Leela's Book (20 page)

Sunita took a long time in the shower. She dried herself slowly. When she walked back into their bedroom, wrapped in nothing but a towel, she expected to see Ash, ready and waiting for her clean, pure, washed body. But the bedroom was empty, and so she searched in the bag that had been left out for her, chose one of the shorter nightgowns with revealing lace along the corsage (bought for her by her sister) and got into bed.

After a while, she heard a noise in the passage. The door opened and Ash entered, carrying a tray with two cups of steaming milk. He placed the tray on the table by the bed, and sat, smiling at his wife. Then he kissed her, very lightly, on the lips. Sunita remained still, her eyes closed in bliss.

When she opened them again, Ash was stirring the cups with a teaspoon. He handed her one, telling her to drink it all down. She found that it tasted a little sweet, a little sour, a little strange. ‘What is in it?’ she asked.

‘Whisky.’

‘Whisky!’ Her first taste of alcohol. She drank it all, and after it was finished, she handed Ash the cup, put her hand to her face, smiled lovingly at her husband, and leant back sleepily on the pillow.

Ash turned off the lights, lay down on the bed beside his wife, held her gently, and waited. He waited for a long time, even after she had fallen asleep (lulled by his inaction) and was snoring lightly. He lay and thought about her, and his marriage, and about her brother. He had no idea what was happening to him. Nothing like this had ever happened before. All he knew was that there were two Ash Chaturvedis: the normal, everyday one, lying here next to Sunita, and the other, midnight Ash who for over a year now had been having passionate conversations on the computer with somebody who called himself Man-God. And this evening, Everyday Ash and Midnight Ash had been forced to come together, and Everyday Ash knew for the first time that Midnight Ash was stronger.

Ash gave a violent shudder. Hitherto things had always been so simple. Midnight Ash was hidden from the world, from Everyday Ash, from Father, from Bharati, from all his friends, from everybody at the lab, from Sunita. Everyday Ash was the one who had decided to behave like everybody else and get himself married.

And he
had
married Sunita, and had done so to quash his hidden, midnight self, and his feelings for Man-God. And yet in some hideous, monstrous, marvellous way, this marriage, which was to have made everything straightforward and right, had only brought the midnight temptations closer.

Ash lay like this for nearly an hour, switching from Everyday Ash to Midnight Ash, trying to reconcile the one against the other. When he eventually got up from the bed, he half-hoped that Sunita would wake and stop him. But her snores went on uninterrupted, even when he tiptoed across to the door and opened it quietly.

As he stepped into the lift, he had another moment of hesitation – she had looked so innocent and sweet with her head on the pillow – but Ram was waiting, and Ram had been waiting long enough already. The lift stopped at the sixth floor, the door pinged opened, Ash walked along the corridor and knocked on the door of the room that Ram had booked in the name of Mr Manhattan, and there he was: Man-God, standing before him, not as some shadowy computer avatar but real and in the flesh.
Beautiful Ram, his wife’s brother
.

‘Eat this,’ Ram commanded; and the pill dissolved onto Ash’s tongue even before he got through the door of the bedroom.

‘Did you know beforehand, then?’ Ash asked. ‘Had you guessed?’

‘That stupid ice cream,’ Ram murmured, as he nibbled Ash’s nipple.

‘Oh,’ moaned Ash – Ram’s aquiline nose nudging his being with tremendous jolts of pleasure.

It was Ash’s grandmother who had triggered their coming together. Following the pleasant distraction of Sunita’s New York auntie fainting, the bride and groom had resumed the endless, thankless process of being snapped; their every movement, their slightest smile, their inadvertent grimaces recorded. Flash! The photographer’s light boy shone the lamp in Ash’s face. Flash! Behind him, Sunita’s father coughed, and adjusted the angle of his turban. Flash! Sunita’s brother Ram, a handsome young man with a curved nose and mischievous eyes and ruddy red lips whom he had met only once before, at the engagement party, changed his weight from one leg to another and shifted his hand to the arm of Ash’s chair. Flash! Both their grandmothers were sitting together, directly below the stage, eating ice cream. The old women were arguing about something. Ash’s grandmother was raising her voice and saying to Sunita’s: ‘It’s Nirula’s ice cream! I tell you it’s Nirula’s!’

‘No,’ said the other, ‘Sunita ordered it. Kishmish, badam, American-type name—’

‘Manhattan Mania!’ the first lady shouted. ‘Manhattan Mania, that’s his favourite.’ She pointed her spoon at Ash: ‘Isn’t that so, beta?’

‘Yes, Granny,’ he replied obediently, ‘Manhattan Mania.’

Suddenly, an unfamiliar hand moved to rest lightly on his shoulder. Flash! The hand tightened around his collarbone. Flash! Ash turned his head to see. Flash! Ram was staring down at him, smiling. ‘Ram?’ he said, and then, before he could stop himself: ‘Man-God?’ Flash! The look they gave each other was captured forever on a roll of Fuji Superior Colour Film.

‘So that was when you knew?’ Ash asked helplessly as Ram licked his way up Manhattan Mania’s legs towards his groin.

‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure …’ said Ram. ‘But the way you said those words,
Manhattan Mania
, it gave me such a shock, I couldn’t help myself.
Sorry
.’

‘You should never have told me,’ Ash said as he felt his limbs quiver and melt under the pressure of Ram’s tongue. ‘You should never—’ He broke off. ‘And what will I tell her? What will I tell Sunita?’

‘Come on, yaar. What does it matter?’ Ram drew back, looked up, and said: ‘Brothers-in-law. So convenient, na? Happens all the time. How do you think these marriages keep going? Because of this only.’

Then Ash felt Ram’s tongue on his naked skin again, and any further speech was muffled.

Her eyes ran over the lines of the text, the neatly enumerated lines, not understanding but striving to understand, taking comfort where best she could – in the familiar-to-India nouns: the garlic and lentils, the yellow cow, the gardens in which rivers flow – and trying not to let fear prevail at the rest: the lightning and thunder, Satan and the angels, the Book, always the Book, invoked like a warning; and, above all, there at the back and the beginning, beneath and above, poised and powerful, flexed like a cobra ready to strike, Almighty Allah, the unknowable entity to which she was seeking to entrust her battered heart.

Urvashi had opened the Qur’an in the evening after dark. Aisha had left for the Chaturvedis’ in the afternoon, and Humayun had gone before that to drive the Professor’s family to the wedding. Feroze was away at the printing press at least until nine. At first she had sat alone in the large hallway, in front of the window, watching the shadows slowly and painfully gather, willing the night to descend and clothe the house in darkness on this evening of her sister’s brightly lit wedding, indulging her misery with a roll call of the loneliness that had been visited on her since her marriage. Her mind shied away from thoughts of her family. Instead, she recalled a visit by her two best friends from school. She had not dared invite them when she was living in the old city, in the privacy-free haveli where Feroze grew up, with its legions of pale, languid cousins dropping in and out all day long, and the old aunts shelling peas on the roof terrace, and the teasing, familiar, young boy cousins who came by after work still dressed in their pant-shirt, to drink tea with Feroze’s Hindu Bibi and to spy on how she kept the house. She had not wanted to subject her schoolfriends to that – getting them to the house itself would have been difficult enough, for it was in the heart of Old Delhi, a ten-minute cycle rickshaw ride from the cinema on Daryaganj, through a warren of tiny streets, with only the occasional Hindu neighbourhood in evidence. But once Feroze and she had moved into their own house, in a respectable colony away from his family, and once she had looked around and approved of the paintwork and chosen the furniture, and generally ascertained that domestically speaking it was all just as she remembered it from the houses of her childhood, she rang up her two best friends, whom she had known since she was at least nine years old, and they both agreed to come over one Thursday lunchtime.

Afterwards she knew that she hadn’t been mistaken: on the telephone she remembered inviting them for lunch, and she remembered them agreeing, and hence that Thursday she spent all morning in the kitchen with Aisha, preparing this thing and that thing and sending Humayun out twice before twelve o’clock to pick up curd and some sweets her friend Shobha liked from a shop in Defence Colony, and by the time the two of them rang on the doorbell it was all laid out on the long dining-room table – the yoghurt curry and pulped aubergine and stuffed bitter gourd and daal topped with coriander – and the rice was done, and Aisha was standing in the kitchen rolling out chapatis.

At first, everything had seemed almost as normal. The three of them sat in Urvashi’s big front room, on the chairs she had arranged under the window, sipping milky tea with just the right amount of ginger, as prepared by Aisha. The friends looked around them and admired the house, its scale, its brand-newness. She took them upstairs, through their bedroom, to the roof terrace, and downstairs again to appreciate the garden that Aisha watered every afternoon. By now forty minutes had passed; it was time for lunch. And so Urvashi led her friends towards the dining room.

‘But we’ve eaten already!’ her friends said in unison as they stood on the threshold, looking at the table with its line of covered dishes. ‘We ate before coming!’

‘How can you have eaten?’ Urvashi asked in wonder. They lived in Saket, so the drive to Nizamuddin must have taken them at least half an hour. She had never heard of anyone eating lunch at eleven o’clock.

The schoolfriends glanced at each other. ‘My bhabhi made me eat some of her uttapam just before I left,’ said Shobha. ‘She loves this south-Indian khana.’

‘I am on a diet,’ said Shoma with a giggle.

‘Come, try just a little,’ Urvashi urged them, still not understanding. She pointed to the dishes she had spent all morning making. She tried to force them, taking an empty plate, and spooning a little bit of curry onto it, tearing a chapati in two and placing half on each plate, anything for the sake of decorum. But her friends wouldn’t lift even a morsel of the food she had made to their lips. They wouldn’t so much as sit down at the dining-room table. They don’t want to eat in a Muslim household, Urvashi realised suddenly. But it isn’t a Muslim household, she felt like saying. It’s just me, and my husband who happens to be Muslim. It wasn’t until this day that Urvashi realised how far she had been cast out.

When Feroze came home that evening he found his wife in tears, and the fridge crammed with more food than they could eat in a week. He packed the aubergine and curry and karela himself into tiffin boxes, and rang his mother and told her to send the driver to collect it. But Urvashi was inconsolable at the rejection.

Yellow cow, lightning strike, Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful
. No longer able to bear thinking about her friends, Urvashi went to sit in her husband’s study, the Book on his desk, illuminated by one strong desk lamp. The text was in English and Arabic, its pages whispered as you turned them, strangely devoid of images, unlike her Hindu books, which had been illustrated with pictures of Arjuna and Krishna and other ancient heroes.

At nine o’clock Feroze rang to say that he wouldn’t be home for another two hours. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. She answered truthfully: ‘Reading the Qur’an.’

‘Oh, Urvashi.’ His voice was full of concern. ‘Look,’ he began again, purposeful this time: and told her that he had rung his mother, that they were expecting her for dinner, that some cousin was visiting from Aligarh, that she must promise to call a cab from the market and go to the old city at once and not to spend any more time sitting at home reading the Holy—

Urvashi promised. But sitting in the taxi, watching the city pass, she thought of her in-laws’ questions and their eager, concerned faces, and the whispers that would have gone round all the relatives’ houses about her having been excluded from her sister’s wedding, and the rich oily biryani they would force her to eat, and the pink sugary sharbat which she hated that they would make her drink. She couldn’t face it. By now the car had reached Daryaganj. Soon she would have to get out and take a cycle rickshaw. She thought suddenly of the great mosque where she had been taken by Feroze one Saturday afternoon to admire the beauty of the architecture (he was never interested in explaining his religion). ‘Take me on to the Jama Masjid,’ she said to the driver.

But when the car turned left towards the great mosque and she saw it looming above her, lifted up from the squalor and the crowds by its flights of red sandstone steps, again her courage failed her. She couldn’t approach that place alone at night, a Hindu woman.

She was aware that her mind was behaving erratically but there was no point making a pretence. ‘Take me back to Nizamuddin West,’ she said to the driver, the panic fluttering inside her, not caring if she appeared contradictory and wilful. It was ten o’clock already. Feroze would be home by eleven.

The taxi headlights scrolled across the front of Urvashi’s house in Nizamuddin and her first thought was that Feroze wasn’t home yet: his car wasn’t here. The taxi lights came to rest on a figure slouched against the pots and ferns just inside the gate. The taxi driver braked. ‘What’s happened?’ asked Urvashi. The driver left the engine running as he went to look.

‘A young girl,’ he said when he came back. ‘Something’s wrong.’

Urvashi got out of the car. The body, lying just inside her front gate, was still. But she knew who it was immediately – from the yellow chiffon suit she wore. Her first reaction on seeing the limp body of her maid under her tobacco plants and Himalayan ferns was one of fear:
What have I done?
And then she remembered that she was supposed to have stopped by to collect Aisha from the Professor’s house at the end of her afternoon shift.