Leela's Book (48 page)

‘Sunita,’ her uncle said, ‘can you pour the lemonade for your sister and Feroze?’

As Sunita brought over two tall glasses filled with the fizzy drink, the ice cracking within them, Urvashi’s father continued talking. ‘There was a bookshop selling all the best things available in Hindi,’ he said, looking around for agreement from his offspring.

But Ram interrupted: ‘And now there’s a McDonald’s and a Benetton, and all those other lovely foreign shops.’

‘Professor Chaturvedi,’ piped up Sunita, ‘says that globalisation is a danger to Indian culture.’

Ram turned to his father: ‘So the Professor and you agree on one thing at least.’

Urvashi could see that her brother was showing off in a way he never used to at home. ‘Did you confront him on the night of the wedding as you planned?’ Ram went on. ‘Amma says you left early to make him recant his anti-national theories.’

The siblings’ mother made a ssshing sound. ‘Beta, your father is a very civilised person. He went to see the Professor to discuss certain ideological questions. Please don’t bring up this thing in front of Sunita.’

‘And did the Professor agree with you?’ Ram persisted, his eyes shining with the novelty he felt at presiding over his father in argument.

Shiva Prasad waved his hand dismissively. ‘He wasn’t in. Only the maid was there.’

Uncle Hari got to his feet at this moment and raised a hand to call for silence. ‘I have asked you all here today,’ he began, ‘because I want our family to be whole again. We are all guilty of encouraging division. I have been away too long –’

But Urvashi could barely hear the words her uncle was saying. A coldness had entered her.
Only the maid was there
.

Hari bowed his head, ‘– away from India, and my family, and my loved ones –’

Only the maid was there
.

‘My brother Shiva has cast his daughter out—’ And now all eyes turned to Urvashi. ‘But the moment has come for the pain of the past to be set aside.’

Only the maid was there
.

Urvashi’s mother suddenly began to wail in the hysterical, forced way, which was familiar from funerals. ‘My daughter, my daughter. We never disallowed our daughter’s marriage to this Muslim gentleman,’ she said, gesturing in the direction of Feroze. ‘
She
ran away from her family.
She
should be asking her parents for forgiveness.’

‘Ma!’ said Ram, ‘she didn’t run away. What are you saying? Pita-ji forbade it and so did you.’

Their mother had obviously been expecting this outburst from her son. She looked over at Urvashi, waiting for her to speak.
You were always your father’s favourite
, Urvashi could hear her mother saying through the silence.
You were the one he loved best. Show that you are the faithful and respectful daughter we always knew you to be, until you married this Muslim. Redeem yourself
.

But before Urvashi could answer, her father got to his feet and crossed the room towards her, a look of forgiveness composed upon on his face; her beloved father whom she missed so much; and when he reached her side, and put out a hand and actually touched the bump of the baby inside her, in a gesture both of humility but also of possession, Urvashi looked up at him. ‘Only the maid was in. What do you mean, Only the maid was in?’

A look of affront passed over her father’s face. Urvashi pushed his hand away and got slowly to her feet.

‘My maid – who is also Professor Chaturvedi’s maid – was raped on the night of Sunita’s wedding.’ It was her voice that was speaking. ‘When everybody was away at the wedding, father went to the house, and only the maid was there.’

She regarded each of them in turn, imagining the effect of the words she had to say.

‘It was father’s DNA that was inside the girl.’

There was a long moment of silence – and then her mother started screaming. Uncle Hari turned to face her, his arms flailing, ‘What are you saying? What are you accusing him of?’ Ram – or was it Sunita? – was yelling that Urvashi had had her head turned by Muslim propaganda. ‘I invited everybody here today to make peace, not to start new battles,’ Uncle Hari shouted.

But Urvashi continued talking. She turned to Sunita, and explained that a doctor examined the girl, and because of Ash Chaturvedi’s Arya Gene Project, this linked their father to the crime, but that the maid had absconded to Bombay, and the police would do nothing.

‘Ash’s gene work?’ somebody said – possibly Ram.

‘Ash wouldn’t do that!’ Sunita gasped, and Urvashi knew that it was her little sister who would take the news the hardest – she, the youngest and most innocent of the three.

Urvashi heard her mother hurl abuse at her, then saw her lunge towards her. She felt Feroze and Hari both move forward to shield her from her mother’s grasp. She saw Ram take his mother by the shoulders; allowed herself to be led by Feroze to the door; and the very last thing she saw as they left was her father, standing alone in the middle of the room, his head bowed, his hands clasped together, his mouth open as if beseeching; and she never knew (and in the weeks after nobody could tell her) whether or not he was begging her forgiveness.

Urvashi Ahmed only saw Humayun’s mother once more that winter. She came to call one evening towards the end of Ramzan, to ask if Urvashi had heard anything about her son. But of course, Urvashi had heard nothing, and she had to turn the woman away.

Raziya walked from Urvashi’s house back along the drain road to where the Professor lived. She had taken to coming to the Chaturvedis’ house every week, after closing up the shop, and before cooking dinner, to stand at the front door and ask if there had been a phonecall, if anybody had heard anything at all. Every time the Professor’s mother gave the same answer: nothing yet but we will let you know as soon as we hear.

At first, Raziya felt sure that her son would return. She had read his note, and knew what an obedient boy he was – how faithfully he had always performed the tasks she required of him, how he attended school right through until Class Ten, how he brought home his salary every month and gave it to her. As the days passed following his disappearance, she thought about him all the time. She thought about him as she took orders from customers – in one month’s time it would be Eid and every lady in the colony was thinking of the new clothes she would wear, and all of them wished to discuss the virtues of bell sleeves versus three-quarter-length, boat or sweetheart neckline, piping, or a special hand embroidery for which Raziya’s shop charged twenty rupees per square inch. Always she wondered where he was, and what he was doing. She thought of him as she lay in bed at night, worrying about how he was living and whether he was safe. She thought of him as she closed up the shop, and counted her earnings, and put half of it in a new locked box in her bedroom and then walked with the other half to the bank. After three days passed, she forgave him for eloping without her permission. Five days went by, and she excused him for taking the gold and her money. After a week, she even ceased to curse his sweetheart. She began to wish that she herself had not been so hasty in denouncing their union.

One afternoon, at the bank in the market, Raziya asked for her account balance and saw that in addition to the black money that she, like everybody else in the country, kept in the house or about their person, she had saved twenty thousand rupees in the past ten years. Part of that was contributions from Humayun’s salary. And she had been saving it – for what? For her son and his wife and their future offspring, Raziya’s own grandchildren, those little unborn angels whom she would clothe and nurture and educate to a life of happiness and plenty.

The following Sunday, after shutting the shop early, Raziya took a bus to Lajpat Nagar central market, walked up the road with five hundred rupees in her handbag, and chose, one hour later, a pale green baby’s jumpsuit, embroidered with small red flowers on the chest from a shop in the covered market. Before turning for home, she also entered the first bangle shop she came across, where she picked out a box of twelve pretty red glass bangles for Aisha.

Back in Nizamuddin, Raziya looked around her small house, and tried to imagine a daughter-in-law within it. She considered whether they would stay here in this room, with her – she could easily sew a good thick curtain dividing the sleeping space in two – or whether she could sleep in the passage leading to the kitchen. Then there was the question of where their babies would go.

In the end she decided that she could have a partition built down the middle of the bedroom, and she called a man from the market who came with his tape-measure, wearing a grubby brown shirt that needed a wash – he was a Hindu – and took off his shoes and looked respectfully around the space she presented for his inspection and asked, after taking some measurements and walking up and down and thinking about it, ‘Do you have access to the roof?’ She nodded: of course, the roof. There was nothing much up there – only a few pots of tulsi and coriander, and a little chilli plant, and the water tank.

They went up onto the roof together, and the man explained how he could build a large bedroom with an insulated tin roof and concrete block walls in no time at all and for only ten thousand rupees. Raziya thought about it, and bargained him down to five thousand by opting for concrete sheets lined with polystyrene. The man returned the next morning with his men and started work; and Raziya began to furnish the space in her mind, filling it with things appropriate to a bridal chamber.

By now it was the second week of Ramzan, and all her staff were fasting and the small room where the tailors worked (behind the space where Raziya received her customers) was full of irritation – they all complained about the dust that the Hindu builder caused to fly around as his men tramped upstairs, and the noise of sawing planks, and, above all, about the smell of drifting cigarette smoke from the roof, and the delicious aroma of Hindu tiffins at lunchtime.

But the man was prompt, and the room was ready within the week. Once he had finished, Raziya called in another man – from the basti, this time – and paid him three hundred rupees for paint (from Bhogal) and two hundred rupees labour charge, and long before Eid the room was white and shining and smelling of the gloss paint that had been used on the woodwork.

Raziya had in the meantime visited the carpenter on the edge of the basti market, and ordered a double bed, for which she paid nine hundred rupees. The carpenter had made it from solid Indian ply with a slatted hardwood base that smelt faintly sweet and sickly, as if it had been dragged from a rubbish tip, and the next day Raziya came home from Bhogal on a cycle rickshaw, balancing a new foam mattress, plus two double sheets, a thick green and pink blanket still in its transparent plastic case, and some red fabric roses with drops of dew pasted all the way down the petals, which she bought from the greeting card and gift shop next to the chemist.

Finally, when the bed was assembled and spread with the sheet and the roses placed in a vase on the window sill, she took down from the row of hangers in her shop the garments that she herself had stitched: a white khadi cotton kurta and pyjama for her son, and a simple but well-cut thick cotton suit made from a red and purple print with a matching diaphanous dupatta for his wife, and she carried them upstairs to the roof, unlocked the padlock to the room, laid them next to the baby suit on the double bed, spread with its new sheets and patterned blanket. She sat down at the foot of the bed, and put her head back and listened, imagining her son in this place with his wife and child. She could hear nothing, only the cars on Lodhi Road and the crows on the electricity lines and the birds of prey swooping through the sky, far above her head.

Linda walked over to the lectern and looked around her at Emperor Humayun’s fort – with its proper medieval battlements and pink, octagonal sandstone library (like in the history books), its huge elephant-procession gateway and daunting views over the city. She stood in the midst of it all, facing the audience seated in packed rows on the concrete steps of what passed for the fort’s open-air auditorium – on the very place where refugees bound for Pakistan, and Emperor Humayun’s courtiers, and the Pandava brothers, had all stood in their turn – and she couldn’t believe it: that she was finally in India, in this hallowed place she had thought about so often in the past, giving a lecture about the Mahabharata, on her birthday. Ever since she had walked out of the airport and smelt the warm, tangy air, she had thought how strange it was. She remembered her mother here before her – younger than Linda was now, heading off into the eastern part of the country – and the idea exacerbated her slightly exhausting sense of continual amazement. She thought of her mother as she took a taxi into the centre of the city, as she stepped out of her hotel and looked at the streets around her, as she stared and listened and soaked in the reds and oranges and greens, like her dumbstruck yokel self, aged thirteen, in Leicester Square.

And beneath her lecture notes, neatly typed out, was the so-called ‘novel’ that the mysterious Indian customer had asked her to transcribe. The neatness of the typing belied the chaos. Linda was a staunch supporter of the imaginative process, but there were things asserted within which she knew to be
factually impossible
. Either that, or it was an elaborate prank mocking her own Ph.D. thesis. There was, however, a lot that made sense.

Linda placed her notes on the lectern and gazed across the crowd of expectant faces. Professor Chaturvedi had just given the keynote speech – all the usual stuff about the god Ganesh, mixed in with some political statements about the present government, as well as obsequious thanks to the Akademi’s funders, and a rather dry and curt manifesto for what this new body hoped to achieve in India and beyond.

It was Linda’s turn now. Of course she felt nervous. She hoped she wouldn’t blush too much. She prayed her voice wouldn’t dry up, that her hands wouldn’t shake, that the pages of her lecture wouldn’t blow away into the audience. She had watched the professor as he spoke. During her research, she had read almost everything he had published. She was familiar with his frequently pleasing turn of phrase, his gift, rare amongst academics, for illuminating entire ages in broad, clear strokes of colour. She had realised this morning, as soon as they were introduced, that his ability to make antiquity feel
real
lay, in part, in his own demeanour: open, attractive, accessible. And then, his attitudes were voguish: sexual politics was his calling card, gender relations,
women
. Judging by the number of young women in the audience, his female students found it shocking and stimulating in equal measure. As a teacher, he was clearly much admired. Linda wondered how she was going to tell Bharati what she had come to know about Professor Chaturvedi.