Leela's Book (4 page)

Over the past twelve months, Hari had wanted
so much
to tell Leela of his plans. He had practised how he might explain Ram’s arrival; rehearsed meetings in his head; planned dinners, impromptu walks, bedtime conversations. He would take her hand, in these visions, and reveal in quiet, reasonable tones how their family could be. She, in turn, would nod, smile, signal by the touch of her hand on his that her desires concurred with his own. But somehow the correct moment kept slipping away. They seemed to waste so much time at parties, fundraising events and functions. Did they really spend so little time alone? Whatever the reason, Hari failed to find the courage to speak. He waited until he had cancelled their holiday in Paris, had moved paintings and furniture out of storage to their house in New Delhi, had booked their tickets to India – and still he hadn’t told her. It wasn’t until the morning of Professor Chaturvedi’s lecture in New York – after Ram rang to inform him it was taking place – that Hari knew he could delay no longer.

Standing at the window, looking out over the garden, listening to the sad song reach its climax, Hari thought with another pang about his wife. She had never wanted to return to India; staying away from this country was the one thing she had asked of him in twenty years of marriage. And yet, here they were.

But the doorbell rang at just this moment, and Hari, who knew that his nephew had arrived, turned away from the window with his usual resolve. Tonight, Ram Sharma would return here as Hari’s son. Tonight, Leela and he would become parents. Tonight, Hariprasad’s family would begin to function in the way he had always intended. Everything rested on the filial alliance.

It is with great pleasure and evident facility that I begin my portion of these pages. Not a moment too soon. (Even a mite too late? I should see about getting the order changed.) For words come naturally to me.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ganesh, elephant-headed god, misshapen son of Lord Shiva and Parvati; beheaded by my father for protecting my mother’s honour; abusively given this flippant elephant replacement; too-long-term resident of Kailash, that icy and unfriendly mountain where my family chose to live; befriended only by my faithful Rat (divine vahana, godly mode of transport). I freely admit that my sworn enemy is Vyasa, pedestrian composer of India’s too-long epic, a poem called the Mahabharata, every word of which I wrote.

Even as a very young elephant, I could feel words building up inside me, pressing against the end of my trunk, fighting to get out – and all at once I would lose control, as a great trumpeting, ear-popping tirade came shooting out into the air to disturb the concentration of that self-obsessed meditation hillock they called Kailash. Before my family could reproach me, I would run off to my side of the mountain, crouch over my peacock-feather pen like a guilty adolescent, and write without stopping.

What did I write about? I hear you ask. Well, the inner lives of others, whose experiences jumped, unbidden, into my mind. It brings me to the point of tears to remember how my father Shiva – the famous ascetic – would thwack me with his trident as I sat chattering during his meditation class, transcribing the thoughts that passed through his mind (
Parvati, come to me, honey-thighed princess
); to recall the ill-tempered curses that met my efforts at indicating to my family the folly of their ways; to recollect those long, brave sessions in the solitary company of my dear little Rat – the only member of our household who would prick up his ears and listen, truly listen, as I poured out my woes.

I was certainly brought up very badly. It is indeed nothing short of a miracle – given the unfavourable circumstances of my early elevation – that I was able to maintain my integrity, believe in my bent, and trust in my trueborn knack of telling a good story.

The danger was that, having had it drummed into me that what I did was
wrong
, I would come to believe that what my family said was true: I would start to interpret my creative faculties as the sign of a voyeuristic bore. And I did listen and did feel dismayed when my mother wailed: ‘Oh, Ganesh. You cannot always be telling people their own stories!’

But bards are supposed to tell the truth. Did Ugrasravas, son of Lomaharsana, singer of the ancient Lore, compromise on this count? No. Did Homer skip the bad bits? I assure you he did not. Back then, stuck in an eternity of timelessness, a vacuum of art and words, I had no way of convincing my parents of this. I was nothing better than a lonely penman lost to his ignorant family.

But while the repression I suffered would have cowed a less resilient will than mine, I am made of determined matter, and neither my father’s scowl nor my brother’s prickly arrow points could dent my verbal shield for long. Like Valmikiya (author of that very minor epic, the Ramayana) I turned ‘
shoka
’ to ‘
shloka
’ (sorrow to resounding verse) and realised how far too lavishly I was endowed to be sitting around on that barbaric goddery-colony and waiting for my kishti to come in. I had almost reached the stage of final disillusion with the other gods. My mind was filled up with serial somethings – they would surface, irrepressible, to taunt me – and thus was I forced to spend more and more time on the other side of the mountain, writing it all down, lost in a world of my own invention. And then something happened that helped it very much. Vyasa turned up.

Yes, up he came, huffing and puffing through the mist, tramping through the snow, hyperventilating to the crest of Kailash Hill – where he threw himself at my feet, laid himself open to my mercy, and begged me to lend him my famed transcriptional faculties. For by then, even the good god Brahma had heard tell of my wordy affliction. Vyasa had complained to him: ‘O Brahma, a Poem which is greatly respected, has been composed by me. It contains the mystery of the Vedas, the hymns of the Upanishads and the history of time Past, Present and Future. It explains the nature of existence and non-existence, the rules for the four castes, and the dimensions of the earth, sun and moon. It reveals the art of war, the key to different races and the languages of all men. Everything has been put in this Poem. But I cannot find anyone to write my Mahabharata down.’

Brahma, being an infinite and beneficent god of creation, thought that, despite the poem’s unmarketable length, it might be worth a try (it could always be sold as Religion). So he put his finger against his nose, looked up at the sky, down at Vyasa, and then he said: ‘You have revealed divine words in the language of truth even from their inception. That’s all very well. But now ask Ganesh to write it out for you.’

So off Vyasa went to find me. ‘Ganesh,’ he said, when he had got his breath back from the trek up the mountain, ‘become the scribe of my Mahabharata, which I have composed in my mind and shall now repeat.’ He explained how he had heard from Brahma that I couldn’t say no to a saga. And he was right. Being an instinctive elephant, I had already seen the potential of Vyasa’s tale in ways its author couldn’t begin to gauge. So I said: ‘Ganesh will be the writer of the work, provided his pen is not made to stop even for a moment.’ Vyasa said: ‘Stop writing only when you do not understand a passage.’ I said: ‘Om.’ And so we set to work – going back to the beginning, for like all good stories we had started in the middle and were ending near the start.

Now, in the Mahabharata, Vyasa portrays himself as a holy sage, with matted hair and an otherworldly air, an expert teacher, the counseller of kings, the wise old grandfather of his characters. He builds up a fabulous portrait: comforting yet aloof, clever yet alluring. I have only one problem with this benign vision: it is totally untrue. In these pages of mine, I will correct the misapprehension under which mortals have languished for so long. I will show how Vyasa disrespected ladies, failed to dissuade his descendants from mutual carnage, gave students of literature headaches with his prose.

Alas, it took an aeon to get the story out. Vyasa was a meanderer, and the sluggish river of his poetry had many tributaries, oxbow lakes and stagnant pools (not to mention too many narrators). With its gigantic cast, mindbending time span, and extensive locations, his Mahabharata was far too large, even for India. Elephantine. But I tugged and I pulled and I urged Vyasa onwards – until at last the bawling progeny of his experiences and dreams came slithering out through his labour pains, into my waiting pen.

The thing that set these literary efforts of ours apart from any ordinary act of authorship was that while we were up on Kailash (he talking, me scribbling), down below on earth everything Vyasa spoke of was
actually coming to pass
. That much everybody knows: Vyasa’s characters peopled India. But the thing that nobody else has yet been apprised of – the glorious twist that I have waited until now to reveal – is that Vyasa’s Great Poem was also the fertile seedbed for my own imaginings: for my own invented cast.

Vyasa, like all dictators, was paradoxical. He guarded his story jealously, refusing to let it be published during the lifetime of his grandsons, for they, of course, were in it, and reading it, would have known what was going to happen next. And yet, despite keeping a very strict eye on the whereabouts of the manuscript – regulating exactly who could learn which sections when – he never once stopped to check what I had written. Perhaps, having thought through those one hundred thousand shlokas twice already, he hadn’t the energy to read them again. Maybe, illiterate bard that he was, he had no way of checking. Or possibly he credited me with more godly honour than is my divine due. In short, I would still be feeling guilty today, were it not for the fact that, without my specific actions, certain important people – the top quality fabric of the story I am about to unfold – would never have seen the limey light of day.

So there we were. Vyasa – with his version of events. And me – all outward concurrence and inward dissension – with mine. And Vyasa never noticed my interpolations until it was far too late.

In truth, at the beginning, my people were shadowy types, marginal jottings, easily overlooked. They slipped between the pages of Vyasa’s text, namelessly traversed the hallowed Vedic scene of ancient Bharat, touched the hem of the holy Pandavas, proffered handfuls of water, vaginas of sex, prostrate bodies for the killing or selling to the waiting, warring clans. Local and imported slave-girls, elephant-riding mlecchas: the barbarian underclass of Aryan dominance, this was my clay. But I was determined to cast them right. My text was their dramatic debut; they were my directorial cue. And I had my eye on posterity. What I needed was a winning formula, a human team of characters who would grow to person-hood within the pages of Vyasa’s book, and then reincarnate across the centuries, each successive life giving each individual character the time and space to practise traits and eliminate tics, to perfect qualities and hone actions, until they had mastered my mode and message. (And yet, all too quickly, they slipped from my grasp and started dictating plot twists of their own.)

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us go back to the beginning. Back to those infantile Kailash days. Allow me to unveil my leading lady.

Leela, lovely Leela, came to me one morning in a haze of undiscovered alphabets as I lay sweating on the hillside after a thankless fit of wordsmithery. She emerged fully formed from the froth and foam of my subconscious with the vagueness of a summer dusk: naked, soft, pulsing with promise, her breasts as delectable as monsoon mangoes, her stomach a gentle curve, her cow-lash eyes impossibly elongated. I had birthed a beauty.

Without mentioning a word of it to anyone, I simply dropped her into Vyasa’s tale, at one of the few places in the epic where a character didn’t have a name – Vyasa’s own bed, as it happened – as the amorous slave-girl he impregnated by mistake (after his late brother’s widows had had enough of him).

Avatar 1: Fish

Of course you remember the story: Vyasa’s fish-born mother conceived him out of wedlock, and then went on to marry a magnificent king, by whom she had two useless sons, one of whom died young in battle and the other of sickness even before fathering heirs upon two wives, the sisters Ambika and Ambalika. Vyasa’s mother, who, like every woman, longed to hold her offspring’s offspring in her arms (and in this way secure their kingdom), summoned her surviving son and demanded that he foist his sperm upon the sisters.
Go on
, she said,
It’s up to you now
. And so it was: Vyasa went to bed with his dead brother’s wives.

Unlike most authors, Vyasa was not vain about his own appearance. He described it in disarming, disgusting detail: his appalling ascetic’s odour, his hideous hair, that gleam in the eyes that seems to afflict the country’s holiest of men. Ambika, whose turn it was first, cowered when she saw him approaching. She shut her eyes tight and refused to open them again until Vyasa had withdrawn himself from her presence and left her to incubate their baby alone. But the sage was not amused by her obvious displeasure. He cursed her as he left – and, true to his word, their child was born blind. Ambalika, who went second, did not like the great epic-touter either. She turned pale with repulsion when he showed his naked body to her, and this time the sage bestowed on their offspring a deathly pale complexion. But these two ill-begotten children were not enough for Vyasa’s mother. She wanted a third, and since neither Ambika nor Ambalika wished to sleep with Vyasa again, they sent a substitute, a servant-girl dressed up in royal robes.