Leela's Book (37 page)

Leela made no comment on the photograph in front of Vyasa’s mother. All she would let herself think as she walked upstairs was: So this was the house where Meera spent the last two years of her life.

The bedroom door on the landing was jammed open with a pile of books and Leela took a quick, sudden breath when she reached the threshold. Clothes were strewn across the room: silk saris had been discarded on the bed, flung down upon the ochre-coloured quilt like rivers winding down from the mountains. There was a heavy, black and red embroidered skirt hanging from the back of a chair which she immediately recognised as Meera’s. This must be Bharati’s room.

Leela stepped over the half-emptied suitcases and made her way to the desk under the window. The desk, too, was piled with books, and the volume that was uppermost had a scarlet cover and a black etching of a woman’s face. Meera’s profile stared haughtily out at the world. Leela picked up the book. She had known about the publication only since reading Pablo Fernandes’ article on the plane; this was the first time she had held it in her hands. It was a slim volume, of barely sixty pages. She flicked quickly through it –
The Lalita Series
, it was called – and turned back to the copyright page. It had been published after Meera died. There was a short introduction from the poet’s bereaved husband.

Leela slipped the book into her bag, and when she came downstairs again, she said goodbye to Vyasa’s mother and walked away down the road. She found that she was clasping and unclasping her hands as she walked. It was nearly three in the morning, and the night was cold. She thought with pity of the prone bodies she had seen as she arrived in Nizamuddin that evening, lying wrapped in their slices of cardboard against the urine-stained wall of the colony.

At the taxi rank in the market, Leela roused a taxi driver from sleep. Before going home to Hari she wanted to read the poems in solitude. She told the driver to take her to one of the five-star hotels near Connaught Place.

The Park Hotel smelt incongruously of incense, and as Leela walked into the coffee shop, she found to her relief that they had at least turned off the music which during the day came incessantly out of the speakers, permeating all conversation with its dreariness. She sat at a table by the window, ordered a coffee from the young, sleepy waiter, and opened the book. Her collaboration with Meera was among the things she had treasured most in the years that followed. Nobody could say whose lines were whose; the point was that they had done it together. It had been sacrosanct, the pact between them. Leela made the two manuscript sets herself, copying the poems out twice in the months after Meera left Santiniketan to marry Vyasa. She wrote them out in the evenings with the black fountain pen that their father had bought her, and that autumn, when Meera returned, she presented them to her as gifts from one sister to another.

Vyasa’s brief foreword explained how he had found the poems among his late wife’s papers. He evoked the febrile atmosphere of her parties, one of the main attractions of which was her poetry recitals, her modern-day mushairas. He described how happy he was to have discovered this neat stack of verses, autographed with the poet-name his wife had chosen for herself,
Lalita
. He trusted that the reader would take as much pleasure in the poems’ youthful expressiveness as he himself had.

Leela called to the waiter and asked for the bill. A thought had struck her. Why was it that in their poem ‘The Last Dictation’, Meera and she had written about two of the sisters from the epic – Ambika and Ambalika – but had neglected to mention Amba? Amba was the one who, unlike her compliant siblings, refused to be given away as a bride to a man she didn’t love. So incensed was she by her treatment at the hands of Bhishma, Vyasa’s half-brother, that she burnt herself to death in order to be reborn as a warrior, and during her next life, when nobody else was able to kill him, it was she who appeared on the battlefield and defeated him. That’s who they should have taken as their model, Leela thought. Some angry, rebellious woman full of defiance.

She walked back home to Kasturba Gandhi Marg through the deserted streets, thinking of the three months she had spent in Delhi as a twenty-two-year-old: trying to decide what to do with her life, and how defiant to be. Meera had written her numerous letters from Delhi that December, each one full of unhappiness at being a wife and mother, with bitterness at the turn her life had taken, with resentment for Leela’s free and solitary existence. When Leela showed them to her father, he begged her to be careful. ‘Don’t interfere,’ he said. ‘She’s an adult woman with responsibilities of her own. She needs to make a go of marriage and motherhood.’ Though Leela found it difficult to protect herself against these letters – their words seared themselves into her mind – the silence that followed was worse. When the letters stopped coming altogether: that was unbearable. On the day she left Calcutta, telling her father that she had to go to Delhi, in case Meera needed her help, he repeated his advice.

Leela only ignored his warning once during the whole time she spent in Delhi, when, on the morning she arrived from Calcutta, exhausted by the journey, she went straight to Vyasa’s house in Nizamuddin to see her sister. But it was Mrs Nalini Chaturvedi who answered the door of the grand house where her sister lived. She turned Leela away.

‘Will you tell her I called, though?’ Leela said as she left, and Vyasa’s mother had nodded.

Yet no word came from Meera in the days and weeks that followed, and Leela didn’t dare to return to the house. The longer she spent in Delhi on her own, the more her thoughts took her round in circles. She went through what had happened: reminding herself that the twins needed a loving family and the worst thing Leela could do was to come between their parents. In the end she decided that her father was right: and instead of going back to see her sister, she walked every morning to the school where she taught, and returned home to the empty house on Kasturba Gandhi Marg in the evening. She allowed herself to be courted by Hari Sharma, and to make plans for emigration. And it was only right at the end – in the very last days before leaving Delhi for New York – that she went back to see the twins: who would never know, or remember, or be able to tell Meera of the woman who had come to visit them on those two spring mornings.

Leela finished her shower, dressed and came out onto the veranda from the bedroom. Ram was sitting in the garden in Hari’s planter chair, his legs tightly clad in a white churidar stretched out before him. He was smoking a cigarette.

‘You missed the wedding lunch at IIC, Auntie. So did Uncle.’

‘The wedding lunch?’

‘Ash and Sunita’s wedding lunch. Given by the Professor.’ He smiled up at her.

‘I forgot all about it,’ she said. ‘I was sleeping. Jet lag. Did it matter we weren’t there?’ Leaning over, she took a cigarette from him and lit it. Meera and she used to love shocking the aunties with their smoking; but it was a girlish thing, and she had dismissed it after marriage. Only since Hari had broken the news of their return to India had smoking become a habit.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nobody came from our side of the family except me.’

‘Nobody?’ Leela said; and wondered when she should explain that she was from both sides of the family.

He shook his head.

They smoked in silence, and after a while Ram said, ‘My sister is lucky to have married into that family.’ Then he asked: ‘Do you like living here?’

‘It has many memories,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

He shivered. ‘Not at all.’

Despite herself she laughed at how emphatic he was. ‘Why not?’

‘See, I had a disagreement with Uncle Hari about it. I said, “This locality is not good, and the house is so gloomy.”’ Ram sighed. ‘I actually found an architect who said he could make this place special: Rajasthani turquoise entrance hall’ – he gesticulated – ‘red Mughal drawing room, Hindu murals in the bathrooms … But Uncle Hari wanted this … plain, white, old-fashioned look everywhere.’

Leela gestured in her turn towards the house. ‘Your uncle is trying to recapture the grandeur of the past.’

‘He doesn’t understand what matters today in India, Auntie!’ Ram jumped to his feet enthusiastically, still holding the cigarette, and walked from the garden up the steps to the veranda. ‘It is other places that matter now. He doesn’t see the drug addicts in Connaught Place and the prostitutes outside the Hanuman Temple. He doesn’t see all the rubbish thrown in the corners along with the paan stains and the needles. That’s why all the families have moved away from this part of Delhi. The past is irrelevant. Why stay here because of it?’

‘This whole area,’ she said, ‘reminds him of when he was taken as a boy to visit relatives in the government apartment blocks at Golmarket. He loved this place and what it stood for. He had a very modest upbringing, much more constrained than yours or mine.’

As she spoke, she thought to herself how strange it was that this brash young man should appear almost charming to her; twenty years ago she would have shunned a boy like this, of his culture and class and upbringing. And the thought of the years that had passed since then gave her a chill; an odd, echoing sense of time. She looked down at her hands, with their wrinkles of age. She suddenly felt old.

Ram left soon afterwards – he was going to a Diwali party somewhere on the edge of the city – and Leela sat on the veranda waiting for Hari to arrive, watching a crow as it strutted proprietorially on the parapet above, stopping every now and then to pick at something, its feathers oily, jabbing and pecking and hopping in ever tightening circles. Ram had asked her if she missed New York, and she had shaken her head and smiled. But she thought now of the wisteria on her roof terrace, the roses and jasmine she had planted. The distant sounds of taxis and sirens in the streets below. The wonderful silence. She shut her eyes and listened. This place had a quality of silence too.

She opened her eyes again. She had made the wrong decision as a twenty-two-year-old. She should have returned to Nizamuddin and demanded to see her sister. So much would have been different if she hadn’t believed that sly old woman. Later, after Meera died, her father wrote to her about his sombre speculations concerning her sister’s marriage. But it was too late now for such regrets. The question was how to make those mistakes better.

There was the sound of a key turning in the front door and Leela got to her feet so quickly that the crow took fright and lumbered into the air and flew away. She felt a sudden sharp feeling of relief. A quarter of a century keeping a secret: all about to end in a few brief words.

After Bharati stormed out of the flat to go to her brother’s wedding lunch, Pablo had set about packing for his trip to Calcutta. Although he liked to think of himself as a pioneering environmental reporter – a tireless investigator of how India’s new wealth was waging war on the natural environment – his editor liked to remind him, every now and again, that his strengths
actually
lay in literary features, svelte cultural analysis, and a certain way with words. That was his bread and butter, from the newspaper’s perspective. And so he was being dispatched to Calcutta, to write a piece on the country’s new archaeological acquisition.

The newspapers were calling it ‘Museum Diplomacy’. India had relinquished to Pakistan three Savile Row suits belonging to Mr Jinnah, one in green Harris tweed, the other two in a fine off-white linen, as well as several silk ties and a pair of darned socks – which a faithful servant had taken from his house in Bombay at the time of Partition and stored, for the past fifty years, wrapped in tissue paper, dotted about with mothballs, at the bottom of a trunk beneath his own, and his wife’s, much humbler articles of clothing. This trunk had accompanied the servant from Bombay to Calcutta in 1953, from Calcutta to his village three hours outside the city in 1967, and, in 1982, after he passed away, back to Calcutta again with his widow, to their only daughter’s house, where it remained untouched until the day, fifty-two years after Partition, when his widow died, and their child went through her deceased parents’ possessions and saw the note, in old-fashioned English script, explaining that the suits were to be returned to Mr Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the day he came back to India from Pakistan. There was a receipt in the pocket of the tweed suit from a bookshop in London’s Charing Cross.

Since Mr Jinnah had died in 1948, however, and since his only child was a daughter – and not, therefore, likely to wear her father’s clothing – the articles were donated to the nation during a reception for which the servant’s daughter was brought from Calcutta to Delhi to meet the President. The story got into the Pakistani press; two museums, one in Karachi and one in Islamabad, immediately put in a bid for the items; and a clever civil servant at the Archaeological Survey of India in Delhi, reading this comment in the papers one morning, spotted a once-in-a-century chance for national glory and rapid personal promotion.

For the past fifty years, India had been agitating for the ‘return’ to India of a small Shiva lingam excavated during British times from a temple site on the far bank of the Indus and, since Partition, held in Pakistan. In 1948, following Gandhi’s death, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, who had scant time to interest himself in ancient relics, had granted permission for the lingam to be exported, in the wake of Pakistan’s Hindu population, to India; but the official process for the migration of antiquities was considerably more lengthy and complicated than that of humans; and just before signing the final paperwork, he was assassinated. The new administration, cut from sterner and more modern cloth, saw no reason at all why they should continue negotiations on this trivial subject – especially when India was behaving with such intransigence over Kashmir.

Fifty years on, at the Archaeological Survey of India’s prompting, the ruling party in India brought up the issue again with their counterparts over the border – and the current military dictator, a jovial, whisky-drinking man with a dog, who had enjoyed several sympathetic tête-à-têtes during his recent visit to India with that country’s gracious, sari-clad Minister of Culture, proved sympathetic both to the plight of the Founder’s clothes and to the ‘Hindus’ holy ding-dong’ (as he called it in private with his generals and wife and lady friends in Lahore), and to the great delight of the Indian cultural establishment, its press and Hindu priests, the lingam and the suits were exchanged in a rare and much-hyped moment of understanding between the fractious neighbours.