Leela's Book (11 page)

It was in good part due to his upbringing. When he was little, Humayun’s mother had looked after the Professor’s children – she had been ayah to Ash Chaturvedi, the man who Urvashi Ahmed’s sister was marrying this very evening. Humayun had grown up around the Chaturvedi household, watching their elegant ways and listening to his mother Raziya’s stories about the twins, Bharati and Ash – who had been raised in luxury but without a mother, poor things. Humayun’s mother had strong opinions about the family she once worked for, and she had pronounced that the affable young scientist was ‘throwing himself away with this marriage’. Aisha, too, who worked not only in Urvashi Ahmed’s house but also cleaned for the Chaturvedis every afternoon, found the future bride to be quite unfriendly and over-fastidious, and sensed that, once married, she might be very bossy. Aisha had confided in Humayun that marriage preparations at the Chaturvedi household were very low-key. There were no special lights or flower arrangements, no visiting tailors from south Delhi or jewellers from Chandni Chowk, no breathless delivery boys with huge boxes of crockery and extra-heavy white goods. The only notable thing that had happened, in fact, was that old Mrs Chaturvedi, the Professor’s mother, had sent Aisha upstairs to tidy her grandson’s room (it was a mess of scientific papers), and then she herself had unlocked the old tin trunk in her bedroom, removed an ancient red and blue quilt, and given this to Aisha to spread on her grandson’s bed. That was it. Aisha, who had been expecting marigolds and candles, jasmine blossom and giggling girl cousins, had pronounced herself, in her turn, ‘very disappointed’.

Humayun agreed. But he relayed none of this information to his mother, Raziya, despite her frequent questions on the subject. It was important, above all, that he did not allow it to come to her attention that Aisha was working in the Professor’s house. Raziya, too, was fastidious, and her greatest disapproval of all was reserved for Aisha’s mother. She liked to point out that the two families were only very distantly related; she certainly had more extravagant hopes for her son than marriage to a girl whose father had disappeared, whose mother had sporadic employment at best (she had recently taken to hawking bananas along the ring road), and who, since the government had cleared the illegal dwellings around the Hindu crematorium, was camping next to the chowkidar’s hut in the graveyard.

Ever since her husband had died, fifteen years ago, Raziya, too, was making do without a man around, and yet she managed, procuring not only a driving licence for Humayun but also employment at the Ahmeds’ – a rich, young and inexperienced couple who had only recently moved into the neighbourhood. Mrs Ahmed, indeed, had been born a Hindu, which made her the perfect employer, for she knew next to nothing about Islam. ‘Three weeks’ annual leave for performing Haj,’ Humayun’s mother had told Mrs Ahmed on the day she kindly volunteered her son as their driver. ‘Twice annual bonuses for Eid. He will need that extra room at the back of the garage quarters for praying in’ – this was, at present, the place where Mrs Ahmed stored her husband’s library of such political- and social-minded books as could not go on display in his study – ‘and,’ Humayun’s mother said, ‘hot and cold water for ablutions.’

Mrs Ahmed had a water heater fitted and ordered three-dozen bars of Lifebuoy soap.

‘He should eat mutton at least once a day,’ continued Humayun’s mother. ‘This is enjoined upon us in our religion.’

With her forefinger, she pointed towards Mrs Ahmed’s belly. ‘You, too, will need this holy diet when the time comes. Muslim babies need Muslim meat.’

Mrs Ahmed, who had been brought up a strict vegetarian, shivered. But the shiver was merely a reflex from childhood; for some time now, she had experienced many thrills (and gained some extra weight) from eating lamb and chicken with her husband. She had acquired a taste for spicy meatballs.

‘Is there anything else?’ she asked Raziya, and the older woman smiled.

‘New clothes on Eid.’ Then she added, as an afterthought: ‘And please do send him to the mosque on Fridays. These youngsters are tending to miss even the obligatory prayers.’ Humayun’s mother left nothing to chance.

It was perhaps in reaction to his parent’s strict measure of the world that Humayun began to take notice of a girl whom he met, quite fortuitously, one evening as he was walking home from work. Just as he reached the poorer settlements that abutted the shrine, where the houses suddenly grew very close together, and the alleys were too narrow for cars to pass along, and there was a sudden increase in the volume of raucous shouting and friendly greetings and none of the amazing
quiet
in which the residents of the planned colony wallowed from morning to evening, he happened to see a girl struggling to carry a plastic container of water. She had turned off from the main street and was dragging the container after her through the gate that led down to the narrow, deep river of sewage that divided Nizamuddin from the housing colonies of Bhogal and Jangpura. She was a thin girl, and her headscarf had slipped from her head and was trailing in the dust behind her. Humayun called out and hurried over.

‘You are Humayun,’ she said shyly as he took the container and hoisted it up onto his hip; as they walked, she explained how they were related through her mother’s family. The names meant nothing to him. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as she listed unknown uncles in faraway villages, and, turning his head, tried to catch glimpses of the girl’s face, now partly obscured by the readjusted headscarf. When they reached the drain itself, she made as if to cross the small concrete bridge that led up to the bank on the other side.

‘But where are you going?’ Humayun asked, suddenly aware of where they were standing: on the edge of the drain that curled through the centre of the city.

This was how he learnt that Aisha and her mother lived in the graveyard. She led him across the putrid stream, up the sandy bank strewn with rubbish, plastic bags, little trails of human shit, past the foraging pigs with lines of mud along their backs from wading through the sewage, to the graveyard on the crest of the hill. ‘We have to enter the graveyard through here’, Aisha explained to him, indicating the green gate enclosing the space where the Muslims buried their dead, to her left. ‘In there,’ she whispered, pointing to the right, to a high wall topped with shards of coloured glass, ‘is the Hindu crematorium.’

Humayun followed Aisha through the gate and between the trees and sandstone headstones to a slight rise in the middle where a white wall enclosed some graves set apart from the rest. Here the watchman lived with his family. Her mother, she explained, rented a tent space for them in the safety of this enclosure. Humayun stared, unable to voice his words.
You sleep here? Alone?
The old caretaker, Aisha told him soothingly – half anxious at the disgrace, half concerned that he shouldn’t worry – kept out miscreants and kept an eye on them.

That night, Humayun returned to his mother’s tailor’s shop in a rage at the shame of it. She had pulled down the shutters and was putting away the articles of clothing her tailors had finished. As he fumed, she listened in silence, picking stray threads off a newly ironed kurta. Finally, she said, ‘I won’t have anything to do with that woman, and neither will you.’

The very next morning, early, before he had to be at work, Humayun returned to the graveyard, this time carrying a pail of milk. Large lumbering black buffalo were being led through the gate and down to the drain. Humayun walked after them, towards the water, to examine it in the daylight. Early morning was the time he loved most in Delhi, while the mist still sat low upon the roads and the river, and the highways where the buses ran nonstop at the height of the day were almost empty. He stood on the bridge that Aisha and he had crossed the night before and looked along the drain to the east. A huge water pipe crossed the drain, linking Nizamuddin housing colony with Jangpura, and already there were people washing in the water that spurted out from the leaks. Men, half-naked in their lungis, were standing on the Nizamuddin side, swishing the water over themselves, or soaping their bodies as they waited in line. Women stood on the Jangpura end, tipping their long ropes of hair into the water, swinging them up so that rivers curved miraculously upwards through the sunlight. Humayun, whose nose had wrinkled at first against the thick scent of sewage, wondered now whether it wouldn’t be more efficient for the concerned officials to mend the leak and install a shower on the pipe which could then be switched on and off. He felt unusually happy.

That morning Aisha, too, felt happy when she saw her robust and practical cousin crossing the graveyard towards them. ‘Come with me and I’ll find you work,’ Humayun said, in what seemed to her a tone of almost otherworldly confidence; and he waited as she picked out her best suit, a flimsy orange georgette with long bell sleeves, and combed amla oil into her hair.

They walked back across the drain and went to a house where Humayun’s mother had once worked. The Hindu man, Professor Chaturvedi, seemed pleased to see Humayun, asking after his mother and her tailoring business in some detail as they spoke together in the hallway. Aisha stood outside in the shade of a large glossy leaved tree, overcome by shyness. But Humayun, who had spent many afternoons waiting in this house after school for his mother to finish work, found it unchanged. He was not fazed by its strangeness; rather, the feeling it had always induced in him was a slight, pleasurable feeling of vertigo, so crammed was it with strange rural objects and pieces of mud sculpture and wooden masks hanging from the walls, of men with twirly moustaches and orange turbans, and Hindu ladies with large wondering eyes and red bindis on their foreheads. On a table in the hallway where they were standing, there was even a clay pot such as those his grandmother used in the village, for keeping water cool. ‘She can come in every day for two hours,’ Humayun told the Professor – who opened his hands out wide in a helpless gesture: ‘But we don’t need an extra servant, now that my daughter has gone to London.’ ‘She can wash dishes,’ said Humayun, ‘and mop the house.’ There was a pause, and then he added, knowing that this point was indisputable: ‘Just as my mother looked after your two children, so she will be a good companion for your mother.’

‘Who is this girl?’ the Professor asked at last, watching the young man’s determined face, and Humayun said: ‘She is my cousin. She is a good girl, I guarantee.’

At Mrs Ahmed’s, he adopted a more triumphant tone. ‘I have found you the ideal maid, Mrs Ahmed,’ he told Urvashi – who, not yet pregnant, was spending a very long time in the kitchen practising simple meat dishes. ‘She can clean the house and do the laundry. She can make daal and vegetables and other little things that are too tiresome for your mother-in-law to send over’ – at present one of Humayun’s tasks was to drive every afternoon to Mr Ahmed’s parents’ house in Old Delhi to collect that evening’s meal, prepared by their aged cook. ‘Her parathas are excellent,’ he continued. ‘She knows everything about korma.’ He even added, extravagantly, ‘She can teach you how to make shami kebabs.’

Aisha stood on the doorstep as Humayun arranged the terms of her employment. She could smell the thick, cloying odour of Mrs Ahmed’s perfume. This house was even more resplendent than the last. Mrs Ahmed was wearing flame-coloured silk, and each time she ran her hands through her long, long, silky hair, her bangles jingled. The house gleamed with fresh white paint.

Since then, almost a year had passed. Aisha’s innocence had touched Humayun from the first, but during the ensuing twelve months he watched with satisfaction as her confidence grew. He remarked to himself how her body seemed to alter with her new composure. Under his gaze, her breasts, still hidden beneath layers of fabric, seemed subtly to swell. He wanted to run his hands through her hair. But he kept his desires to himself, for Aisha was young; and lest the other servants in this colony should gossip to his mother, he was careful to limit his interaction with his cousin in public, collecting Aisha from the graveyard early in the morning on the way to work, and taking her home after dark.

He hadn’t broached the subject of marriage with the three women concerned – neither his mother nor Aisha herself, nor Tabasum Khatoon, Humayun’s prospective mother-in-law – and his mother at least, would take a lot of convincing. There had to be some forceful way in which he could do it; but given his mother’s temper, he didn’t yet know how; and the only other person he had mentioned it to was his cousin Iqbal, and Iqbal’s prognosis of his success in this matter had not been good. ‘She’ll never let you,’ he had said. ‘Inshallah the thing will turn out for the best.’

Humayun was thinking this over as he walked along the path that ran parallel with the black and winding drain that carried the city’s sewage away into the river. The drain was invisible from the housing colony in Nizamuddin – there was a park, a high wall, and a line of trees screening it from view – but you could smell it, despite these attempts to pretend it wasn’t there. The houses that stood here were the oldest in Nizamuddin West, and even though they were large – two or three storeys high, each divided from its neighbour by a wall and a garden – in the time since they were built, the amount of sewage in the drain had swollen from a trickle to a flood, and the people who lived here lived with the stink.

All of Delhi was built like this, his mother had once told him: pockets of airy, quiet residences where the rich people lived, and right alongside, pushed into the crevices the rich people didn’t want, the busy scrum of everybody else’s existence. She was proud of the tiny, independent space she had made for them both, her little house on the edge of Lodhi Road; but as Humayun walked, he looked up at the big wide houses, with their drawing rooms, and dining rooms, and their succession of bedrooms with bathrooms en suite, lived in by doctors and engineers, and he tried to imagine how it would feel to live in such a house with Aisha – with all that white space on the walls, all those steps to run up and down, all those doors to walk through and cupboards to open.