Leela's Book (33 page)

For months, the way in which she was to take this chance remained opaque. Then, one evening, when her mistress was dressing for a party, Raziya entered the room to find her angrily pulling off an embroidered shirt. ‘The cut is wrong,’ Meera said, standing before her, naked but for a skirt and bra. She held out the shirt and dropped it to the ground. ‘Can you fix it?’

Raziya nodded. Her father had been a tailor; she had grown up hearing the whirr of his sewing machine. He made his money from the dull, straightforward clothes that men liked to wear, the simple long shirts and baggy cotton trousers with their endearingly limited range of variation. But he also made clothes for his daughters, and although Raziya had never been encouraged to think that she might practise this profession – of course not – she had learnt it de facto. She had learnt how to sew and cut and hem. She had been taught about the fall of certain fabrics. She knew, above all, how to achieve with her needle and scissors the things that made women happy.

And so, as she sat on the veranda in the afternoons, the twins asleep in the room behind her, one of her mistress’s silk blouses in her hands, she began to imagine a small shop in the basti, designs from catalogues pinned to the walls, an array of coloured threads, the satisfying snip of her tailoring scissors. As a first, tentative step, she sold the thick gold earrings dotted with jewels that the woman had given her, and bought a sewing machine. After that, she began to take in the odd bit of sewing for neighbours. Over the next few years, she continued to dream of this shop and the life it might entail.

Then, by the time the twins turned three, Raziya got pregnant at last. Remembering the morning at the tomb, she named her boy Humayun. Her husband, cautious at the best of times, agreed that it was a nice name, though unusual; her mother-in-law openly disapproved, complaining that people would think her grandson was a Shiah; but Raziya was adamant. She wanted her son to remind her of how she had acquired ambition, and how, one day, she would secure him a life different from her own.

Perhaps nothing further would have happened if her husband, sickly as he was, had not contracted dengue fever and died. Raziya was now a widow, with a weaker position in her in-laws’ home than before. She knew that if her business was to thrive, she had to move out. She could never achieve financial independence if she stayed: her brothers-in-law would circumscribe the hours she worked; her sisters-in-law would interfere and say disparaging things to her clients; all of them would want to take a cut.

There was a building she had seen on the Lodhi Road side of the basti. The cheap top-floor rooms were for sale; the commercial property at the bottom was being put out on rent. The living space that went with the shop was crucial. So Raziya went to see the Professor and told him what she needed. Humayun was only four years old – she was a widow, with a tiny son, he couldn’t very easily refuse her. She showed him the work she was doing; she explained about the commercial opportunity she, as a female Muslim tailor, offered in this neighbourhood. She would continue to come in part time, for a year or so, to take care of his children. But soon they wouldn’t need an ayah. They were already busy with school – their grandmother was living with them; and by the time her shop was established, Raziya calculated, she would have looked after the twins for long enough.

What the Professor suggested pleased her: he would buy the shop and the residence outright from the owner, she would buy it back from him in monthly instalments. By the time the property was entirely hers, she would have paid him three per cent more than the original selling price, in line with inflation.

And that was what happened. He had papers drawn up, which she signed; she took her son and moved to their new home; and throughout the years that followed, there would come moments when she would look up – at her workers, at the rail of ladies’ suits, at the measurement book where the statistics of every woman she sewed for were recorded – take a deep breath and go slowly upstairs to her bedroom, to unlock the trunk and unfold the cloth bundle with its thick gold bangle and long Hindu necklace, and remind herself of how it had happened.

Even though many years had passed, Raziya had remembered the woman immediately when she passed by the shop after closing time – still the same wavy black hair, the same erect bearing, above all the same impossibly elongated eyes. But things were different now – Raziya was a businesswoman, not a servant – and she refused to speak to the woman about the gold, even though she hadn’t sold it. She had kept the thick bangle and the chain with its pendant. The bangle would be good for a daughter-in-law; the pendant, with its lacquerwork butterflies and peacocks, would probably have to be sold. But the woman’s peremptory tone annoyed Raziya; she wanted nothing further to do with her.

As Raziya walked away towards the basti, she knew that Humayun and she were alone in the world, and that nothing but her quick mind could save him from being falsely accused of rape, and that the next visit she had to make was far more humiliating even than the fruitless one she had just paid to the Professor. She had to beg for help from her late husband’s brothers.

They lived altogether in a joint family house behind the shrine, a portion of which technically belonged to Humayun. They had done well for themselves – one brother owned a small shop, another was an autorickshaw mechanic, and the house, though small, with whole families sharing tiny rooms, had a large, electricity-guzzling fridge, and a toilet for their exclusive use. They hadn’t, however, done as well for themselves as Raziya had, with her tiled kitchen and bathroom with a tap. She had done the best of all, and her brothers-in-law knew it and found the insult difficult to take.

The brothers – who in their pious old age had abandoned the spit-slick hairstyles and Western-collared shirts that had helped them get on in their chosen professions, and were wearing instead the spotless, pressed, white salwar kameez that identified them as respected and senior members of the community; who played with prayer beads and dropped Arabic phrases into their speech like a sprinkling of almonds on a fine white kheer – had to contend with her anger. They could see it in the way her eyes flickered between them, in the colour of her cheeks, in the movements of her head and hands, and most of all in the words she spoke about Aisha and her mother. ‘But, Raziya,’ they began, once she had explained that Aisha’s accusations of rape marked her out as a whore like her mother, ‘these women are from our own family.’

‘My son has been slandered. I demand retribution.’

Raziya paused, restraining herself from speaking too much. During the silence that followed her speech, she could hear the clink of beads, the clearing of a throat, the steady swish of the overhead fan, the whine of the neighbour’s television. She felt irritated with their ponderousness; it was as if, somehow by virtue of being men, they had accumulated wisdom and worthiness. It irritated her, too, that although she had managed her own affairs ever since she became a widow – had taken nothing from her husband’s useless brothers – now that the police were involved, being a woman and a mother was no longer enough, and so she had to come to these people and beg.

From the mosque came the first notes of the call to prayer, and looking around her at the men assembled in this crowded basti room, with its glossily painted walls and line of trunks on the shelf, where every breath of air carried with it the sweet fetid scent of too many humans living together, Raziya thought again of her tailor’s shop, with its living quarters that overlooked Lodhi Road, its three sewing machines and newly painted sign, its terracotta plant pots with tulsi and mint and coriander, its roof terrace, its simple but clean living space: one bathroom, one bedroom, one kitchen. It was luxury, and nobody could comprehend how a woman, a widow, could have done it alone. When she heard these doubting words, Raziya would mention Khadija, the businesswoman and widow who had married the young Prophet of Islam and supported his mission. That shut people up. How could they know, how could they guess, all the hard work that had got her this far? She would do anything for Humayun.

Suddenly, somebody spoke. Without turning her head, Raziya knew who it was: Iqbal, Humayun’s best friend, the weakling youngest son of one of Raziya’s husband’s younger brothers – a boy who had not yet learnt the value of parroting his elders.

‘Chacchi,’ he began, ‘Cousin Humayun wants to marry Aisha. So it is impossible that Aisha accused him of this crime. That is not the reason why Humayun has been arrested. Police prejudice must be to blame for that. The truth is that both these young people are in trouble and we should be doing our best to help them.’

Since learning of the arrest, Raziya had been told several things that she didn’t want to hear about the relationship between Humayun and Aisha. When she walked back through the basti, the fruitseller on the shrine road murmured something to her concerning it; at her shop even one of her own tailors referred to it. None of these people had ever spoken to her on personal matters before; and yet now that she was in crisis, everybody wished to impart their knowledge concerning her affairs. She understood that she was partly to blame, for of course she would have known these rumours about her son as a matter of course had she not moved away to the outer edge of the basti; she would have been able to stifle this gossip had she not set herself apart from the family she married into. This was why families stuck together with suffocating closeness – it was for crises such as this. And so, listening to Iqbal, she felt the old anger rise into her throat. Aisha’s mother – that witch – with her claims of blood kinship to Raziya’s husband’s family, whose own husband had abandoned her and gone to some other part of the country. She hated to remember how her husband had mentioned Aisha’s mother just before he died – he had known her since childhood, had grown up in the same village in Bihar, and he had always nurtured an affection, who knew how deep, for that stick-thin woman with her hungry-looking face and squinting eyes. Even more, she hated how this woman had got her hands on Humayun by using her daughter to tempt him. Raziya knew also that she should have arranged for his marriage before now. She thought of all the mothers who had come to her door with proposals for her son, offering him their pure, fair-skinned daughters, pious beauties, Qur’an hafiz, undefiled. Every one of them she had proudly turned away, for her son was to aim still higher.

‘She has created this story to trap Humayun,’ Raziya said at last. ‘How will he prosper if he has bound himself in marriage to the child of that whore?’

But Iqbal answered back before any of the elders had time to stop him. ‘The police arrested Humayun last night when he went to report Aisha missing from the Professor’s house.’ He raised his eyes to Raziya’s. ‘It is the laziness of the police that has put your son inside that cell. Humayun feels strongly and with great respect towards this girl, Aisha, whom you so distrust.’

Raziya stared at him. Who was he to talk about her child? She could hear the plaintive voice of animals outside, being brought to the butcher; the calling of hawkers selling dinner tickets to pilgrims. She had seen the blackened mess left by the fire last night and all this unimproved disorder made her throat tighten as a kind of involuntary animosity coursed through her. How right she was to have taken her son away from this chaos, to their own house on the edge of the basti; she would do it again – she would go through that hard, lonely work three times over for Humayun. She did not want her precious son to end up in the clutches of skinny Tabasum’s daughter. She wasn’t even able to say why she hated that woman so much – it didn’t matter why; it was a woman’s instinct. She straightened her back and folded her hands tightly in her lap. ‘You must send Aisha and her mother away from Delhi,’ she said.

‘No,’ said one of the younger brothers – it was Iqbal’s father. ‘We won’t do that. The marriage should take place at once. Then the police will have to drop the charges.’

Raziya shook her head. It was a ploy; she saw it clearly now. They wanted to bring her son, with his driving job and excellent prospects, down a notch, to below their level.

‘You are condemning my son,’ she said. ‘I turned away many better daughters and you know it. I wanted something more for Humayun. Because that girl has got herself in trouble she wants to drag Humayun in after her, and you are all going to abet her.’

There was another uncomfortable shifting in the air, and finally, the eldest brother cleared his throat with a great phlegmy rattle, and said, ‘We won’t let any harm come to Humayun, Raziya. He is part of our family, our dear brother’s only child. We will speak to the elders in the shrine after prayers, and they will advise us. They know how best to manage police procedure. This work, at least, is best left to men.’

‘No!’ Raziya interrupted shrilly. ‘Don’t do this to my son, don’t—’

But the man raised his voice over hers. ‘You will do nothing,’ he continued. ‘We are all agreed on that. Please leave it to us. We will sort the matter out. Now it is prayer time.’

And Raziya’s brothers-in-law got to their feet and ushered her out of the room.

Aisha saw her mother waiting by the gate when Mrs Ahmed brought her home from the police station. ‘How thin your mother is!’ Mrs Ahmed said, waggling a finger backwards and forwards in disapproval. They looked through the car window at her frail parent, hunched over with her permanent cough, dressed in a faded sari. Then Aisha got out of the car and put her arms around her mother. She breathed in her warm familiar odour. The two of them wept.

Mrs Ahmed, meanwhile, had unlocked the front door. She led Aisha and her mother inside, and briskly disregarding Aisha’s tears, took her into the kitchen to help heat some food for her starved-looking mother. ‘I need to talk with your mother alone,’ Mrs Ahmed said to Aisha sternly, as she took out the leftover daal and subzi from the fridge. ‘You understand?’ Aisha nodded. She watched Mrs Ahmed put the food in the microwave, and then, when it was ready, carry it through to Aisha’s mother, beckoning her into the study, and sending Aisha off to sit in the guest room and wait.