3. Repentant Hari would enlist Shiva Prasad to write a regular column (translated from Hindi) for his English-language tabloid. Shiva Prasad Sharma would graciously acquiesce. The English-reading public, stunned by Shiva Prasad’s erudition and political resourcefulness, would clamour for more.
4. Following the wildfire success of the Shiva Prasad Sharma column in the Delhi Star, television groups across the land would implore Mr Sharma on bended knee to host his own Hindi-language chat show.
5. Ash Chaturvedi would identify the Arya Gene in his father-in-law, thus solving the hitherto intractable mystery (the ‘singular scientific annoyance of our times’, according to high-ups in the Party) of exactly who in the motherland was genetically a noble, made-in-India Arya.
6. Bathed in glory in the eyes of the Party, Shiva Prasad’s stars would fuse into a galactic political future. He would become Mayor of Delhi. All the major awards for national service would be his, in record time. And finally he would receive that call: to the Presidency of holy Bharat, the most ancient country in the world (and currently and inaccurately called India).
And as his Big-Ben alarm clock put its hands together in a reverent midnight namaste, Shiva Prasad added one extra, clinching clause:
7. Ram would keep his mother in silk saris for the rest of her days.
chapter 6
While her father snored in south Delhi, Urvashi the Unmentionable, ‘Pinki’ to her sister, Uzma for the purposes of her Muslim marriage, formerly-Sharma-now-Ahmed, woke up in her conjugal bed on the first floor of a twelve-month-old house in Nizamuddin West, weeping.
Sometimes, at the weekends, Urvashi met her younger siblings for tea. Their father had forbidden them the luxury of eating meals together (too much camaraderie) but as a special dispensation he allowed his children the privilege of drinking tea in Connaught Place, in the old-style grandeur of the United Coffee House. They sat under its air-conditioned hum, attended to by cheerful-shabby waiters, soothed by the glitter and glint of the decor, by the tea dripping unhurried through silver strainers, among the scent of old beer, lost crisps and meandering conversation, for an hour or two of strained and unsatisfying chitchat – before Sunita was ordered home again to south Delhi.
The one advantage to this arrangement was that afterwards, having sent Sunita off in a taxi, Ram, who always had taken pleasure in silently disobeying Father’s dictates, took Urvashi out to the bars that fringe Connaught Place. Then, while Urvashi drank one daring cocktail all evening and he knocked back an unlikely combination of concoctions, Ram told her stories of his friendships with other onyx-eyed young men: stories that were likely to shock a conservatively educated girl like Urvashi – except that she was now married to a Muslim, and was therefore beyond the boundaries of the wholesome and civilised. She found that her reputation had begun to precede her, anticipating and fashioning her responses to these tales, and so she shrieked with laughter as Ram described his online encounters with other men who wanted to web-chat without women listening. There was one, in particular, who made her giggle. He called himself ‘Manhattan Mania’, chosen for the cherry-specked, nut-spotted Nirula’s ice cream which he liked licking – with Ram? off Ram? (Her brother hadn’t made it clear.) Afterwards, at home, Urvashi tried to unravel the outlandish details of the stories of male camaraderie that Ram told her, but her imagination failed her, and she was content instead to dwell on the warm intimacy she had built up with her brother since her elopement; and was glad, in a sisterly way, that he had made so many friends through the modern medium of the world wide web. Somehow she knew never to discuss these matters with her husband. She treasured the fact that somebody, anybody, was confiding in her.
For the past six months, however, ever since Sunita announced her engagement, Urvashi’s conversations with her siblings had been dominated by discussion of the wedding. Until now, regarding this event, Urvashi had been in a state of anticipation. She had actually seen the wedding invitations – made from thick, pink, silky handmade paper, tied with gold thread, bilingually embossed with fluid Devanagari script on the front, and squat English writing on the reverse, cordially inviting so-and-so to the wedding of Sunita Sharma and Ashwin Chaturvedi – which Sunita had shown her one afternoon in the United Coffee House. She had heard all about the groom’s family; could list the contents of Sunita’s dowry; knew the exact timing of the wedding reception, its location and menu.
Sometimes, because her family was not from the elite of Delhi society like the Chaturvedis, Urvashi even dared to wonder if the groom was disfigured – so unequal was the match. But she had been shown the Engagement Photos, where the groom was displayed in his perfect healthy glory, limbs and all intact. And although Sunita never mentioned it in so many words, the truth was that Urvashi herself had played a critical role in securing this dream man as her sister’s husband. It was she, after all, who had mentioned to Sunita that Professor Chaturvedi – who lived a block away from the Ahmeds in the same housing colony – was looking to hire somebody to come in three days a week and organise his library. She had received this piece of news from her maid, Aisha, who also worked in the Chaturvedis’ house. ‘You know the Professor’s home?’ Aisha had said one afternoon. ‘In G-block?’ And Urvashi nodded, for her young maid often spoke of this large shadowy house with its big piles of books and black-and-white photographs that made her think of ghosts. The Professor, it seemed, needed somebody who could read and write in English and Hindi, to catalogue his library. And so Urvashi sent her sister Sunita along with her curriculum vitae printed out on gleaming white paper, and later that day Sunita rang Urvashi to say that she had been given the job as Professor Chaturvedi’s librarian! At a tea session some weeks later, a newly confident Sunita told Ram and Urvashi that the Professor had a son, Ash, a scientist – the Professor himself had introduced them. And barely a few months passed before the little sister announced to her siblings that Ash and she were engaged. A love match! Soon Sunita would be married – and then the sisters would be neighbours.
Sitting at home in Nizamuddin during the months leading up to the auspicious day, Urvashi could think of little else. But the event threw up one short-term problem: what to wear? After weeks of deliberation, after looking sceptically back and forth through her wardrobe and consulting a range of fashion magazines, Urvashi summoned her driver, Humayun, and made him take her to Nalli Saris in Connaught Place. There, she spent at least two hours appraising wave upon wave of multicoloured silk, struggled to choose between nude georgette with a dark blue lace border (three thousand three hundred rupees) or printed leaf-green/shell-pink crêpe (five thousand exactly); draped the georgette across her bosom (over the tiny bump of a three-month-old foetus in her womb), stared at her reflection in the long store mirror, and tried to picture herself walking through the crowd at Sunita’s wedding. Maybe georgette was too modern, really, for the Sharmas. She picked up a heavy purple tanchoi brocade. There were ornate gold flowers along its six-metre length. There was kalga work on the border. Urvashi held it to her face. So pretty, so refined. She lifted the paper price tag: twenty thousand rupees. Far too expensive. But for her little sister’s wedding? She took out her new golden credit card, and placed it on the sari. An investment for the future.
The week before the wedding, Urvashi met her siblings in the United Coffee House at half past four. ‘I’m going to wear my second-best wedding set,’ she said as they waited for their order. ‘It’s amethysts; they’ll match my sari. Tanchoi brocade,’ she whispered to Sunita.
‘But . . .’ Sunita began.
‘I’m so excited!’ said Urvashi.
Ram looked between his sisters. ‘Sunita! Tell her.’
‘What?’ said Urvashi. ‘Tell me what?’
Sunita was sitting with her eyes cast down, a smile playing on her lips. She put a manicured hand over her mouth, and when she spoke, her words were muffled. ‘You just don’t understand. Father will never let you . . . You married a . . . Don’t you see?’
Te
ars sprang into Urvashi’s eyes. ‘Did you think I was going to bring my husband?’ she said quickly. ‘Of course I know that Father wouldn’t want him to be there.’
Sunita, who was now smiling intently at her pink glossy nails, made no reply to this, and so in the end it was Ram who spoke. ‘What Sunita is trying to say, Pinki, is that father doesn’t want you to be there either. We’re sorry we didn’t tell you before.’
The night before Sunita’s wedding, at home in her custom-built mansion, lying next to her hardworking, loving, handsome (Muslim) husband, tears rolled down Urvashi Ahmed’s cheeks.
Because Urvashi, formerly-Sharma-now-Ahmed, had married a Muslim, she was unfit to attend her younger sister’s wedding. Because Urvashi had married a Muslim, she could not be introduced to her younger sister’s fiancé. Because Urvashi had married a Muslim, she sometimes experienced a longing for that past life where there was never a choice to be made between cooking chole bhature or serving mutton rice, where acquaintance was divided into those we know and the rest we have no need to understand, for her former status as the definitely not unclever, undeniably pretty, sister-cousin-daughter to the people she had grown up knowing, and whom now she never saw. Because Urvashi had married a Muslim, a sweet, kind and loving Muslim, she was sometimes very lonely.
Feroze was lying on his side with his back to her, breathing deeply, fast asleep. He was a man of punctual habits, faithful to a set of rules that served him well at home and in the office. Regular meal times was one, uninterrupted sleep was another, and the six or seven hours he spent absorbed in this latter activity were sacrosanct. She knew she could not disturb him with her trivial worries. But as she lay there, a memory came to her from childhood, of how, when she was a very little girl, and couldn’t sleep, it was always her father who took her downstairs to heat a glass of milk, her father who murmured soothing phrases; she had always received so much attention from her father. And even though she was a grown-up woman now, the vision of herself lying here in her marital bed, alone with her sorrow, made the tears fall anew, and she hugged herself in pity.
Urvashi lay awake for a long time that night, staring into the darkness of her bedroom, until she could make out the bedside table, and a chair with a white kurta of her husband’s on it, discarded there for washing, and the long blue and gold patterned curtains that she herself had chosen after much deliberation. After a while, her eyes fell on the present she had been given by a young girl-cousin of Feroze, the last time they visited his parents’ house in the old city. Not thinking much of it at the time – the sticker on the bottom said Made in China – she had placed it, a little irreverently, on the table by her bed. But she reached out now and picked it up, tipping it so that the coloured balls inside the clear perspex fell through the liquid in the darkness of the night, just as snowflakes had fallen through the sky when she shook the glass snowstorm her grandmother had owned and which she had played with as a child, taking it down from the showcase in the front room and turning it round and round so that the snowman inside was lost in a sudden, furious storm. This was no snowstorm, however. It was a holy ornament, an auspicious gift (the cousin said), for it contained two tiny replicas of Islam’s holiest places: the black cube of the Ka’aba at Mecca, and the green-domed mosque of the Prophet, also in Saudi Arabia. Instead of snowflakes, glittering balls of silver and green and gold floated down when you shook it.
Urvashi turned the object in her hand, watching the balls as they slid off the roof of the mosque and bounced off the top of the Ka’aba, then fell slowly through the liquid again until gravity put them right. She shivered suddenly, for a thought had struck her: Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, would he shelter her?
And as she stared at the model of the Ka’aba, a warm feeling spread through her – she put the object back on the table in fright and pulled the sheets tighter round her shoulders. For she knew that it was her soul, filling up with yearning for her husband’s religion.
chapter 7
Ram Sharma couldn’t stop smiling. He smiled at his own good fortune, at the surprise that he, Ram, had sprung on his family with this sudden promotion from provincial Delhi boy to international man of business. He laughed to himself at his father’s inadequate reaction to the momentous news that Uncle Hari had broken over dinner: for Shiva Prasad had barely seemed to notice that his own son was being taken from him. He had responded with maddening nonchalance to the fact that his till-now estranged brother was standing in his house, offering to bestow on Ram unheard of riches (that he, Shiva Prasad, was incapable of providing) and explaining what an impressively charming and talented boy Ram was. Ram grimaced at the thought of his father. The old man was very annoying.
But his annoyance hadn’t lasted long. In fact, it was already waning by the time Ram bid goodbye to his weeping mother and walked outside to where his uncle’s 4x4 was waiting. He got into the front seat, leant back, admired the gleaming windows and sparkling appliances, the state-of-the-art AC and clean comfortable upholstery, and then, as many times before, imagined his life as Uncle Hari’s heir stretching luxuriously away before him into the future.
Neither Hari nor Leela spoke during the long drive home to Connaught Place and Ram, who was used to constant bustle in the small, humdrum home he had grown up in, with his father shouting at everybody and his sisters creating their own type of commotion and his mother standing in the middle of it all, calmly dispensing tea and paratha and advice about which gods to propitiate according to which requirement, found the silence distinguished by comparison. It pleased him. They were driving north, and after half an hour they passed the turning to Nizamuddin West, where Urvashi lived. Ram thought of his elder sister with fondness. She, at least, had manifested genuine surprise and enjoyment when he told her about becoming Uncle Hari’s heir, and he was half-tempted to ask the driver to let him out so that he could walk to Urvashi’s house and regale her with a rendition of the evening’s successes: of how it had gone off so very much to the visiting party’s satisfaction; of how generous Hari’s offer was; of how a reconciliation between the brothers was immediately effected; of how the heir arrangement was received without so much as a murmur; of how Hari, Ram and Leela fled back to their tank-like vehicle at half past nine, full of Ram’s mother’s food, glad of the gin they drank earlier.
But Ram had an appointment to keep, and so he said nothing, and the car sped silently onwards through the city.
Suddenly Auntie Leela spoke from the back seat. ‘Can you stop the car?’ she said. ‘I want to get a cigarette.’
Ram leapt into action. They had just reached India Gate. ‘When we get to the house I’ll walk up to N-block,’ he said, craning round to speak to his uncle and aunt. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’
In fact, Ram had a packet of cigarettes in his pocket; but he didn’t want Uncle Hari to know that he smoked. He wasn’t sure which Uncle Hari approved of less: wives who smoked or nephews who did. How odd Auntie Leela was, Ram reflected, as he watched the car turn into the driveway. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. This afternoon he had arrived at the house to find his uncle’s taciturn wife waiting outside the front door, clutching a bag of fruit, and dressed in such a plain cotton sari that for a moment he mistook her for the maid.
‘Auntie . . . may I help you?’ Ram had asked, and leant over to take the bag out of her hands. Then he bent down to touch her feet – an automatic gesture of submission to one’s elders drummed into him by his authoritarian father. But she moved her feet away from his outstretched hands, and said, ‘No need for that.’
‘Did you take a round of Delhi?’ Ram persisted. ‘Are you liking the new car? Did you try the music system?’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I took the bus.’ The bus. His uncle’s crazy spouse used public transport. He hated to think that the lovely white car that Uncle Hari had caused to be purchased for her exclusive use was not being appreciated as much as it deserved.
Ram shook his head in disapproval as
he reached Connaught Place. Being November, the chill of winter had already set in, and a forlorn, deserted air had descended like a damp mist on the wide, colonial-era arcades and shabby shopfronts of this place his uncle loved so much. Tonight there was hardly anybody about at all: the smart people were at home in their south Delhi residences. But Ram was too preoccupied to be affected in any lasting way by this isolation. By now it was half past eleven – only thirty minutes to go. He bought the cigarettes for his aunt and walked quickly back down the long, ill-lit street. When he reached the house, he ran up the path in some excitement, unlocked the front door, and strode into the hallway.
Ever since Ram had been allocated, by Uncle Hari, the task of renovating Auntie Leela’s house, he had the feeling of walking straight back into the past. Everything about the property was dusty and old-fashioned, from the location to the architecture to the cracked marble-chip floors that Ram had urged Uncle Hari – fruitlessly, as it happened – to replace with something modern. Despite his best efforts, the place still looked antique. This evening, typically, an old Indian film song, crackly with age, was drifting through the house from the record player Auntie Leela had brought with her all the way from America.
But the place had potential. Walking across the hall, Ram caught a reassuring glimpse of his dashingly curved nose and long, black-lashed eyes in the heavy carved wooden mirror opposite (that new pink and green silk tie suited his complexion) and when he entered the lounge area (referred to by Uncle Hari as the ‘drawing room’, and which he himself thought of as a space for massive and spectacular parties) he found his uncle standing by the drinks table under the window, pouring whisky into tumblers, his bald head glowing. Leela, who had been sitting on the settee reading a newspaper, got to her feet when she saw Ram, took the cigarettes from him with a quick, grateful smile, and walked out into the garden to smoke one, her face turned up to the darkened sky.
Leela's Book Page 7
