Leela's Book (16 page)

But her mother was undeterred. ‘I’ve decided to take my annual leave over Christmas,’ she announced as Linda set out the croissants and wiped down the counter. ‘I shall come up to London to be near you. We can go to the theatre. Do you need some new thermal undies? Have you got a boyfriend? Are you happy? Are you taking adequate precautions?’ And looking up bravely from her cuppa, she fixed her only child with a wavering smile.

Linda tried not to blush as she made herself a triple espresso.

Linda couldn’t remember her father, who had keeled over quite cleanly and died, in 1982, one day when Linda was at playgroup. All her memories were of her mother, and the tiny flat where they lived throughout her childhood, within shouting distance of the seaside. But despite her fondness for her widowed parent, despite the fact that they never argued, despite Linda’s desire never to offend her fragile sensibilities, the woman who had brought her into the world remained inscrutable. She worked as a nurse, yet they had never discussed the mechanics of reproduction. She was an unwavering Christian and yet, at twenty she had spent five anomalous months in India, travelling there on the strength of a job she had got with a Methodist charity. She had loved her husband, and yet they never ever saw his family. Throughout Linda’s childhood, she had pestered her mother for more information about these two topics – her father, the Indian adventure – to no avail. The mental image of her father was obscure. He existed in her imagination as a hazy version of the man from the photograph: clean-shaven, dressed in a brown corduroy suit, standing in the distance on the steps of a church, with a slip of a girl in a simple white dress on his arm, whose barely perceptible bump (Linda) was only just covered by the long lacy veil. But the travels to India took on a life of their own in Linda’s mind. As a ten-year-old, Linda pictured her mother riding through a desert on a purple-painted elephant. As a teenager, she had imagined clouds of opium smoke, naked holy men, and jingly prayer beads. During the stint in Topshop, the vision had been sartorial: red cotton saris, swishing skirts, extravagant beaded throws. Only when she reached the age of twenty herself did she stop thinking about it. It was all too implausible. But she couldn’t help it if the question occurred to her now and then: how did her mother – this woman now timidly drinking her tea, a cornflower blue bobble hat on her head (she had bought it at the Harvest Festival church fair), who found London daunting, who lived for cleaning the house and going to church – have the know-how to travel alone through Asia and get a job there? Not for the first time, Linda was tempted to ask her mother to explain this daring, once and for all. But she was distracted by the arrival of one of her regulars.

He was a harassed-looking man of forty odd, always dressed in faded jackets and chinos that looked like they had been slept in. Linda disliked him because he was immensely fussy about the way they made their coffee; he liked to send back cups that weren’t strong enough, or ask for extra jugs of hot milk, or insist on a sprinkle made from
pure
cocoa rather than the drinking chocolate that ‘ruined everything with its added sugar crystals’. This morning he carried a briefcase bulging with papers. Pushing his way into the café, he nodded absently at the women, plonked himself down at the table under the window and began leafing through his papers with an air of desperation. Mother, Liz and Linda regarded him dubiously from the elevation of the bar.

‘He doesn’t usually come in till the afternoon, does he?’ Liz said.

‘What’s he brought all that paperwork out for, on a weekend?’ Mother added, more loudly.

‘
Shush
, Mother,’ Linda said, refilling her mother’s teacup and turning away to make the chinos-man his macchiato.

Because she had her back to the door, she thus missed the visually arresting arrival of her favourite customer: a middle-aged Indian man who dressed on the outside in a grey duffel coat and sandals with socks, and on the inside in long colourful shirts (startling orange, blue or yellow – he made her think of an African parrot), who liked to sit at the table under the window, who only ever ordered a large glass of water, a cappuccino, and an egg and bacon bap to follow, and who, as she brought his order over, seemed to emanate the whiff of something spicy – the aroma of camels, palm-trees, glinting surf. She had nicknamed him ‘the Dictator’ because he would spend the morning sipping his coffee, nibbling his bap and whispering into a dictaphone that he always carried with him, and then leave in a hurry to avoid the lunchtime crush.

‘Who is he?’ Linda’s mother asked in an anxious whisper.

But Linda didn’t reply. She was watching the Dictator march up to the table where the harassed-looking gent with thinning hair was already sitting, and place himself in the spare chair under the window. As the women looked on, he arranged his possessions on the table top, called over to Linda to bring ‘the usual’, and turned on his dictaphone.

The harassed-looking man began to protest: ‘Actually, do you mind, it’s just that—’

But the Dictator took no notice. He held the dictaphone up to his mouth, leant back in his seat, clicked Record and started talking.

‘I say, hold on a sec,’ began the man, and Linda held her breath. She feared very much that there might be an altercation.

But chinos-man no longer sounded angry. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and, leaning over, addressed the Indian man directly.

‘Where are you from?’ he said.

The Dictator glanced up. He pressed Pause. ‘From?’

‘Where are you
from
?’ the other man persisted, ‘Are you …?’

‘India,’ the Indian said. ‘I’m from India.’

‘And what are you doing?’ asked the other.

‘I’m composing,’ the Dictator said, in a tone of great irritation. ‘I am composing a work of literature.’

‘Ah,’ said chinos-man, and sat back. ‘In the writing trade?’

The Indian man put down the dictaphone and fixed his interrogator with a disapproving glare. ‘You could say that,’ he said.

‘Really.’ The other man leant forward again. ‘A writer. I need one of those. An Indian. Do you sell your work here?’

Linda couldn’t quite hear the Dictator’s reply, because she was back behind the counter now, toasting the bap and frothing milk for the coffee. She scrambled the egg extra fast, assembled the coffee in its cup plus sugar crystals, and carried the whole lot over on a tray, eager to hear their discussion.

‘So,’ chinos-man was saying as she put the tray down on the table, ‘I’ll give you twelve weeks to get me a book. I handle all rights. You rake in the royalties.’

The Dictator looked dubious. Chinos-man held out his hand. ‘I’m Bill,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Bill Bond, but my friends call me William.’ He placed a business card on the table.
Literary Agent
, it read,
Specialist in Foreign Literature
.

He tapped a second cigarette against the tabletop. ‘Now it’s your turn,’ he said, and added encouragingly, ‘Who are your characters?’

Linda had no time to listen to the answer, however, because by now the café was filling up with customers. For the next two hours, as she cleared away coffee cups and totted up bills, and Mother sat at the counter reading a series of yesterday’s tabloids, Linda heard only snatches of Bill’s conversation with the Indian.

‘This might come in handy,’ she heard Bill say at one point, pulling some stapled sheets of A4 out of his briefcase. ‘
Notes for New Writers
: a little publication of my own. I give it to all my new recruits.’

‘Dear sir,’ the Dictator replied loftily, ‘I’ve been in this game far longer than you. I’m not sure you should categorise me as a “new writer”.’

Linda could see that Liz, who was usually tolerant of the establishment eccentrics, did not share her fascination with the two gentlemen in this instance. The fact that they had not even ordered so much as a second coffee was trying her patience.

Things came to a head at one o’clock, by which time the café was crammed with customers seeking a table.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ Liz said, ‘what’s taking you so long?’

Bill and the Dictator both began speaking at once.

‘We were just doing a deal on a book,’ Bill said.

‘I was telling him about Leela,’ put in the Dictator.

‘He is in the grip of his artistic inspiration,’ Bill added.

‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ Liz said, ‘I think it’s time to wrap things up.’

The Indian pointed to the dictaphone. ‘I have to get this onto paper,’ he protested.

‘He needs a typist,’ Bill objected.

‘I suppose I could do it,’ Linda said suddenly.

Everybody turned to look at her.

‘Linda, what are you saying?’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How can you do it? And who knows what these tapes contain?’ She had gone quite pink.

‘They contain a wonderful story,’ said the Indian confidently. He looked to Liz for guidance. Liz looked at Bill. Bill looked at Linda. Linda found herself nodding. ‘She’s a
postgraduate
,’ Liz said. ‘A student of literature.’ And that settled it.

‘So you listen to what I’ve recorded here,’ the Indian man said, holding up the dictaphone for her to see, ‘type it up, read through it correcting any mistakes, and have it ready for when I return from Delhi—’

‘Delhi?’ said Linda.

‘I’m going to India for an important wedding,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back at the end of the month.’

And then he got to his feet, wedged his
Notes for New Writers
under his arm, and, waving at them all, was gone as suddenly as he had come.

‘Linda dear,’ Mother said, her cheeks now quite florid. ‘Do you think this is entirely proper?’

The sight of his brother’s wife fainting had both sickened and annoyed Shiva Prasad. It was not just the woman herself – whom he instinctively disliked – but also something more visceral about what she represented, that empty, yearning womb, that childlessness. Looking up at Sunita, sitting on the wedding dais in all her golden finery, a memory came back to him of his youngest daughter as a baby, gurgling with pleasure as her grandmother tickled her belly. She had been content and docile as an infant, and she was content and docile now – as content and docile and compliant as any father could wish for. And so it infuriated him to remember how, for at least a year after she was born, a debate had raged about her in the family. It was Shiva Prasad’s own mother who had insisted that he should give Sunita away to childless Hari:
That is the tradition
, she kept pointing out;
that’s how brothers have always helped each other. You have three, he has zero. With two healthy children already, what do you need one more for
?

Shiva Prasad might have felt differently if Hari himself had been obedient to tradition – if he had stayed here in India, lived under one roof with his family, been kind and attentive and behaved like a loyal little brother. But Hari hadn’t done that. He had married some aloof, unknown woman, and immediately emigrated to America, where, to make matters worse, instead of struggling with the cultural and religious void which was the USA, instead of working all hours of the night and getting only visa hassles and debt issues for his troubles, instead of coming home sheepishly to the family scarred and subdued by the whole experience, Hari had seemed to
flourish
. It was unbelievable: each time he returned home he seemed more confident, more cultured, more moneyed. It was one thing to hand over a surplus third child within the joint family to a grovellingly grateful junior bhabhi – but it was another prospect altogether to give away a child to rich American émigrés, as if the baby herself was a needy third-world victim, as if back home in India her parents should be grateful.

Shiva Prasad couldn’t do that. So when his mother raised the question, he simply refused on point of principle: no child of his, he raged, would ever be import-exported to that temple of mammon over the Atlantic just because of a failing of Hari’s dark-skinned whatever-her-name-was.

And here she was again, ruining things. Summoning a peon, Shiva Prasad ordered him to help Hari and his spouse as quickly as possible from the wedding grounds and into their car. In the meantime, he continued to greet guests, to receive their congratulations and to direct them up to the dais to be photographed with the bride and groom. When he sensed somebody coming up behind him, he turned towards them automatically with his hands folded in a pious namaste, words of welcome already forming on his lips. But it wasn’t any ordinary guest. Shiva Prasad found himself coming face to face with his tapasya – his ascetic trial in the manner of the Vedic seers of yore –
Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi
.

At last, they were about to have an encounter. Not just across a row of flashing cameras, or namaskaring guests, or on either side of a Harmonious Wedding Pose, but a close encounter, such that Shiva Prasad Sharma could see each wiry hair on the (slightly) younger man’s chin, reassess the quality of that telegenic nose and examine the scraped-back coiffeur that the Professor clearly didn’t bother dyeing. Shiva Prasad looked about him. No ex-prime ministers were on hand to solemnise the greeting. The only important-looking person in the vicinity was a large woman wrapped any old how in yards of blue silk, with not a gold necklace in evidence on her physically intimidating person. Shiva Prasad couldn’t remember who she was, though he vaguely recalled that she was something to do with the university. But he greeted Vyasa boldly, beckoned the lady with a cupping motion of his hand, and said: ‘Ahhh. Namaskar … Deb … Geet … Urv …’ (What on earth was her name?) ‘My dear madam: it is so wonderful to see you here at my daughter’s wedding. And now it is my pleasure to introduce you to the groom’s father, Professor Vyasa—’

‘Oh hello, Vee,’ the woman cut in. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you that I can’t come to the wedding lunch tomorrow. I’ve got my Shakespeare seminar.’

It seemed that the two already knew each other. ‘We teach Literature in rival faculties at north campus,’ Vyasa explained to Shiva Prasad with a slight smile, ‘but we’ve been friends for years. Ever since Oxford.’