Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  Leela whistled the notes that Meera and she used to identify each other’s movements along the narrow streets near Chandni Chowk, and hearing them, Meera crept out from the tent where she was dozing. Wandering through the crowd, she came to the well that had been dug so many feet deep into the earth, so many years ago, with so many steps leading downwards. Since Meera was too small to see above the crowds of hungry and frightened people, and since the fear of losing Leela choked the reply in her throat, she climbed up onto the walls of the well to look for her and just before she fell – jostled so that she lost her footing and sprawled into the air and down down down onto the sandstone steps below – Leela saw her.

  Pulling her hand out of Miss Urvashi’s grasp, Leela ran, pushing through the crowd, tripping over bed rolls, jumping over the legs of grandmothers who had already lived through too much to be leaving the place where they had composed families and quilts and letters and lives, to be leaving it for an unknown edge of the vanished British empire, knocking down carefully saved tins of daal, and pots of steaming rice – and heard the thump as Meera’s body hit the stone forty feet below. If Meera fell too quietly for the other passers-by to notice, everybody heard the scream that Leela made, and everybody claimed to have seen her jump, trying to save her Meera.

  Avatar 9: The Present

  This tragic end might have brought my tale to a close. But I was determined not to be downcast – I knew that my story had almost reached its dramatic conclusion – that I had to be patient. And so, barely a decade after India achieved its Independence, Leela was born in a small village in Bengal, and Meera Bose in an elegant brick Calcutta townhouse. The Bose family owned the fields that Leela’s parents farmed.

  At first I was troubled by this link between them, which seemed too attenuated to be trusted, especially given the talk of land reform, of the old guard being swept away in a fervour of socialist redistribution. This time I decided to intervene directly. I couldn’t allow my beloved Leela to suffer, as she certainly would if she lost her companion, her confidante, her refuge, her succour. I considered my options: a famine? A flood? A plague? All these things were regular occurrences in India. But they were too heavyhanded; I didn’t want to take out the entire village.

  So in the end, I simply gave her parents cholera – and in this way Leela, aged three, was orphaned.

  She was a sweet child, with curly hair, inquisitive eyes and a steady smile. It would have been a shame to send her to the missionaries, or to put her out as a servant in one of the bigger village houses. At least, this was the opinion of her late mother’s friend, who was married to Mr Bose’s munshi. The munshi was a thin, sober man, with a good head for mathematics, employed by Meera’s father to manage the estates, to make sure the rent came in on time, to weigh each villager’s yield of rice, to divide the crop and to calculate the profit. But he had seven children already; he couldn’t possibly take in another. ‘She’s a pretty thing,’ mused his wife one evening. She spooned some more rice onto his plate. ‘Take her to Calcutta to see Bose-Sahib.’

  Meera’s family lived in north Calcutta. There was a courtyard in the middle of their house, and a long, cool flagstone hallway that ran down one side of the house to a library at the end where Mr Dipankar Bose read the papers, dabbled in writing and received his guests. On the afternoon the munshi arrived with Leela, Mr Bose and his three-year-old daughter were sitting in this room, he at his desk with his papers, she at a table under the window with hers. While he studied a bill of transfer, she drew an abstract impression of her family on a piece of headed paper. A jagged purple mass of lines, like a ball of unravelling string, was her mother. Her father was a dynamic streak of yellow. The ayah, the cook and the mali were stubby jabs of red. Even aged three she had a sense of hierarchy and order. But all that was about to be overturned by the arrival of Leela.

  Meera looked up from her artwork to see, for a change, a person of exactly her height looking right at her. She held out a crayon, moved along the bench to make room, and as the munshi looked over in approval, the two children bent their heads together, laughing to themselves as they caricatured the grown-ups.

  The munshi pursed his lips thoughtfully. Out loud, he said to Meera’s father, ‘I am on the way to the orphanage at Entally. The nuns will baptise her, but what to do? At least she will come to no harm there. At least she will be fed.’ He spread his hands helplessly before him. ‘I would take her in. But you know, I have been burdened by too many children.’ He bent his head. ‘The nuns will look after her.’

  Mr Bose had a young, pretty wife who loved him, plenty of money and few real cares. He lived a happy existence, fattened on milk-sweets tinged with nutmeg, kept healthy by pond fish, given meaning by the revolutionary language and equitable aspirations of India’s glorious independence. There were two things that vexed him in 1958: the first was the benighted state of India’s peasant population, with its truly frightening array of noxious gods – whether indigenous, imported or on loan from elsewhere, they were all as bad as each other. The second was a dim sense that while he himself had talked a lot about revolution, about change, about tearing down the old and building up the new – despite drinking numerous cups of coffee with his comrades and drafting a multiplicity of manifestos – he had not actually done anything to foment the rebellion. He stared distractedly at his daughter sitting with her new village playfellow, at the dust falling through the shaft of light coming in through his window (reminding him that the maid hadn’t been in to clean his library today – that the day had passed without him having finished his letter to the Statesman on the subject of peasant education – and moreover that it was teatime).

  There was a long pause; he turned these thoughts over in his head; the only noise a contented murmur from the children under the window. Then he got to his feet. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said to the munshi, and gestured to one of the chairs on the other side of his desk. ‘Sit here while I speak with my wife. I’m sure we can do something for her.’

  Later, neither girl would be able to remember a time before. It was as if they had always known each other. From this day onwards they were bathed by the same ayah, they slept in the same dark room with its high bed and heavy wooden furniture, they went to the same school with their hair tightly plaited.

  Of the two, Meera was the child with the most determined sense of rebellion. She enjoyed shocking her parents, who dutifully pretended to be outraged when, aged twelve, she announced that she wished to eat Chinese noodles and British pudding only; when, aged fifteen, she said wicked things about Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet of Bengal; when, aged sixteen, she kissed a boy outside the school gates and the headmistress sent home a letter suspending her. Wisely, the Boses understood that quiet, solemn Leela kept Meera in check, and that as long as the two girls remained at each other’s side, no harm could come to either.

  But harm can come from unexpected places. On the day Leela and Meera turned seventeen – nobody knew Leela’s date of birth, so the sisters synchronised anniversaries, menstruation, decisions – their mother called them into her bedroom, unlocked her boxes of jewellery from her trunk, and picked out three pieces for them each. She gave Leela her heavy gold pendant with a bright lacquer-work of butterflies and peacocks; some hoop earrings speckled with semi-precious stones; and a gold filigree-work bangle with one large amethyst in the middle, which was Leela’s favourite. Meera was given a similar bangle and earrings – the stones in hers were rubies – but when she saw the heavy gold necklace, wide and thick, like a silty river spreading out as it reaches the plain, she wrinkled her nose in distaste. It was a traditional piece: so ornate that she refused to wear it in public, and it was put aside for her wedding day.

  But both girls were pleased with the abstract notion of these gifts, which they interpreted as signs of their transition out of girlhood. They didn’t realise that for their mother, this dividing of the spoils had little to do with their age, and everything to do with her illness.

  S
oon afterwards, the sisters began at Calcutta’s Presidency College as students of literature, and the house was filled with their cheerful disputes about whether Eliot was a better poetthan Tagore, or Bankim a finer novelist than Dickens, though they both agreed that Shakespeare had the edge over Kalidasa. They began frequenting poetry readings and writing workshops, which proliferated throughout the city, and though they read in both Bengali and English with equal facility, when they began writing poetry themselves, it was English that they chose as their language. So thrilling was this time of their lives, so full of meetings and encounters and conversations and discoveries, that if their mother was paler than usual, or their father quieter, the sisters, immersed in the happy sound of their own precociousness, had little time to notice.

  ‘Come home quickly today,’ their mother said one morning as they left for college.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Meera replied as the door slammed behind them. But that afternoon, as they wandered slowly back home, they couldn’t resist stopping to buy saris for each other. There was a party at the end of term and they needed something elegant but vivacious, sophisticated and pristine. They searched for hours, Leela eventually picking out a fine tant weave in neem-tree green, and Meera, ever ostentatious, choosing for her sister the brightest sari in the shop: saffron-coloured cotton with a thin golden border. It was late when they arrived back home. They pushed open the front door expecting to find their parents waiting up for them – mother with her proud smile, father with his frown of concern – to listen with feigned displeasure to the girls’ triumphant narration of their afternoon adventures.

  But the house was quiet, and as they walked down the hallway to the library, they heard nothing but the dripping of the tap in the courtyard and the cawing of a crow in the road outside. The servants were huddled together in the kitchen. Where are my parents? Meera demanded. And it was then that their mother’s secret was revealed – how quickly the disease had spread through her blood, through her bones, how there was nothing any doctor could do. She died that night in hospital, and Meera, it was said later, never recovered.

  Leela had lost her parents once already – but that was in the village. It was silently understood that since the peasantry in the countryside bore all sorts of troubles (bereavement, penury, chronic ill health) without once complaining, such an event, at such a young age, had been easily overcome. If Leela ever dreamt about her real mother, or pined for her unknown face, nobody ever thought to enquire.

  But for an educated young girl from the city – well, that was different – such a death, for such a daughter, was a trauma.

  Meera mourned her mother flamboyantly and persistently, wearing the marriage necklace at inappropriate times: over her sari when they walked to the fish market, or to lectures at college. She who had always hated cooking learnt to prepare her mother’s favourite dishes. As their father wept and did his best to carry on, and Leela retreated into silence, Meera explored the extravagant hinterland of grief.

  It was in this mood, one night at dinner the following spring, that Meera announced she had taken a decision. Instead of going to Delhi University for an MA as they had already agreed, she would spend the following two years at Santiniketan, studying Sanskrit at Rabindranath Tagore’s university in the Bengal countryside, just as her mother had done before her.

  Privately, their father was appalled. Tagore was revered by Bengalis as a kind of saint, and because of this, the university he founded had a reputation for an almost otherworldly devotion to authentic Indianness (whatever that meant). Meera’s mother had studied there in the 1950s, and he remembered how, on their first meeting – in Flurys cake shop on Park Street – she had talked with a boldness that belied her mild demeanour of how Santiniketan alone of India’s educational institutions was capable of forging in its students a proper understanding of, and respect for, indigenous culture. Sitting there in Flurys, gazing at her lowered eyes, listening to her speaking, he had found the adulation preposterous. Twenty years later, he considered that his witty, cosmopolitan daughter was making a big mistake. The university was no longer what it had been; even for a Bengali, it had become provincial. Gently, he tried to persuade her of the merits of the capital, of the fine teachers in the English literature department at Delhi University. But Meera was not to be dissuaded; and whatever Meera had set her mind on, Leela had to do too. So it was in some perplexity and with many misgivings that early one stifling morning in July, Mr Bose saw his two daughters off at Howrah station, never suspecting, poor man, that the villainous Vyasa, recently appointed as Santiniketan’s youngest professor of Sanskrit, was readying himself to enter their lives; unable to predict, as I was, that chaos would ensue.

  chapter 5

  On the eve of his daughter’s wedding, Shiva Prasad Sharma, guardian of the national identity, saviour of pure Hindu India, was sitting at home in his small South Delhi flat, full of thoughts of his Autobiography. This morning he had completed the dictation of his early childhood up to the age of ten. It was at that point in his life – the year being 1945, the month November, fifty-six years ago almost to the day – that he had delivered his first public act of prodigiosity. His assistant, Manoj, a young man from Varanasi whose sole task it was currently to type up the Autobiography, had been greatly moved by the event. ‘But, sir,’ he exclaimed in Hindi, ‘was it possible that as a child you had no fear of speechifying?’

  ‘Ah, Manoj,’ Shiva Prasad had replied softly, ‘you see, there was no choice. The village elders said to me: Your turn boy. And I was pushed out in front of the crowd, where I gave my speech – a very simple, direct speech – declaring that I, too, would become a freedom-fighter: that I, too, would expel the Britishers, their English language, and their non-Hindu ways from our sovereign land.’

  Yes, the crowd had cheered, the newspapermen had come to take his photograph, his grandmother had fainted, and his mother had sent him to bed at the same time as baby brother Hari, for being an impertinence, and only ten years old. She feared that her elder son would end his days in a dank British jail along with all the other young revolutionaries. But Shiva Prasad knew that his father was proud of what he had done, and so, early next morning, he took a bath – washing carefully, for he did not know how long it would be until he could wash again – packed a small bag, and bade goodbye to his family, saying: ‘I must go to join the protest against the unlawful trial of Indian National Army officers in Delhi. I may come back. I may not.’

  As his mother stood weeping in the doorway (baby Hari in her arms; Father, as always, was giving extra tuition at the other end of the village), Shiva Prasad took a staff and left the house in Amarkantak. His home town, situated in the forest at the source of the Narmada river, was not a big place, but it was significant; the omens were auspicious; and as he set out on his journey, Shiva Prasad felt like a rishi in the days of yore. He walked all the way to the railway station in Pendra, climbed aboard, and off he went, to show solidarity in the fight against the Britishers.

  A militant young Krishna, Shiva Prasad won over crowd after crowd at Pendra, Gwalior, New Delhi, with his pure, Sanskritic Hindi rhetoric. Even Gandhi-ji, it was rumoured, was impressed. Who is this infant Churchill? he was said to have asked, His words are too stirring. It was a glorious beginning.

  Due to a happy exposure, in the country’s capital, to the policies of the Hindu Mahasabha, Shiva Prasad returned to Amarkantak determined to rally the people there with a brave new cry. ‘Now is the time for action!’ the eleven-year-old would proclaim. ‘We must have pride in our ancient and glorious Hindu culture! We must push back the alienating immigrations of Islam and Christianity and embrace our indigenous Vedic values. Our ancient Arya forefathers gave the world language and science and geometry! Now the time has come for us to conquer once more!’

  The crowds continued to cheer, but to his surprise, Shiva Prasad’s father took to locking his son in the buffalo shed every time a rally was planned. ‘Finish school with good grades,’ he said. ‘Only o
nce you have left my house may you practise this new-fangled form of fanaticism.’

  Shiva Prasad took this minor setback in his stride. He lost no time in displaying his formidable intelligence, turning out to be the cleverest pupil in the district, consistently topping his class in every subject by at least three marks. Before long, he was bidding his mother goodbye once more, and returning to the capital to protect the culture of which he was so proud.

  Once in New Delhi, Shiva Prasad finished his BA in record time, completed his MA with special distinction, and was personally headhunted by the Guruji Research Foundation, a new think tank dedicated to promoting native values and rooting out all imported ones. By the time he was twenty-four, Shiva Prasad’s melodious tones, beaming forth astute political commentary and cultural critique, were in demand at all his Party’s meetings. After he began writing a column for the Party magazine, the publication was inundated with fan mail; he himself received countless proposals from the parents of college-educated girls with wheaten complexions; in certain circles, one could say, ‘Shiva Prasad Sharma’ became a household name.

  Yet each time he returned home to Amarkantak – basking in the glow of recognition and success – it was to encounter an increasingly sterile reception from the one man in the world whom he felt should have been most excited by his eldest son’s progress. Why was it that his father had transferred his affections so facilely to that much younger and more insignificant son, tiny Hari, born in the embarrassing tumescence of old age? Their father was the headmaster of an obscure village school – in New Delhi such a position would have been thought inconsequential. And yet, it was undeniable: whenever Shiva Prasad stood back to survey the progress of his own famous life, his dazzling career, it was with a marked lack of satisfaction, a sense of non-completion. He had not yet experienced his father’s quiet pride.