Leela's Book (43 page)

Humayun, by contrast, did not take to Bombay. Every morning, as the light of day seeped slowly into their turquoise room and he began to see the outline of his wife lying beside him, he knew that very little time was left before he would have to get up and go out into the city to look for work. The thought made him feel nauseous. He had enquired about becoming a taxi driver – the rates were good – but he was warned that newcomers who spoke no Marathi might have difficulties finding work. He asked a few people at the mosque and in the surrounding areas about working as a driver, letting them know that he was qualified and licensed; but he hated to beg, and although his wife smiled at him when he came home, though she cooked carefully for him on the stove that he had bought with his stash of money (now half the size it had been), though he knew that she was good and faithful, nevertheless each evening when he returned home to the blue-painted hut, reached from the road by a little slippery ladder, he felt the resilience draining from him. As he lay next to her at night, listening to the strange noises of the city, he wondered what djinn had possessed him to come here. He refused to sleep with her, fearing that the rapist had made her pregnant, and the separation that this put between them in their exile made him bitter. Even that human comfort was denied him.

She had saved a plant thrown out by a neighbour – a little, useless, climbing plant with translucent leaves, which she watered every evening with dishwater. Humayun watched it warily, in the evenings, as he lay on his back in their tiny room, waiting for his dinner. It had no smell, put out no flowers, it had no use at all that he could see; and yet she tended it faithfully, and it grew, as if marking their time in Bombay. He felt that the plant and he were in competition.

Aisha, feeling that he was lost, took him to the sea to revive him; but he stared out at the waves, wondering what the policemen in Delhi had been trying to teach him. It was now the holy month of Ramzan, and she tried to persuade him to go to the mosque, thinking that he would find some community there. But he refused.

Then, one evening, when he got home, she told him that she had bled. Her monthly bleeding had come, taking that fear away, at least. It was a blessing. ‘Mubarak,’ he said, and smiled spontaneously for the first time in weeks.

That evening, in a spirit of thanksgiving, he went to the mosque for prayers. Muslims were pious during the month of fasting, and the crowd was huge in the Jama Masjid. As Humayun knelt before God, his forehead touching the mat in front of him, surrounded by his Muslim brothers, he prayed for Aisha, he prayed for his mother. Above all, he prayed for the return of that unthinking self-confidence, that unexamined contentedness, which was once the most secure and inviolable part of his being.

‘Ash’s schoolfriend telephoned for you,’ said her grandmother, as Bharati let herself in through the front door the night before Diwali.

As a result of spending the day after the wedding lunch with Ash and Sunita, Bharati was now quite drunk. She had wanted to spend some time with her brother before leaving for London at the weekend, and before the newly-weds went on honeymoon on Friday, and because the twins’ birthday on Thursday was being overshadowed by their father’s Sanskrit lecture. But to recover from the prudish company of her sister-in-law, and her constant Hindi– English chatter, Bharati had gone to her friend Kavita’s place in the evening, where she sat and laughed and talked and ate greasy kebabs from the market and drank too many beers – and, more to the point, smoked a lot of ganja, as she tended to in Delhi.

Bharati tiptoed with inebriated exaggeration into the front room where her grandmother was sitting by the window, a bowl of rasmalai on the table in front of her. ‘He rang from Calcutta,’ the old woman went on (as Bharati sidled up to her and ate two of the sweets, milk dripping from her fingers). ‘Pablo. He says to call back whatever time you get in.’ And she handed her granddaughter a piece of paper with Pablo’s mobile number written on it in her spindly handwriting. ‘Such a nice young man.’

‘You liked him?’ Bharati asked, grinning at the sweetness of what she was eating – her naughty Dadi was diabetic.

‘I remember him from when you were at school.’

‘Ah yes,’ Bharati said. She kissed her grandmother goodnight, and was walking back through the hallway when the old black-and-white photograph on the stairs, of her mother at college in Calcutta caught her eye. ‘Ma’s sister whom nobody ever talks about,’ she said. ‘Did you notice that she actually came to Ash’s wedding?’

Her grandmother’s reply was sharp. ‘That woman is nothing but trouble,’ she said, and Bharati walked upstairs without asking anything further on the subject. But she thought to herself:
That’s the third member of my family who doesn’t want to talk about my mother’s sister
. And she remembered her argument with Pablo, and how angry she had been with him for probing her mother’s history, and wondered if his curiosity was justified after all.

Sitting in bed, Bharati dialled his number, and when he answered, she said, ‘It seems you charmed the pants off my Dadi.’

He laughed, pleased with his success. ‘Oh, good. Whatever it takes to please the venerable lady’s beautiful descendant.’

‘And what are you doing in Cal?’ Bharati asked.

‘A highly important lingam story,’ Pablo said. ‘My editor hates me. But today I went to Santiniketan.’

There was a pause.

‘And?’ Bharati said.

‘And I found out something about your mother.’

‘
And
?’

‘And I can’t tell you over the phone. But it’s important. Very very important.’

‘Oh
yeah
?’

‘Promise me one thing.’

‘What?’

‘That you’ll go and see Leela Sharma. Tomorrow.’

‘Leela? Why?’ She began to feel suspicious again.

‘This is her number,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘I got it for you from the office; Leela’s husband is—’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

He read the number out. ‘So promise.’

‘Why the rush?’ she said again.

‘Because … because I want Leela to give you a crucial piece of information—’

Bharati laughed unsympathetically.

‘Tell her I went to the Santhal Mission Hospital,’ he said, a little defiantly.

‘
What
?’

‘Just tell her that. Promise me.’

‘OK, I promise.’

‘When can I see you?’ he asked.

‘When are you back?’

‘Tomorrow evening.’

‘So come by and get me,’ she said, with cannabis-induced generosity.

‘Really?’

‘Don’t take it personally.’ She laughed. ‘Anything to get away from Sunita.’

He laughed too, in disappointment. ‘I’ll be there by ten tomorrow evening.’

As she fell asleep she thought:
Why was he so insistent?
But when she woke the next morning, the first thing she did was to dial the number he had given her. It was the husband, Hari Sharma, who answered.

‘I’m Sunita’s sister-in-law,’ Bharati explained: ‘Ash Chaturvedi’s sister—’

‘Bharati.’

‘Yes.’ She was surprised he knew her name.

‘Do you want to speak to my wife?’

‘Please. Is she in?’

‘Was she expecting your call?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll go and get her,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ said Bharati. ‘It’s important. It concerns my mother Meera.’

‘All right,’ he said.

When Leela came to the phone she sounded a lot more reticent than her husband. At first she was reluctant to meet, but Bharati persuaded her that she only wanted to talk about Meera’s poems. In the end they arranged to wait for each other at four o’clock that afternoon, outside the entrance to Humayun’s tomb.

At half past three Bharati set out from home to walk to the tomb – it was barely ten minutes away from her house, up to the basti and across the main road next to the plant nursery – and the mild exercise did her good. She felt calm and prepared, ready to meet this sister of her mother’s, even if it did go against both her father and grandmother’s express wishes. Pablo’s excited trepidation – his doggedness – kept buzzing in her head. She felt intoxicated all over again by the fuss he had made.

And yet, the longer she stood waiting in the cold, the more uneasy she felt. She wondered, for the first time, why siblings became estranged from each other. Bharati couldn’t imagine ever wanting to cut Ash out of her life (even if he had married a woman she didn’t care for). And what could
he
possibly ever do to
her
– what was he capable of doing? – that would warrant her saying:
I never want to see you again
…? Such a thing was impossible.

Bharati had spent the morning rereading
The Lalita Series
– she couldn’t find the copy she had brought from London, so she took one from her father’s library – and had tried to locate within it hints of a joint authorship, or some presentiment of it at least. But there was nothing. Only in the new poem that Pablo had showed her did the poet allude to a creative association.
Sisterhood of blood and ink, proof of our collaboration
. And only in this poem, Bharati thought as she observed a white car pulling up to the entrance of the tomb, was Ved Vyasa mentioned in this sinister way. ‘The Last Dictation’ was written in November 1979. The month the twins were born. By then her mother was a married woman. Married to a man called Vyasa who taught the Mahabharata for a living.

A woman stepped out of the white car and Bharati knew it was her – the one from the wedding. Seeing her again like this, she realised: that was why she had seemed familiar at the wedding. Bharati must have seen her face in the background of one of those photographs that her father kept in boxes in his library.

Leela Sharma was wearing a cotton sari of a deep saffron-yellow, and a huge soft shawl. As she walked towards the gate where Bharati was waiting, she smiled, and her face, which had seemed so serious and intent a moment ago, looked momentarily happy.

‘Hello, Bharati,’ Leela said.

‘Hello.’

They bought tickets from the booth. Bharati paid for them herself, talking to the ticket man in Hindi, and then, to get things going between her and Leela, just by way of conversation, and because she felt so tense, said to Leela, ‘I’m writing a dissertation partly on
The Lalita Series
.’

‘Are you?’ Leela Sharma raised her eyebrows in surprise.

‘I’m looking in particular at the thread of political disillusionment that runs through the poems, and the milieu in which they were written, the Writers’ Workshops in Calcutta in the seventies, P. Lal’s English translations of the Mahabharata … Do you think that was an influence? Do you think my mother went to one of his Sunday-afternoon recitations? I know that they are still going, twenty years later, I was thinking that I should go to Cal on this trip and go along to one of them myself. He might remember her, do you think?’

She knew she was gabbling.

Leela, meanwhile, reached into her bag and took out a copy of Bharati’s mother’s book. She held it in front of her and looked at it a little wonderingly. ‘I think this must be yours. I borrowed it from your house.’

‘It
is
mine,’ Bharati said, annoyed, as the booth man handed her the change for the tickets. ‘I looked for it this morning. When did you borrow it? I only brought it back with me from London on Sunday.’

‘I came by on Sunday night after your brother’s wedding. I had a long conversation with your grandmother. Didn’t she tell you?’

‘No,’ Bharati said, ‘she did not.’

‘Well,’ Leela answered.

‘Well what?’ Bharati gave Leela her ticket and walked ahead of her through the gate into the gardens.

‘There was no reason for her to mention it,’ Leela said when she reached Bharati, who was waiting for her on the path. ‘I haven’t seen her since I was a young woman. Or you since you were a baby. I’m not part of the family any more.’

They walked in silence after that, down the straight path that led up to the first of the two arched gateways that guarded the tomb. Visible from here in the distance, perfectly aligned with the top of the archway, was the pale marble dome of the tomb itself.

Leela had spoken calmly, but as they walked up the steps and through the gateway, Bharati realised her mother’s sister was trembling. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked in surprise. And then, without waiting for Leela – perhaps because of that awkwardness she felt in her presence – she ran on down the steps and along the path to the second gateway, the red sandstone arch that led directly into the gardens of the tomb.

‘So,’ Bharati said to Leela, turning towards her as she approached, and trying to get back to the point of their meeting, ‘you are my mother’s long-lost sister.’ They stood side by side, surveying the tomb and its gardens, which were criss-crossed by slender canals.

‘Shall we go into the tomb?’ Leela said in answer, and this time it was Bharati who followed her, along the canal and up the steps to where the graves of Emperor Humayun and his family and courtiers stood encased within the huge red sandstone shell, in a maze of darkened rooms joined and divided by stone lattice-screens, so that each vista was obscured by shadows and penetrated by stars.

‘You were alienated from each other,’ Bharati persisted, her voice echoing loudly in the stone chamber, not caring how many tourists and visitors heard her, caring only that her words sounded strained and unnatural. ‘That’s what everyone has told me.’

Still Leela didn’t reply, and only after Bharati had followed her out into the garden again, where the green of the trees was dazzling, and down the steps to the lawns, did she say, ‘There was certainly a month or two when we didn’t speak. But by the time you and your brother were born it wasn’t like that. However, because of something that happened, thereafter it became impossible for us to see each other again.’

‘Because you moved to America with your husband,’ Bharati pointed out. They sat next to each other on the grass beneath the shade of four large trees.

Leela didn’t reply. Instead she handed Bharati the book of poems and said, ‘Thank you for this.’