-law and spoke as clearly and simply as he could.

‘The sample the doctor gave me contained the DNA not of
two
people as I expected – the victim and the rapist – but of three people. That is what is shown up on the gel matrix.’ He pointed to the relevant portion. ‘By chance, one of those people had a match with another in my … gene database. I had already tested certain people in your family … I had already tested your father.’

‘My father?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and went on bravely, ‘He wanted me to prove the existence of an Aryan gene in him. That’s why he is in my database. So what my analysis showed up was Aisha’s DNA, as expected. There was a second anonymous person, who by statistical probability, seems to be her relative. And there was a third person, who, as I explained, was in my database already.’ He locked his eyes to Urvashi’s as he spoke, determined to say it out loud: to be clear and unequivocal and unflinching. ‘Your father was in my database already—’

But she interrupted. ‘My father? You’re not trying to tell me that my father …?’

He nodded.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I need to know whether your father has been at the house recently. Has he slept in your house, used a bathroom that Aisha may have cleaned, met her at any time? Could there have been any inadvertent contamination of the sample taken by the doctor?’

‘My father has never been here. He hasn’t spoken to me or seen me since I left to get married.’

‘I see,’ Ash said slowly. Instead of thinking of the heinous crime that Sunita’s father had quite possibly committed, however, he thought of the shame that such a revelation would unleash – not just on Sunita’s family but on his.

‘There’s another thing,’ he said. ‘The DNA of the second person, Aisha’s relative. Can you think of a reason why that would be?’

‘Yes,’ said Urvashi. ‘Aisha was having a … thing with her cousin, our driver.’ It was as his mother had said: they had deceived her with their clandestine romance.

‘And Humayun and Aisha are definitely related to each other?’ Ash went on, not wishing to acknowledge that, secretly, this is what he had hoped: that somebody else other than Shiva Prasad had raped his grandmother’s young Muslim maid.

‘They are cousins,’ Urvashi said.

There was a silence. ‘Of course,’ she added, ‘that doesn’t mean he raped her.’

‘No,’ Ash said, ‘except that – you said that she’s a minor.’