Leela's Book (18 page)

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘It’s your brother’s wedding; are you—’

She put her lips on his to shush him, and then, as she had wanted, she felt his hands, moving under the silk of her sari, reaching under her sari petticoat, up her legs, until his fingers brushed across her knickers.

Above them, there was a sudden thump as somebody put something down on the table. ‘Mmmm,’ he said in his turn, and his voice was muffled as his mouth bit at the silk of her blouse. There was a clang and the sound of lids being lifted from pots. She grabbed at him, pushing up his shirt, pushing at the button on his jeans. The murmur of voices around the table grew. She could smell the blandness of a generic curry, and she heard her own voice, mixed with that of a waiter calling across the lawn, as he pulled up her sari. ‘Quick,’ she was saying, and she reached for her purse, for the condom brought all the way from England, bought from a supermarket near her college. She ripped off the edge, filling the air under the table with the un-Indian smell of spermicide and latex.

They struggled against each other for a moment, cloth and foil and skin, until Bharati felt him moving inside her with hot, warm jabs, and after that she could no longer hear what she was saying, although she thought she heard her grandmother’s voice, and as she twisted her body away from his, she laughed again at her own audaciousness, and then gave in to the shudders of her pleasure.

Afterwards, she lay back and waited for Pablo to ask,
Was it good?
so that she could thwart any illusions he had about his sexual prowess – men often had them – with one of her sharp-edged speeches about how a woman’s sexual pleasure was all of her own making, that the man was merely a cipher, that the whole idea of some men being good lovers was an utter invention. But Pablo merely slipped an arm around her waist and said nothing, and despite her own wish to keep her resistance intact, she lay back against him and ran through her mental catalogue of the lovers she had had: the ones with special finger movements, the others with supposedly acrobatic thrusts, or practised and choreographed scripts; and then that other type, who blithely poked, blandly prodded, without even asking or noticing or thinking that it mattered whether or not she was enjoying it. She often liked to say – to shocked Indian girlfriends – that she could
see
why lovers turned to whips and ropes and drips of hot wax. Either that or anonymity. Only between strangers was frisson not entirely lacking.

He spoke. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’

She answered eagerly, pleased by the opening: ‘Yes, two or three.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m living in London now,’ she explained.

‘And?’

‘And I’m polyandrous, like Draupadi in the Mahabharata. I always prefer to have more than one man on the go.’

‘That wasn’t Draupadi’s choice exactly.’ Pablo sounded amused. ‘She was won in a competition, remember? And the man who won her was duty-bound to share everything with his brothers.’

‘Still.’ Closing her eyes, Bharati smelt the sugary scent of tea and heard the ebb and pulse of the voices above them. ‘I like the idea.’

‘And you have two or three on the go right now?’ Pablo asked.

‘Three or four.’

‘But you are aiming for five, like Draupadi.’

‘Five would be ideal, yes.’

She felt him lean forward and kiss the back of her head.

After the crowd moved away, and the waiters lifted off the tureens, Bharati and Pablo came out from under the table. Bharati stood behind the champak tree and adjusted the pleats of her sari.

‘Look,’ she heard Pablo say. The garden had emptied, and the bride and groom were no longer sitting up on stage. Over on the bench were two young children, licking ice creams. But he was pointing to a cloth canopy at the other end of the garden where a priest sat chanting Vedic shlokas. There was a small fire, and walking round it, their garments knotted together, were Ash and Sunita.

‘We’ve spent my brother’s wedding under a table,’ said Bharati, feeling both pleased and appalled.

Pablo didn’t answer. He was watching the moment, the act of being wed, the ancient sacred steps around the fire.

‘Well, at least this means it’s almost over.’ She spoke again: ‘Let’s go back to your place? I can’t stay here. Look at me, so crumpled.’

He smiled at her. ‘I like how you look. But we can go if you want.’

In the car park, Bharati couldn’t see Humayun. She gave a message to one of the other drivers to let him know that she had taken a taxi home. But there were no taxis, and Pablo had come by motorbike. Because she was wearing a sari, she had to sit sideways. ‘It’ll be cold,’ he warned her.

It was. The Flying Club was a long way from the main road, and between here and there were the empty dark grasslands of the airport. They set off down the lane, Pablo driving slowly. It was dark, and the hedges were high, and Pablo found the quiet and the night, the fields and the trees, the unexpected empty space in this city filled with people, an interesting prospect. But it was different for Bharati. Every now and then a car would pass them, carrying wedding guests back into Delhi. ‘Somebody’s going to recognise me,’ she complained, pulling her sari pallu over her head. ‘What?’ he said, not being able to hear her because of the wind, and slowing down even more as a result. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said angrily. ‘Just keep going.’

They had just reached the bend in the lane where it veered towards the main road when they were overtaken by a white saloon car with more red roses taped onto it than there was white space. ‘That’s the wedding car,’ Bharati said, turning and waving, so that she almost lost her balance and had to grab hold of Pablo – but the driver didn’t see her, or chose to ignore her. ‘My twin brother, married.’

She was quiet by the time they reached the main road, and cold right through. Her feet hurt, and the thought of spending the night with this schoolfriend of her brother’s – the thought was suddenly ridiculous. She said nothing as they drove up Lodhi Road, the wind pushing her pallu away from her head and slipping like a thousand icy hands under her sari. She didn’t speak even when the bike curved around the blue-domed monument – ‘Sabz Burz, it used to be green’ he yelled back at her didactically – and into the entrance to Nizamuddin basti. They wove awkwardly between beggars and mullahs, men and boys, past the kebab stands, took a right, and eventually came to a stop outside a tall thin house with blotched and blistered paintwork. ‘Is this where you live?’ she asked, as he wheeled the bike up the path. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll heat you up some dinner since we didn’t eat anything at the wedding. After that, if you like, I’ll walk you home.’

She followed him through the little broken gate and along a path lined with empty red plantpots. ‘The bulb has gone,’ he said, and went ahead of her up three flights of steps in the dark, lighting a candle that had been left in an alcove next to the door at the top. He lived on the top floor of the building in the cheap barsaati flat.

With a small silver key he turned the lock and pushed the door open. Bharati stepped after him into the flat. As he turned on the lights she saw a small kitchen to the right with a gas bottle, some pans and a shelf of spices in packets. Beyond it was the bathroom; a bucket caught the drips from the tap. She followed him out onto the roof terrace, where, against the wall, was a line of pots with grimy leaved plants. And there, to the right: Nizamuddin, as she had never seen it before, the higgledy-piggledy houses of the basti, and the long, crenellated wall of a mosque, as solid as an elephant’s back in the dark. There was an acrid smell – ‘The public urinal is directly below the house,’ he apologised again – but mingled with it, was the familiar sweet-thick jasmine-cardamom scent. ‘You have a chameli tree,’ she said. The branches, loaded with almost invisible flowers, brushed against the wall of the terrace.

‘It’s not chameli,’ Pablo said, and she felt a prick of annoyance. ‘I think the true name is
saptaparni
.’ And he opened the double wooden doors leading to his living quarters and flicked on the lightbulb. ‘In the Himalayas it can reach twenty or thirty metres. But it’s stunted by urban life.’

‘Like so many Delhi residents,’ she said drily, following him in.

She saw a room, lined with books. There was a mattress spread with a pale flowered sheet and piled high with cushions. He apologised a third time. ‘I never normally entertain such honoured guests.’

She took off her shoes, and stepping into the room in her bare feet, felt the chill of the concrete floor. ‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he said, and while he was fetching glasses from the kitchen, she walked slowly round the room, examining the shelves of books, and glancing over the table which served as his desk. She opened a small wall cupboard. Inside were several freshly ironed, carefully folded shirts. She looked at the black-and-white photograph pinned to the wall above, of an old man with the same curly hair, only white; Pablo’s father, presumably.

By the time he came back, holding two glasses of rum, she was sitting upright on his bed, her legs folded neatly in front of her. He sat down beside her, leaving a decorous space between them, and she took a glass of rum and sipped. Perhaps I will stay the night with him after all, she thought, and waited for the rum to take effect.

Unbeknown to Bharati, Shiva Prasad had watched her lead the young man across the garden to the table below the champak tree, and continued to watch as she disappeared under it with him. He was so angry and disturbed at this further insult from the Chaturvedi family – he couldn’t help thinking of what that girl was up to, of the wickedness she was engaged in; was, in fact, inflamed by these thoughts – that he ordered the pandit to begin the fire ceremony as soon as possible. He wanted to get things over and done with. Then, instead of luxuriating in this moment of national communion with the past, he stared at his daughter as she walked obediently round the fire with her husband and wondered if he had miscalculated on every level. Urvashi had fallen through the net of caste and religion into the abyss; was Sunita to be lost to him in a different way: ensnared within the anti-national orbit of father-in-law and the sexualised zone of her husband’s sister? His gaze shifted beyond the nuptial couple to the family members sitting round the fire. His wife was weeping; the aunts and cousins were looking on, their faces profound with the reflected solemnity of the moment. Only Professor Chaturvedi was smiling to himself. Shiva Prasad Sharma shook his head angrily. He must do something. He must confront the man now, and save his daughter from these unholy liberals.

As soon as the ceremony was over, he walked over to where Chaturvedi was standing. ‘Now that our two families are …’ he said, and with his hands he mimicked their convergence. ‘Now that our two families have come together,’ he finished.

Chaturvedi inclined his head slightly. ‘Yes?’ he said, a hint of condescension in his voice.

‘I would ask you,’ Shiva Prasad went on stubbornly, ‘not to make any further public pronouncements about our holy Hindu scriptures of the type that might cause harm or grief to your daughter-in-law.’ Shiva Prasad felt a bead of sweat trickle down his brow.

‘Pronouncements that might cause harm or grief to Sunita?’ Chaturvedi repeated, as if he had never heard of such a thing in his life before.

‘For example about Lord Ganesh and his role in the epic,’ Shiva Prasad said emphatically, for he had realised with a flash of intuition that academics worked with heavy tomes and turgid texts, and did everything by
inference
, and that this, by contrast, was a time for speaking clearly. He waited a moment for Chaturvedi to reply. But the man said nothing, he seemed to be thinking deeply, and this gave Shiva Prasad new courage.

‘I wish you,’ he went on, ‘to recant your Ganesh thesis, which has caused such harm to Hindus up and down the country.’

All at once, Vyasa burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Mr Sharma,’ he murmured, ‘I am so delighted that our two families have …’ And he mimicked Shiva Prasad’s convergence gesture with his hands. ‘Such hours of happiness it will give me in the future.’ And he stood looking at him with such a look of benign amusement on his face that it took Shiva Prasad a moment to realise that, very possibly, he was being mocked.

He turned away, short of breath, and to dampen the fury that was dancing inside him, immediately launched himself into another, more innocuous discussion that was taking place in Hindi between an aunt of his wife’s and the family doctor (who was so helpful last Holi with Shiva Prasad’s ingrowing toenails) concerning the treatment of angina. But all the time he was asking himself in disbelief: why had he allowed his daughters to behave in this way – to marry Islamists, to marry secular atheist agents of foreign powers, to marry without his express consent, and choice in the matter, and permission? Even so, never once in his life had he imagined that his own daughter’s wedding could go so wrong for him, ideologically speaking. He wondered what the Party bosses would say to his disgrace as a Hindu, as a party-member, as a father.

When it was finally over in double-quick time, when the nuptial couple had been waved off in their rose-dabbled car, and Shiva Prasad saw Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi walking around the garden looking for his mother and daughter, he knew at once that while he couldn’t possibly confront Chaturvedi at the wedding, in front of his own life’s sum of business acquaintances, colleagues and family from farflung parts, he also could not let the slight of this evening go unchecked. He would have to speak to the man and establish, once and for all, a clear understanding between them. He would drive to Chaturvedi’s house tonight, meet him at the door and demand that he show some respect for his daughter-in-law’s father: some respect, some proper deference and some humility.

Once Shiva Prasad had decided upon a course of action, nothing could be done to change it. Of course his wife objected to his leaving the wedding early – he should have stayed to wave off every last guest and attend to each distant acquaintance. But Shiva Prasad was adamant. Cutting through his wife’s protests, telling her that one of her nephews would drive her home in the Corolla, he walked out into the car park as quickly as his dhoti-clad legs could carry him and summoned the taxi driver from where he was smoking a cigarette with the other servants.