‘Your heir? A son?’
‘Yes,’ said Hari, growing excited. ‘It would make a change to fill our lives with young people, wouldn’t it, Leela?’
And the old, assertive Hari returned: ‘It is not so unusual for brothers to take each other’s children. We could go and collect him. We could move back home. Back to India. I want to live there, Leela. We could move into your house on Kasturba Gandhi Marg. We could all move there together. You, me and Ram. We will be like a family together.’
Leela had stood looking up through the grandeur of those tall, silent trees in which she had instinctively taken comfort when she arrived in this city, remembering the deal they had done when they married: that she would emigrate with him, bringing all her culture and poise to bear on his business, and that he, in return, would never ask about the time before they were married, would never – above all – force her to return to India. Like many of their compatriots, Hari pined for the place he grew up in; yet for twenty-two years he had honoured this arrangement.
Hari was still talking. ‘I would go to the lecture myself,’ hesaid, ‘but I have an important dinner this evening. Can you go instead? I’d like you to meet him.’
‘Who?’ she asked, still disbelieving.
‘Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi. We should get to know him, now that he’s going to be family.’
And so the sickening feeling came back to her that, once again, Vyasa was dictating the course of her life. The mere thought of Vyasa – of everything he had done – filled her with rage. But she said nothing further to Hari; and although she still felt angry, sitting on the plane with the paper folded in her hands – while she wanted to scream that she had been doubly betrayed, to weep that she would not set foot in her motherland however much he begged her – she knew, too, that the reason why she had agreed to come back had nothing to do with her husband and everything to do with Meera. Once, long ago, she had made a promise, and she could not leave India a second time until that promise had been honoured.
chapter 3
The day Hariprasad Sharma brought his wife back to India was the sum and pinnacle of all his achievements. For the month leading up to their departure from New York he could barely sleep from excitement.
‘It will be Diwali just after we arrive!’ he said as he showed her the tickets.
‘The wedding is two days after we land,’ he explained as he unlocked her jewellery.
‘I’ve done up your house,’ he confessed a week before their departure. ‘Leela? The place your father left you?
‘Leela?’ he said, when she failed to respond. ‘Aren’t you excited?’
No, Leela was not excited. She packed a small bag. A saffron-coloured sari. A sheaf of papers. A couple of old LPs.
They were met at the airport by his driver, who took them straight into the centre of Delhi on a suitably genteel route: along the empty road that led out of the airport terminus, past multinational hotels serving visitors in the city on business, into the calm diplomats’ enclave of Chanakyapuri, through India Gate’s ceremonial sandstone vistas, along the wide, bungalow-lined avenues designed by Lutyens (Hari loved the Raj incarnation best of all Delhi’s avatars) and due north-west along the street once known as Curzon Road, but which, since Independence, had been renamed Kasturba Gandhi Marg after the wife of the Father of the Nation.
Finally, Hari led his wife up the path to the secluded, two-storey house with its massive garden behind, whose construction dated back to before Independence, to the time when Connaught Place was built, to the creation of New Delhi. He was aware that his hands were trembling. The last time they stood together in front of this door was in 1980, when he had just asked this beautiful, English-speaking woman to marry him. He had already learnt that she was the only one living in this spacious residence which she was borrowing from her father who lived alone in Calcutta. She had explained that she had a job teaching at a school in Delhi. He had expected to find out so much more about her. But just as she had never invited him into the house, so she had never opened her past to him. And now, here they were, two decades later, having returned in this triumphant way to India.
Hari stepped aside and allowed Leela to enter the building first. But he followed eagerly after, for he couldn’t wait to show her how wonderfully her father’s gift to her had been transformed. ‘A very rare location,’ his architect had said, when Hari told him about it. ‘A house on Kasturba Gandhi Marg? Impossible! Like gold dust.’ When his nephew Ram suggested they live somewhere more modern, Hari shook his head. It was the heritage he wanted; and the link to Leela’s past.
Over the past year, he’d had the house renovated from top to bottom: the kitchen ripped out, new units fitted, the roof terrace whitewashed and filled with plant pots, the Burma teak woodwork stripped and waxed, the terrazzo floor polished. Chandeliers now hung from the ceilings. Works of art from their house in America were splashed across the walls. Magazines and newspapers had been splayed out in a fan on the table in the hall. In the garden, steps led straight down from the terrace to a lawn that it had taken three malis eight months to tend, as if each blade of grass was a helpless newborn baby. The old ficus tree cast some perfect shade, the raat-ki-rani provided the sweet smell of autumn, and all along the edge were bougainvillea and jasmine, a gulmohar tree and an ashoka. A brick path led through the lawn to a red sandstone bench, above which was an alcove with a small stone statue of the god Ganesh. This space, so near Connaught Place, yet peaceful and secluded! Away from all the bustle and commerce and pollution!
But the pièce de résistance – Hari took Leela into the bedroom to show her – was a wardrobe full of new saris: silks, georgettes, chiffon, Banarsi, and his favourite, Bengali tangail cotton. He had chosen them personally. Hari couldn’t stop smiling. His wife, back in India. His dream had come true.
The following morning was a Saturday, and (ever the tactician) Hari took the opportunity to drive down to his office in South Delhi – supposedly to make sure everything was in order, but really to give his wife the chance to unpack and get acquainted with her new surroundings. ‘Will you be all right?’ he said as he left. ‘Do you need anything? The driver is here. The cook will leave at seven. The maid should be done by then too. There’s—’
‘I’ll be just fine,’ she said, blowing cigarette smoke into the air and smiling.
He watched her as she stood in the middle of the garden. Smoking was a new habit; Hari had yet to voice his disapproval.
It being so near Diwali, there was a festive spirit in Delhi’s exhaust-filled air, and Hari’s Saturday excursion took longer than he meant it to. When he arrived home at six, the house was empty. ‘Where is Mrs Sharma?’ he asked the cook, who was making curd in the kitchen.
‘She went out,’ the cook said.
Hari walked through to the high-ceilinged drawing room, which overlooked the garden, mixed himself a gin and tonic, and settled back into one of his newly upholstered pale khadi silk chairs. The familiar warmth of alcohol would settle his nerves. He felt tense sitting here, like a shy young groom awaiting his bride.
The maid had lit only two of the silk-shaded lamps, and the light they cast in the early-evening shadow, across the faded Persian carpets and embroidered settee, was pleasantly dappled; it reminded Hari of the sal forests outside the village he grew up in, where his father had taken him every Sunday morning, explaining about the mahua tree and how this land was sacred to its indigenous inhabitants who had lived there since time began. Hari was pleased with the effect he had created in this house, with its amalgamation of different epochs of his marriage – the paintings from their modern art-daubed apartment in New York, the Mexican ethnic artefacts gathered during a trip across the border, the bits and pieces collected from travels to London, Geneva, Venice, and transplanted to New Delhi. Things had moved on considerably since that morning three years ago in New York, when Leela revealed that her father had left her the Delhi property.
Hari had been taken aback. ‘But your father died, wh
at, innineteen eighty-five? Almost twenty years ago.’
Leela stirred brown sugar into her porridge. ‘There were tenants in the building till just now. The issue has only just been resolved.’ She unfolded the crisp, lawyer’s letter, and passed it over.
Leela said nothing more, and during the next fifty trips to Delhi, Hari stayed as usual in the Imperial Hotel. But it was the house that set him thinking. Does a house represent a root? he wondered, late at night, lying on his side in New York, in the enormous double bed they still shared. Was a house enough to bring his wife back home?
The night Hari met Leela he was at a crowded garden party thrown by the company he worked for. He had been in a strangely febrile mood. For the past few months he had been obsessed by the idea of setting up his own business. As he approached his boss (soon to be his rival), bearing a small box of sweets tied with a ribbon, Hari’s attention was drawn to a young woman. It was Leela. Hari’s boss and his wife, who was Leela’s colleague, were listening attentively as she told a story. Hari took in her dark, sardonic eyes, her dignified bearing, wrapped so elegantly in a simple cotton sari, and he told himself with a defiant pang that with a woman like that at his side, he could take on the world. That evening, when Hari offered Leela a lift home, to his surprise she ended up staying at his place. They continued to see each other in the weeks that followed. Two months later, he had started his own import-export cotton clothing company, Harry Couture (he thought of calling it Dharma or Karma or even Bharata but Leela persuaded him this was more personable). Soon after that they were married, and on their way to New York. Leela’s father blessed their union with his approval but not his presence. Leela explained to Hari that she was adopted, that her mother had died when she was at college, that her father loved her, but his grief kept him in Calcutta. The intimate disclosure affected Hari deeply; he promised himself that he would protect her. This feeling wasreinforced some five years later, when her father died. She was all alone in the world, with nobody to look after her except Hariprasad Sharma. The sacred duty made him proud.
Happily, Leela more than made up for her negative equity in the area of family. She was an excellent investment: loving and supportive, constantly feeding his commercial instinct with money-making plans. As she set up house in New York, Hari instructed his workers back home to sew see-through frills of shiny polyester into slippery shifts and lacy slips – replicating designs Leela brought home from Macy’s. In 1982, he opened a second line, Namaste India, selling ethnic chic to American teenagers. In 1984, their wealth was assured with the purchase of a riot-stripped dried fruits shop belonging to an Old Delhi Sikh; Hari took over the ailing godown – the man was emigrating to America to run one of those 7-Elevens – expanded the line to include pistachios and Kullu apricots, Leela designed the packaging in black and gold, and he sold his product to all the smartest grocery stores in New York, cresting a wave of interest in Indian cuisine. As the eighties stretched profitably into the liberalised nineties, Hari became a gem king, making the emerald his corporation’s niche. Cut in Rajasthan, designed in Karol Bagh, set by a team of Bangladeshis on the top floor of a workshop behind Chandni Chowk, destined for Manhattan, the margins were wide, the profits divine. Finally, in 1994, Hari agreed to put money into a newEnglish-language newspaper, a tabloid jauntily named the Delhi Star, twenty-four per cent of which was owned by a foreign media conglomerate. It was an exciting departure for India. Hari never dreamt of the trouble that would ensue.
The ‘trouble’ concerned Hari’s elder brother, Shiva Prasad, who threatened never to speak to him again if he persisted in this money-grabbing, foreign-funded, English-language venture. He shouted that his little brother’s trade was demeaning for a Brahmin; that it was unpatriotic to promote the colonial language through his media venture; that it was wicked to do business with immoral global corporations. For Hari, whose patriotism was as mild as his personal politics were vague, Shiva Prasad’s vehemence was perplexing, irritating and economically irrelevant. ‘He’s out of date,’ Hari protested to Leela. ‘And besides, even his own party is in bed with the multinationals.’
‘He’s jealous of your success, that’s all,’ she replied. Shiva Prasad had always been a bully; and Hari refused to give up his new endeavour. For a time, the brothers seemed destined to go their separate ways.
But Hari missed his brother. Though they hadn’t been close as children, Shiva Prasad was part of his life. It was all right for Westerners to behave in that detached way, Hari reflected, but it wasn’t possible for Indians. And he wondered, late one night, whether he had spent rather too much time in super-charged, family-lite America. Then he hit on a plan. It wasn’t revenge. Far from that. It was a way of reconnecting with family.
Soon after they were married, Hari and Leela had agreed to wait a few years before having children. A few years turned to six; by now Hari was amply rich; he expected a child. They copulated scientifically. Leela turned thirty, his mother rang him from India to explain about gurus and practices, and Hari began going to the temple on the other side of town. He would enter the sanctum quietly, aware of where the idol stood, a black stone, dabbed orange at its base: Ganesh with his long curved trunk, ears alert and wide apart, listening. Hari felt comfort in this place.
But he began to see that he had wanted too much from Leela Bose. He was proud of his graceful, atheist, modern wife. But he had other expectations, too, of a kind of womanhood that came to seem impossible. Too late, he understood that he had wanted a virgin on his wedding night; that he had expected a religious wife. Hari never discussed religion with Leela. In the early years, she went through the motions of pious belief, bowing her head to the puja fire his mother lit on her visits to New York, buying the appropriate sweets for the proper people on every propitious date. But he felt there was something missing – a critical lack of fervour – and that for his wife, the fathomless space, which his mother filled with voluminous gods, remained empty. It was but a matter of time before Hari sought the solace of the supernatural. But even that couldn’t help when it came to reproduction. So in the end, Hari fell back on the resources of family.
On one of his many visits back to India, Hari arranged a secret meeting with his brother’s son Ram. Uncle and nephew – united by a mutual love of capital – had always got on, and Hari, whokept a careful eye on his brother’s finances (dented by aself-published book in Hindi on the ‘Indigenous Origins of the Indo-Arya’), guessed that Shiva Prasad had nothing to offer the market-oriented Ram which he could possibly desire. This was Hari’s moment. Like a fairy godmother in a smartly tailored Western suit, he stepped neatly into the financial breach, waving a dollar-coloured wand.
Hari was philosophical. He knew that he mustn’t, under any circumstances, make it too easy for his heir. Ram would have to work, he would have to sing for his supper, he would have to prove that, despite his father’s Arya posturing, he was worthy of being his uncle’s heir. Ram did exactly as Hari asked. He took a degree in Economics. He studied for an MBA. He even did time on the garment-factory floor. Having done all this, he was ready to move into Hari’s office as his understudy, and thence into Hari’s house. But there was one major obstacle to this plan: Hari’s relationship with his brother.
Shiva Prasad’s beloved eldest daughter, Urvashi, meanwhile, had made an unsuitable marriage. She eloped with a Muslim, which in the context of her father’s position as a pillar of Hindu society, was a near disaster. She was already twenty-three, and the Muslim boy, Hari discovered, came from an upper-middle-class family of printers, now settled in South Delhi. With rewarding prescience, Urvashi’s husband had shifted the printing press from the site of his father’s works near Kashmiri Gate to a modern complex in Okhla, easily accessible to the South Delhi businesses; while his father printed a respected Urdu daily, the son switched to English; and so the business boomed.
Shiva Prasad responded to his favourite daughter’s Muslim marriage with characteristic zeal, banishing his Urvashi from the hous
e. Childless himself, Hari was at pains to understand his brother’s trenchant attitude to his offspring. What he did comprehend was that while the loss of a daughter was one thing (she was bound to leave in the end), the loss of a son would have been sacrilege beyond repair.
But then Sunita, Urvashi’s little sister, got herself engaged – a surprise love match, all her own initiative – to the son of India’s most celebrated Sanskrit scholar. The Sharmas hailed from a small town in the middle of India. The Chaturvedis belonged to Delhi’s urban elite. It was a glittering alliance: far beyond the prospectsof Sunita’s family and friends. Her father, a sucker – like anyone with political ambitions – for celebrity, power and connections, was overwhelmed. According to Ram, Shiva Prasad considered,only briefly, the awkward fact that he, father of the bride, was ideologically opposed to him, father of the groom. He briskly set aside in his mind the hours he had spent ranting with fellow party members about Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi’s heinous views on Hindu mythology, the gods, the Vedas. He became amnesiac about the curses he had shouted against liberal academics, anti-national atheists, and other persons of Chaturvedi’s ilk. There were, finally, greater issues at stake than national and religious morality.
But this chance for his own and his family’s social promotion did not come without its worries. As Ram told Hari, Shiva Prasad was in financial despair. The expense of putting on a wedding with a guest list of politicians, TV figures and newspaper editors was astronomical. Shiva Prasad had already cashed in his Provident Fund – and that barely covered the basic catering arrangements. It still left the venue, the invitations, the pandal, the pandit, his daughter’s trousseau and a modern-era dowry of assorted electronic items.
Hari saw his chance. Without letting on to his wife what he was up to, he rang Manoj, his brother’s assistant, early one morning from New York, to discuss a donation to the ‘wedding account’. ‘Would fifty lakhs cover some of the more vital costs?’ Hari asked. And from the next room, Shiva Prasad intimated that fifty lakh rupees would just about do. So brother Hari bankrolled the wedding party. But there is no such thing as a free lunch – at least, not when it is on a wedding menu. Now that he was back in Delhi, Hari planned to visit his brother’s house and suggest a revision of family affairs. But he had to do it delicately. It wasn’t just that Shiva Prasad might feel inadequate for failing to provide for Ram’s material ambitions; he would also object to the taint of merchants, money and foreign influence that came from associating with – profiting from – his brother Hari’s world.
Leela's Book Page 2