Leela's Book (19 page)

Shiva Prasad had never learnt to drive, but he had hired three cars for the evening – Sunita’s white wedding car, a silver-grey Corolla for the rest of the family and a taxi from the stand below the house to carry around the remaining riff-raff, such as surplus cousins and the pandit. ‘Nizamuddin West,’ he told the taxi driver, who stubbed out his cigarette and assumed an air of anxiety, presumably at the thought of his venerable employer frequenting Muslim neighbourhoods. ‘Urgent business,’ said Shiva Prasad, and gave him Vyasa’s address.

By the time they reached Nizamuddin West, it was well past eleven o’clock. In the market, Muslim boys, huddled into drab grey shawls, were sitting together on park benches. In the streets, white-capped madrassa men were clustered round telephone booths, probably, thought Shiva Prasad, arranging international terrorist atrocities. The air was thick with the smell of sewage, which drifted across the night from the city’s open drain.

Shiva Prasad ordered his driver to park just in front of Vyasa’s house, which was in near darkness; there was not a single light proclaiming the imminent arrival of the holy festival of Diwali. He could see one soft bulb on in the hall. There was no car in the driveway.

Shiva Prasad got out of the car feeling hot and clammy, opened the gate, walked up the steps and pressed his finger against the doorbell. He waited for a moment, but nobody answered. He didn’t like standing here uninvited by the door like a common kabariwallah. He wondered what to do.

He had walked back down the steps and was standing in the road, thinking it over, when he heard the soft click of Vyasa’s front door opening and a slight female figure dressed in pale yellow appeared in the light from the hallway. There was a pause, and then the young girl spoke.

‘Mrs Ahmed?’ she said. ‘Humayun?’

For a moment, Shiva Prasad didn’t reply. ‘Mrs Ahmed’ was his daughter’s married name. Why was this servant girl – a Muslim, clearly – uttering the name of his Unmentionable daughter? Was it a trap? A further humiliation by Vyasa?

‘Is Chaturvedi-Sahib in?’ he asked at last.

The maid drew back, closing the door so that he could only see a sliver of her: fearful eyes looking down at him, bright yellow Punjabi suit. She shook her head.

‘I will come in and wait then,’ he said, starting towards her up the steps. She still hadn’t moved from the doorway, but he put out a hand and roughly pushed the door open. It gave him a thrill to do that: to treat this maid of Chaturvedi’s roughly.

Feeling his hand on her, pushing her backwards, she shrank against the wall, dropping her eyes from his face and pulling her headscarf back over her hair. Without looking at him, she gestured to him to sit and wait in a large room overlooking the front garden where there was a couch and some chairs. She was a very small, slight girl, and she seemed to merge back into the shadows of this large and ill-lit house, and he would perhaps have forgotten about her altogether if she hadn’t spoken again, drawing his attention to her presence.

‘Would you like some tea?’ the girl asked.

‘A glass of water,’ Shiva Prasad said, sitting down on the couch. He heard the girl walk through to the kitchen, and as he waited for the water to be brought out the thought came to him that this was the maid whom Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi had hired to wash his daughter Sunita’s clothes, to lay out her intimate undergarments, to prepare her tea in the morning. This Muslim girl had been paid to pick up sari blouses from the floor of Sunita’s bedroom, to chop meat and vegetables for her unholy dinners, to pollute her Hindu body with Muslim exudations. He thought of the smile on Chaturvedi’s face as he listened to Shiva Prasad’s speech about family harmony, and of how Chaturvedi’s whore-like daughter had committed unmentionable acts at the wedding. And then he thought of the unmentionable acts committed by his firstborn daughter Urvashi, and when the girl returned with the glass he looked up at her and all his suppressed anger seemed to surge through him, through his blood, into his hands and throat, concentrating in his loins, scorching, iridescent.

Later, Shiva Prasad would know that it had been a palpable, even divine, force of retribution; that the power of Lord Shiva had in fact entered him and illuminated the route to purity and forgiveness, to the assuaging of Shiva Prasad’s own failings as a father, to the avenging of crimes against innocent Hindu populations, to revenge against the barbaric Muslim man who had taken virginal Urvashi as his nautch girl.

But at the time he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing, or about where he was. He thought only of the girl, and how he had her in his power, how he could turn her round, strip her of her clothes, bend her in half and break her, if he chose. First he pulled her down on the couch so that the tray she was carrying fell to the ground with a desperate little clatter. Then he pulled apart her legs, observing to himself to what delicate advantage the synthetic fabric of her dupatta draped itself over the contours of her young and perfect body, and as she began to whimper pathetically he spoke for the first time. ‘Don’t complain,’ he said, and he held his hand against her throat as he unwound his dhoti and yanked down her salwar and pressed his penis inside her. Shiva Prasad, who hadn’t performed the sexual act for years, who had assumed that this chapter of life was closed to him, was amazed. He was overcome by an emotion stronger than any feeling he had ever felt when conjoined with his wife, a feeling which rushed through him, suffusing him with a warmth that spread quicker than any poison. His climatic moment came quickly, too quickly, and all the humiliations he had suffered at his own daughter’s wedding seemed to have been transported somewhere very far away. As he came, he cupped the girl’s face in his hands and cried the name of his Unmentionable daughter. Afterwards, as the girl lay there on the couch, he stood, rearranging his garments, feeling like Arjuna, the ascetic Pandava brother who, after years of austerities, finally embraced a woman – the Pandavas’ shared wife, Draupadi. This act, too, had been a mystical experience.

The girl whimpered again, and on hearing that noise – like something emitted from a small hurt animal – Shiva Prasad remembered where he was, and what had happened, and he hurried out into the hallway of the house without looking back at her. The last thing he did before pulling the front door shut behind him was to reach out a hand and knock over a large turquoise water pot that stood on a table in the hall. It fell to the marble floor with a satisfying smash and Shiva Prasad felt sure that it had broken into at least a thousand pieces.

The car was still there in the road but his driver, oddly, was nowhere to be seen. Shiva Prasad paced up and down, growing worried that Vyasa might return at any minute and find him. At last there was a clang of the gate and the driver emerged from the garden of Vyasa’s house, smoking a cigarette. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. But Shiva Prasad wasn’t to be appeased.

‘You,’ Shiva Prasad said, ‘go back to the wedding grounds and see if there is anyone else who needs collecting. The pandit, for example. Give me a lift to the market. I’ll take a taxi from there.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The man opened the door, and Shiva Prasad settled back into the seat with some relief. His dhoti was only slightly soiled.

By the time Shiva Prasad arrived home, his wife was asleep. He took off his clothes in the bathroom, sloshed water over his naked body, and lathered himself all over. His hands moved carefully over his skin, investigating each crevice and crack, winkling out sweat and juices and the salty traces of sex.

Sunita sat in the wedding car, half-happy, half-afraid – a married woman – as Ash and Ram walked across the tarmac and into the lobby of the Taj Man Singh Hotel. So far everything had gone perfectly. Ram had driven them here from the wedding as planned, making only a few jokes about the joys that lay in wait for Sunita on her wedding night. Ash had held her hand tightly and given her shy smiles. She was now waiting for her husband to come round to her side of the car, to pick her up and carry her over the threshold as if he was the hero of a film and she, his fair-hued heroine. She had seen this scene many times, in many different films, with many different casts and costumes. But Ash did not come to collect her. She could see him through the glass doors, looking at Ram and laughing at something as they walked over to the desk to collect the room key. And so, in the end, Sunita got out of the car, walked across the tarmac, and entered their wedding-night hotel alone.

By now she was very tired. It had been a long and sweaty evening, and the initial yearning she had experienced at the wedding – to climb out of her heavy wedding clothes and extra-heavy wedding jewellery bought for her by her extravagant father, to wash herself in clean running water, to step into a cool, breezy kurta-pyjama – had returned. Sunita was studded, wrapped, enveloped in gold. There was gold around her neck and on both wrists. The American-style engagement ring with its triple diamond spray, which Ash had slipped onto her finger three months ago, glittered on one hand. A thick traditional Indian gold wedding ring was connected by a fine chain to a thick gold bangle. There was a gold tikka in the parting of her hair, and long gold drop earrings in her ears. The gold diamond-studded nose-pin which she wore was linked by a fine gold chain to the earring, which in turn was joined to the tikka. Round her neck was a Rajasthani-style choker. Her clothes – the tight bodice blouse, the full lehenga with its beads and layers of silken tissue, the heavy embroidered dupatta – had been hand-sewn with golden thread. On her feet was a pair of golden high-heeled slippers and she no longer noticed the blisters they gave her. Her hair had been curled and styled, and the jasmine flowers with which it was clipped and plaited had been falling against her skin, lodging under the neck of her blouse, all evening. Her face, painted with several layers of fairness cream, kohl, eyeshadow, powder and lipstick by an irritable woman with bad breath from the Ashoka Hotel, had become sore from smiling.

At the wedding, after sitting still for an hour (and for four hours in total), Sunita had tried to imagine cool buckets and showers of clean water trickling over her. She imagined scooping and pouring, lathering and scrubbing, rubbing and rinsing. She looked over at Ash and imagined him as a part of her bathing ritual. For he, too, was finding the flower garlands irritating; he kept scratching at the skin of his neck with his finger, where the white flowers were rubbing.

Then Uncle Hari’s wife fainted, and during the ensuing commotion, Sunita was suddenly made aware of the fact that she didn’t know where she was any more. It was dark now, and the wedding garden – so full of lanterns and fairylights, of tasteful white loops and bunches of silk-effect awning draped along the hedges, of sprays of flowers, of tables of food, of red-velveteen chairs, of guests, above all, so many guests in shiny and sparkling saris, expensive jewels, colourful wedding turbans – no longer resembled the place it had been before. ‘Mother,’ Sunita whispered, after Uncle Hari’s wife had been carried away, her face strained with the pressure of being a bride, ‘can I have one of those painkillers you mentioned?’

After she swallowed the pill her mother gave her Sunita stopped caring about these inconveniences – the weight of her garments, the sweat trickling slowly down her legs and her breasts, the video cameraman and the light boy, who hovered and buzzed, darted out behind the wedding guests, swooped back again to leave her dazzled and perspiring, swarmed around another configuration of wedding guests, and then returned to the stage where Ash and she sat, to dazzle her once more. Whatever it was that Mother gave her brought the tender and innocent smile back to her face, and as she greeted wave upon wave of shining and congratulating, long-life-and-many-children-bestowing relatives and wedding guests, she drifted away, flying up through the wedding garden, out above the club, and across the city, skimming the top of India Gate, flying on through Old Delhi. And as she flew, she became the goddess Sita: spotless, mythical, cleansed and pure as snow.

Piano music was playing quietly in the hotel lobby as Sunita and Ash – husband and wife – said goodnight to Ram and walked towards the lift. They were staying in a Deluxe Room on the second floor. When the lift doors closed behind them, Sunita stared across into the mirrored wall at her husband. He smiled at her, and when they reached their floor, stepped out of the lift before her, crossing the landing and opening the door of their bedroom with a flourish. Entering the room after him, Sunita saw the big double bed, and the bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates on the table by the window. She sat down on the bed. ‘Will you help me take off my jewellery?’ she said.

She thrilled to the touch of his fingers as he unclasped the choker, tenderly pulled out the tikka, unhooked her bracelets, undid the watch, slipped off her rings, and even removed the golden slippers. Sunita was respiring with excitement by this stage. She felt as if they had never before sat so close together.

‘Your feet are all swollen!’ Ash said as he placed the slippers carefully on the floor.

‘All swollen!’ she echoed.

‘Why don’t you have a bath,’ he suggested.

‘A bath!’ she said.

‘And I’ll go and order us a drink?’

‘A drink?’

He kissed her on the forehead and left the room.

Sunita sat motionless for a moment, alone in their marital bedroom. Then she removed her clothes, folding them in a bulky pile on a chair. She left on only her knickers and her bra. Opening the bathroom door, she saw herself in the mirror, smudged makeup on her face, curled hair coming down in tendrils, and below that the breasts, encased in a lacy bra, the stomach which her husband would soon kiss, the parts below, which …

Sunita stood under the shower, letting the warm water stream over her body. In her imagination, she placed Ash next to her, under the same jet of water. As she soaped her body, she imagined soaping
his
feet with this floral-smelling soap, and
his
shins and calves, and
his
knees and thighs, and … But her mind could go no higher.