Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  Sitting in bed, Bharati dialled his number, and when he answered, she said, ‘It seems you charmed the pants off my Dadi.’

  He laughed, pleased with his success. ‘Oh, good. Whatever it takes to please the venerable lady’s beautiful descendant.’

  ‘And what are you doing in Cal?’ Bharati asked.

  ‘A highly important lingam story,’ Pablo said. ‘My editor hates me. But today I went to Santiniketan.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘And?’ Bharati said.

  ‘And I found out something about your mother.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I can’t tell you over the phone. But it’s important. Very very important.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Promise me one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’ll go and see Leela Sharma. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Leela? Why?’ She began to feel suspicious again.

  ‘This is her number,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘I got it for you from the office; Leela’s husband is—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’

  He read the number out. ‘So promise.’

  ‘Why the rush?’ she said again.

  ‘Because . . . because I want Leela to give you a crucial piece of information—’

  Bharati laughed unsympathetically.

  ‘Tell her I went to the Santhal Mission Hospital,’ he said, a little defiantly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just tell her that. Promise me.’

  ‘OK, I promise.’

  ‘When can I see you?’ he asked.

  ‘When are you back?’

  ‘Tomorrow evening.’

  ‘So come by and get me,’ she said, with cannabis-induced generosity.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t take it personally.’ She laughed. ‘Anything to get away from Sunita.’

  He laughed too, in disappointment. ‘I’ll be there by ten tomorrow evening.’

  As she fell asleep she thought: Why was he so insistent? But when she woke the next morning, the first thing she did was to dial the number he had given her. It was the husband, Hari Sharma, who answered.

  ‘I’m Sunita’s sister-in-law,’ Bharati explained: ‘Ash Chaturvedi’s sister—’

  ‘Bharati.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was surprised he knew her name.

  ‘Do you want to speak to my wife?’

  ‘Please. Is she in?’

  ‘Was she expecting your call?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll go and get her,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bharati. ‘It’s important. It concerns my mother Meera.’

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  When Leela came to the phone she sounded a lot more reticent than her husband. At first she was reluctant to meet, but Bharati persuaded her that she only wanted to talk about Meera’s poems. In the end they arranged to wait for each other at four o’clock that afternoon, outside the entrance to Humayun’stomb.

  At half past three Bharati set out from home to walk to the tomb – it was barely ten minutes away from her house, up to the basti and across the main road next to the plant nursery – and the mild exercise did her good. She felt calm and prepared, ready to meet this sister of her mother’s, even if it did go against both herfather and grandmother’s express wishes. Pablo’s excited trepidation – his doggedness – kept buzzing in her head. She felt intoxicated all over again by the fuss he had made.

  And yet, the longer she stood waiting in the cold, the more uneasy she felt. She wondered, for the first time, why siblings became estranged from each other. Bharati couldn’t imagine ever wanting to cut Ash out of her life (even if he had married a woman she didn’t care for). And what could he possibly ever do to her – what was he capable of doing? – that would warrant her saying: I never want to see you again . . . ? Such a thing was impossible.

  Bharati had spent the morning rereading The Lalita Series – she couldn’t find the copy she had brought from London, so she took one from her father’s library – and had tried to locate within it hints of a joint authorship, or some presentiment of it at least. But there was nothing. Only in the new poem that Pablo had showed her did the poet allude to a creative association. Sisterhood of blood and ink, proof of our collaboration. And only in this poem, Bharati thought as she observed a white car pulling up to the entrance of the tomb, was Ved Vyasa mentioned in this sinister way. ‘The Last Dictation’ was written in November 1979. The month the twins were born. By then her mother was a married woman. Married to a man called Vyasa who taught the Mahabharata for a living.

  A woman stepped out of the white car and Bharati knew it was her – the one from the wedding. Seeing her again like this, she realised: that was why she had seemed familiar at the wedding. Bharati must have seen her face in the background of one of those photographs that her father kept in boxes in his library.

  Leela Sharma was wearing a cotton sari of a deep saffron-yellow, and a huge soft shawl. As she walked towards the gate where Bharati was waiting, she smiled, and her face, which had seemed so serious and intent a moment ago, looked momentarily happy.

  ‘Hello, Bharati,’ Leela said.

  ‘Hello.’

  They bought tickets from the booth. Bharati paid for them herself, talking to the ticket man in Hindi, and then, to get things going between her and Leela, just by way of conversation, and because she felt so tense, said to Leela, ‘I’m writing a dissertation partly on The Lalita Series.’

  ‘Are you?’ Leela Sharma raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  ‘I’m looking in particular at the thread of political disillusionment that runs through the poems, and the milieu in which they were written, the Writers’ Workshops in Calcutta in the seventies, P. Lal’s English translations of the Mahabharata . . . Do you think that was an influence? Do you think my mother went to one of his Sunday-afternoon recitations? I know that they are still going, twenty years later, I was thinking that I should go to Cal on this trip and go along to one of them myself. He might remember her, do you think?’

  She knew she was gabbling.

  Leela, meanwhile, reached into her bag and took out a copy of Bharati’s mother’s book. She held it in front of her and looked at it a little wonderingly. ‘I think this must be yours. I borrowed it from your house.’

  ‘It is mine,’ Bharati said, annoyed, as the booth man handed her the change for the tickets. ‘I looked for it this morning. When did you borrow it? I only brought it back with me from London on Sunday.’

  ‘I came by on Sunday night after your brother’s wedding. I had a long conversation with your grandmother. Didn’t she tell you?’

  ‘No,’ Bharati said, ‘she did not.’

  ‘Well,’ Leela answered.

  ‘Well what?’ Bharati gave Leela her ticket and walked ahead of her through the gate into the gardens.

  ‘There was no reason for her to mention it,’ Leela said when she reached Bharati, who was waiting for her on the path. ‘I haven’t seen her since I was a young woman. Or you since you were a baby. I’m not part of the family any more.’

  They walked in silence after that, down the straight path that led up to the first of the two arched gateways that guarded the tomb. Visible from here in the distance, perfectly aligned with the top of the archway, was the pale marble dome of the tomb itself.

  Leela had spoken calmly, but as they walked up the steps and through the gateway, Bharati realised her mother’s sister was trembling. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked in surprise. And then, without waiting for Leela – perhaps because of that awkwardness she felt in her presence – she ran on down the steps and along the path to the second gateway, the red sandstone arch that led directly into the gardens of the tomb.

  ‘So,’ Bharati said to Leela, turning towards her as she approached, and trying to get back to the point of their meeting, ‘you are my mother’s long-lost sister.’ They stood side by side, surveying the tomb and its gardens, which were criss-cr
ossed by slender canals.

  ‘Shall we go into the tomb?’ Leela said in answer, and this time it was Bharati who followed her, along the canal and up the steps to where the graves of Emperor Humayun and his family and courtiers stood encased within the huge red sandstone shell, in a maze of darkened rooms joined and divided by stone lattice-screens, so that each vista was obscured by shadows and penetrated by stars.

  ‘You were alienated from each other,’ Bharati persisted, her voice echoing loudly in the stone chamber, not caring how many tourists and visitors heard her, caring only that her words sounded strained and unnatural. ‘That’s what everyone has told me.’

  Still Leela didn’t reply, and only after Bharati had followed her out into the garden again, where the green of the trees was dazzling, and down the steps to the lawns, did she say, ‘There was certainly a month or two when we didn’t speak. But by the time you and your brother were born it wasn’t like that. However, because of something that happened, thereafter it became impossible for us to see each other again.’

  ‘Because you moved to America with your husband,’ Bharati pointed out. They sat next to each other on the grass beneath the shade of four large trees.

  Leela didn’t reply. Instead she handed Bharati the book of poems and said, ‘Thank you for this.’

  Bharati frowned at the dim sense she had of not quite understanding anything anymore. ‘My friend Pablo thinks you wrote the poems together,’ she said. ‘He was the one who made me ring you.’ And before Leela could reply, she said, ‘But my father says that this unknown poem – you know the one that was published in the Delhi Star—’

  ‘“The Last Dictation”.’

  ‘Yes, that it’s a fake. That somebody was imitating Meera out of envy, or something.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was silence for a moment, and then Bharati asked, anxious now, ‘So what do you think about the poem?’

  ‘It isn’t fake,’ Leela said, looking straight at her, and Bharati was struck by her candid expression, by her long dark eyes. ‘We wrote it together . . .’

  ‘Right,’ Bharati said. ‘So you wrote all the poems together, or just that one?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘So . . .’ Bharati began. So her mother wasn’t the sole author of The Lalita Series after all; it was just as Pablo had said. ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked. ‘And how come your poem is about Vyasa, when that’s my father’s name, and . . . ?’ She didn’t want to say it out loud: that the Vyasa of their poem was nasty and lecherous and egotistical. She didn’t mean to ask the next question either, but something about Leela Sharma’s whole demeanour put the worry in her head and the question came out without her being able to stop it: ‘Did my mother love my father?’

  As soon as she said it, she knew that it was a betrayal, and that if her father heard this conversation – or her grandmother – their dismay would shame her. For a moment the question hung there unanswered, and Bharati felt shocked by the thoughts that were veering into each other in her head, one interrupting another before she had time to unpick the meaning of the first. The question she had just asked made her think of her mother living in Delhi with her twins, away from her sister in New York and her father in Calcutta, and then the way she suddenly died, and the hints Bharati had gleaned during her childhood from people outside the family, which she had wilfully refused to explore, not even with Ash, about the nature of this sudden and tragic circumstance. And so, before Leela could answer the first question, Bharati asked another one. ‘Did my mother mean to die the way she did? Was it deliberate?’

  ‘Oh, Bharati.’ A tear slid out of Leela Sharma’s eye.

  ‘Well?’ Bharati said. ‘Was it?’

  Leela shook her head and brushed the tear away. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was in New York by then. But my father told me – he said that she was—’ She stopped and cleared her throat. ‘Has Vyasa talked to you about this?’

  Bharati shook her head.

  ‘How can I talk to you about it then?’ Leela said. ‘We were so happy – she was so happy – when we were growing up. She was such a happy person.’

  ‘And then she stopped being happy?’

  Leela began to sob now, and Bharati, who hated crying, felt a tear run down her own cheek at the thought of her dead mother, and looked away from Leela in disgust. She stared instead at the archway they had just passed through, where two thin men – from the ticket booth, probably – were lounging, talking to each other, eyeing up all the pretty girls passing in and out of the gardens in their new Diwali clothes, and she thought of something her ayah had said to her once, about how difficult her mother had found it looking after twins.

  ‘So what was it that made her sad? Was it being a mother?’

  Leela turned to look at her. ‘No, it wasn’t that. You mustn’t think it was that.’ She wiped her face with the end of her sari. ‘When I talked to Father about it later he thought it began after our mother died. I think so, too. While we were at university in Calcutta, our mother got cancer and it came on so very suddenly we didn’t even know she was ill until afterwards. They didn’t want to worry us and so she died like that’ – Leela clicked her fingers – ‘and of course we never had time to ask all the things you want to ask of your mother, which you would think of asking her if you knew she was dying. Meera resented our father for that. But we weren’t children when it happened – we were students. It made us feel like children again, I suppose. Meera especially. From that time onwards there was a kind of sadness about her, not always, but every now and then.’

  ‘My friend Pablo wanted me to speak to you,’ Bharati said,‘because he said you needed to tell me something.’

  ‘Is he the journalist? Pablo Fernandes? The one—’

  ‘Who wrote about the poems, yes. He’s in Calcutta. He went to Santiniketan yesterday. And he rang to tell me he had found out something important.’

  ‘I see,’ said Leela.

  ‘He said he’d been to a hospital,’ Bharati went on.

  ‘Bharati.’ Leela took a deep breath and knotted her fingers together. ‘I didn’t come here today to tell you this.’

  ‘I need to know, don’t I?’ Bharati said, ‘If Pablo knows, I need to know.’

  ‘Oh, Bharati. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.’

  ‘Forgive you for what? Tell me what it is, quickly.’

  ‘I haven’t told you before, because I didn’t want to upset you and the people around you. Meera knew, and our father knew, but nobody else did.’

  ‘What is it?’ Bharati said.

  ‘I made Meera a promise when I left, and that’s why I’m telling you this now. I hope you will forgive me—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘You see, the thing was, we both got pregnant at the same time. Your mother was married, and I wasn’t—’

  The expression on Leela’s face as she made her confession was half-pleading, half-defiant.

  ‘You haven’t got any children.’

  ‘I haven’t got any now.’

  ‘But you had some once?’

  ‘I had a child.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Meera took her.’

  ‘Her?’ Bharati got to her feet, pushing at the air with her hands as if she was trying to make the words that Leela had just spoken disappear. ‘No.’ And then she screamed, so that pigeons flew up from the steps of the tomb. ‘No! Don’t come here like this, talking like this about me and my mother. Who are you?’

  She walked away from Leela along the lawn and stood looking at the tomb, and then she looked back at her mother’s sister, with her wavy hair so like her own, her eyes so like her own.

  She walked back to where Leela was sitting. ‘Why don’t you just say it clearly?’

  Leela looked up at her, her eyes full of tears.

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘You are my daughter, Bharati.’

 
‘And who is my father supposed to be?’

  ‘The same as Ash’s father.’

  ‘What? Both of you, with him?’ She stared at Leela Sharma. ‘All three of you, all at once?’ The implications of what this woman was saying were disgusting: how could her father have sired children by two different women, by two sisters? It was too shocking to be real. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Bharati cried.

  ‘It wasn’t like you think,’ Leela Sharma interrupted.

  ‘So how was it then?’ Bharati said. ‘You can’t even say it out loud! You come to me after twenty years and you still can’t say this thing clearly. Are you so ashamed?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Leela said, ‘I’m sorry. I have always wanted it to be known and if I haven’t told anyone it’s because—’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to make your life more difficult.’

  ‘So instead you did – what? Gave me away and disappeared to America?’

  ‘Yes,’ Leela said, bowing her head.

  Bharati stood looking down at her. ‘How can you have deceived me so much? You liar.’ She thought of her father. Her lovely father. Could he really have done a thing like that? It wasn’t possible. But if it was true, and he hadn’t known during all this time any more than she had, then he too had been tricked. ‘You deceived Baba! Both of you lied to him, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’

  Leela nodded. ‘We didn’t tell your father. But—’

  ‘So you abandoned me,’ Bharati said.

  ‘I didn’t.

  ‘Why have you appeared now? What exactly do you want?’

  ‘I didn’t plan this,’ Leela repeated. ‘I didn’t come here today—’

  ‘Did you love my father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yet he is my father. Something happened, didn’t it?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain,’ Leela began. ‘I would have done anything for Meera. I never loved your father, I never—’

  ‘But you slept with my mother’s lover—’