Leela's Book (17 page)

The Lady Professor turned to Shiva Prasad: ‘I hope you don’t mind that I gatecrashed the wedding ceremonies this evening.’ And she laughed, as if she was sure that he didn’t.

‘Not all, not at all,’ said Shiva Prasad. ‘Any friend of Professor Chaturvedi is a friend of—’

But the Lady Professor was no longer listening. Instead, raising her eyebrows emphatically as she addressed him, she said to Vyasa: ‘What I’ve been meaning to ask you, Vee, ever since I read about your New York lecture in the papers, is: doesn’t this obsession with the ancient texts worry you a little? This preoccupation with Hindu-era epics, surely it obscures subsequent matters? You aren’t worried that it will play into the hands of those who hark back to an invented Hindu golden age?’

Shiva Prasad Sharma looked on in bewildered silence as Chaturvedi put back his head and laughed. ‘But it’s our common heritage,’ he said, ‘our history. If you like, the storytelling of the epics – it’s an alternative to the holy books. It’s extremely important to remember that this is the primary legacy of a text like the Mahabharata. One can, I think, distinguish culture from religion.’

‘But these texts are appropriated by Hindu nationalists in an attempt to divide the country’s religious communities,’ said the Lady Professor.

Shiva Prasad could stand by no longer while his culture was vandalised by ignoramuses. ‘My dear lady,’ he said loudly, fearing as he said it that she might poke him in the eye with a pencil, or step on his feet with her heels, ‘it is our
sacred duty
to honour the holy book of our ancestors.’

The Lady Professor gazed at him briefly. ‘But it’s not a holy book.’ Then turning again to Vyasa, she said: ‘So what
does
the book represent to you?’

‘To me?’ Vyasa shrugged. ‘War, principally. The carnage of war. Power. Land. Hegemony over people, honour, tradition. The fight between cousins. And also sex. Reproduction and inheritance are central concerns.’

Sex? Shiva Prasad felt his outrage mounting. Clearly, the man was not prepared to keep his foul views about the nation’s most sacred texts to himself, not even at his own son’s wedding. It was distinctly compromising to be standing here conversing with him. It was people like this who allowed planes to be hijacked, and innocents to be kidnapped, and chaos to be unleashed on a blindly permissive society that was only now reaping the rewards of decades of compromise and negligence. He peered around the garden for political allies. This would be the perfect moment to achieve lasting fame by exposing the hollowness of the ‘Ganesh Theory’ that had caused such consternation in high-up circles. Shiva Prasad knew that the ruling party was considering sponsoring a wholesale import to Delhi of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival which Mumbaikars enjoyed every year with such devoutness. He felt sure that he himself might well be offered the important job of editing a dedicated Ganesh full-colour booklet, tasked with explaining the true history of the god, how he had lost his head defending the virtue of his mother – for there were many wonderful legends about Ganesh that would need to be put in context. But how could this go ahead if Shiva Prasad allowed Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi to purvey his scandalous views like this, in mixed company, in front of an impressionable woman?

The Lady Professor continued to natter away to Vyasa in her hoity-toity Oxbridge-English tonality. ‘The funny thing about Hinduism,’ she was saying, ‘is that every year millions of people continue to be born as Hindus, by virtue of being Indians, but those with an education don’t believe one half of the tenets of their religion. Of course they don’t; how can they? A god with a blue face? An elephant-headed scribe? Phantoms of trees and mountains? But it is precisely the inherent ridiculousness of Hinduism which is its own best defence. Who could argue with a religion as silly as that?’

‘Sacrilege!’ shouted Shiva Prasad Sharma at last. Having achieved a rapt silence, he placed his finger on the large lady’s arm in emphasis. The large lady, alerted by his voice, turned towards him, his finger slipped – Horror of horrors! – skidded, skated across the defiled aryavarta expanse of her breast, only narrowly missing the Himalayan cedar tree of her nipple. ‘Impossible!’ he said again. ‘Ganesh was the scribe of our great Mahabharata. He is at the heart of the hallowed literature of Bharat. How can you claim that the son of Lord Shiva and Parvati is
silly
, as you say?’

‘My dear sir,’ the large lady said, seemingly unperturbed by the pokage of her bosom, ‘you mention Lord Shiva. Ah, well, yes. Who is he? Why, Shiva is an adivasi, he is one of the indigenous forest-dwelling people, a fierce, undomesticated god, remember? That is the point. A god of mountains, of wild places. He is the one whom Arjuna mistakes for a backwoods archer. You don’t think that he was one of those prehistoric Aryan invaders, do you, Mr Sharma?’

‘Aryan invaders?’ Shiva Prasad repeated the phrase: ‘Arya
n
?
Invaders
?’

‘She doesn’t mean invaders,’ Chaturvedi was saying, wearily. ‘Let’s try to keep things decent. Migrants might be a more accurate term, historically. You know very well,’ he said to the Lady Professor as she laughed flirtatiously, ‘that using the word “invader” is deliberately controversial.’

But Shiva Prasad had borne enough. ‘It hurts me, it truly hurts me,’ he said, ‘that you liberal types think we Indians haven’t been invaded enough times through history that we must invent yet another such invasion in the realm of the distant and glorious past! It is a figment of some academic speculation! It demeans our precious Indian culture! India as it was thousands of years ago before these Mughals and Britishers came in and ruined it – in Vedic times, the time of our holiest scriptures – that time was a sacrosanct one, an era of the incubation of all our greatest achievements and inventions and philosophies, one that the greatness of this land is founded on. And you have to turn that time of purity into yet another colonisation from afar, by warriors from the West? You people have gone to an extreme with this undermining project. What atrocity will it take for you to realise your foolishness?’

‘So, for right-wing Hindus the golden age is a time lost in the fog of prehistory? Lord help us.’ The Lady Professor raised her eyebrows.

But Shiva Prasad ignored her. His voice grew resonant as his argument – his disquisition – gathered force. ‘Everything,’ he said, ‘every single thing that we know and honour as good, derives from that time only. And people like you – educated people with suspect loyalties – want to take it away from us. You tell us that our precious indigenous Arya culture was brought to India on horseback by prehistoric Europeans, is it? Just as the modern Europeans brought us trains and bureaucracy, is it? You know that these former British colonial masters of ours, who held India and bled it for over two hundred years, that it was
they
themselves who invented this theory, about their forefathers coming here and making us into Aryas? My dear lady, your whole mindset has become enslaved to a corrupt colonial paradigm. I pity you.’

With that, Shiva Prasad turned away disgusted, only to witness another outrage from the Chaturvedi family. At the far end of the garden, sitting on a bench, not taking any notice of the sacred wedding celebrations around her, was Professor Chaturvedi’s daughter – a young woman who had chosen to leave her native place to study in England, about whom he had heard (from a shocked Sunita) rumours of loose European habits and sexual misbehaviour – looking up into the eyes of a handsome youth with lascivious longing. As he watched her, Shiva Prasad felt a cold fear take hold of him. Chaturvedi himself had just made it quite clear: everything
his
family stood for was counter to everything that Shiva Prasad’s held as best. The worst of it was that, somewhere deep inside him, Shiva Prasad had known this all along. He had allowed himself to turn a blind eye to the faults of this wedding union because of the Chaturvedis’ wealth and social standing. And because of the benefits of the Arya Project with Ash, of course. Above all, he had deluded himself into believing that Professor Chaturvedi would come to appreciate the great qualities of Shiva Prasad Sharma himself. That was never going to happen, he knew it clearly now. Ash’s father had not sought his opinion once in all the time that they had been conversing together. He had ignored him, rather, and had given his attention instead to this wholly insignificant Lady Professor of literature.

And meanwhile, over in the corner of the garden, Chaturvedi’s daughter suddenly stood up, put out a hand, and pulled the tall lanky youth to his feet. Chaturvedi’s wicked Sex Daughter, Shiva Prasad saw with mounting indignation, was in the act of profaning the holy nuptials.

‘I was at school with your brother Ash,’ the young man said to Bharati as they stood in the queue. ‘Until Class Nine when we moved back to Bangalore.’

She tilted her head to one side, appraising him. ‘So we haven’t met since we were …?’

‘Fourteen,’ he said.

‘Fourteen,’ she repeated, amused at how that
very
shy and gangly boy had turned so pleasingly into this serious-faced – almost handsome – person.

‘Were you one of the ones he played chess with always?’ she said with a smile, and the man, whose name was Pablo, nodded.

Bharati added, with teasing grimness: ‘And what’s more you, were a
birdwatcher
.’

‘Ah,’ he answered solemnly, ‘I still am.’

‘And do people still mock you for it?’ She remembered how
uncool
she and her teenage schoolfriends had always considered Ash and his posse, with their spectacles and long words and erudite passions.

‘It seems they do,’ he said, smiling at
her
now.

‘And what are you doing these days?’

Pablo had moved back to Delhi four years ago for college, and now he was working as a journalist for the
Delhi Star
. He was a junior reporter, so he covered everything: schooling, health, politics. He liked doing stories on literature and culture. But the environment was his speciality: smog, river pollution, species extinction. He began to talk about wildlife with an enthusiasm she dimly remembered from their schooldays. Delhi, he said, was built over the Khandava forest. ‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘the ecological genocide in the Mahabharata? When they burn down the forest and all the snakes and animals perish?’ She shook her head. ‘Well,’ he said – and launched into a long description, which culminated in an even longer list of each and every local bird species that was facing eradication. ‘Despite everything we are doing to this city there are still good places to see birds, though,’ he went on and Bharati pinched her toes together under the hem of her sari and dared herself to lean up and stroke him on the cheek to make him shut up. She didn’t dare, however, not quite yet. ‘Did you study environ mentalism at university?’ she asked, when she could bear no more armageddon.

‘No,’ he said, looking over at the stage, where Ash sat garlanded with jasmine and marigolds, ‘Literature.’ He regarded the bride and groom in silence for a moment and then turned back to her again. ‘You know that I wrote the story on your—’ he began, and then stopped.

‘What?’ she asked. Her eyes had been roaming over Pablo himself, reappraising his long red cotton kurta and faded jeans, his thin dark face and curls, and as he turned to look at her, she suddenly felt very hopeful.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and she took him by the arm.

‘Hey,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s get away from here.’ She pushed him through the crowd, across the garden, until they reached a bench against the far wall where an old couple was sitting in silence, watching the party.

‘How strange to be married so near Diwali,’ Pablo said, as they sat down.

‘The bride’s father insisted. He called an astrologer. And although Ash is a scientist, he still didn’t object.’

‘Your brother,’ Pablo said, after a moment, ‘was always very kind to me in school.’ And as he talked about his life, about the small, modest privations of which she could have no conception, she felt the warmth of his arm, the pressure against her bare skin … and her own desire, thickening within her.

It was now quite dark and the scene in the garden was both illuminated and blurred by the thousands of fairylights slung through the trees, along the hedges, over furniture, around tables. It was while he was saying something about the originality of her father’s scholarship that she leant over and kissed him on the mouth, her parted lips pressed to his, her tongue touching his. In London she had done this to virtual strangers many times. But now she sat back, breathless, both alarmed and pleased, and waited. Of course he couldn’t kiss her back, they were at a wedding, sitting beside some old relatives of the bride’s. But when he bent down to whisper in her ear, instead of words, she felt his tongue, his teeth, on her earlobe. She looked round, and wondered if there was anywhere they could go.

There were food tables all along the edge of the garden, draped with long white cloths taped to the bottom of the table legs so that guests didn’t trip up on the fabric. The tables had been empty until now, but waiters, young men of around her age, were just beginning to bring out the food. They were lighting the tabletop gas burners, and setting over them steel tureens of curry, trays of rice, and bowls of daal. Most of the tables were laid out end to end near the entrance to the garden, but there was one, set back from the rest, under a champak tree, and this was still empty. The waiters would probably put the desserts or tea there later, after the first course had been eaten. The table was in semi-darkness; whoever had draped fairylights around the garden had forgotten to wind some through the tree’s branches.

Bharati stood up. ‘Follow me,’ she said, and took him by the hand.

Under the champak tree she knelt down behind the table, out of sight, and unpinned one side of the cloth. She crept in first, and he came in behind her, pinning it back. She laughed, pleased with her daring. It was dim under here, and the grass was damp. She closed her eyes, allowing the sounds and smells of the wedding to waft around her.