Leela's Book (36 page)

‘But one day, Shiva Prasad took to the floor with a dramatic decision. “My dear friends,” he announced very softly, trying not to traumatise them, “I am returning to Amarkantak. I am renouncing the world and travelling back to the source itself, to the holy river. My time as a householder is over. I must give all my energies up to the people who need me. I must leave India’s capital and turn to a life of sacred seclusion in the forest.”’

At this point the batteries ran out, and Shiva Prasad listened to the clunk of the machine and reflected with something of his old, excited tingle, on the disappointment he would inflict on his Party. He knew that sooner or later he would have been offered a glorious ministerial post, and that over the coming months, people all over India would shake their heads and say,
Shiva Prasad is instead becoming a Vanaprastha – what a loss to Indian society! How nobly he is retiring to the forest before even collecting his worldly accolades! What an inspiring example he sets for us all!

Nothing could harm him now – not the outrages of the Chaturvedi family, nor the marriage Urvashi had made, nor the spurning of his talents by the Party. For thousands of years, twice-born Hindus in India had reached this stage of life, and become noble Arya Vanaprasthas. Now it was his turn to bow his head to Dharma and peacefully follow where they had led before.

They were swimming underwater, the current rippling over their bodies, the pale green light washing through them as they moved through the river – so fast that even though her eyes were open she could sense but not see Meera beside her, her sari streaming out, sinuous as seaweed. The telephone began ringing. ‘Answer the phone, Leela,’ Meera said, her voice commanding, and when her sister turned towards her, Leela looked into her eyes, large and questioning and angry, and saw the wound on her head where the truck had struck her. She picked up the receiver and put it to her ear.

‘Where were you last night?’

But Meera and she had never learnt to swim, it was something she did after she moved to New York.

‘Where
were
you?’ Her husband’s voice.

‘Last night?’ She couldn’t remember what had happened.

‘You didn’t come home. I rang throughout the night.’

‘I came home,’ she said logically, looking around her at the bedroom. ‘I’m here now.’

‘It’s four in the afternoon. Where were you during the night? Where did you go?’

The light was coming in through the curtains. She remembered suddenly. ‘I went to see Vyasa’s children,’ she said, momentarily triumphant at the recollection. ‘I went to see their ayah.’

She remembered everything now: Raziya, the shrine, the fire, the journalist who knew about the poems, Vyasa’s mother. Nothing had happened as she had wanted it to.

‘Why?’ Hari was asking.

‘There’s something I needed to discuss with them,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But I didn’t manage it,’ she added.

‘What is it you have to discuss?’

‘I can’t tell you till I’ve spoken to them.’

‘Why not?’

‘It concerns my sister.’

‘Is it something serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what is so serious that you can’t tell your husband?’

‘So many things, Hari,’ she said. ‘So many things are so serious that I can’t discuss them with you.’

‘You don’t want to?’

‘I want to.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Tell me.’

‘No, please, not on the telephone.’

There was a silence, and then Hari said, very slowly, for he was issuing an ultimatum: ‘I am going to come home now. And if you can’t tell me what has been going on—’ his voice broke, ‘and whatever it is that’s so serious, then … I don’t know how we can go on together.’

He put the phone down and she lay back in bed, closing her eyes, trying to return to that river where she had been swimming with Meera until the phone rang.

But she couldn’t. She got out of bed and walked through to the bathroom to stand beneath a cold stream of water. Meera was gone, and after twenty years she had still not atoned for the things they had done to each other.

This was what she had achieved last night: the realisation that the way she had acted all these years was selfish, cowardly and wrong. If she had learnt a single truth from her childhood it was that it didn’t matter who brought you up, family or strangers, as long as those people were capable of giving you love. She, who had divined the preciousness of this bond at the earliest age – who could not remember anything of the family she had had before; who felt, as a young woman, that this chance had taught her life’s most important lesson – had learnt of Meera’s death twenty years ago, and done nothing. Instead of returning to Delhi to offer Vyasa’s children her presence and love, she had allowed her fear and resentment to stifle the one thing she believed in. And as the water streamed over her body, filling her eyes and ears, Leela willed herself to think on that one last promise she had made to Meera as they said goodbye in Santiniketan.
If anything happens to me, you will look after them, won’t you?
And Leela answered:
Yes, Meera, I will, I promise
.

It had been the darkest hour of the night when Leela opened the gate of Vyasa’s house in Nizamuddin West. She had seen the light come on in the downstairs window and hoped that it was one of the children. But when she stepped through the flowerbed and up to the window and saw the plump, contented old lady with her plait of white hair, she thought to herself:
Good
. Better to have the conversation about her sister’s last years with the mother than with her son. ‘Hello, Mrs Chaturvedi,’ she said, and the old woman – her given name was Nalini – looked up at the sound of Leela’s voice and peered out into the garden.

Vyasa’s mother had come downstairs that night, unable to sleep. On nights such as these, when the sleep wouldn’t come, she waited until everybody else in the household was in bed, and then she made her way down to the kitchen, where she prepared for herself one of those special dishes which she loved, and which her over-anxious doctor had tried to abolish from her diet: sliced bread fried in ghee with a fried egg on top. The young Tamil doctor complained it was bad for her weight, and thus for her diabetes, and consequently for her eyesight. But it tasted good; and how many more sights did one need to see at her age? She had seen her son married, her son widowed, and now her grandson take a wife. She had lived through Partition and the Emergency and this ‘liberalised’ phase when young girls had boyfriends and self-respecting ladies wore skimpy tops. She had heard her relatives gossip about her granddaughter’s behaviour; had seen the blue and turquoise vase – her oldest possession – smashed by the maid. She had seen enough.

She took her plate through to the front room, sat down in her favourite chair next to the open window – the breeze came in but the wire gauze kept the insects out – and allowed the small frugal bites which she took of this delicious concoction to bring back the peaceful feeling that had gone ever since Bharati returned to Delhi. This evening her mind couldn’t leave the subject of her granddaughter alone. She loved Bharati, and yet she was also aware that the girl, pretty and clever though she was, was nevertheless not all she could have been. She lacked a certain gravitas, and that lack was quite improper; it saddened Mrs Nalini Chaturvedi to see that an old-fashioned type of modesty had all but been eradicated from the manners of those women who moved in her son’s academic circles. For Bharati, in particular, it was a shame, and Nalini felt quite strongly that it went against the very matter of womanhood itself. The girl was composed of too much emotion. She was all
heart
– she wore it on her sleeve, on her skirt hem, wherever the fancy took her – and not enough
common sense
. It was at this point in her ruminations that Leela spoke.

Because it was dark outside, and the lamp at her elbow cast a warm light across her person, and there was in addition the mosquito gauze that mercifully divided them from each other, the speaker’s outline was blurred. But Nalini knew at once who it was, standing in the front garden, wrapped in a shawl, half-hidden by the bamboo bush. She bravely suppressed a yell at this ghostly vision, having never forgotten the girl who had come to see her on that day in January 1980 – thin and dark and mournful, like a sad lady from one of those Kalighat paintings: an unlucky village orphan, snatched from one life and placed, with such disregard for social strictures, in another.

Back then, Nalini knew just by the look on Leela’s face that the girl was dangerous.

‘I think my sister lives here,’ the young girl standing on the doorstep had said; but Nalini was unmoved, and replied in her grandest manner: ‘My daughter-in-law doesn’t want to be disturbed. She is busy with the twins’; for she had overheard a conversation between her son and his troublesome wife in which Meera had shouted that she no longer wished to see her sister, and it had been difficult for Vyasa to calm her down.

Leela dropped her eyes and left the house without another word; and Nalini heard nothing more of her. And now, here she was, making trouble again. ‘It’s rather late,’ Nalini said, in an unfriendly voice.

Leela smiled and said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs Chaturvedi. I came to Nizamuddin to pay a visit, but there was a fire in the basti and that delayed me.’

Nalini raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered from your fainting fit,’ she observed. ‘It must be all the travelling you’ve been doing.’

Leela gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m so sorry. It was a lovely wedding. I hope it didn’t spoil the event. It’s never happened to me before, but after twenty years away everything feels so strange, and yet so familiar.’

‘Our families have collided again, it seems,’ Nalini said.

‘It is especially odd being here without Meera. And then, seeing her children, grown up.’

Nalini said nothing.

‘It must have been difficult for them, growing up without a mother,’ Leela went on.

‘My son was there to look after them,’ Nalini was moved to correct her. ‘I was there too.’

‘Yes,’ Leela said. ‘They certainly seem to be very nice children.’

‘I have been blessed,’ Nalini said. She studied Leela through the gauze, wondering whether to invite her into the house. She decided against it. ‘Do you have any issue of your own?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Leela said; and Vyasa’s mother shook her head at the involuntary pity she felt for this thin dark foundling.

‘Meera wrote about you in one of the letters she sent me after she was married,’ Leela said after a moment, in her low voice.

‘She wrote that she didn’t like me, I imagine.’ Nalini was under no illusions about the extent of her daughter-in-law’s betrayal. Meera had been a Calcutta urbanite – exquisitely turned out, educated to excess, as lovely, so everybody said, as a champak flower. But Vyasa’s mother never trusted her daughter-in-law. She had wanted her son to marry a good, fair-skinned U.P. Brahmin; not a Kayasth fish-eating Bengali. She suspected that Meera didn’t love Vyasa; and Meera certainly didn’t love his mother. Worst of all, she appeared not to love her children. Only after the ayah arrived did the babies flourish. And only after Meera died, two years later in that strange accident, did Vyasa’s mother grow to love his children.

Leela said, ‘I think she sometimes wished she was back in Bengal without the responsibilities of—’

‘That was her destiny,’ Nalini interrupted. ‘It’s the destiny of all of us. What’s more, she chose it. She had nothing to complain about. Her husband loved her and provided well for her. He gave her this house—’ She gestured around her with one hand. ‘What did she have to complain about?’

‘She was homesick.’

‘All young brides are homesick. I was homesick once. It’s what happens.’

‘She missed home.’

‘No, she didn’t. She never wanted to visit her father in Calcutta.’ Nalini peered out at Leela. ‘You never wanted children of your own?’

Leela shook her head, and Nalini felt displeased. Something about the way this foundling carried herself gave the old woman an impression of … she wasn’t sure what; something she couldn’t quite distinguish or define;
poor woman
. Not to have borne a child; not to have suckled an infant; to have been denied every woman’s greatest achievement.

‘Mrs Chaturvedi, may I wash my face before going home?’ Leela said. ‘I feel quite shaken by the fire.’

This time, Nalini nodded quite benignly. ‘I’ll open the door,’ she said, and got to her feet. Neither of the children were here – it could do no harm.

She unlocked the front door and pointed up the stairs. ‘Use the bathroom through the bedroom straight ahead of you,’ she said. ‘The only other person here is my son, who sleeps on the floor above.’

Nalini nevertheless waited in some trepidation as Leela walked upstairs, and was glad when she soon returned and took her leave. As she watched Leela Bose walk away down the street, something about their conversation hovered like a wraith in the back of her mind. But she couldn’t seem to get any firm purchase on it, beyond a feeling of having been compromised in some way. She locked the front door again and walked slowly upstairs to bed.

Almost the first thing Leela saw as she stepped through the door of Vyasa’s house was the framed picture on the stairs of Meera. It was taken on the first day of their BA degree at Presidency College in Calcutta – and you could see that she was happy. Such plans they had, what grandiloquent visions, as teenagers they had dreamt of rich, meaningful lives. They were going to be poets, like Rabindranath Tagore, and they had enrolled on the literature degree to read and learn from the canon – from Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. Many years later, Hari would tell his friends,
My wife has a degree in English!
, as if she had joined some exclusive, international club; but Leela herself never questioned the politics of what they were doing until one night, a few days after their final examinations, when Meera came and announced her decision: to leave Calcutta for Tagore’s university in Bengal, to study Sanskrit and Bengali, to write other, better poems in a more authentic environment. ‘You want to go and live out there, in the middle of nowhere, away from the city?’ Leela said in an unbelieving voice, well aware that the things that engaged her sister most were city pleasures (late-night conversations over coffee, midnight walks, throngs of elegantly dressed women, chance meetings with loquacious men). In the end, however, she agreed with Meera’s plan; their grieving father, always trying to be liberal, let them go; and it was there, at Santiniketan, that Vyasa found them.