Leela's Book (15 page)

He looked around. Where was Urvashi? He leant across his wife and addressed his aunt. ‘Where is my niece Urvashi?’

Hari’s aunt wrinkled up her face in a grimace. ‘She wasn’t invited.’

‘What? Because of …?’

‘Because of that, yes.’ And the old lady shut her lips tight.

For the first time since returning to Delhi, Hari actually felt sickened by his brother’s ideology. He himself had always had a soft-spot for his niece Urvashi. In the early years of her life he had made a point of visiting the family home whenever he was in Delhi, and he found her to be an open, affectionate child who lisped the word uncle –
Chacha
– in a way that made his heart melt. She was much less aloof than Ram had been at first; with none of the formal distance acquired in time by her younger sister, Sunita; prettier and more becoming than her mother. Hari’s brother knew this: he had palpably doted on his firstborn. ‘There is no comparable joy in this life,’ he had disclosed to Hari late one night, in the days before they stopped speaking to each other. And Hari had nodded, never suspecting that such a joy, in his own life, was to be denied him.

How stupid his brother was, to have cut off this most wonderful part of himself, and all in the name of religion. Hari thought of the wedding
he
could have thrown for just such a daughter, of the crores of money he would have lavished on the occasion, of the forts in Rajasthan he would have rented without a moment’s hesitation, the elephants he would have hired to march the guests around on, the filmstars he would have flown in from Bombay to dance at the party, the chefs he would have booked for the reception, the designers he would have requisitioned to dress up his daughter like a nymph from the epics, the jewels he would have chosen.

He glanced across at Ram, a little shyly. There was a man who would soon have to choose his life partner from among the many candidates available to him. Wouldn’t he, Hari, as his new father, have a role in choosing the bride? And this time, when Hari’s eyes roamed across the garden, they ignored the middle-aged men in suits, and searched instead, among the many nubile beauties, for Ram’s ideal companion.

Weddings were the perfect place to find a bride. If Ram could begin looking tonight, Hari himself would make further enquiries, Leela would cast the deciding vote with her unerring sense of moral character – and before a year was out, Mr and Mrs Sharma would be throwing their adoptive son a stupendous wedding party in New York – something truly sumptuous, in one of the museums, perhaps, Leela would know what was currently most stylish. Hari sighed to himself as he visualised a room full of distinguished New Yorkers, with waiters circling round them carrying flutes of champagne, prawns speared through with little sticks, pastries filled with blobs of caviar. They could hire the roof garden of the Met, let off fireworks at midnight, fly a rock star in from Karachi to show the Americans the meaning of
open-minded
.

‘Namaskar Leela, how are you?’ somebody was saying to Hari’s left. Turning his head and looking down the row of guests lined up for the photo, Hari saw to his surprise that the woman greeting his wife with such familiarity was none other than Professor Chaturvedi’s mother. He couldn’t believe it. Did Leela know the Chaturvedi family? She had never mentioned it. So how was it possible that—

Before Hari had time to finish that thought, the Professor himself, standing next to his mother, also turned graciously to Leela and spoke to her in an intimate tone, as if he knew her: ‘Welcome back to Delhi, Leela.’

Astounded by this interaction, Hari glanced at his wife. She had said nothing in reply to the Chaturvedis’ greeting but nodded politely back at them as if nothing was wrong, as if this familiarity between them was utterly natural and to be expected. Hari felt wholly confused. What was going on? How was it possible that she knew the Chaturvedis?

‘Did you meet at the lecture in New York?’ he whispered in her ear but she shook her head. ‘How then?’ he insisted.

She refused to answer – she was staring straight ahead – and he felt not just puzzled but mystified by this secretive, implacable woman he had married. Why was it that she kept him at such a distance?

Just at that moment, two things happened. An excited murmur ran through the crowd assembled on the dais – the bride was at last being brought across the wedding garden to meet her groom; and a young woman in a green sari, standing just beyond the Professor and his mother, said something to them in a low, ironic undertone, which made Leela glance over with an abrupt turn of her head. Hari, too, turned his head and sized the girl up. He saw at once that she was not at all the right type for Ram, what with her cynical expression and very skimpy choli. Ram needed somebody simple and loving and unaffected. But he was distracted by his aunt, on his other side, tugging on his sleeve. Hari bowed his head to her – noting wryly that she was the only woman at the wedding wearing cotton – and asked courteously after her health, and the welfare of her sons, before explaining in reply to her questions exactly how it felt to have lived away from India for all these years, and why they hadn’t come back before, and where it was that they had moved to in Delhi.

‘Arre,’ cried his aunt suddenly, and Hari stopped speaking.

The party was in commotion. Men were exclaiming, women were tutting; it seemed that somebody had fainted. And Hari, turning back to Leela, saw to his horror that she had disappeared from view. It was
she
who had fainted – as silently as a cloud passing across the sky – right onto the woman in front of her, narrowly missing the bride.

Unfortunately, as Ram explained later, she had fainted just at the moment that the photographer clicked the shutter, moments after the bride had finally been seated on the dais, when all eyes in the garden were trained upon them. She had thus fainted in front of Hari’s entire family – not to mention the assembled grandees of Delhi society – and, of course, the Chaturvedis.

Hari went swiftly to her side, kneeling over her anxiously, shouting for somebody to bring some water. His first panicked thought was self-accusing: had his coldness towards her just now wounded her so much? Had he made a huge mistake, in bringing her back here, to India?

But matters were quickly taken out of his hands. The air was filled with voices: his brother, calling for assistance; a grunt as three men lifted Leela off the dais; the cry he made as he ran after them across the garden; a yell in his ear as somebody told him to ring his driver. And before he had time to protest that he was sure she would recover, that he would rather spend the rest of the evening here at the wedding, that there was no need to worry, the large white car that he had bought for her was drawing up at the entrance, they were bundled inside, the doors slammed shut behind them, and the driver was carrying them away down the lane towards the city.

Hari, sitting in the front, looking pointedly away from Leela who was stretched out along the back seat, felt an unfamiliar strain of suspicion mingling with his usual, insurmountable affection.

When Linda was fourteen, she worked as a paper-delivery girl in Brighton. Aged fifteen, she spent all of August in a chip shop. At sixteen, she waited tables in a summer-season cream-teas-only beach hut. Seventeen brought a spell in Topshop. Throughout her eighteenth year she ran an organic burger van in Hove (a local gang slashed the tyres and graffitied the windows), and at uni she was manager of the comparatively tranquil college stationery shop. Thus, by the age of twenty-two, she was more than familiar with work that was poorly remunerated, intellectually unchallenging and socially taxing. But when Linda tried explaining this recently to Bharati, her Indian friend shook her head.

‘You’re doing a fully funded Ph.D.,’ she said. ‘What do you need the extra money for?’

‘I need to save,’ Linda said. ‘The funding’s not enough if I want to …’

‘You could spend your Saturdays going to art galleries or the theatre.’

Linda took a sip of beer. It was a cold evening and they were sitting in the student union bar; soon the barman would call Time and Bharati would wander off in her sparkling T-shirt and super-tight jeans to some club or other – and Linda would return to the scruffy hall-of-residence room she called home. She
knew
there was no point in trying to explain how unreal it seemed, to be given money by the government just to do something she loved so much; that she needed a rubbish job in order to keep things in perspective; that if she didn’t, somewhere deep inside she would start to panic. ‘I like the café,’ she said at last, ‘it has—’

‘What?’ Bharati interrupted. ‘What
exactly
has it got going for it?’

‘Well …’ Linda began. Set at the end of a mews to the west of Euston station, the Nine Muses was not just blessed with an address – 9 Drummond Mews – that lent itself to the kind of punning jokes so beloved of London locals, it was also run by a woman called Liz who was large, practical, red-haired and straight-talking. Her clientele was numerous, regular and demanding, the meals were simple, the ambience pleasing. Linda had grown to admire the nonchalant culinary élan of the Bap, the Sarnie, the Toastie. Eight hours on a weekend buttering scones, chopping up cabbage for coleslaw, slicing cakes and making coffee, made a blissful break from a week crammed full of Sanskrit philology. She amused herself thinking up new ways of cutting tomatoes (little slivers with a sharp kitchen knife; wild and violent chops with a cleaver) and novel means of assembling cheese and pickle sandwiches. She listened to the radio, chattered blithely to Liz, kept an eye on the customers, noting that the place seemed to attract men of melancholy dispositions.

‘Why don’t you come by during my shift tomorrow?’ Linda suggested. ‘I’ll make you one of our super-strength coffees.’

But Bharati, who was snobbish about the institutions she patronised in London – she drank her coffee at an Italian place in Soho – wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘Thank you but I have to pack tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to Delhi for my brother’s wedding.’

‘Are you?’ Bharati hadn’t mentioned it before.

‘Just for a week.’ Bharati sighed. ‘Let me tell you, if there’s one thing that’s intellectually unchallenging, it’s a bloody Indian wedding.’ She drained her glass.

Linda sighed. ‘I wish I was coming too.’

‘Come!’ said Bharati.

‘I couldn’t possibly afford it,’ Linda said. ‘The college has a travel scholarship for postgraduate researchers and I’ve applied for that, but I haven’t heard anything.’

‘Why don’t you apply to give a paper at my father’s Living Sanskrit conference? It’s in Delhi on November the fifteenth. They want to support uptake of the classics among the youth. You’d be perfect.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes!’ Bharati said, ‘Put in a proposal. What harm can it do?’

Linda suddenly felt defensive. ‘Of course I wish I could visit India,’ she said. ‘I long to do that. But I’m reading texts in Sanskrit. I’m thinking about words that were composed thousands of years ago. I don’t know how much help modern India would be to my area of—’

‘Of
course
it would help,’ Bharati interrupted. ‘You can’t just talk to these non-resident types. You’ve got to go there and see for yourself. Modern India thrives on its ancient culture. The old temples and the forts aren’t just sitting there as tourist attractions. They’re living parts of our political and cultural landscape. On top of that,’ she added, ‘you should taste the kulfi and the chaat—’

‘Kulfi?’

‘Oh Linda, really.’ Bharati looked quite fed up, and Linda – thinking of the country she knew through the words of ancient men (Kalidasa, Panini, Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa) and the modern land she had sensed in hints and snatches (the hefty Indian hero of the film she saw once by mistake in a musical epic at the Mile End Genesis cinema; a spicy balti she had shared with a girl from her Sanskrit grammar class at the Taj Palace restaurant in Brixton just last weekend; an Indian scarf of her mother’s she had worn as a teenager) – nodded. Her friend was right.

The morning after her beer with Bharati, Linda was woken earlier than usual by a knock on her door. A voice, which seemed familiar, was speaking her name. Opening an eye, she realised she had fallen asleep with volume one of the Chicago translation of the Mahabharata splayed across her pillow. Her glasses were perched on the end of her nose, her bosom, wrought by the fervour of something she had dreamt in the night about India, was heaving.

‘Hello, dear?’ said the voice again, a little more anxiously now, and Linda knew at once who it was.

‘Mother!’ she said, sitting bolt upright in bed and gazing around her in horror. Her anxiously beloved, just-turned-forty, very-single parent prioritised cleanliness in all areas of her life, but especially the domestic. The flat where Linda grew up smelt of Pine toilet-cleaner and the lemon spray with which her mother doused the air every morning; it was thoroughly dusted every Saturday so that, on Sunday, her mother could sit back and appreciate the godly effects of these efforts. Linda knew that her hall-of-residence room, which smelt of beer-scented breath, which coughed-up used underwear with every exhalation, which could not disguise the mouldering curry-dinner under the bed, was not a safe place for a woman of Mother’s sensibilities.

So she jumped out of bed, pulled on her café clothes and shouted as she tugged a comb through her hair, ‘Mother! What are you doing here? I’ll be out in a tick. I was just going to work.’

Half an hour later, having sat her mother in front of the Nine Muses’ full-strength brew and slid a plate of cupcakes across the counter, she at last learnt the reason for this pilgrimage to London. Last night, in the queue for the supermarket checkout, her innocent parent had flicked through a parenting magazine and discovered there that it was the duty of single mothers with only daughters to
nurture
the maternal bond. Nurture, she read, meant close physical proximity, impossible sex-talks, long restaurant dinners, exhausting high-street shopping trips, and, wherever possible, bonding through mutual hysteria: ‘a cleansing cry together’. It was for this that she’d caught the 6.03 to London and forced herself to wait an extra hour on a bench in King’s Cross, before riding the 253 down the Euston Road to see her daughter. ‘Mother!’ remonstrated Linda, and sloshed more boiling water into the round brown teapot.