Leela's Book (5 page)

This was where I came in. This was where I inserted my precious Leela. It seemed like a brilliant ploy at the time, a subtle and subversive way to inviegle my character into his Mahabharata. Only later did I realise the scale of my error.

Vyasa, you see, was quite taken by Leela: he wouldn’t leave her alone, he harried her with kisses, he pestered her with inappropriate advances. She ran from him, threw herself onto the hard stone floor of the temple where the idol of Ganesh was standing, and screamed at the statue with its dull eyes and absurd fat belly.
Save me from this monster
, she implored. What have I done to my creation? I said to myself as I watched her.
You’ve pimped me to your enemy
, she seemed to scream as she lay there. And if there had been blood in my veins it would have run cold.

I did what I could to wrest back control. I stowed the servant-girl away on a skiff carrying Kashmiri saffron downstream to where the Yamuna joined the Ganga, and sent Vyasa off into the wilderness to indulge in some enforced meditation.

Life expectancy for servant-girls was not very long back then. She lived out the span of her mortal life unharried by Vyasa, and though I bitterly mourned her departure – my first creation, so short-lived, so thwarted – to my delight she was soon reincarnated: this time into the bosom of an inconspicuous and low-caste fishing family who lived in long wooden boats on the banks of the River Yamuna in an out-of-the-way place called Indraprastha. She was born not long before the war that ended Vyasa’s story.

Avatar 2: The Wife-Life

Unfortunately, Vyasa had already had the idea to steal Indraprastha as a location for his epic. At first, I didn’t notice. It was such a nondescript little village (I thought), a mere collection of huts on the banks of the Yamuna (a lovely stream with its snowmelt, mountainbreeze and cold, deeply flowing water). But as it happened, Vyasa’s grandsons had lived there in their made-up palace; and later it would become the Mughal headquarters; and subsequently the capital of British India, by then renamed Delhi. Had I foreseen this, I would certainly have moved my Leela on elsewhere. But back then I was innocent of history’s grubby paws, and could not conceive of anywhere more discreet than this scraggle of champak trees and small collection of fish-odourated people.

With joy I observed Leela turning from a girl into a woman; smiled as I saw what a headstrong young person my imagination had spawned; laughed to myself as I witnessed how my creation had inherited my love of storytelling. For as she ferried passengers across the river, Leela sang songs of the republics ruled by women in the land beyond the Great Himalaya; of the hill tribes to the west where women danced without censure; of the matriarchal rulers of the south, where mothers gave their children money, moral guidance and even the names they carried (… and the fathers, it was whispered, cleaned the house and prepared the dinner). So famed did these rebellious ditties become, so frequently did they turn the heads of the women who heard them – child-brides in fertile red being carried off to their weddings, mothers pregnant with their seventh offspring, grandmothers bent under decades of labour – that they came to the hearing of Vyasa himself, who travelled downstream to take a look at my Leela and gauge the challenge she posed to his avowed mission of peopling the land with the fruit of his loins, with a breed of warriors of particular ferocity.

Leela was not afraid of the wily old Brahmin. She had a low opinion of his cheap narrative machinations, and she voiced it thus to anyone who would listen. She said she had heard the implausible story he had put about of his mother’s conception (of how his grandfather, the king, entrusted his sperm to a bird, who dropped it into a river where it fell into the mouth of a piscine goddess) and as far as she was concerned, it stank: a fishy tale, invented by Vyasa to make his mother sound high-caste, and his own subsequent conception purer. Leela herself recounted a more prosaic version: that the queen, Vyasa’s step-grandmother, was barren; that the king risked his heirs upon the river ladies who lived in such freedom on the banks of his kingdom; that only an unscrupulous liar like Vyasa could have foisted such an outrageous story on humankind through his deceitful epic.

By now Vyasa was a sage great in austerities and since it was irksome to have one’s reputation assaulted by an insignificant ferry-woman, he arrived at the riverbank prepared to silence her. But as he watched Leela rowing passengers across the river, returning with her boat, waiting with one foot on the bank and the other on the prow, her toes stained with henna, her hair uncovered, the five-metre cloth of her sari not even attempting to conceal the curve of her bosom; as soon he glimpsed her – this lithe-limbed lass dressed in very little attire, the cold dark water swirling her unstitched cloth like monsoon clouds around her thighs – he had a better idea. At dusk, he approached the bank and called across to where Leela was sitting with her feet up on an island in the middle of the river. Turning her head, catching sight of his improper looks of longing, she cursed him for his attempts to learn her songs and steal her stories, and for his designs to elevate himself away from the amphibious riverstock of his mother.

Unfortunately, when it came to illustrious matches and the monetary rewards offered by powerful Brahmin sages, Leela’s opinion of the matter made no difference to her father. Vyasa went to speak with him; and by the time I came to know of the matter, Leela was wedded to my foe.

At first, I took this sharp maneouvre on Vyasa’s part as an attack on my story. Thankfully, Leela wasn’t so easily cowed. She refused – so it was rumoured – to behave with propriety towards her new lord and master. She never once (so Vyasa was said to curse) touched his feet or called herself his servant; she neglected to address him as her god; she failed to wait for him to come home in the evening before licking her supper plate shiny clean. Worst crime of all, she refused to bear him a child. ‘I need to conserve my energies,’ she would repeat, ‘for other activities.’ When she did give herself to him, it was the wrong time of month, and the time-release ovarian engine was out of sync. She was a scientific lady who knew the rhythms of her body. Her science paid off. She remained childless.

Back then, Vyasa had old-fashioned ideas. He was appalled by her absence of maternal instinct and independence of mind; he believed she was tampering with Nature, contravening the Laws of Life; refusing his genes their eternal due. She spat back with sarcastically culled quotes from a handy precursor to the Laws of Manu:
You have six choices for begetting a son: Foist him on your wife, take him as a present, buy him, rear him, adopt him or find yourself a better broodmare elsewhere
.

In the end, Vyasa did as Manu advised and got himself a bride who came into the house with bowed head and hymen intact at the age of twelve. Vyasa hoped to teach this recalcitrant elder wife a lesson in Vedic ethics; to spur Leela on to jealousy-induced conception; and to receive, in the meantime, the attention he deserved from a younger spouse.

But Leela was delighted with the arrival of her special saheli, her girlfriend. She whispered to Meera:
I am fed up with men
. She explained, over the sound of tinkling bathwater as they lathered each other’s backs and winkled grime from behind respective ears, her theory of female emancipation; she elaborated, as they crouched together in the courtyard sifting rice, upon the methods they would deploy to convert their husband to the light; she was very clear, as they picked up kindling from the forest outside, about the means available to them if he refused.

Meera, as pristine as she was voluptuous, had been born into the usual, traditional kind of family. When she returned home, twelve months after the nuptials, not yet pregnant, her head full of extremist ideas, her father quit his boasting and sat down to write a complaining letter to his son-in-law.

But Vyasa was helpless. It was easy for his first wife to strike up an intimacy with wife number two; the river was the channel of their friendship; and Leela, who swam like a nagi, took Meera down to the water the morning after her arrival, determined that she, too, would learn that freedom resided in the waves and the shallows.

They paddled there, below the old abandoned Pandava palace. At dusk, they wandered through the burnt-out rooms, picking their way over fallen rafters, wondering where it was that Draupadi had lived – ‘with her five husbands, Meera!’ said Leela. At night, Vyasa would return to the hut he had built them just to the south of the palace, and as they prepared the food for dinner, he would begin to recount another of those tales for which he was famous. ‘And how,’ Meera would ask innocently, ‘was it that you fathered the Pandavas’ father and uncle?’ And Vyasa would begin to explain how his mother’s two younger sons were killed by battle and disease, and that she, needing a mate for her daughters-in-law, came to see Vyasa and begged him to procreate with his half-brother’s widows. ‘On the first night,’ Leela interrupted, ‘the first sister shut her eyes in horror at the sight of you, and on the second night the second sister turned pale with fright, and on the third night these two women – who couldn’t bear your advances any longer – sent a servant-girl in their place.’ And Meera would put back her head and laugh, as the tears sprang into her eyes.

In short, under Leela’s tuition, Meera grew rebellious, and the unfortunate joint husband – unable to impregnate them – was forced, like his grandfather, to foist his heirs upon the local washerwomen.

As for Meera, towards the end of her life, she became so haunted by a foreknowledge of the child-bearing, shit-cleaning, bangle-jingling existence of wifehood that she knew awaited her in future incarnations, so terrified did she grow of relinquishing the bliss of the present for the monotonous future, that on her deathbed she wailed, beat her breast and begged the gods to let Leela remain with her always.

Avatar 3: The Buddha’s Pen

And so it was to be: Leela and Meera reincarnating together for ever after. Nevertheless, I feared the damage this era of Vyasa-scripted epic might do them. And so, at first, as the centuries passed without them putting in an appearance, I felt relieved. But on the ages stretched, and soon I began to get nervous at their absence. Where were they? Wallowing bare-breasted in the warm salt water of the southern seas? Re-born without my knowledge into the forest peoples of central India? Had they dispensed altogether with the hassle of reincarnation by passing Go, collecting two hundred heavenly rupees, and clocking up their time in nebulous nirvana?

No. Only after all memory of the Pandavas’ city – of Vyasa and his story – had faded from the Indian imagination did my prudent characters return to the Yamuna. By now a new philosophy was in the ascendance, and Indraprastha was being transformed, under the Buddhist dispensation, into a brick-built city called Indapatta. Leela and Meera graced this brand-new era of handwritten scriptures, of breathless tales from places outside India, of the breaking of corrupt and obsolete idols, working as scribes, turning the utterances of this latest holy man into something long-lasting. Their existence was by and large peaceful. Much later came the rumour that they had left for Tibet, trading exotic carnelian for nuggets of pure river gold, and later still I heard a report that a monk called Vyasa had been knifed through the back as he penetrated a trainee nun in a cemetery on the Black and White Faced Mountain.

Avatar 4: Wanderers

Their coming and going remained mysterious. Life number four, for example, I heard tell of early one morning, just as I was settling down to a tepid dinner of bread (roti) and dripping (gaomedha) in a cobwebby sarai down by the river. A woman was recounting the scandalous tale of a local princess, Leela, and her handsome handmaiden, Meera. She told how Princess Leela had everything that a woman could possibly desire – saris, servants, fruits brought for her delectation from the furthest side of India – but that she had renounced it all in the name of poetic creation. Fleeing the court accompanied by her maid, she was even now wandering as a kind of minstrel, singing hymns in praise of the elephant-headed god (yes, that is what the woman said, I promise). Of course, with hindsight – in retrospect, during the journey from one rumour to the other – some details of this story were changed in other gods’ favour. Later, I heard that the Rajput princess was called
Meera
; that the palace was in
Rajasthan
, not Dilli; that the object of her devotions was blue-faced
Krishna
. But it doesn’t matter: I breathed a sigh of relief, and rejoiced in my characters’ independence.

Avatar 5: Scriptures

Soon the wind began to blow in from the west, bringing with it a new type of people: from Samarkand – from Kabul – from all those arid places west of Taxila. They came to the Yamuna, erected forts for their wives, tent cities for their soldiers, and penned bittersweet poems tinged with sadness at the loss of the snow, the mulberries, the mountains of the lands they had left behind them. One of their sons was named Humayun, and he, like all the others before him, took over the site of the Pandavas’ castle and fitted out a palace there with a splendid library.

Meera was the young daughter of one of Emperor Humayun’s courtiers. Her beauty came to his attention, and he requested her specially for his harem. Once ensconced in the fort, however, she developed a debilitating addiction. She could not stop reading tales of intrigue and battle, of spice merchants and river crossings, of avenging lovers – all provided in volumes smuggled across the Yamuna from one of the less reputable sarais, and written by a woman named Leela on paper the ink of which smudged as you turned the pages.

One such story was a yarn of two lovers, both women, deceiving the husband who held them captive. It had been translated into Persian from an unspecified local dialect, and illustrated with portraits of the women dressed as marauders from Herat, entering the city in a caravan of Kabuli melons, and leaving in a cartload of indigo-dyed dhotis.