Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  It was the thin man in the blue shirt, the one who earlier this evening had spoken disrespectfully of Muslim women. Humayun tried to reason with himself; surely the man was mocking him? But the tremor in the driver’s voice could come from nothing but fear or pity.

  The driver spoke again: ‘She was wearing a yellow suit of clothes, wasn’t she? You’d better hurry back and find her.’

  ‘Who was it who attacked her?’ Humayun said.

  But the window slid upwards, and the car accelerated away towards the entrance of the Flying Club. Humayun’s hands trembled as he tried to fit the key into the ignition. He saw the thin man get out, walk quickly into the wedding grounds, and shout something through the jasmine archway. The Professor and his mother were just coming out. Nobody spoke during the short drive home.

  When they reached the Professor’s house, the front door was ajar. ‘Aisha,’ said Humayun. He leapt out of the car, instead of hastening over to help the Professor’s mother as he should have done. ‘Aisha,’ he shouted as he ran up the steps.

  The Professor’s house was in near darkness; one light was on in the kitchen and another in the hallway. Humayun almost skidded on the clay waterpot, which was in pieces on the floor.

  He ran up the stairs, calling Aisha’s name, turning on lights, opening the door into bedrooms and bathrooms, and eventually reaching the library on the top floor, where the Professor kept his books. The bookshelves loomed up aggressively like well-trained soldiers. In the centre of the room, Humayun turned on the desk lamp and crouched down to look under the table. He even unbolted the door to the veranda and walked round the terrace, looking over the wall and down into the garden.

  When he ran back downstairs, the Professor was standing in the hall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the Professor said. ‘Where is Aisha?’ His voice was low and angry. ‘What the hell are you both up to?’

  ‘She promised she would wait here until Mrs Ahmed came to collect her,’ Humayun said.

  ‘She broke my mother’s vase!’ the Professor said. ‘It’s lucky that nobody walked in through the open door and took the rest. Aisha is young and clumsy and distracted. Go and look for her at that other place she works and tell her not to come back here.’

  Humayun didn’t reply. But as he walked away towards the front door, the Professor called after him. ‘Take this,’ he said. Humayun turned, and saw that he was holding out an envelope. It was his pay for the evening.

  Humayun pushed the envelope into his pocket and ran up the drain road towards the basti to look for Aisha at the graveyard, thinking over what the Hindu driver had said as he ran, and asking himself if he had been guilty of lust. It was because of his own dirty thoughts about the Professor’s daughter that he had forced himself on Aisha before they were married, made her late for work at the Professor’s, failed to make proper arrangements to collect her after the wedding – and even trusted flighty Mrs Ahmed when she promised solemnly to fetch the girl herself as soon as it got dark. If what the driver said was true, then it was his fault. It was just as his mother had said – Humayun clenched his fists together as he ran – men were the cause of all the world’s sorrow.

  He had almost reached the gateway that led down to the drain, when he heard the shouting in the lane ahead, and smelt the burning. ‘What’s happened?’ he called to a group of people who were standing under the trees near the drain. During the day, the waste collectors’ wives sat here weighing beer bottles, Old Monk and Royal Challenge whisky bottles, mango pickle jars, English and Hindi newspapers, and all kinds of slop-stained plastics. A man in a blackened shirt, holding a baby, turned towards Humayun. ‘Can’t you see? The kabari settlement caught fire. The fire spread into the next gully. The wind was coming from across the drain, and we thought the whole basti might catch, but thanks to God it has only affected twenty or thirty houses. We’ve managed to contain it.’

  ‘Is anybody dead?’

  ‘One young girl, maybe two, died in the smoke. Also, a baby from the other side of the basti. Many people have taken refuge in the shrine. The bodies have been taken to the police station.’

  ‘Which young girls?’

  The man’s baby woke up and began crying, and he turned away from Humayun and handed the child to his wife.

  ‘Which young girls?’ Humayun repeated, shouting now. ‘What were their names?’

  The man looked up again. ‘Our house is full of smoke,’ he said, ‘my children are crying from fear and cold. I don’t know the girls’ names. Go and ask for yourself at the police station.’

  Humayun hesitated a moment, and then he ran – pushing through the crowds of men who stood in the street discussing the burning with dismayed but resigned expressions – choking and coughing on the smoke as he skirted the edge of the basti in the direction of the main road.

  At the corner of the basti market, scared anew by the thought of approaching the police station alone on a night like this, he called out to the carpenter who was sitting on a bench outside his workshop, dangling a grandchild on his knee and watching sceptically as his son planed the top of a table. ‘Did you see the girls who died in the fire? What were they wearing? Was one of them in yellow?’

  The carpenter, a big man, looked up and shrugged. ‘Yellow?’ He looked over at his son. ‘Was one of them in yellow? Yes, maybe she was. But you should go and—’

  Humayun, however, hadn’t stayed to hear any more.

  By the time he arrived at the thana he was breathless. The police station was beyond the market, on the outside edge of Nizamuddin, in the armpit of the two main roads which ran along the colony’s northern and eastern edge, and was set back from both, in its own garden. After the noise and fear in the basti, the place was oddly quiet.

  Humayun walked up the driveway and climbed the steps to the door. As he stood there, getting his breath back, he had another moment of hesitation. Nobody he knew would ever willingly go to the Hindu officers of Nizamuddin police station for help. Then he thought of Aisha – raped or dead or dying – and put out a hand and knocked. The worst they could do was to send him away without an answer.

  A tall policeman with a large paunch answered the door. He was speaking to a colleague about a particular chicken dish: ‘No onion, no garlic, only coconut. Fried in ghee with a little tiny pinch of poppy seeds. Yes?’ he asked, looking down at Humayun.

  As politely as he could, Humayun explained that he had lost his cousin; that he was concerned that she had been harmed in the fire; could they confirm that none of the recently deceased was named Aisha?

  The policeman opened the door wider, and pointed to a long wooden bench by the entrance where Humayun should sit and wait, opposite a desk where another policeman sat making notes in a large register. He called through to the room beyond: ‘It’s fried hard till the skin pops. A special Bengali trick. My sister-in-law does it’ – and from a nearby room, three other male voices burst out laughing. The chicken-loving policeman turned to face Humayun: ‘What did you say her name was?’

  ‘Aisha,’ repeated Humayun.

  ‘Aisha.’

  There was a sudden silence. The policeman at the desk looked up from his writing. ‘And your name?’

  ‘Humayun.’

  Again the policemen looked at each other, and the fear entered Humayun and made him grip the bench with both hands for reassurance.

  ‘Do you know what happened to a girl called Aisha this evening?’ the man at the desk asked eventually.

  Humayun opened his hands to show he knew nothing, not being able or willing or inclined to ask these men about the other thing that might have happened to her. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I hope she has not been caught in the fire.’ He didn’t want to hear these men talk about Aisha; it would make him go mad.

  But a third policeman, sitting in an inner room, got to his feet and came to the door. ‘Something much worse for a woman’s reputation than that.’

  The policemen looked between each other again; and the man at the desk n
odded.

  The chicken-loving policeman stepped forward, leaning over him so close that Humayun could feel his warm breath. ‘Is that mud on your trousers?’ the policeman asked, and he took a pinch of the material on Humayun’s thigh between thumb and forefinger. Humayun glanced down at the mark. ‘It’s ash from the fire,’ he explained.

  The chicken-loving policeman cuffed him round the head. ‘Sister-fucker, it’s mud,’ he said. ‘Have you been involved in a struggle?’

  ‘A struggle? No, sir.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Have you had carnal relations?’

  ‘Sir?’

  And Humayun heard the man at the desk say in a tired voice. ‘Take him out of my sight. The interrogation room.’

  ‘But, sir,’ Humayun said, and as they pushed him towards the room at the back of the thana he heard his own voice rising: ‘Don’t you understand? My fiancée is Aisha. I am engaged to be married. Tell me what you’ve done to her!’

  A door in the corridor opened and Humayun felt himself being pushed from behind. He sprawled into the dark room, tripping on a chair so that he lost his balance and half fell, half tumbled to the floor. Somebody turned on the light. Humayun lay there for a moment and he remembered how he had pulled down Aisha’s salwar that afternoon, how the warmth had flowed between them in their first private moment together; and as the chicken-loving policeman loomed over him, and Humayun scrambled to his feet, he tried to balance this vision with that of Aisha in her yellow suit, being led away by another man and violated.

  ‘Did you fuck her?’ the chicken-loving policeman said, making a lewd motion with his hand. And then Humayun did something stupid, something that, even at the time, he knew he would immediately regret. He lunged for the man, grabbing him by the shirt, and then they were on him. One of them hit him round the head. Sister-fucking terrorist, he heard them shout. Another punched him in the chest. He felt a pain in his leg and back where a third was kicking him.

  They spent a few moments seeing to his incapacitation, and then they dragged him to the cell at the front of the station, and locked him in.

  Part Two

  chapter 1

  The alert reader may have noticed, while I was sitting and talking through my project with the literary agent Bill Bond in London, that circumstances had forced me to effect one key transition. I, Ganesh, had taken human form.

  It happens to gods at strategic moments in history. Krishna did it; Jesus tried it; and I, too, took my turn. In the beginning, up on Kailash, I debated with myself only briefly about the type of avatar I should choose. A holy man? A warrior? A merchant? No. I needed to be able to influence events, to get my errant characters back on track, to wrest control from Vyasa. And how to do that? Through my pen. This was the truth I had taught Vyasa. This was the way I would observe my characters across multiple lives, and pursue them through numerous ages, and eventually get them together as one grand cast. I dabbled in it across the centuries, leaping down to earth to be the scribe of courts and sarais and mushairas, to preserve literary traditions, to transmit cultural ideas . . . and always with my elephant’s eye on my own cast of characters.

  But now that the time of their great meeting had arrived, I realised the stakes had been raised. I couldn’t be just any old scribbler. I was determined that everything would happen just as I had planned it. I had readied myself for the crisis (prepared the ground with hakims, astrologers, christenings – all the right and proper proper names) until everyone I needed was walking the streets of my city, masquerading under the identities I had chosen. It was time to make them mine again.

  ‘Of course, when I say I need an Indian writer . . . I mean, you do write in . . . English?’ said the eager agent when we met at the Nine Muses café, a look of doubt suddenly crossing his schoolboyish features.

  I sighed. If he only knew. Yes, I wrote in English, but the pain of it, the sacrifice.

  When I began the narrative exploration of which the following is the fruit – the sugary, gram-flour laddu – I of course had very little idea about what I was letting myself in for. I am now in a position to inform the Reader that my principal task during the tracking of my cast across the yugs was the problem of keeping pace with exactly how to record their exploits and activities. That is, I did not wish to vote, as Vyasa did, for the elite and high vehicle of Sanskrit. No, my aim was more demotic. I wanted my story to be disseminated in every script that was being scribbled in the land now known as India, all of them. And that changed the dynamic completely.

  For thousands of years my task was fairly straightforward, merely a matter of migrating across the country from tribe to tribe, town to town, readjusting myself to the ins and outs of a basic set of scripts and tongues. Right to left and left to right. North to south and east to west. I learnt Brahmi and Kharoshti, Maurya and Shunga, Gupta, as the emperors grew in stature and demand. I was ready to master Munda and Kolarian; or Persian to soothe the Sultans; and so from the loins of Sind-Hind-Ind sprang a dynasty of people infused with the love of a good line and the thrill of an intricate plot. I was the first to admit that the collusion of cultures breathed into my story glorious dimensions the likes of which had never been seen before.

  The Europeans, meanwhile, had been arriving: the French, Dutch, Portuguese and English, on and off for years. None of us took much notice at first; but slowly, steadily, insidiously, they began marching us down the great long straight Roman Road of no return, and we fell for it without fully understanding how, or pausing to reason why. The Roman letters came and saw and conquered, little by little, drip by drip – a printed sign here, a paper notice there, a transcription, a contract, even a translation or two (of the Ramayana, the Gita – though they have never to this day scaled the heights of the mountainous Mahabharata). All these things were small enough to go unnoticed in the hectic vortex of busy India, until the British forced upon us English education, and then our minds became Miltonic, iambic, full of loony vowels and foggy climes.

  But I, at least, retained the desi aroma. I had Leela on my side, didn’t I? That’s what I told myself, anyhow.

  ‘The people still love me,’ I whispered to Bill as he looked on sceptically. ‘The ones who don’t speak English do; all those who prefer the thick vowels and agile consonants of the mother and father and brother cousin sister tongues still do puja to Ganesh. But how can I answer their prayers? When I can barely sing their songs, feel the rhythms of their rhymes, trill their prose? I had a multiplicity of tongues, and I abandoned them, to write in English only!’ And I added (overcome with self-doubt, prone by nature to exaggerate my woes): ‘I have become a vernacular illiterate! There! It is true.’

  ‘And a good thing too,’ said Bill, taking out a draft contract. ‘Now, run me through your characters. Pronto.’

  Bill, you see, is an Englishman born and indelibly bred. His instincts are racy, his sense of structure hinges on the cliffhanger (I quote from those now much-thumbed Notes for New Writers). He wished for none of this sensitively explored, infinitesimally detailed, psychological study of character. No. He has banned interior monologue, pathetic fallacy, poetic ambiguity. His creed is: 1) character exposition: Boom! 2) Plot plan: Wham! What he likes best are broad sweeps of local colour, clouds of unusual odours, plenty of exotic women. ‘Strictly no disjointed postmodernists, limbless cripples or impoverished persons,’ is Bill’s mantra.

  I began to explain. ‘There’s Meera and Leela whom we’ve talked about already, there’s Vyasa and his mother, Shiva Prasad and his wife. Then there’s Bharati, Sunita, Urvashi, Ash and—’

  ‘Wait up,’ Bill said, holding his head in his hands. He had been trying to take notes and his pad of paper was a mess of scrawlings. ‘Bharati, Sunita, Urvashi and who?’

  ‘Ash,’ I said. ‘The genealogist.’ I looked over at him and added (a little defiantly), ‘I need some help keeping track of my characters’ origins. You should try reading the Mahabharata. It is obsessed wit
h lists of sons of sons of sons of. Aren’t you following?’

  He shook his head. ‘All these previous lives!’ he grumbled. ‘It could go on for ever.’

  Of course, it wasn’t Bill’s fault he was slow to catch on. But at least you, dear Reader, will have gathered by now that these precious products of human striving take longer than a lifetime to accumulate. Character, like culture, is cultivated gradually over millennia. It is formed by historical reaction – something like dominoes, or osmosis, or the migration of ospreys along an interlinked series of watercourses, gathering plumage, shedding it, changing in flight. Characters I invented at the beginning of time have lived and relived their lives, winding their way in and out of history, right up to the present, adapting, growing, maturing – but with always a glimmer of their original being. You have seen this already in my first and most important character, that wondrous lady Leela.

  O my Leela, my heroine, my muse; the quintessence of my creation, that triumph of rebellion from Vyasa, the best that I gleaned from my under-rewarded, conspicuously sidelined act of literary transcription.

  Having resolved that direct divine intervention in the scenes of my creation was the only way I could ensure that the plot would come to fruition in Delhi, I sped across the heavens, dreaming of Leela all the way. I allowed myself to wander indulgently through her eight successive lives: recalling how unequivocally she refused Vyasa’s advances just before the Bharata war, how prettily she danced out the epic with her sister, how wilfully she plunged to a watery death in the refugee camp at the Purana Qila. The further we flew through the clouds, the more my mind was intoxicated by our propinquity. When we landed at Indira Gandhi airport I barely noticed the changes to my beloved city – the Yamuna, a once beautiful mountain goddess, now shrunk to a black sewer – so caught up was I in the idea of her existence.