Perhaps none of this would have mattered had not a house by the drain, belonging to a family of waste collectors, caught fire. Sometime after midnight, three weeks’ worth of waste newspapers and plastics, bought from the neighbourhood’s maids and housewives, ignited and burnt so quickly and blackly that soon all the nearby houses were filled with smoke. There had recently been attacks on Muslims in other parts of India, and when the panicking residents smelt the smoke, they thought it was arson. Running into the street, they saw the flames reach the buffalo shed. By the time the police arrived, at least six houses had been destroyed. It was even said that a rich Hindu woman had been nabbed in the act of stealing poor Muslim children under cover of the chaos.
Later that night, after sceptical junior reporters had filed stories on the fragile mental health of India’s poor – illustrated with maps of the basti, and an artist’s impression of the demon – and had jocosely regretted amongst themselves that something more colourful hadn’t happened (a shooting, perhaps, a riot, a gangland war), and the two dead bodies had been taken to the Muslim graveyard, the speculation began. The talk circulating in the rich colony was pontificatory: the fire had been started by the Hindu land-mafia to clear the space along the drain of unwanted Muslim poor – for a huge new residential complex was planned, with shopping malls and parking; a motorway, someone else said; a cricket pitch, countered others. The temple priests, in their turn, cast aspersions on the Muslims: they were forever attracting attention to themselves! Shankar Raj, a grocer from Jangpura, told customers in a lowered voice that in his opinion these dirty places could do with being cleared; the Muslims were heavy breeders; soon they would try to take over India again, as in the time of the Mughals. And in the graveyard on the slope above the drain, Aisha’s mother, Tabasum, waiting for her daughter to come home, wondered with a shudder whether the rumours were true: that the Elephant Demon had come back to get them.
Earlier that evening, at around the time that news of the Elephant Demon first emerged, a car was speeding north along one of the wide avenues radiating out from India Gate. Anybody glancing in through the window would have assumed the same thing of the elegant woman inside that people always did. Seen across dinner tables in Manhattan, Leela had appeared perfect: beautiful, well-kept, in good condition for a woman of her age, her education worn lightly, her opinions delivered calmly. Only two things generally gave beholders pause: her husband – that businessman with his sweet face, bald head and singular lack of conversation – where did she pick him up? And then: a certain stillness in her; a kind of sadness; at the very least, a marked reserve. Was it because they had no children? But of course. Poor thing: this was the cruel thread that bound her to him. Here was the sadness offsetting the beauty.
Only, it wasn’t quite true. The world was wrong in its assumptions about Leela Bose.
Hari and Leela drove back to Connaught Place in silence. She felt the thickness of the silence, its awful weight, but somehow she didn’t care. All she could think about was why she had stayed away so long, why she hadn’t returned before. There was her sister’s son, Ash, and that exquisite, precious girl, Bharati, already all grown up before her eyes. She saw how obtusely she had nurtured an image of the plump little babies she once held in her arms; standing before them at the wedding, she felt the full scorn of her years of absence. The children were barely two years old when Meera abandoned them, walking out into the road in despair. And yet Leela hadn’t done what Meera asked her. Come home, her father had written, The children are alone with him now. But she had not gone home. The same despair that had settled on her sister like a mist now floated across the seas and lodged with her, too: as a lethargy, a blindness, a capacity to shut out what she couldn’t see and to forget what she couldn’t bear.
In the car she refused to talk, and Hari would say nothing in front of the driver. But as soon as they reached home, and the front door closed behind them, he walked across the drawing room to the window, and poured himself a glass of whisky. ‘So, what’s the big secret?’ he said, his back turned.
Leela hadn’t moved from the hallway. There was an edge to his voice that was new, and she saw that he had reached the limits of his forbearance. He would try to force her to talk about her past. ‘You and I made an agreement,’ she reminded him. ‘We moved to New York; I forgot my life in India. That was what we agreed.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ As he turned towards her, she could see his eyes glistening in the light from the street outside. She had never seen him this angry before.
‘Tell you what?’
‘That you knew Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi.’
‘What does it matter?’ she said.
‘It matters,’ Hari began, his voice rising, ‘because our family is joined with his now. Our families are joined in marriage. Such things matter. I repeat: how do you know him?’
She looked at him, this man she had married, through calm, appraising eyes. She hadn’t married him only to escape the world she came from, she reminded herself of that; not just because he promised to take her away. She had also admired this Hari of hers; took pleasure in his practical way of seeing the world; experienced the logic of his mind like a solace, his brain which effortlessly calculated numbers, judged situations and people with accuracy, and yet shied away from expressing itself in words. She had weighed up her chances and found that the peaceful solidity she felt in his presence was better than the pragmatism of arranged marriage, more steadfast than changeable love.
‘He was married to my sister,’ she said. ‘Meera, his wife, was my sister.’
Hari hadn’t expected this. He stared at her. ‘You don’t have a sister.’
‘I did.’ She contradicted him matter-of-factly. ‘My parents, who adopted me, had a child already.’ She repeated the name again for emphasis. ‘Meera.’
‘So why?’ he began.
‘Because by the time I met you,’ she said, ‘my sister and I couldn’t see each other any more. That was why I didn’t tell you.’
‘But all this time . . .’ He sat down in the chair by the window. She watched as he drank his whisky, thinking through what she had said, and then immediately got to his feet again to pour himself another.
‘All this time,’ he repeated slowly, ‘you’ve kept this from me. Why would you do such a thing?’
‘I didn’t want to talk about it,’ she said; and though the memory began to yawn and scream inside her, she spoke calmly, as if it was of little matter. ‘My sister left me at Santiniketan and married Vyasa. She died not long after we moved to New York.’
They looked at each other for a moment. Again, she considered telling him her lonely secret. There was something she had done, twenty-two years ago, of which she hadn’t spoken since. Something shameful, which demeaned her, something she had barely been able to explain in all the time that passed. This was the tragedy of Leela Sharma, sister of Meera Chaturvedi, adopted daughter of Dipankar Bose. It was no good telling him now. She began to walk away towards the bedroom.
‘Come back,’ Hari shouted after her. ‘Come back here and tell me why you kept these secrets from me all this time.’
She had reached the veranda at the back of the house when he threw the glass. She heard it smashing against the floor and flinched, turning in time to see him flinging the whisky bottle after it. Then he tipped the glass drinks table over with an effort, heaving it up in his arms, and she watched as the bottles slid slowly along the shelf and fell to the ground in a series of merciless tinkles.
‘Hari,’ she said softly. ‘Hari, it’s not as—’
‘You embarrassed me this evening,’ he interrupted, standing amidst the violence of the shattered glass. ‘You refused to talk to Professor Chaturvedi, whose son is marrying my niece, and yet’ – his voice rose again – ‘we are living here in Delhi. Our families are joined together. How are we supposed to interact with them now we are back, will you please tell me?’
‘It was you who asked me to come back,’ Lee
la said. ‘I didn’t ask for any of this.’ She gestured around her at the house. ‘You made me return here. You put me through this. You went against our deal.’
‘I love you, Leela,’ he said. ‘I have given you everything I can. It is you who have kept things from me. It is you—’ He pointed a finger. ‘It is you who wouldn’t give me the one thing I wanted as a husband.’
And he began to cry, now that he had said the one unsayable thing that stood between them.
She looked at him as he wept, his upper lip trembling with self-pity, and her instinct was to go to him and hold him, to tell him that she loved him too. But she couldn’t. She still had to keep some piece of herself intact, before it all fell apart. So she watched him standing before her, beseeching her with his anger, and then she turned away, into the bedroom.
She closed the door behind her and sat on the bed, listening to the breathing and whispering of the house around her. As soon as Hari’s back was turned, her father’s house shrugged off its triumphant new incarnation, slipped its arms out of those freshly painted walls, untied from around its waist the modern paintings, peeled off the carefully chosen furniture, and became the house of Leela’s errors again. Underneath the warm polished teak, she could smell the scent of Delhi then: the brown fog in the early morning, the perfumed trees at night, that aroma of betrayal which wafted towards her with every breeze that came in from the garden.
She lifted her head and listened. There was still no sound from outside, and she realised that she had expected him to come meekly to the door of the bedroom, in a spirit of penance, seeking her forgiveness. Just as she was about to start to her feet, she heard the crunch of glass. His feet made no sound as he walked towards the front door but the house reverberated slightly as he pulled the door to behind him.
She jumped up from the bed and ran out onto the veranda. ‘Where are you going?’ she called after him, but there was no one there. ‘Hari?’ she cried. All her calm authority was gone now. ‘Hari?’ She ran down the hallway to the front door and pulled it open. She was just in time to see his huge car pulling out into the road.
Back inside the house she looked at the pile of glass shards he had assembled there in his anger, and which the maid would have to clear up in the morning, and the thought came to her suddenly of the two young people they had been: he so fresh and hopeful, she with the scar running invisibly through her. He had wanted everything, her Hari, expected all the happinesses of the world to arrive in his arms with the easeful delight of a child running to greet its father. They had stood outside this house as he expressed his wonder that she had agreed to be his. Standing on the path, the key of the house in her hand, she had smiled back. She had felt his hopefulness and allowed it to infect her. She told herself that she could turn away from the sadness of the past, from Vyasa and Meera, from the sorrow and mourning that her father lived in: that she could step away to the new world with this unknown and optimistic man, leaving everything that was wrong and tainted behind her.
She walked quickly across the hallway, into their bedroom, throwing open the closet and pulling out a shawl. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, her thick black hair shot through with silver, the saffron sari that she had picked out of Hari’s collection – solely for the way it spoke to her of Meera – she laughed out loud. What a role she had made for herself.
Nobody ever told her she had to be the sensible one, the responsible one; such a thing was never even mentioned. Her parents never asked her to act as Meera’s keeper. But she knew she had been taken in from outside the family, and hadn’t fully understood the bonds between them; had always sensed that the tenderness they felt for this waif could not but be conditional on her good behaviour. Even as a very young child she told herself that it was Meera who deserved the greater portion of their love. So she became adept at being well-behaved. She watched over Meera. She was careful.
Foolish woman, she told herself now. Meera may have exploited this vulnerability – but your father loved you.
And picking up her bag, she went out into the street to hail a taxi.
She only remembered the children’s ayah when they reached Nizamuddin basti. Leaning forward, she asked the driver to stop. ‘Next to the police post,’ she said, looking out at the entrance to the basti, crowded with light and stalls and people.
She felt scared suddenly. She didn’t know Nizamuddin well. In the few months she had lived in Delhi, between Santiniketan and New York, she had only visited it twice. She had gone there the first time to see Meera – and instead met Vyasa’s mother. The house Vyasa lived in with her sister was tall and stately, on a street lined by trees. There was a maid and a gardener, and the children had an ayah called Raziya. This woman, a Muslim, was also newly married, and she lived with her husband’s family in a small set of rooms near the shrine. Back then the basti had the feel of a village, with buffalo outside the huts and chickens in the yards and lines of washing linking the tatty but cheerful shacks where the poor Muslims lived. But in the years Leela had been away, a mesh of concrete buildings and partially paved roads had grown up like vegetation, obscuring the shrine. There was a line of cheap hotels facing the road, with shops below selling services and things to those who were only passing through: a bed for the night, a person to sleep with, a shawl to lay over the holy man’s grave.
She didn’t know where the ayah lived, but she remembered her saying it was on the other side of the shrine, between the drain and the road. The place had changed so much, though, that as she walked up towards the shrine through the market – past travel agencies, dogs, telephone offices, madrassahs, beggars with sticks and men pushing trolleys laid out with kohl for the ladies and elastic for everybody’s trousers – she found that her memories meant nothing. She didn’t want to hesitate and stop in this place late at night, and so she walked on, following the path as it led up past the Urdu poetry academy set up almost over the grave of the poet Ghalib, towards the shrine of Nizamuddin the saint, through a square of shuttered food stalls, and into the tapering passageways lined with flower sellers and shoe tenders. She slipped off her shoes, carrying them in her hand, her bare feet tickled by the pitted marble path. The nearer she got to the entrance to the shrine, the damper the path became, and she trod with distaste over the faint muddy outlines of countless other feet.
Everything had been so quiet in the streets outside that she was expecting to come down the steps into the shrine’s courtyard and find it almost empty of other human beings. But as she rounded the last corner in the passageway, she saw that the shrine was full of people.
There were hundreds of them – poor people – in their worn-out clothes, carrying only a few belongings, murmuring and crying, lying and sitting together, or standing and talking with uneasy, fearful faces. They weren’t here to pray for any private purpose – for children, for gold, for good luck in a business venture – nor had they come for the music, to lose themselves in the sacred, imploring singing. These people, she sensed immediately, were here because of some collective drama. Mothers sat holding tight to their children; the men conferred in anxious groups. Old women rocked themselves backwards and forwards, emitting a thin sound of fear. Leela saw people glancing up and catching each other’s eye: the crowd had a strange, shared awareness of danger.
She addressed an old man in an astrakhan cap who was sitting on the steps. ‘What’s going on?’
He looked up. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ He put a finger to his lips and whispered, ‘The elephant-headed demon has returned.’
‘And because of a demon these people are here?’ she said, not caring to keep the disdain out of her voice.
He considered her briefly for a moment before looking away. ‘Careful, lady.’
‘And what does the elephant-headed demon do?’
‘Some remember him coming before. Then five people died.’
Leela looked out across the crowds of people. ‘Do you know Raziya?’ she asked at last. ‘She was ayah to Professor Chaturvedi�
�s children in Nizamuddin West.’
But it was the old man’s turn to sound contemptuous. ‘Which Raziya?’ He shrugged. ‘You only know one? But there are so many.’
Pushing her way impatiently around the huddled families and subdued children, over legs and bare feet, Leela crossed the courtyard, ignoring the saint’s marble grave, and entered the narrow passageway on the further side that led round the deep, open well with its scum of green murky water. When she reached the northern gate, she slipped on her shoes again, lit a cigarette and looked around her. The street was dark but there was a light coming from a small office a short distance away near the main road. She smoked quickly as she walked, not caring if anybody saw her, and when she reached the streetlight where the insects danced, she stubbed the cigarette out and called to the three men she could see through the dirty window. According to the board outside, it was the Nizamuddin office of local Congress activists; they were playing cards and drinking rum, but a small man with hennaed hair came to the door, and she described the ayah to him, reiterating the point about Raziya’s employment at the professor’s. The man consulted with his colleagues. ‘Try the tailor’s shop on the right-hand side,’ he said when he came outside again; ‘just opposite the butcher’s shop.’ He slapped a mosquito away from his neck. ‘But be careful. The people are saying there is a demon about.’
She laughed, and the man gave her a look of affront.
‘It was your accent,’ she apologised in Bengali. ‘I haven’t heard it for so long.’ Her explanation was only half untrue; in America, Hari and she had almost always spoken in English, but here in Delhi she felt her mother tongue, Bengali, and the Hindi she had once known, unfurling inside her, reaching up through her lungs from some dark hidden place, freeing up more and more of her early life like the tendrils of a plant reaching out towards the light.
Leela's Book Page 17
