Leela's Book (39 page)

‘I can help you,’ said a voice, and Pablo looked up to see a chubby old man – or perhaps he was middle aged, it was difficult to tell – who was wearing a pair of glasses, an ingratiating grin and a long orange shirt, and carrying a newspaper, a banana, an umbrella, a notebook, a dictaphone and a pencil. Pablo could see at once that he was the neighbourhood busybody; Santiniketan must be full of them: people who hadn’t quite made a career out of disseminating knowledge, and so dispensed it for free to any innocent visitor who was unlucky enough to be passing.

Before Pablo had time to shake him off, the man said, ‘She hasn’t been back here for over twenty years.’ He smiled again at the look of surprise on Pablo’s face, and then he said, ‘I remember her
and
her sister.’

Pablo stared. Had he mentioned that he was looking for two sisters? He couldn’t remember.

‘They went to college here. They also spent some time at the Santhal Mission Hospital.’

‘The mission hospital?’ Pablo said, confused. ‘Were they ill?’

‘Oh no,’ the man said, with a self-satisfied smirk, ‘they weren’t ill.’ He looked towards the rickshaw driver and asked him something in Bengali. The young man grinned and said nothing.

Pablo felt annoyed at this collusion. ‘What was wrong with them then?’ he said.

The waiter picked up the empty tea glasses from the table and began to walk back towards the kitchen.

‘Nothing was wrong with them,’ said the man, jabbing his pencil in the air. ‘They were both sweet girls. You can go there easily and see for yourself.’

‘To the mission hospital?’

‘Yes, yes,’ the man said. ‘It’s easy to find. Even though it’s no longer in use there’s a chowkidar still and the chapel is kept clean for when the pastors are visiting. Take the road to Ilam Bazaar, three kilometres out, just before Sriniketan. It’s a house down a lane to your left. You’ll see the pond first, and then a grove of papaya trees. I’ll tell the boy how to find it.’

‘Will he manage, or should I call a taxi?’ Pablo said, but the man shook his head.

‘He’ll be able to take you.’ He gave the boy directions in Bengali. ‘Good luck,’ he said to Pablo as they left. ‘Come back here if you don’t find what you are looking for.’

What a nation of know-alls, Pablo thought ungratefully as they set off. The road to Ilam Bazaar was narrow and quiet and Pablo sat upright on his seat as the young man bent his head and peddled. He still didn’t have a clear idea of what he would find at this hospital he was being taken to. He began to fret again about the wisdom of coming here in the first place. What if his editor wanted the finished lingam story by this evening? Meanwhile the rickshaw-wallah was swinging his vehicle left off the road, and glancing back, Pablo saw the pond the man had mentioned, and the papaya trees with their heavy green fruit. The path was very bumpy and Pablo soon called out to the man to stop peddling. He could see the iron gates of the hospital at the far end of the lane, which was shaded by large trees.

Pablo shivered as he walked up the avenue. When he got to the gate at the end, he stood with one hand on the latch, reading the faded sign:

Santhal Mission Hospital and Orphanage,

Est. 1968 by the Methodist Church of Bengal District Synod

(formerly Methodist Missionary Society of England).

Medical Superintendent: Revd. (Dr) D. Ganguli.

He pushed the gate open and walked up the red mud path. It had recently been swept and although the whitewash on the building was very old and stained by countless monsoons, and several of the windows were cracked and broken, the place hadn’t been completely abandoned. Somebody had collected fruit from the papaya trees – there was a big pile of it on a sheet next to the path. Pablo walked up the steps and rapped on the door. But there was no answer, and the door was locked. He put his face to the dusty glass and found himself looking down a long tiled hallway which was reminiscent of the schoolrooms of his childhood. Three doors led off the hallway with signs above them but he couldn’t make out the words.

Pablo came down the steps and walked around the building, across an overgrown garden, to the yard at the back. The chapel that the old man had mentioned was at a little distance down a path lined by red flowerpots with nothing in them. The chowkidar was clearly living at the back here, in what was probably the old kitchen of the hospital. Pablo rapped on the door.

The man opened it himself, stepping outside when he saw Pablo and closing the door behind him. Without speaking he led Pablo away from his private quarters – as if he was ashamed of them; or maybe he didn’t want Pablo to see his wife – and down the path towards the chapel. It occurred to Pablo, as he followed him, that the man might think he had come here to pray.

‘I don’t want to go to the chapel,’ Pablo said suddenly in Hindi.

The chowkidar stopped and looked back at him. He was wearing a long white shirt and a dhoti and his thick glasses had been mended with tape. ‘Why are you here then?’ he asked.

Pablo took out the clipping of Meera. ‘I need to find out about this woman.’

The man took it and held it away from himself in his cracked and lined fingers. Then he handed it back, and said, ‘Yes, she was here. She came at the end to be with her sister.’

‘The end of what?’ Pablo said.

The man looked away into the distance. ‘She came here like all the rest,’ he said. ‘In those days the hospital had an orphanage. That was why she came here.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Pablo said. ‘And what then?’

‘Her sister had been here for a while and then, at the end, she came,’ the man went on. ‘And they both left soon afterwards.’

Pablo felt confused. He took out his notepad. ‘Do you remember her name?’ he asked, the detective in him being thorough and cross-checking.

The man seemed to consider the question for a very long time.

‘Well?’ Pablo asked at last.

‘I’ll ask my wife,’ the man said. ‘She worked with the nurses in those days. She will remember.’

The chowkidar walked back down the path towards his quarters, and Pablo followed him, feeling puzzled. But he waited as the chowkidar went inside his house to fetch his wife, and when the woman was brought out, and he saw that she was slow and arthritic and shy, in a worn cotton sari patterned with large flowers, he smiled at her as kindly as he could, and held out the newspaper clipping.

She barely glanced at it before handing it back. ‘I can’t remember her name,’ she said, ‘but her sister, who came here before that, she was called Leela. She stayed longer than the others and we all liked her best. This was a busy place then. But we never forgot Leela.’

‘Are you sure?’ Pablo said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Leela.’ After a moment she asked, ‘Is she all right? Has anything happened to her?’

‘No,’ Pablo said, ‘everything is fine.’ He pressed a hundred-rupee note into her husband’s hand. ‘I would like to see inside the hospital. Can you show me?’

The man hesitated a moment; but after fingering the note he disappeared it into one of the folds of cotton on his person, and without saying anything else, the husband and wife led Pablo round to the front of the hospital, under a big neem tree and up the steps to the door, where the man took out a key from somewhere and fitted it into the padlock. The door was pushed open and Pablo stepped in after him.

‘They took the furniture and equipment away to the hospital at Bankura some years ago,’ the man was saying as Pablo looked around the shadowy place with its cobwebs and broken chairs piled haphazardly together at the back of the hall. He tried to imagine it clean and full of sunlight with busy doctors and Christian nurses in their stiff white caps.

‘Where did Leela sleep?’ Pablo called after the chowkidar.

The old man stopped in front of one of the doors which led off the hall. ‘The babies were put in the children’s ward,’ he said.

‘But the unwed mothers,’ said his wife, ‘lived in a dormitory upstairs until their time came.’ She pointed to the sign above the door and Pablo saw that it read,
Obstetrics
.

The chowkidar pushed the door open and Pablo and the woman followed him into a large empty room. ‘There were thirty beds in here,’ the man said. ‘My wife did all the cleaning with one other woman.’

They walked across the room and their feet left marks in the dust. When they reached the high window at the end, Pablo looked up and saw the branches of the neem tree in the yard through the dirty glass.

The man turned to him as he spoke. ‘We had a very good doctor, a Christian pastor, who delivered all the local women. Leela’s sister had a boy—’

‘She came here to give birth?’ Pablo interrupted.

‘Yes,’ the husband said, and he and his wife looked at Pablo in surprise. ‘That is why they came here.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Pablo said, feeling stupid in front of them.

‘She had a boy,’ the woman resumed.

‘Twins,’ Pablo said assertively, ‘a boy and a girl.’

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘The sister had a boy. Leela herself gave birth to a baby girl.’

Pablo looked between them. ‘Leela had a baby?’

‘A very pretty baby,’ said her husband, and he glanced at his wife, and back again at Pablo. ‘A lovely little girl.’

‘But Leela stayed here alone,’ his wife finished eagerly, ‘and it was the sister who took both children back to Delhi.’

The rickshaw driver drove Pablo back in silence on the Bolpur road. At the station Pablo tipped him generously and bought a ticket to Calcutta. He sat on the platform as a succession of men with kettles of milk and pots of instant coffee came by and asked him, ‘Kofe, kabe?’ ‘Cha?’ ‘Shonpapri?’ ‘Donation to Thalassaemia Genetic Blood Disorder?’ As the train shunted back towards Calcutta, Pablo turned everything down. He didn’t notice the fat man from the café, sitting a few seats away and regarding him with a look of satisfaction. He stared instead out of the window, and the hawkers learnt to ignore him, this man with the vacant eyes who didn’t listen to a word they said. In fact, Pablo’s eyes were registering every scene that passed: the neat squares of bright yellow and brown fields; a derobed statue of the goddess Durga, abandoned after her recent festival – sari, ornaments, even clay all washed away in the sacred immersion, and now only a naked straw figure left with a pike holding her onto her lion vahana. As the train passed over a deserted riverbed, he saw the sand patterned with a thousand anonymous bird prints. The shadows lengthened, the train drew near to Calcutta, and in the fields he saw men in white caps bending down to pray. And always one thought was going round and round in Pablo’s head like an incantation:
Bharati is Leela’s child
.

Urvashi discovered Aisha was missing the moment she came downstairs for breakfast. The guest room was empty. She must have had to go and meet her mother in a hurry, Urvashi thought, perhaps to buy some wedding clothes. They wouldn’t take the train to Bihar without saying goodbye.

For the rest of the morning, Urvashi waited in the house. It was the day before Diwali, a festive time, and it was difficult enough spending it by herself; and then Feroze, when he called, refused to comment on the situation. Urvashi readily filled the silence with his likely reprimands: that she was in the wrong to involve herself in the family life of the servants, that she had interfered enough, that she was middle class and ignorant and muddled about social priorities.

Sitting there alone, Urvashi realised that she didn’t even know where Aisha lived. Despite having been in this colony for almost a year, Urvashi shared with most of Nizamuddin West’s inhabitants an abiding fear of visiting the basti. Feroze had taken her there once, to Karim’s restaurant, and the things she had seen and smelt – the billowing smoke from the kebab vendors, the matted hair and cry of a female beggar, the crafty-eyed Muslim shopkeepers in their beards and white caps, the sickly sweet smell of a halal perfume shop opposite the restaurant – had filled her with revulsion. Until now she hadn’t dared to venture to the slum where the servants lived.

But in the afternoon, Urvashi went upstairs, put on a simple salwar kameez and some flat shoes, and gathered her resolution around her like a big dupatta. Aisha’s auntie, Humayun’s mother, might know where Aisha lived. Humayun had pointed out his mother’s tailor’s shop to Urvashi once, as they drove down the Lodhi Road. It was on the lane at the far side of the shrine, and Urvashi walked there slowly, through the expensive part of the housing colony, into the place where Humayun and Aisha’s families resided. She passed the police post where she had taken Aisha two days ago, and walked quickly through the streets towards the shrine itself, past a line of maimed beggars outside the mosque, past a madrassa. In the square outside the shrine, the food shops had sloshed down their doorsteps and the drains ran dirty with meat juices, blood and mud. Urvashi could smell something cloying and greasy. She asked directions from a fruitstall owner and he called to a small boy, his own son, and ordered him to lead her down an alley where there were stalls selling flowers, sugar sweets and religious texts. Hawkers of five-rupee meals for the poor called out to her as she passed. She ducked after the boy under an archway, into an even tinier street. They passed a barber’s shop, a well, and another mosque. Two fat sheep bleated at her from a doorway. Urvashi was bewildered by the time they reached the small tailor’s shop run by Humayun’s mother.

Once Raziya had ascertained that Urvashi, too, knew nothing about the whereabouts of Humayun and Aisha, she refused to talk to her further. ‘Haven’t you done enough by allowing this to carry on in your own home?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that girl was working for you? I would never have allowed my son near her.’

‘I need to know where Aisha lives,’ Urvashi told the boy after Raziya had turned them away. They walked back along the street, and he stopped at the butcher’s shop and asked. There was blood down the butcher’s trousers; he had just strung up a sheep and was knifing through its innards. The guts spilt out onto the floor. ‘Aisha, daughter of Tabasum?’ he said, as he cut out the heart and liver and lungs and they plopped into a bowl. ‘They don’t live here any more, they moved out to the nala long ago.’ He pointed out over the kabariwallah park, where children were sorting waste plastic and foil, and explained something to the boy.