Leela's Book (8 page)

Shiva Prasad debated – only briefly – the positive and negative ramifications of the match. On the negative side was the association with a man who had humiliated him some nine years before in a moment of ignominy. It had occurred when Shiva Prasad agreed to appear as a guest on a political debate show run by one of the new television channels. The other guest was Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi; their scheduled conversation topic, the building of the new Ram temple at Ayodhya; and the conversation was supposed to take place in Hindi. However, so deracinated was Professor Chaturvedi that every now and then he would throw in a word or phrase in English:
historical perspective, apotheosis, divide and rule
. This kind of slip provided Shiva Prasad with the excuse he needed to unveil his fellow guest (with his hollow, treacherous politics) as a fraud, and as soon as he could, he took him up on it with some relish. ‘You find the language of your forebears inadequate for self-expression?’ Shiva Prasad asked. But the Professor merely leant back, smiled across the table at his interrogator, and when he opened his mouth to reply, what came out was a stream of Sanskrit, uttered in a singsong expression so evocative of ancient forest ashrams that it gave Shiva Prasad a little shiver as he heard it. The awful thing was, his own Sanskrit wasn’t good enough to understand what the man was saying. It was only afterwards, as he played the videotape back, that he realised what Chaturvedi had been quoting: a passage from the
Satapatha Brahmana
. ‘Hence let no Brahmin speak barbarous language,’ Vyasa had said, ‘since such is the speech of the demons. Thus he deprives his spiteful enemies of speech; and his enemies, being deprived of speech, are undone.’ Vyasa stopped speaking – and there then ensued the worst thing of all,
a terrible silence
. Later, Shiva Prasad thought of all the wonderful put-downs he could have uttered; the equally fabulous quotations from even more ancient texts; the withering tone of voice he could have used to utter these rebuffs. But at the time he said
nothing
, and at last the television presenter turned back to Professor Chaturvedi and the conversation between them drew to a close without Shiva Prasad having uttered a single further statement.

The incident had rankled for some years in Shiva Prasad’s mind. He never mentioned it at home, and when his meek little Sunita came to him with the news that she was to be married to Vyasa’s son, he didn’t mention it then either. He weighed the fact of having been humiliated by Vyasa against the social advantages of the match, and saw that something more significant was required. Something clever had to come of this union, something brilliant, some extraordinary benefit for Shiva Prasad himself in the eyes of the Party. In the end, it was the nascent Arya Gene Project that was the deciding factor in Sunita’s favour.

On the day when Ash first visited Shiva Prasad’s office, touched his feet, and said, in pure, Sanskrit-inflected Hindi, ‘Sir, my name is Ashwin Chaturvedi, I met Sunita while she was undertaking some work for my father, a writer and professor of—’ Shiva Prasad had interrupted, in English.

‘I know of your father,’ he said. Then he paused, seemed lost in thought, pressed his fingers together, shut his eyes; and when he opened them again, it was to announce: ‘You may marry her. On my terms.’

Shiva Prasad had already been told by Sunita that Ash was a student at the Centre for Biochemical Technology in Delhi. He had learnt from her that the boy had a specialism in genetics; he understood that Ash was amenable to a project of a scale that would outshine the paltry philosophising of Ash’s misguided father. That afternoon, father and son-in-law came to a tacit understanding. Shiva Prasad became convinced that as a science Ph.D. student, Ash Chaturvedi could identify a gene in high-caste Hindus that allowed them to trace their lineage back to the ‘race of Aryas’, who had composed the Vedas thousands of years ago. More than that, he would prove that these noble bearers of Arya civilisation were indigenous to India. And finally, that Shiva Prasad and his family were themselves Aryas par excellence.

In the months that followed, Shiva Prasad’s confidence in his Autobiography grew once more. He told Manoj to put aside the duties he had hitherto prescribed him, of transcribing each and every one of his magazine columns with the long-term aim of compiling a book called
Shiva Prasad Sharma’s Cultural Insights
. Instead, they spent the mornings lost in the bliss of dictation. It was the Arya Gene Project that would provide his Autobiography with the fillip it needed; it was this that would bring crescendo, climax, conclusion – the firework or two it required, that extra bit of noise.

It was this, too, that allowed Shiva Prasad to overlook the awkwardness of meeting Ash Chaturvedi’s father during the various wedding formalities – the engagement, by way of example – for in the scheme of things, what was the exchange of polite greetings, weighed against the glory that was soon to accrue to Shiva Prasad Sharma’s name? Now, whenever he felt irked by Vyasa, or concerned at being humiliated a second time by this unscrupulous anti-national leftist with his preposterous Ganesh theories, one thought went through his head like a soothing forest breeze: the career of his prospective son-in-law, and the use this would be put to by a party eager to advance its ideologies in the areas of education, science and history. All he had to do, as father of the bride, was smile, say something asinine to his great nemesis, and behave, as every Indian knew how, with due decorum.

As it happened, there had not yet been an opportunity for anything more than the most superficial exchange of pleasantries – all other arrangements had been negotiated via their children, or through Manoj. The really important meeting – the union of the two families – would come tomorrow night at the wedding. In Shiva Prasad’s dream scenario, three things occurred at this juncture. First, Shiva Prasad upbraided the quisling Vyasa, making him repent of his faulty conclusions about the sacred Mahabharata and its reverend and holy scribe. Then, Shiva Prasad forgave him, saying, ‘My dear Brother, do let me introduce you to one or two of India’s most treasured businessmen/prime ministers/ charitable benefactors’; and as the women in his family caught their breath, as the garden full of wedding guests quivered in expectation, as the stars in the sky held back their blinks in awe, Vyasa-I-am-so-special-Chaturvedi would put his hands together and humbly intone: ‘How utterly delightful to meet you again, Shiva Prasad Sharma. How much I have benefited from your incisive commentary over the years, dear sir!’ Thirdly, Shiva Prasad would tell Vyasa exactly what his own son Ash thought on the burning issue of the—

But Shiva Prasad’s reverie was interrupted at this point by his wife and daughter, calling to him from the kitchen.

‘Yes?’ he answered.

‘Didn’t you hear the bell?’ one shouted.

‘It will be Ram,’ called the other. ‘Open the door.’

Stirring reluctantly, Shiva Prasad removed his (portly but stately) figure from his carved-wood armchair, and progressed to the front door. He pulled it open.

Three figures stood in the doorway. He saw his son Ram, wearing an idiotic grin. He saw his brother Hari, very bald these days, clad in a badly cut silk kurta. He noticed his brother’s dark-skinned, childless Bengali wife standing in the shadows behind them both and holding a box of expensive-looking sweets. Instead of shutting the door in their faces, as they so clearly expected, Shiva Prasad smiled, bowed his head in a grandiose namaskar and said, almost jovially: ‘Come in, do come in!’

Then he stood back from the doorway (exactly in the manner of the Prime Minister inaugurating a function, or the President opening a new military training centre) as they took off their shoes and filed obediently past him. ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he urged his timid guests, still smiling graciously upon them as they settled themselves cautiously on his Maharashtrian sofa. And finally he called through to his wife in the kitchen: ‘Our brother is here!’ And turning to the party of three, he said: ‘Dinner is ready. Shall we eat?’

During dinner, after Hari made his little announcement – he was asking to waive the small matter of the loan for Sunita’s wedding – Shiva Prasad’s thoughts actually began to crystallise into triumph. Hari had come to plead for his forgiveness. Not only that, he was offering to take unwieldy, sulky, materialistic Ram off his father’s hands. Repentant Hari was perfect Autobiographical timing. For the second time that day, Shiva Prasad danced all over his Autobiographical misgivings.

‘What does Ash Chaturvedi do?’ Hari asked politely as Sunita brought out the dessert (a splendid rice pudding topped with almond slivers).

‘He’s a scientist,’ Shiva Prasad’s wife began explaining, as she dolloped spoonfuls into small glass bowls. But Shiva Prasad could contain himself no longer. He interrupted his wife: ‘Ash Chaturvedi is analysing the DNA of our family, you know, every one of us!’

‘Whatever for?’ his brother’s wife suddenly asked, shocking everybody (they were almost the first words she had spoken); and Shiva Prasad, realising that he had gone too far with this disclosure, looked to his daughter for guidance.

‘Retinitis Pigmentosa,’ said Sunita, and her father had nodded: ‘An eye condition. He will test you, too!’

‘I hope not,’ the woman answered back before anyone could stop her.

But Shiva Prasad didn’t reply. He was thinking how Sunita’s marriage was going to put right everything that Urvashi had disfigured through her union to a Muslim; how this new son-in-law, Ash, was going to prove the genetic purity of the Arya with his DNA project; how Urvashi’s treacherous rejection of her upbringing was going to—

‘Where does the Chaturvedi family live?’ somebody else asked. Shiva Prasad looked up. It was his brother who had spoken.

‘Nizamuddin West,’ Shiva Prasad said.

‘Oh, like your daughter Urvashi,’ put in the childless Bengali wife. ‘Isn’t that what you told me earlier, Ram?’

There was a terrible silence. For a moment, everybody froze. Then they all began speaking at once. Hari mentioned the vital importance of honeymoons for marital harmony. Ram spoke of the virtues of the new cars available in the market and the dangers of driving those old Ambassadors with their terrible suspension. Shiva Prasad’s wife began to explain how the recipe for gulab jamuns was cited in the Vedas, and how they were serving this most ancient of dishes tomorrow night at the wedding.

Shiva Prasad himself said nothing. He allowed the conversation to ebb and flow awkwardly around him, for he had nothing to say. It was true: the location of his daughter Sunita’s marital home, just a few streets away from Urvashi’s, was a great disadvantage. The thought of that place made Shiva Prasad shudder. For while Nizamuddin West was a smart-enough residential colony, well planned, with large houses and tree-lined roads; while it had sprung up after Partition, settled by Hindu traders who had fled their ancestral places and come to Delhi when Pakistan was forced into being; it was also an inescapable fact that it took its very name from the Sufi shrine it stood beside, and therefore from the eponymous Muslim saint, Nizamuddin, who had made this place the centre of his cult. And it was no coincidence that the so-called saint had come here during medieval times, along with all those other grasping, bloodthirsty, jihad-minded foreigners, at the point in history that had changed everything for the worse for India’s Hindus.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the fact that there was a Sufi shrine on the edge of Nizamuddin West meant, naturally, that there were Muslims. Poor Muslims, but Muslims nonetheless. They lived around the shrine, Shiva Prasad knew, in a chaotic jumble of brick houses built any old how, slums that had gradually congealed into numbered houses and properly paved streets with all the craftiness of a colony of underwater polyps extruding their tender tendrils into coral. The poor Muslims worked for the rich Hindus; the Hindus lived in the planned residential area, keeping themselves to themselves and minding their own business. In this way the two classes and religions of Nizamuddin West remained distinct, and everybody understood the status quo. But recently, so the newspapers Shiva Prasad read informed him, the boundaries had blurred. Muslims from the old city, having become unaccountably rich selling halal meat as their co-religionists’ numbers bloated with uncontrolled breeding, and wishing to move away from the squalor of their upbringing, had taken to buying up properties in the Hindu part of Nizamuddin West – and pushing out their Hindu neighbours with their new mosques, their Arabic writing on the gateposts, their ladies hidden away in burqas. And it was here that Sunita was to be brought as a bride. Shiva Prasad pursed his lips and shook his head. There was no avoiding it. The Chaturvedi family did not live in a good location. But there were consolations. The family was well-known throughout India, their house was sumptuous – and the Arya Gene Project would put all other considerations in the shade.

Hari and his wife left the house soon after her awkward blunder, bestrewing their exit with lavish compliments to their sister-in-law’s vegetarian cooking. Ram went with them, to try out his new abode; Sunita burst into tears; her mother joined in; and Shiva Prasad, having exacted a promise from his brother before he left that a journalist and photographer would be dispatched from his English-language tabloid to cover the great wedding in full-colour splendour, left his women to clear away dinner as he shut himself into his study (the Unmentionable Urvashi’s former bedroom) to consider his new life agenda.

An hour later, when he walked upstairs to bed, to lie on the yogically thin mattress he shared with his long-suffering wife, his reflections on the wedding, on his future, on his coming glory, made his entire body tingle with excitement. Tonight was a watershed, a turning point. The triumphant scene of his future conquest of Vyasa, of Hari, of the Party, of India, ran before him like a Republic Day commentary on television. ‘What are you so cheerful about?’ asked his wife through the darkness. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve lost me all my children?’

But Shiva Prasad wasn’t listening. He knew now that a whole new life was just beginning. Tomorrow, the cream of Delhi society – politicians, journalists, shakers and movers – would assemble for Sunita’s wedding to the son of India’s favourite academic. The reception was to take place in a respectable but not-too-extravagant Delhi location, the Flying Club, next to the old airport. Shiva Prasad had been forced to pay for several immoral alcoholic drinks with an old Air Force acquaintance before he could secure the booking, but it was worth the effort. He had then hired the very best Pure Vegetarian caterers in the city. There were to be three different kinds of chaat and some tasty dry snacks to begin with, multi-juice refreshment throughout, the waiters would be smartly dressed in maroon suits with starched white topis, and the dinner that followed – paneer tikka, tandoori vegetable kebabs, two different kinds of raita, three types of daal, a choice of six subji, missi roti, romali roti, kulcha paratha, butter naan, the standard South Indian fare of idli and vada, three types of ice cream (pistachio, his favourite; mango, the desi choice; and something with dried fruits in it ordered according to Sunita’s particular instructions), an array of extremely fresh fruits, Nescafé and/or masala chai – was sure to be talked about for weeks.