Urvashi Ahmed only saw Humayun’s mother once more that winter. She came to call one evening towards the end of Ramzan, to ask if Urvashi had heard anything about her son. But of course, Urvashi had heard nothing, and she had to turn the woman away.
Raziya walked from Urvashi’s house back along the drain road to where the Professor lived. She had taken to coming to the Chaturvedis’ house every week, after closing up the shop, and before cooking dinner, to stand at the front door and ask if there had been a phonecall, if anybody had heard anything at all. Every time the Professor’s mother gave the same answer: nothing yet but we will let you know as soon as we hear.
At first, Raziya felt sure that her son would return. She had read his note, and knew what an obedient boy he was – how faithfully he had always performed the tasks she required of him, how he attended school right through until Class Ten, how he brought home his salary every month and gave it to her. As the days passed following his disappearance, she thought about him all the time. She thought about him as she took orders from customers – in one month’s time it would be Eid and every lady in the colony was thinking of the new clothes she would wear, and all of them wished to discuss the virtues of bell sleeves versus three-quarter-length, boat or sweetheart neckline, piping, or a special hand embroidery for which Raziya’s shop charged twenty rupees per square inch. Always she wondered where he was, and what he was doing. She thought of him as she lay in bed at night, worrying about how he was living and whether he was safe. She thought of him as she closed up the shop, and counted her earnings, and put half of it in a new locked box in her bedroom and then walked with the other half to the bank. After three days passed, she forgave him for eloping without her permission. Five days went by, and she excused him for taking the gold and her money. After a week, she even ceased to curse his sweetheart. She began to wish that she herself had not been so hasty in denouncing their union.
One afternoon, at the bank in the market, Raziya asked for her account balance and saw that in addition to the black money that she, like everybody else in the country, kept in the house or about their person, she had saved twenty thousand rupees in the past ten years. Part of that was contributions from Humayun’s salary. And she had been saving it – for what? For her son and his wife and their future offspring, Raziya’s own grandchildren, those little unborn angels whom she would clothe and nurture and educate to a life of happiness and plenty.
The following Sunday, after shutting the shop early, Raziya took a bus to Lajpat Nagar central market, walked up the road with five hundred rupees in her handbag, and chose, one hour later, a pale green baby’s jumpsuit, embroidered with small red flowers on the chest from a shop in the covered market. Before turning for home, she also entered the first bangle shop she came across, where she picked out a box of twelve pretty red glass bangles for Aisha.
Back in Nizamuddin, Raziya looked around her small house, and tried to imagine a daughter-in-law within it. She considered whether they would stay here in this room, with her – she could easily sew a good thick curtain dividing the sleeping space in two – or whether she could sleep in the passage leading to the kitchen. Then there was the question of where their babies would go.
In the end she decided that she could have a partition built down the middle of the bedroom, and she called a man from the market who came with his tape-measure, wearing a grubby brown shirt that needed a wash – he was a Hindu – and took off his shoes and looked respectfully around the space she presented for his inspection and asked, after taking some measurements and walking up and down and thinking about it, ‘Do you have access to the roof?’ She nodded: of course, the roof. There was nothing much up there – only a few pots of tulsi and coriander, and a little chilli plant, and the water tank.
They went up onto the roof together, and the man explained how he could build a large bedroom with an insulated tin roof and concrete block walls in no time at all and for only ten thousand rupees. Raziya thought about it, and bargained him down to five thousand by opting for concrete sheets lined with polystyrene. The man returned the next morning with his men and started work; and Raziya began to furnish the space in her mind, filling it with things appropriate to a bridal chamber.
By now it was the second week of Ramzan, and all her staff were fasting and the small room where the tailors worked (behind the space where Raziya received her customers) was full of irritation – they all complained about the dust that the Hindu builder caused to fly around as his men tramped upstairs, and the noise of sawing planks, and, above all, about the smell of drifting cigarette smoke from the roof, and the delicious aroma of Hindu tiffins at lunchtime.
But the man was prompt, and the room was ready within the week. Once he had finished, Raziya called in another man – from the basti, this time – and paid him three hundred rupees for paint (from Bhogal) and two hundred rupees labour charge, and long before Eid the room was white and shining and smelling of the gloss paint that had been used on the woodwork.
Raziya had in the meantime visited the carpenter on the edge of the basti market, and ordered a double bed, for which she paid nine hundred rupees. The carpenter had made it from solid Indian ply with a slatted hardwood base that smelt faintly sweet and sickly, as if it had been dragged from a rubbish tip, and the next day Raziya came home from Bhogal on a cycle rickshaw, balancing a new foam mattress, plus two double sheets, a thick green and pink blanket still in its transparent plastic case, and some red fabric roses with drops of dew pasted all the way down the petals, which she bought from the greeting card and gift shop next to the chemist.
Finally, when the bed was assembled and spread with the sheet and the roses placed in a vase on the window sill, she took down from the row of hangers in her shop the garments that she herself had stitched: a white khadi cotton kurta and pyjama for her son, and a simple but well-cut thick cotton suit made from a red and purple print with a matching diaphanous dupatta for his wife, and she carried them upstairs to the roof, unlocked the padlock to the room, laid them next to the baby suit on the double bed, spread with its new sheets and patterned blanket. She sat down at the foot of the bed, and put her head back and listened, imagining her son in this place with his wife and child. She could hear nothing, only the cars on Lodhi Road and the crows on the electricity linesand the birds of prey swooping through the sky, far above her head.
chapter 17
Linda walked over to the lectern and looked around her at Emperor Humayun’s fort – with its proper medieval battlements and pink, octagonal sandstone library (like in the history books), its huge elephant-procession gateway and daunting views over the city. She stood in the midst of it all, facing the audience seated in packed rows on the concrete steps of what passed for the fort’s open-air auditorium – on the very place where refugees bound for Pakistan, and Emperor Humayun’s courtiers, and the Pandava brothers, had all stood in their turn – and she couldn’t believe it: that she was finally in India, in this hallowed place she had thought about so often in the past, giving a lecture about the Mahabharata, on her birthday. Ever since she had walked out of the airport and smelt the warm, tangy air, she had thought how strange it was. She remembered her mother here before her – younger than Linda was now, heading off into the eastern part of the country – and the idea exacerbated her slightly exhausting sense of continual amazement. She thought of her mother as she took a taxi into the centre of the city, as she stepped out of her hotel and looked at the streets around her, as she stared and listened and soaked in the reds and oranges and greens, like her dumbstruck yokel self, aged thirteen, in Leicester Square.
And beneath her lecture notes, neatly typed out, was the so-called ‘novel’ that the mysterious Indian customer had asked her to transcribe. The neatness of the typing belied the chaos. Linda was a staunch supporter of the imaginative process, but there were things asserted within which she knew to be factually impossible. Either that, or it was an elaborate prank mocking her own Ph.D. thesis. There was, howe
ver, a lot that made sense.
Linda placed her notes on the lectern and gazed across the crowd of expectant faces. Professor Chaturvedi had just given the keynote speech – all the usual stuff about the god Ganesh, mixed in with some political statements about the present government, as well as obsequious thanks to the Akademi’s funders, and a rather dry and curt manifesto for what this new body hoped to achieve in India and beyond.
It was Linda’s turn now. Of course she felt nervous. She hoped she wouldn’t blush too much. She prayed her voice wouldn’t dry up, that her hands wouldn’t shake, that the pages of her lecture wouldn’t blow away into the audience. She had watched the professor as he spoke. During her research, she had read almost everything he had published. She was familiar with his frequently pleasing turn of phrase, his gift, rare amongst academics, for illuminating entire ages in broad, clear strokes of colour. She had realised this morning, as soon as they were introduced, that his ability to make antiquity feel real lay, in part, in his own demeanour: open, attractive, accessible. And then, his attitudes were voguish: sexual politics was his calling card, gender relations, women. Judging by the number of young women in the audience, his female students found it shocking and stimulating in equal measure. As a teacher, he was clearly much admired. Linda wondered how she was going to tell Bharati what she had come to know about Professor Chaturvedi.
‘The legend of Ganesh as the Mahabharata’s scribe,’ Linda began, ‘has not fared well with scholars. Even though Ganesh is a popular god, ubiquitous in folklore, these very words – popular, folklore – are anathema to Sanskrit scholars. They have generally treated Ganesh’s literary credentials with contempt, denouncing him as anachronistic, and editing him out of their editions. Today, I wish to reinstate the god Ganesh at the heart of India’s literary canon.’
And catching her friend Bharati’s eye – she was sitting three rows from the front, next to a man with curly hair, whom Linda guessed was the latest boyfriend – she smiled.
‘The description of Ganesh’s role as scribe frames the epic – and yet it has been in jeopardy ever since the late nineteenth century when the idea that Ganesh was a spurious, later addition to the epic became current. Indeed, the late-twentieth-century Chicago translation of the Mahabharata excised the Ganesh episodealtogether.’
Linda knew that Professor Chaturvedi had made this notion – of Ganesh as a late interpolation – the basis for his much-quoted thesis about the god, and that the theory she was to lay before her audience, and his audience too, posed a subtle challenge to his scholarship. This was not an auspicious basis for a future relationship. However, there was nothing to be done. She took a sip of water. She felt very calm.
‘Where did this idea come from? The first person to raise it was one of the fathers of Sanskrit studies in Europe, the famous nineteenth-century scholar Moriz Winternitz. Winternitz noted that there were crucial differences between the various versions of the Mahabharata, which was not surprising given its length and antiquity, and because of the original oral transmission of this text.’
She glanced over at Professor Chaturvedi. He was listening to her words with great attention.
‘The main disparity scholars found when they consulted these different editions was the South Indian text’s “remarkable” omission of the Ganesh legend. Winternitz therefore proposed the formation of a Sanskrit Epic Text Society, the explicit aim of which would be to publish a critical edition of the Mahabharata that reconciled the differences. It was this suggestion that led to the Bhandarkar edition, and, in turn, to the marginalisation of the Ganesh legend.’
Linda was enjoying herself now. She scanned the crowd for the Dictator’s characters with whom she had recently become so familiar. Maybe that was ‘Pablo the Protector’ sitting next to Bharati. And was that anxious-looking boy on her other side ‘Ash the Genealogist’? Had shy and retiring Sunita come to the lecture? Was ‘Urvashi the Truthteller’ here?
‘It is understandable why Winternitz and his followers drew the conclusions they did. Other than in the dictation scene, Ganesh is not mentioned elsewhere in the Mahabharata, nor in the Ramayana nor the Vedas, and given that the first verified textual appearance he makes elsewhere in Sanskrit literature is in the comparatively recent Puranas – around the fifth century AD, possibly a millennium after the initial composition of the Mahabharata – scholars have till now had good reason to assume that the dictation legend cannot have existed within the epic before that date.’
Linda saw Professor Chaturvedi nodding in agreement.
‘Furthermore, in the more easily authenticated and historical Puranic cult of Ganesh, there is no mention of the elephant god as scribe. As one twentieth-century scholar noted, “No ancient Indian frescoes or sculptures depict him in this role.” Another has reflected that the “late interpolation” probably represented a pragmatic and belated attempt “to get Ganesh into the epic of which it is said that anything which is not included within it does not exist”. And yet, there are certain features of the Puranas which may be connected to the dictation legend of the Mahabharata. Indeed, I believe these reveal that the Ganesh legend was present in the Mahabharata from early on, and was there for a specific historical reason.’
Professor Chaturvedi was by now looking distinctly wary. Linda couldn’t help feeling pleased. In the process of transcribing the Dictator’s pages she had at first been infected by the narrator’s derogatory view of the Mahabharata’s Vyasa – which was complicated, given the position she then found herself in vis-à-vis the Professor.
‘In the Puranas,’ she continued, ‘Ganesh is given wives (or attributes), variously known as Buddhi and Siddhi, or Buddhi and Riddhi. Academics have long argued’ – and here, she knew, she was indirectly criticising Professor Chaturvedi himself – ‘that the association of Ganesh with script arose through a confusion of the name of his wife Siddhi (the word siddhi means success) with siddham (a term for the Hindu alphabet from ancient times). But scholars have not examined the possibility that the name of Buddhi could actually be taken to refer to the Buddha.’
A woman a few rows back from Bharati looked up sharply at this. Linda had noticed her already, pen in hand, taking notes, and she glanced now between the woman and Bharati. They looked alike. Could she be the famous Leela?
‘I would like to argue that Ganesh’s role in the Mahabharata is a response to the competition Buddhism posed to the oral hegemony of the Vedas, from the sixth century BC onwards. Remember that while the Vedic tradition was predicated on oral transmission through the “perfect” and elite vehicle of Sanskrit, Buddhism made a merit of disseminating its message in as many dialects, languages and scripts as the faith came into contact with. Also, while the Vedic priests stressed veda (to announce or proclaim), the Buddha’s own focus was on budh (to understand, to awake) – that is, on actually understanding rather than simply repeating the scriptures.’
The Leela woman was certainly lovely. She had wavy dark hair like Bharati, and the longest, biggest eyes that Linda had ever seen. Linda thought of the way the Dictator had described Leela in his book – with her ‘cow-lash eyes’ – and thought that on balance the phrase didn’t do her justice. On the whole, she wasn’t sure she’d liked the Dictator’s cast of women. She had doubts about their over-lofty stature, their lustrous skin, their dark, flowing, Ganges-glossy hair. She was dubious about their breasts, those annoyingly perfect rotundas, as big and smooth as supermarket melons.
‘In the Puranas, Ganesh’s marriage to Buddhi stakes Hinduism’s claim of authority over the scriptures. Similarly, one could argue that he was placed in the Mahabharata in an attempt by Hindus to co-opt the new and previously shunned medium of script, which, thanks to the Buddhists, was becoming increasingly popular in India.’
This Leela lady was the only true exception. Though the Dictator was apt to lose himself in his story (as Linda found through the ache in her fingers when she typed up his ramblings), and although she was bemused by his supernatural tales
of Leela’s exploits, she couldn’t help feeling admiration. As she listened to the gentle Indian voice enlarging on Leela’s various incarnations, she even felt a pang of envy. She wanted to be a woman like that. To have somebody describe her as a brave and undaunted firebrand kind of person.
‘We can see this in how the Ganesh dictation episode is described in the North Indian edition of the epic. Here the act of writing protects “divine words in the language of truth”. For the first time in recorded history, script becomes integral to the fabric of Vedic-Hinduism.’
The more she followed Leela’s story – and that of Meera, her playmate, supporter and associate – the more Linda began to wish herself into the book too. She wanted to be one of Leela’s followers. She wanted to sit in those cool clay courtyards, under the shade of those tamarisk trees, by chill mountain rivers. Before long, every Leela-episode the Dictator invented underwent the same metamorphosis in her imagination.
‘But the question still remains,’ Linda said, ‘if Vedic-Hinduism used Ganesh as a means of answering those challenges from Buddhism that were seen as most dangerous – “understanding” and script – then how does one explain the concurrent prominence of Ganesh-worship within Buddhism? Where does Ganesh come from?
‘All the evidence I have looked at points to the simultaneous and independent existence of Ganesh-worship within Buddhism. Emperor Ashoka’s daughter took Ganesh-worship to Nepal. The Buddha himself disclosed a mantra in praise of Ganesh to his companions. There has been a very wide dissemination of Ganesh-worship via Buddhism, beyond the borders of India – to Buddhist Nepal, China and Tibet, as well as to Burma and Indonesia. Indeed, Chinese-Buddhist paintings and sculptures of Ganesh are earlier than any Ganesh image in India. If Buddhism took Ganesh-worship to China as early as this, logically it must have existed in India before that.’
Leela's Book Page 38
