Leela's Book (41 page)

‘Wait,’ Hari interrupted. ‘Your sister wanted you to sleep with her boyfriend?’

Leela shrugged. ‘That’s what she said.’

At first, Leela explained, she refused, and it was Meera who reacted like a spurned lover, pouting and sulking and throwing out cutting words whenever Leela came near her. Leela was distressed at the change that had come over her sister. But she thought that she had a choice. She told herself that she could watch Meera walk away with this man who had deluded her, or she could bring her to her senses by agreeing to the tryst that Meera and Vyasa both so wanted. It was only her body, and its functions, that they were talking about, after all. Not her mind, or her heart. And so, on a clear February day, as the scents of spring seeped mockingly out of the wet earth, Leela allowed Vyasa to touch her and kiss her, to untwist her from the cotton sari that Meera’s mother had dressed her in. And then, when it was over, she found—

‘What?’ asked Hari, his head hammering with hatred for this man, Vyasa.

‘That it wasn’t what Meera had wanted, after all.’

She had felt clever, Leela said, until this moment; had thought that by agreeing to this thing she would make Meera realise what kind of man Vyasa really was. Now she didn’t feel clever at all: she saw that it was Vyasa who was triumphant, and that it she who had been duped, and Meera who felt betrayed – and who would from now on be jealous of the sister she had loved. Something had gone wrong between them.

Soon after this, Meera moved out of the room she shared with Leela and began living with Vyasa in a house on the edge of campus. Leela learnt that her sister was pregnant. When the term ended, Vyasa and Meera left for Calcutta, where they were married, and travelled on to Delhi, where they were to live. Alone in Santiniketan, Leela found that she was pregnant, too. She waited, uncertain, and finally she wrote to her father.

‘He didn’t mind?’ Hari asked, trying to conjure up an image of this father-in-law he had never met.

‘He was a gentle, kind man,’ Leela said. ‘He loved us both.’

Her father wrote back, suggesting that she should continue with her MA, until her pregnancy began to show. Between then and now, he said, she must ring him every week, to let him know how she was doing; and it was during one of those phonecalls, as Leela stood in the phone booth telling him of her awful sickness, that he asked the question she hadn’t yet been able to answer. ‘What will you do with the baby?’ Leela shook her head and said nothing. She still didn’t know.

‘So what did you do?’ Hari asked.

‘I went to the mission hospital near the university. That’s what all girls in my position did. They gave you a place to hide your shame, they brought doctors to deliver your child, and then they took it and baptised it, and put it in their orphanage, and you were free to go, a new beginning …’

‘So you were going to give the baby away?’

She glanced at him, and then quickly looked away. Instead of answering his question, she described the strange calm that descended on her in those days at the hospital. She could spend hours watching the clouds pass in the sky, or a yellow-striped squirrel climbing up and down a tree, or the sunshine moving across a patch of grass. After a while her stillness scared her.

Hari shifted uncomfortably. He hated this story – the way she was spinning it out, telling it so slowly. But then he didn’t want her to rush these details. If she went too fast he demanded that she go back to the beginning; that she should tell him every last awful thing that had happened.

‘Meera came to the mission hospital at the beginning of November. She had told Vyasa she was going to Calcutta to give birth in her family home. But when she reached our father’s house he told her what had had happened to me. She hadn’t known till then. So she came to Santiniketan to find me.’

The moment of Meera’s return – Hari would never forget how Leela described it: two girls, mirror images of each other, walking slowly towards each other on the long avenue that led to the Santhal Mission, both their bellies hugely swollen.

‘And then?’ he said.

‘And then—’ Leela began, and stopped. And then. And then for two consecutive nights, Meera and she lay on adjacent beds in that high-ceilinged room at the hospital, dressed in identical cotton nightgowns made by the same hands in Calcutta, feeling their babies moving within them. Leela lay there in the half-darkness, listening to Meera’s moans, glancing over at her pale and luminous face, the eyes dancing in pain like neem leaves in the wind, and as she watched the nurses moving briskly backwards and forwards across the room, a whisper came to her, a lilting intonation of long-forgotten village words: but before she had time to grasp their meaning, they had disappeared through the night under the whirring of the fan.

‘What I remember most,’ she said, ‘is the sudden terrifying love I felt, a rush of love.’

There was a long silence. It was now too dark to see each other’s faces. ‘And what are you expecting now?’ he said. ‘Do you think she will ever be your daughter? After all this time?’

She answered back with a hard edge in her voice: ‘Is Ram your son, really? Will he ever be? Does he actually think of himself as your son, or is it just you who thinks of it that way because you wanted a child so badly?’

He began to shout. He hated her anew, for this true and unfair comparison. He called her a whore and a liar. He shouted himself hoarse, until he was so worn out by his own emotion that he had to go and lie down on their bed and cry himself back to calmness.

Late that night, as they lay together, exhausted, he could sense the warmth of her body at the other side of the bed and he felt a constriction somewhere inside, an unknown tightness. Was it his heart?

He spoke through the darkness.

‘Tomorrow you should go and see Bharati and tell her that you are her mother.’

Leela was silent. Then she put her hand in his. ‘And what about us?’

‘It was you who mentioned Ram,’ he said. ‘I have brought a son into our lives, why can’t you bring a daughter?’

‘I’m not sure her father will see it that way,’ Leela said. ‘And how can I go to her now, after all this time, and disrupt her life? She seems so confident.’

‘Perhaps she’s not as confident as you think,’ said Hari. ‘Imagine a life without a mother …’

‘I don’t dare, Hari. I just don’t dare. Supposing she hates me. Supposing what I say does something to her—’

‘What can it do?’

‘It might make her sad. It might make her turn against her father. Any of these things. And who am I? I am nobody to her.’

To his shame Hari felt a pounding love for this woman whom, logic dictated, was a stranger to him.

But in the morning, when he woke, and saw her sleeping beside him, curled up on her side, he felt the enfeebling, sickening sense of injustice. The fresh sensation of having been wronged. The spouse he had boasted about to friends and acquaintance.
I could get addicted to it
, Hari realised with a shudder.
But if only she had told me: at least then I could say to people that I knew all along, that I wasn’t deceived, that I married her anyway
. And looking down at her, he felt a germ of pity for everything she now represented.

He had slept on the train to Bombay with the money and jewellery in his arms, as if it was a baby he was carrying. She slept beside him. They shared a bunk, Aisha on the inside, her face pressed against the wall, Humayun on the outside, shielding both her and the money from the world. He woke throughout the night: every time somebody passed by, each time the train came to a creaking stop at a country station. He clutched her tightly to him, and in the morning when they sat up to wash their faces and drink some tea, she was refreshed and happy. He smiled to see her like that. For his part, he felt anxieties alighting heavily on his shoulders – like vultures hopping down to tear at a piece of meat.

During the day, as the train moved slowly through the countryside, through a monotonous open country of scrub and electricity pylons and distant villages, with only the occasional tree or pump gurgling water in the corner of a field to relieve the monotony, she looked out and was transfixed by what she saw. ‘What is that?’ she would ask, pointing at a banana tree; or ‘Where are they going?’ as a family of small children made their way along a fence leading infinitely away into the middle of nowhere. ‘Why are we going to Bombay?’ she whispered to him at dusk. ‘Because that was the train which arrived,’ he explained, only now beginning to feel exhausted by this new inquisitive trait he was discovering in her. ‘It was our good luck.’ He had passed a terrible, uncomfortable night in Hazrat Nizamuddin station, sore from the blows the police had given him, cold from the sudden drop in temperature, sad about leaving his mother. He added, in a sarcastic voice, ‘Where would you rather go, to your village in Bihar?’ She shrank back a little, and said nothing more for several hours – until a woman in a green and pink polyester sari climbed aboard with a basket of water chestnuts. And then she asked, ‘Where does she get them from, Humayun?’ The landscape grew darker, and finally, at his side, to his relief, Aisha fell asleep.

The train reached Bombay very early the following morning. He had been expecting a huge crowd and a rush at the station; imagined himself holding onto Aisha as the millions of people of that city pushed against them. But the station was quiet, and they followed the old man in a white skull cap whom Humayun had deliberately sought out for guidance – he was elderly with a black bruise on his forehead and a dull silver and enamel ring on almost every finger – down the platform and up some steps, from where the old man pointed out across the station. ‘Take the C-train,’ he said. ‘Understand?’ And Humayun nodded; yes, the C-train. ‘Get off at the third stop,’ the old man went on, ‘Marine Lines. From there you walk east, past Vardhman Chowk, up Princess Street. The Jama Masjid is just there, next to Zaveri Bazaar.’ He gave precise instructions and Humayun listened and tried to memorise the names of the nearby streets and the market where the best mosque of Bombay stood.

The man shook his head at them as he left. ‘She is too young,’ he said, gesturing to Aisha, and repeating what he had said on the train. ‘There are many regulations in place nowadays.’ And Humayun nodded equivocally, recognising that this was a problem, but knowing full well that the bride was always sixteen or under, for everybody knew that this was the very best age to get a girl married; and, anyway, Muslim law worked regardless of Indian law. Some qazi would agree to marry them under Muslim law; and he clutched the bag of money and jewellery to his side, and tried to feel again the determination that had brought him this far from Delhi.

The C-train came, almost empty of passengers, and Humayun and Aisha stepped onto it tentatively and sat together. ‘The air smells of fish!’ she said, as they reached the second station.

‘It’s the sea,’ he said crossly, for he was concentrating on not getting down at the wrong stop.

‘The sea!’ she said; and, pointing through the bars of the window, asked, ‘Is that the sea, Humayun?’

‘Yes,’ he said, glancing out at the greyish mass of water, uncertain whether it was indeed the sea or a lake or a river.

At the third stop they followed the few other passengers out of the station, and down to the road by a narrow metal bridge. Princess Street was lined by tall yellow and white houses with ornate painted balconies. Aisha and Humayun walked up the road towards the mosque, which was somewhere in the distance. He was apprehensive; she, excited by the city. ‘Can we eat some fish for dinner, Humayun?’ she whispered, as a gust of air from the sea brought a tingling taste of salt and sea life to their lips. He squeezed her hand. He would feed her fish, he would feed her sweets, he would feed her the best of everything that Bombay had to offer. He forced himself to shout these claims to the huge and uncaring city; and the city looked back at him and laughed at his ambition.

They walked on in silence, his eye noticing a courtyard with its stone statues of ladies in clinging dresses, and the large green trees with huge overlapping leaves as big as his head, and the bodies lying sleeping all along the pavement – but his mind was always thinking only of the mosque that lay ahead.

Eventually the white minarets came into view on the left, and he found that he had been expecting something austere and grand, made of red sandstone, inlaid with white, like the Jama Masjid in Delhi – but Bombay’s central mosque struggled to rise above the tangle of shops and stalls at its base.

‘Let’s have some breakfast,’ he whispered to her, afraid again, and they crossed the road to a teashop and ordered omelettes and tea and sat opposite each other in a booth, smiling at each other as he tried not to worry about the future. The first thing to do was find a qazi who could marry them. He sat facing the road, watching passers-by: taking in their clothes, and the way they walked, and how they spoke to each other. Tentatively, he allowed himself to feel pleased by what he saw. When a religious man passed, he ran outside and stopped him and asked respectfully, ‘Please, what is the name of the qazi of the Jama Masjid?’ The man looked at him, at Humayun’s black eye and bruises, and said sternly, ‘You should speak to the manager; he will call a qazi for you. It’s the office on the right up the stairs past the library.’

When Humayun came back into the teashop, at first he couldn’t see Aisha and the wild fear tore at his heart. But she was sitting out of sight, shrunk back against the wall. He slipped into the booth beside her and held her close to him for a moment, not caring who saw them. ‘Never leave my sight again,’ he breathed.

‘But you went outside—’ she began, and he shushed her.

‘I know, it’s my fault.’ He stilled the sudden rush of anger inside himself, and said, ‘Are you ready? Let’s go.’

As he led her round to the mosque’s eastern gate, through a narrow covered passageway of humdrum shops, he couldn’t speak to her of the pang of longing he felt: for his mother, for his home, for Mrs Ahmed’s car even, for the place he grew up in. What had Aisha done to him, to make him turn his back on all of this, to throw caution away, to come to Bombay with her, a penniless, fatherless girl? What dark magic was it she had worked on him? He listed the current insecurities of their life: how they would eat, where they would sleep tonight, how they would find work. What was he doing uniting himself with a girl of this fate and reputation? ‘Stay behind me,’ he said to Aisha sharply, as they reached the gates, and she stopped gazing around her and cast her eyes downwards, submissively.