Leela's Book Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Non-fiction

  Empires of the Indus

  Leela's Book

  a novel

  Alice Albinia

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  T.S.

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Part One

  chapter 1

  ‘O elephant-headed god, son of Lord Shiva and Parvati; scribe who wrote down the Mahabharata from the seer Vyasa’s dictation: Lord Ganesh, look favourably on this endeavour.’

  Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi paused, looked out across his audience, and smiled. ‘The god invoked at the start of all compositions. What better way to begin?’

  A ripple of laughter, fruity and indulgent, washed pleasantly through the room – and Vyasa knew at once that the audience was going to give him an easy time. At home, in India, he was equally familiar with adulation and denigration. His work was always coming under attack – from apoplectic Hindus, jealous colleagues, upstart young students, all of whom fired darts that fell harmlessly from him, as if he was Bhishma, invincible warrior of the Mahabharata. It was just such a missile – an egg, splatting against Vyasa’s shoulder, leaving its bright trickle of photogenic yellow down his starched white kurta – that had first put his face on the front of every Delhi newspaper, and first linked his name withiconoclasm and controversy.

  But these people – these coiffed and pressed, impeccably opinionated, yet traumatised New Yorkers – were not going to put up their hands at the end of his talk and ask complicated questions about obscure shlokas. It was unlikely that any of them would shuffle to their feet when Vyasa had finished speaking to tell a long, rambling anecdote about the god Ganesh’s popularity among the Hindus and Buddhists of Nepal. That lady at the front with the blonde curls and white linen jacket: she was not going to rant about how Professor Chaturvedi maligned the divine dictation of India’s epic. The New York Public Library was too large for such tirades, the domed glass ceiling of this room too politely soaring. Here, Vyasa had the soothing sensation of being underwater, in a cave of darting fish, cosseted deep within the library’s glinting heart, within the belly of the city. These people had come to hear him becausehis books sold well, because he had appeared on American TV, because they had heard his voice on the radio reasoning with all the assembled cranks and ignoramuses of India. He knew it was odd – how in India, and increasingly elsewhere, such arcane knowledge, such esoteric subject-matter, had worked in his favour; how the journalists and editors had come to rely on his opinion, of all the very many available to them; how his doctoral thesis was edited down into a sumptuously illustrated book (which leapt to the top of the Indian bestseller lists and stayed there from Diwali through to Holi). He smiled at himself, at his outstanding good fortune, and when he opened his mouth again, the words came out just as he intended: honeyed, practised, slow.

  ‘It is an honour for me to address you tonight at this time of crisis for your city,’ he said, bowing his head towards the faces turned piously in his direction, so that the room burst into spontaneous applause. He paused again – gave the clapping a moment to subside – allowed the silence to thicken, grow rich; and when at last his elegant, persuasive voice vibrated through the air, and licked its way around the hall, the audience seemed to tremble in collective anticipation.

  ‘Tonight I will speak on a subject very close to my heart, on the elephant-headed god Ganesh, the most endearing deity of the voluminous Hindu pantheon. Ganesh’s cheerful, rotund form is found in homes and temples the length and breadth of the subcontinent. Every endeavour – every wedding, every business, every lecture, even – must begin with an invocation to Ganesh, who removes obstacles, and imposes them, on mortals. Ganesh is renowned, too, as the scribe of India’s mammoth, all-encompassing epic, the Mahabharata. Tradition has it that he alone, of the many thousands of Hindu gods, was chosen by Brahma to write down this work of literature for Vyasa, its author.’ Vyasa looked up from his notes and glanced around the hall. ‘Yes, this same jovial-mysterious god was employed by my namesake.’ The ties between them, Vyasa thought, went deeper than history and when he spoke next, his voice was almost a whisper: ‘Yet in the current political climate, when my country is being run by right-wing Hindus, it behooves me to state clearly that, contrary to popular belief, despite the agonised utterances of certain religious factions, Ganesh was not actually the Mahabharata’s scribe. It is dangerous to invoke the wrath of any deity’s fanbase’ – he threw the room a quick, practised smile – ‘particularly those of the ever-living gods of India; but I feel sure that Ganesh himself would agree with me when I state that the elephant-headed god is an impostor.’

  With that, Vyasa leant back on his heels – and the audience relaxed once more into laughter.

  It was simple now; he had got them on his side. All he had to do for the rest of the hour allotted to this lecture was to stand here, square his shoulders, open his mouth, and the words he had spoken so often, in so many other, less-illustrious halls, in much further-flung corners of the world, would flow out of their own accord: as if his ancient literary forefather, Vyasa himself, was dictating the narration.

  A door opened at the far end of the hall, and Vyasa registered a slim figure on the periphery of his vision, clad in an intense saffron-yellow. It wasn’t one of his Hindu nationalist detractors, however. It was an Indian woman in a sari, who moved quietly along the back row of chairs and sat down in the corner. The colour was unusual for this borough of New York. The smart Indians who inhabited Manhattan did not usually wear saris like that, especially not in late October. They dressed like everybody else, in blacks and blues and cool off-whites, in wool and plaid and leather. They did not want to be mistaken for more recent, more aromatic, arrivals, the type who ran grocery stores in Queens. And Vyasa supposed that in the past month, few people of a certain complexion would venture forth in ethnic attire.

  He still didn’t turn to look at the woman in the sari – anyway, she was too far away for him to make out the details of her face, whether she was young or middle-aged, native to Manhattan or a provincial visitor – but her presence was beatific nonetheless, and as his argument grew in pace and complexity, as he dragged his audience back in time to the riverbanks and forests of ancient India, through prehistoric dictations and modern interpolations, the idea occurred to Vyasa, with a delicious shudder, that this distant blur of saffron-coloured femininity might be the very woman for whom he had pined so long – Leela.

  New York had become her home. She was one of those Indians who, having left, chose never to return. He had wondered about her so often during the intervening years, had so frequently tried to imagine her new life in America, with its inevitable parade of children and possessions, accomplishments and disappointments, that this yearning had become a part of his being. But there was no need, any more, to be haunted by phantoms of her presence because, after all this time, and despite her many efforts to the contrary, Leela and he were destined to come together. His unsuspecting son was marrying the niece of Leela’s husband – and Vyasa himself had subtly encouraged the union. Every thought he had had since arriving in New York, in her city, was freighted with the knowledge of this triumph.

  ‘The Brahmins usually outlawed their sacred texts from being committed to writing,’ Vyasa said now. ‘Indeed, the Mahabharata’s claim to sacred status as the fifth Veda is partially predicated on the ancient oral form of its transmission. So how, we might ask, did Ganesh come to be associated with the writing of it? I would like to suggest,’ and here Vyasa gave one of his disarming smiles, ‘that the sections of the Mahabharata that deal with Ganesh’s scripting are in fact later interpolations. Ganesh was not there in the beginning.’

 
; And as the roomful of New Yorkers leant forward to hear his controversial argument, Vyasa, almost giddy with desire, turned his eyes at last on the woman in the corner. He was bringing Leela back into the family, and there was nothing whatsoever she could do about it.

  chapter 2

  Hari gave his wife a nudge. ‘Look, Leela. India.’ She raised her eyes from the newspaper she had been pretending to read and looked out of the aeroplane window. There was nothing much to see yet: a vast brown land mass shot through with green, waterways that looked like trickles from this distance, those paper-thin fields upon which the country depended for nourishment. ‘We’ll soon be flying over Delhi,’ Hari said, trying to contain his excitement. ‘Connaught Place, Humayun’s tomb, India Gate, the Yamuna River.’

  ‘Do we really fly in over the city?’ Leela asked. She doubted it. The airport was in the south-west.

  But Hari wasn’t listening. ‘It’s changed completely since you were here last. Beyond the river there’s so much development now. Those jungly places in the south – where it was scrubland and dust – nothing but houses. Offices everywhere, and new roads, and cars of all types, from all over.’

  Leela nodded. She had heard this wonderful story many times before – the tamarisk and mango groves magically transformed into high-rise blocks; the housing colonies and markets that had sprung up along the river; and, above all, the arrival of the flashing, beeping icons of modernity: cellphones, cappuccino, chainstores.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Hari said. ‘It’s not the city you left behind.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she agreed.

  She looked down again at the newspaper in her lap. A smiling stewardess had placed it in her hands as they boarded the flight. It was a Delhi tabloid, the Delhi Star, with yesterday’s date on it, Thursday 8 November 2001; a paper which Hari’s money had helped to finance. For the past seven hours she had let it lie there unopened, as if by ignoring it she might be able to defer the moment of return indefinitely; just as during the past twenty years she had avoided any news from India: no stories of her aunts (she had none), of the Congress Party (she wasn’t bothered), of the fate of its poets, its radicals, its rivers (she blocked out these things she loved with scrupulous, ruthless care). Hari, for his part, had always done his best to bring these chaotic noises to her door. When his work took him into Jackson Heights, he would return to their apartment near the Met tenderly bearing boxes of guavas or mangoes; she knew from the smudge of red on his forehead and a particular glassy look in his eye that he had visited the temple. It was even worse after his journeys back to Delhi: then his clothes smelt different, his speech sounded foreign, and the temple-look had taken hold of his person, so that as he unpacked brocade silk saris for her from his suitcase, and sandalwood soap, and news of his brother Shiva Prasad’s latest outrage, and breathless accounts of the effects of economic liberalisation, she always knew what would follow. ‘Shall we go back in the autumn?’ he would plead as he placed the empty suitcase back in the closet. ‘Just for a holiday? To Kerala? Or Goa?’ But each time she shook her head. ‘There’s nothing for me now in India, you know that.’ And he would nod, resigned to this empty verdict, until the next time.

  As the pilot’s voice came over the tannoy, warning the passengers to fasten their seatbelts for the descent into Delhi, Leela lifted the newspaper in her hands, weighing it, as if its heft might tell her something. Then she bit her lip and fixed her eyes on the front page, where there was a story about the deal Pakistan’s military dictator had done with the Americans, and a photograph of India’s right-wing Hindu Prime Minister: a man whose thick-set, sleepy-looking face belied his sinister, sectarian politics. A column along the bottom told of a cultural détente between the two neighbours involving the exchange of important antiquities. It was just as she had thought: under the glitter, the same old India.

  ‘There’s an article about Professor Chaturvedi’s wife,’ Hari observed, without looking round from the window.

  ‘Is there?’ Leela said. Her heart began to pound.

  ‘She wrote poems,’ Hari observed. ‘Her husband – Professor Chaturvedi – had them published after she died.’

  ‘Really?’ She flicked quickly through the inside pages, her eyes glancing over photographs of Delhi’s highlife, at the news from the provinces. She turned to the back, to the finance and cricket. ‘I can’t see it,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

  ‘It’s in the Culture section,’ Hari said. ‘A new poem by her has just been discovered. What a literary family my niece is marrying into. You will find it interesting to meet them at the wedding, I am sure.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Leela said. The article was by a journalist called Pablo Fernandes who explained how, for three brief years during the late 1970s, Meera Chaturvedi had spun a series of poems richly interlaced with references to India’s epic culture, shot through with veiled references to the poet’s own experience, and then, two years after producing twins, Ashwin and Bharati, and twelve months or so after her Muse deserted her, died when a speeding truck ran her down early one morning in Delhi while her husband was away in Bombay. A small collection of what was believed to be her life’s work had been published after her death. So this poem – this new discovery – shed a ‘fascinating light’ on Meera’s oeuvre. Pablo Fernandes made much of the scoop: how the envelope received at the newspaper offices in Delhi contained just one sheet of paper – the handwritten poem itself. There was no covering note, no return address, nothing. The poem, entitled ‘The Last Dictation’, was a nine-shloka verse in the anustubh metre, signed by ‘Lalita’, the poetic persona that Meera had adopted. But ‘most intriguing of all’, were certain lines – ‘As we write, defend our children, / This last poem is our weapon, / A sisterhood of blood and ink: / Proof of our collaboration’– which seemed to hint that Meera was not the sole author of this work. ‘It looks to be one of India’s most teasing literary connundrums,’ Pablo Fernandes wrote – before concluding with a description of the poet herself, a woman whom many described as a Khajuraho carving come to life. There was a black-and-white photograph of her to prove it.

  Leela stared down at the picture of her sister, all long, dark hair and flirtatious eyes; the caption even called her a ‘literary siren’. Meera had died so long ago that Leela had learnt to contain the catastrophe of her loss, to hide it from the world, to hide it even from Hari, who had never been told that she once had a sister. But the picture had caught her off guard, and the sadness coursed through her as if the death was still fresh. Quickly, she bent her head towards the poem, and her eyes moved along the lines, seeing but not reading the verses, tears blurring the words she knew by heart, which Meera and she had written together.

  She looked up suddenly, wondering whether Hari had somehow discovered that Meera Chaturvedi was her sister, whether this surprise wedding wasn’t, in fact, a clever trap, a way of bringing her back into contact with everything she had banished sosuccessfully for the past two decades. But she could see that her husband had already forgotten about the newspaper article. He was tensing himself instead for the joy of the moment when the plane’s wheels hit the runway: was already anticipating pulling off hisseatbelt, pulling out their luggage from the overhead locker, pulling her by the hand into the city.

  She closed the paper and leant back in her seat. Who could have sent the poem to the paper? Surely not Vyasa. She shuddered at the thought of the man, with his seductive smile, his hair pulled back behind his head, his eyes that had a habit of softening when they rested on women he favoured. For years she had put him out of her mind, had tried to forget his brusque, confident way of speaking in public, and those whispered confidences, so striking in their contrast, which he had used like a charm on Meera. But now Hari was forcing her to remember. More than that, he was forcing her to be part of Vyasa’s family. As they flew onwards through the sky, ever nearer to Delhi, Leela asked herself why she had allowed Hari to persuade her to return to the land she grew up in – when for years she had
worked so hard to forget it.

  She remembered the moment when Hari broke the news. It had been typical of him – of his sense of efficiency, of his dread of coming face to face with her displeasure – to choose a cellphone conversation as the means of imparting something so momentous. It was half past eight in the morning; she was walking her usual circuit through Central Park. ‘I’ve reached the office,’ Hari said, and Leela knew at once that he had something important to tell her. ‘I’ve just heard some interesting news,’ he said. ‘The father of my niece Sunita’s fiancé, the man she is marrying just before Diwali, a huge society wedding in Delhi, is—’

  ‘Who?’ Leela interrupted.

  ‘Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi,’ Hari finished at last. ‘And he is speaking tonight at the New York Public Library.’

  ‘What?’ Leela stopped walking, the phone still pressed to her ear, bewildered by hearing that man’s name in Hari’s mouth.

  ‘He’s giving a lecture,’ Hari said, confident now that he had her attention. ‘On the Mahabharata. It’s just the kind of thing you like, isn’t it, Leela? He’s a very well-known professor. And his son is marrying my niece.’ He paused, evidently pleased with the effect of this revelation. In the silence that followed, Leela turned this new information over in her mind. It seemed implausible thatHari had only just found out about this wedding. What else was he plotting?

  Indeed, when Hari spoke next, he sounded nervous. ‘There’s something more I have to tell you, Leela. My nephew, Ram – Sunita’s brother. I need someone I can trust to manage the business. I am making him my heir. He is such a good boy. I know that you’ll like him. You will like him, won’t you? He’s a hard worker, an ideal son.’