Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  Hari held out a whisky to his nephew, and although Ram preferred something less classical himself – the new vodka mixes were more exciting – he sat down with the glass, and picked up the newspaper that Leela had been reading, flipping over the pages as he took a sip. It was the paper his uncle financed, the one that his father so despised: the Delhi Star. The gossip column was on the back page with yet another paragraph about the deceased society beauty, Meera, late mother of Sunita’s future husband, who also wrote poems.

  ‘Listen to this naughty poem that Professor Chaturvedi’s wife wrote before she died,’ Ram said, and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper read out some lines: ‘They dispatch a servant / In their place, dressed in royal robes, Who caresses and kisses him / And charms him with her ardent moans.’ He looked up: ‘These Bengalis!’

  His levity had the desired effect. Finally, at last – as needed to happen – the two men laughed.

  But then Uncle Hari sat down opposite him, and Ram saw that the elder man’s smile had vanished. His uncle turned the drink slowly in his hand and took a sip. ‘Did my brother ever hold a position in the Party?’ he asked at last.

  Ram shook his head. His father’s expectation – continually disappointed – at being favoured by the party was one of the themes of his childhood. He distinctly remembered, as a ten-year-old, vowing that he would never grow up to be a man like his father: constantly waiting on the Party for favours and promotions that never materialised, forever leading his family with him up false avenues of hope, telling stories that infected their mother, too, so that she whispered to her children that their father was just about to be asked to stand for election to the Lower House, and had only to decide where to contest from: a constituency in Madhya Pradesh (where he hailed from) or Delhi, where the family was now settled. Ram alone, it seemed, understood the truth: that his father was far too ideological to be a politician; that he had no real sense of how things worked; that his school-going son knew better what made the wheels of the world turn than he did. As a teenager, taken along to Party meetings (and the Party was then in its infancy as a political force in India), Ram saw with a jab of humiliation how the big bosses smiled condescendingly on Shiva Prasad for his passionate pronouncements, and humoured him in his vision of himself as a political actor, but that when it came to actually getting things done, there were other, more pragmatic people that they turned to. Shiva Prasad was disappointed time and again, and nobody else in the family saw it for what it was. Neither Ram’s mother nor his sisters dared to look each other in the eye and speak the truth: that their father had spent his entire life waiting for something to happen that never would.

  Ram had not spoken of this to anybody before, but now it all came out, and Uncle Hari listened, not with a gleam of satisfaction, but with a sad look of sympathy, that of a younger brother mourning the mortification of the elder.

  ‘You must not forget him, Ram,’ said Hari. ‘You must still visit.’

  It was nearing midnight by the time Hari and Leela said goodnight to Ram and walked across the hallway to their bedroom. As the hand of his watch moved northwards Ram became impatient; but he didn’t move from the couch until the bedroom door had shut behind his aunt and uncle and he was sure that they had turned in for the night. He waited a minute further, and then he ran outside and up the steps to his special suite of rooms along the roofline, pushed open the door to his bedroom and switched on his new laptop, brought over by Uncle Hari from America, which was waiting for him on the bedside table. Uncle and Auntie slept one floor down at the other end of the house. Nevertheless, Ram took the precaution of locking the door.

  Ram dialled up the Internet connection, logged onto Delhiwallah’s House of Sin, entered the prebooked cyber room, and waited. Fifteen seconds elapsed. Then a message: ‘Are you there, Man-God? It’s me, Manhattan Mania.’

  Ram had had boyfriends ever since he was six years old, and he had been having sex since the sultry afternoon of Gandhi-ji’s birthday (it was a school holiday) when he did it with the son of his parents’ mali. But this one – this shy Internet lover whom he had never met in person – was special. They had come across each other in the House of Sin six months ago: ‘Let me touch you,’ Man-God (Ram) had written, and Manhattan Mania, who had clearly never done anything like this before, typed back: ‘Gently then.’

  It had begun like that. They would meet at midnight in their chatroom twice a week to stroll around their virtual Delhi, unzip each other’s trousers – and faster than it is possible to type with one hand, reach yet another monumental climax. It worked every time.

  ‘Your name, naam batao!’ Ram would gasp into the computer, and Manhattan Mania, who was a lot less proficient than Ram at typing quickly, would reply: ‘I CANT DON@T ASK.’

  In the first few months, Manhattan Mania was cautious – afraid, Ram surmised, of being found out. ‘Where in Delhi do you live?’ Ram wrote one evening. ‘Can we meet?’

  ‘No,’ Manhattan Mania replied, and terminated the connection.

  Ram remembered all too well how upset Manhattan Mania’s ensuing absence from the House of Sin had made him. His Internet partners were usually more brazen. There was none of Manhattan Mania’s reticence, his unfamiliarity with the language men use together. Every night for a week Ram logged on only to be met by nothing. Silence.

  Then, ten days later, Manhattan Mania reappeared as usual, as if nothing was wrong: ‘We walk down Rajpath, arm in arm . . .’ he typed, and Ram added, ‘When we get to India Gate I pull you down onto the ground and . . .’

  Via the ether of their top-floor chatroom, they fondled each other on a boat on the Yamuna (‘But the river is disgusting, yaar,’ protested Manhattan Mania realistically), on the lawns of the Purana Qila, on the dance floor of the Zed Bar, and went even further when sprawled across the bonnet of a dusty white car parked outside the Income Tax Office. Ram had a taste for the illicit: the Jama Masjid, the Hanuman Temple. Manhattan Mania revealed his more homely streak: Nirula’s ice-cream parlour (of course), the INA Market, the Pelican Pond in the Zoological Park.

  Later, in broad daylight, Ram would occasionally revisit these places, haunting the sites of their verbal-virtual trysts, trying to catch the eye of passers-by, and wondering. Who was Manhattan Mania, really? People told each other such lies over the Internet. He knew that they assumed new identities, personas, even genders, in their Internet avatars. But he himself was just as much Man-God in his real life as during his midnight dates. Was it the same with Manhattan Mania?

  Ram looked up from the computer and stared round him at his bedroom. He would like to bring Manhattan Mania here, to show him the trappings of his new life as Uncle Hari’s son. The screen was flashing. A message had appeared: ‘Do you remember the place we went to first?’

  Manhattan Mania was certainly in a nostalgic mood tonight. He wanted to linger on Rajpath longer than usual. He kept asking Ram if he could remember what they had done where. ‘What’s wrong?’ Ram typed at last, and waited patiently for the reply to appear.

  ‘Man-God, if I don’t come back, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Then why might you not come back?’

  No answer came. The fear jabbed at him, a premonition.

  ‘Answer me!’ Ram typed.

  ‘I’m getting married.’

  ‘NO!’

  ‘Isn’t that what people like us do, in India?’

  Ram felt, for almost the first time in his life, the hot, maddening throb of jealousy. ‘No!’ he replied, ‘it’s not what we do. Not in this day and age!’ His hands were shaking. ‘It’s a brand-new era. Don’t you understand?’

  He waited again, trying to resist the impulse to discover the worst. But he couldn’t resist, and finally, he wrote: ‘WHEN are you getting married?’

  There was a moment of flickering emptiness, and Ram held his breath as he waited. Then the single word
appeared on his screen, and Ram hit the keyboard and turned his head upwards and screamed. But the word was impervious to his troubles; it remained there, suspended before him: Tomorrow.

  chapter 8

  On the morning of Sunita Sharma’s marriage to Ash Chaturvedi, Humayun (son of Mohd Hamid, deceased) said goodbye to his cousin Aisha at the Ahmeds’ house in Nizamuddin West where they both worked – he as a driver, she as a maid – and pulled the door softly to behind him. Before he left, she had handed him two pails, one for the milk that he would buy in the market, and the other a tiffin of Mrs Ahmed’s chapli kebabs for his mother, and he swung these jauntily now, as he walked down the side alley of the house and opened the gate. The route from Mrs Ahmed’s house to his mother’s home beyond the shrine ran along the far western edge of the housing colony, parallel with the drain. He loved this daily journey, crossing from the large, tranquil place where he worked, into the hectic, densely packed, and much more antiquated settlement where he had grown up. He liked the peace and order of the planned colony; but the familiar people and the places around the Sufi shrine were part of him too: it was like walking from a peaceful riverbank into a forest noisy with birds, he thought, and he was pleased with himself for thriving so well in both places.

  It was in good part due to his upbringing. When he was little, Humayun’s mother had looked after the Professor’s children – she had been ayah to Ash Chaturvedi, the man who Urvashi Ahmed’s sister was marrying this very evening. Humayun had grown up around the Chaturvedi household, watching their elegant ways and listening to his mother Raziya’s stories about the twins, Bharati and Ash – who had been raised in luxury but without a mother, poor things. Humayun’s mother had strong opinions about the family she once worked for, and she had pronounced that the affable young scientist was ‘throwing himself away with this marriage’. Aisha, too, who worked not only in Urvashi Ahmed’s house but also cleaned for the Chaturvedis every afternoon, found the future bride to be quite unfriendly and over-fastidious, and sensed that, once married, she might be very bossy. Aisha had confided in Humayun that marriage preparations at the Chaturvedi household were very low-key. There were no special lights or flower arrangements, no visiting tailors from south Delhi or jewellers from Chandni Chowk, no breathless delivery boys with huge boxes of crockery and extra-heavy white goods. The only notable thing that had happened, in fact, was that old Mrs Chaturvedi, the Professor’s mother, had sent Aisha upstairs to tidy her grandson’s room (it was a mess of scientific papers), and then she herself had unlocked the old tin trunk in her bedroom, removed an ancient red and blue quilt, and given this to Aisha to spread on her grandson’s bed. That was it. Aisha, who had been expecting marigolds and candles, jasmine blossom and giggling girl cousins, had pronounced herself, in her turn, ‘very disappointed’.

  Humayun agreed. But he relayed none of this information to his mother, Raziya, despite her frequent questions on the subject. It was important, above all, that he did not allow it to come to her attention that Aisha was working in the Professor’s house. Raziya, too, was fastidious, and her greatest disapproval of all was reserved for Aisha’s mother. She liked to point out that the two families were only very distantly related; she certainly had more extravagant hopes for her son than marriage to a girl whose father had disappeared, whose mother had sporadic employment at best (she had recently taken to hawking bananas along the ring road), and who, since the government had cleared the illegal dwellings around the Hindu crematorium, was camping next to the chowkidar’s hut in the graveyard.

  Ever since her husband had died, fifteen years ago, Raziya, too, was making do without a man around, and yet she managed, procuring not only a driving licence for Humayun but also employment at the Ahmeds’ – a rich, young and inexperienced couple who had only recently moved into the neighbourhood. Mrs Ahmed, indeed, had been born a Hindu, which made her the perfect employer, for she knew next to nothing about Islam. ‘Three weeks’ annual leave for performing Haj,’ Humayun’s mother had told Mrs Ahmed on the day she kindly volunteered her son as their driver. ‘Twice annual bonuses for Eid. He will need that extra room at the back of the garage quarters for praying in’ – this was, at present, the place where Mrs Ahmed stored her husband’s library of such political- and social-minded books as could not go on display in his study – ‘and,’ Humayun’s mother said, ‘hot and cold water for ablutions.’

  Mrs Ahmed had a water heater fitted and ordered three-dozen bars of Lifebuoy soap.

  ‘He should eat mutton at least once a day,’ continued Humayun’s mother. ‘This is enjoined upon us in our religion.’

  With her forefinger, she pointed towards Mrs Ahmed’s belly. ‘You, too, will need this holy diet when the time comes. Muslim babies need Muslim meat.’

  Mrs Ahmed, who had been brought up a strict vegetarian, shivered. But the shiver was merely a reflex from childhood; for some time now, she had experienced many thrills (and gained some extra weight) from eating lamb and chicken with her husband. She had acquired a taste for spicy meatballs.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ she asked Raziya, and the older woman smiled.

  ‘New clothes on Eid.’ Then she added, as an afterthought: ‘And please do send him to the mosque on Fridays. These youngsters are tending to miss even the obligatory prayers.’ Humayun’s mother left nothing to chance.

  It was perhaps in reaction to his parent’s strict measure of the world that Humayun began to take notice of a girl whom he met, quite fortuitously, one evening as he was walking home from work. Just as he reached the poorer settlements that abutted the shrine, where the houses suddenly grew very close together, and the alleys were too narrow for cars to pass along, and there was a sudden increase in the volume of raucous shouting and friendly greetings and none of the amazing quiet in which the residents of the planned colony wallowed from morning to evening, he happened to see a girl struggling to carry a plastic container of water. She had turned off from the main street and was dragging the container after her through the gate that led down to the narrow, deep river of sewage that divided Nizamuddin from the housing colonies of Bhogal and Jangpura. She was a thin girl, and her headscarf had slipped from her head and was trailing in the dust behind her. Humayun called out and hurried over.

  ‘You are Humayun,’ she said shyly as he took the container and hoisted it up onto his hip; as they walked, she explained how they were related through her mother’s family. The names meant nothing to him. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as she listed unknown uncles in faraway villages, and, turning his head, tried to catch glimpses of the girl’s face, now partly obscured by the readjusted headscarf. When they reached the drain itself, she made as if to cross the small concrete bridge that led up to the bank on the other side.

  ‘But where are you going?’ Humayun asked, suddenly aware of where they were standing: on the edge of the drain that curled through the centre of the city.

  This was how he learnt that Aisha and her mother lived in the graveyard. She led him across the putrid stream, up the sandy bank strewn with rubbish, plastic bags, little trails of human shit, past the foraging pigs with lines of mud along their backs from wading through the sewage, to the graveyard on the crest of the hill. ‘We have to enter the graveyard through here’, Aisha explained to him, indicating the green gate enclosing the space where the Muslims buried their dead, to her left. ‘In there,’ she whispered, pointing to the right, to a high wall topped with shards of coloured glass, ‘is the Hindu crematorium.’

  Humayun followed Aisha through the gate and between the trees and sandstone headstones to a slight rise in the middle where a white wall enclosed some graves set apart from the rest. Here the watchman lived with his family. Her mother, she explained, rented a tent space for them in the safety of this enclosure. Humayun stared, unable to voice his words. You sleep here? Alone? The old caretaker, Aisha told him soothingly – half anxious at the disgrace, half concerned that he shouldn’t worry – kept out miscreants and kept an eye on them. />
  That night, Humayun returned to his mother’s tailor’s shop in a rage at the shame of it. She had pulled down the shutters and was putting away the articles of clothing her tailors had finished. As he fumed, she listened in silence, picking stray threads off a newly ironed kurta. Finally, she said, ‘I won’t have anything to do with that woman, and neither will you.’

  The very next morning, early, before he had to be at work, Humayun returned to the graveyard, this time carrying a pail of milk. Large lumbering black buffalo were being led through the gate and down to the drain. Humayun walked after them, towards the water, to examine it in the daylight. Early morning was the time he loved most in Delhi, while the mist still sat low upon the roads and the river, and the highways where the buses ran nonstop at the height of the day were almost empty. He stood on the bridge that Aisha and he had crossed the night before and looked along the drain to the east. A huge water pipe crossed the drain, linking Nizamuddin housing colony with Jangpura, and already there were people washing in the water that spurted out from the leaks. Men, half-naked in their lungis, were standing on the Nizamuddin side, swishing the water over themselves, or soaping their bodies as they waited in line. Women stood on the Jangpura end, tipping their long ropes of hair into the water, swinging them up so that rivers curved miraculously upwards through the sunlight. Humayun, whose nose had wrinkled at first against the thick scent of sewage, wondered now whether it wouldn’t be more efficient for the concerned officials to mend the leak and install a shower on the pipe which could then be switched on and off. He felt unusually happy.

  That morning Aisha, too, felt happy when she saw her robust and practical cousin crossing the graveyard towards them. ‘Come with me and I’ll find you work,’ Humayun said, in what seemed to her a tone of almost otherworldly confidence; and he waited as she picked out her best suit, a flimsy orange georgette with long bell sleeves, and combed amla oil into her hair.