Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  Leela was not afraid of the wily old Brahmin. She had a low opinion of his cheap narrative machinations, and she voiced it thus to anyone who would listen. She said she had heard the implausible story he had put about of his mother’s conception (of how his grandfather, the king, entrusted his sperm to a bird, who dropped it into a river where it fell into the mouth of a piscine goddess) and as far as she was concerned, it stank: a fishy tale, invented by Vyasa to make his mother sound high-caste, and his own subsequent conception purer. Leela herself recounted a more prosaic version: that the queen, Vyasa’sstep-grandmother, was barren; that the king risked his heirs upon the river ladies who lived in such freedom on the banks of his kingdom; that only an unscrupulous liar like Vyasa could have foisted such an outrageous story on humankind through his deceitful epic.

  By now Vyasa was a sage great in austerities and since it was irksome to have one’s reputation assaulted by an insignificant ferrywoman, he arrived at the riverbank prepared to silence her. But as he watched Leela rowing passengers across the river, returning with her boat, waiting with one foot on the bank and the other on the prow, her toes stained with henna, her hair uncovered, the five-metre cloth of her sari not even attempting to conceal the curve of her bosom; as soon he glimpsed her – this lithe-limbed lass dressed in very little attire, the cold dark water swirling her unstitched cloth like monsoon clouds around her thighs – he had a better idea. At dusk, he approached the bank and called across to where Leela was sitting with her feet up on an island in the middle of the river. Turning her head, catching sight of his improper looks of longing, she cursed him for his attempts to learn her songs and steal her stories, and for his designs to elevate himself away from the amphibious riverstock of his mother.

  Unfortunately, when it came to illustrious matches and the monetary rewards offered by powerful Brahmin sages, Leela’s opinion of the matter made no difference to her father. Vyasa went to speak with him; and by the time I came to know of the matter, Leela was wedded to my foe.

  At first, I took this sharp maneouvre on Vyasa’s part as an attack on my story. Thankfully, Leela wasn’t so easily cowed. She refused – so it was rumoured – to behave with propriety towards her new lord and master. She never once (so Vyasa was said to curse) touched his feet or called herself his servant; she neglected to address him as her god; she failed to wait for him to come home in the evening before licking her supper plate shiny clean. Worst crime of all, she refused to bear him a child. ‘I need to conserve my energies,’ she would repeat, ‘for other activities.’ When she did give herself to him, it was the wrong time of month, and the time-release ovarian engine was out of sync. She was a scientific lady who knew the rhythms of her body. Her science paid off. She remained childless.

  Back then, Vyasa had old-fashioned ideas. He was appalled by her absence of maternal instinct and independence of mind; he believed she was tampering with Nature, contravening the Lawsof Life; refusing his genes their eternal due. She spat back with sarcastically culled quotes from a handy precursor to the Laws of Manu: You have six choices for begetting a son: Foist him on your wife, take him as a present, buy him, rear him, adopt him or find yourself a better broodmare elsewhere.

  In the end, Vyasa did as Manu advised and got himself a bride who came into the house with bowed head and hymen intact at the age of twelve. Vyasa hoped to teach this recalcitrant elder wife a lesson in Vedic ethics; to spur Leela on to jealousy-induced conception; and to receive, in the meantime, the attention he deserved from a younger spouse.

  But Leela was delighted with the arrival of her special saheli, her girlfriend. She whispered to Meera: I am fed up with men. She explained, over the sound of tinkling bathwater as they lathered each other’s backs and winkled grime from behind respective ears, her theory of female emancipation; she elaborated, as they crouched together in the courtyard sifting rice, upon the methods they would deploy to convert their husband to the light; she was very clear, as they picked up kindling from the forest outside, about the means available to them if he refused.

  Meera, as pristine as she was voluptuous, had been born into the usual, traditional kind of family. When she returned home, twelve months after the nuptials, not yet pregnant, her head full of extremist ideas, her father quit his boasting and sat down to write a complaining letter to his son-in-law.

  But Vyasa was helpless. It was easy for his first wife to strike up an intimacy with wife number two; the river was the channel of their friendship; and Leela, who swam like a nagi, took Meera down to the water the morning after her arrival, determined that she, too, would learn that freedom resided in the waves and the shallows.

  They paddled there, below the old abandoned Pandava palace. At dusk, they wandered through the burnt-out rooms, picking their way over fallen rafters, wondering where it was that Draupadi had lived – ‘with her five husbands, Meera!’ said Leela. At night, Vyasa would return to the hut he had built them just to the south of the palace, and as they prepared the food for dinner, he would begin to recount another of those tales for which he was famous. ‘And how,’ Meera would ask innocently, ‘was it that you fathered the Pandavas’ father and uncle?’ And Vyasa would begin to explain how his mother’s two younger sons were killed by battle and disease, and that she, needing a mate for her daughters-in-law, came to see Vyasa and begged him to procreate with his half-brother’s widows. ‘On the first night,’ Leela interrupted, ‘the first sister shut her eyes in horror at the sight of you, and on the second night the second sister turned pale with fright, and on the third night these two women – who couldn’t bear your advances any longer – sent a servant-girl in their place.’ And Meera would put back her head and laugh, as the tears sprang into her eyes.

  In short, under Leela’s tuition, Meera grew rebellious, and the unfortunate joint husband – unable to impregnate them – was forced, like his grandfather, to foist his heirs upon the localwasherwomen.

  As for Meera, towards the end of her life, she became so haunted by a foreknowledge of the child-bearing, shit-cleaning, bangle-jingling existence of wifehood that she knew awaited her in future incarnations, so terrified did she grow of relinquishing the bliss of the present for the monotonous future, that on her deathbed she wailed, beat her breast and begged the gods to let Leela remain with her always.

  Avatar 3: The Buddha’s Pen

  And so it was to be: Leela and Meera reincarnating together for ever after. Nevertheless, I feared the damage this era of Vyasa-scripted epic might do them. And so, at first, as the centuries passed without them putting in an appearance, I felt relieved. But on the ages stretched, and soon I began to get nervous at their absence. Where were they? Wallowing bare-breasted in the warm salt water of the southern seas? Re-born without my knowledge into the forest peoples of central India? Had they dispensedaltogether with the hassle of reincarnation by passing Go, collecting two hundred heavenly rupees, and clocking up their time in nebulous nirvana?

  No. Only after all memory of the Pandavas’ city – of Vyasa and his story – had faded from the Indian imagination did my prudent characters return to the Yamuna. By now a new philosophy was in the ascendance, and Indraprastha was being transformed, under the Buddhist dispensation, into a brick-built city called Indapatta. Leela and Meera graced this brand-new era of handwritten scriptures, of breathless tales from places outside India, of the breaking of corrupt and obsolete idols, working as scribes, turning the utterances of this latest holy man into something long-lasting. Their existence was by and large peaceful. Much later came the rumour that they had left for Tibet, trading exotic carnelian for nuggets of pure river gold, and later still I heard a report that a monk called Vyasa had been knifed through the back as he penetrated a trainee nun in a cemetery on the Black and White Faced Mountain.

  Avatar 4: Wanderers

  Their coming and going remained mysterious. Life number four, for example, I heard tell of early one morning, just as I was settling down to a tepid dinner of bread (roti) and dripping (gaome
dha) in a cobwebby sarai down by the river. A woman was recounting the scandalous tale of a local princess, Leela, and her handsome handmaiden, Meera. She told how Princess Leela had everything that a woman could possibly desire – saris, servants, fruits brought for her delectation from the furthest side of India – but that she had renounced it all in the name of poetic creation. Fleeing the court accompanied by her maid, she was even now wandering as a kind of minstrel, singing hymns in praise of the elephant-headed god (yes, that is what the woman said, I promise). Of course, with hindsight – in retrospect, during the journey from one rumour to the other – some details of this story were changed in other gods’ favour. Later, I heard that the Rajput princess was called Meera; that the palace was in Rajasthan, not Dilli; that the object of her devotions was blue-faced Krishna. But it doesn’t matter: I breathed a sigh of relief, and rejoiced in my characters’ independence.

  Avatar 5: Scriptures

  Soon the wind began to blow in from the west, bringing with it a new type of people: from Samarkand – from Kabul – from all those arid places west of Taxila. They came to the Yamuna, erected forts for their wives, tent cities for their soldiers, and penned bittersweet poems tinged with sadness at the loss of the snow, the mulberries, the mountains of the lands they had left behind them. One of their sons was named Humayun, and he, like all the others before him, took over the site of the Pandavas’ castle and fitted out a palace there with a splendid library.

  Meera was the young daughter of one of Emperor Humayun’s courtiers. Her beauty came to his attention, and he requested her specially for his harem. Once ensconced in the fort, however, she developed a debilitating addiction. She could not stop reading tales of intrigue and battle, of spice merchants and river crossings, of avenging lovers – all provided in volumes smuggled across the Yamuna from one of the less reputable sarais, and written by a woman named Leela on paper the ink of which smudged as you turned the pages.

  One such story was a yarn of two lovers, both women, deceiving the husband who held them captive. It had been translated into Persian from an unspecified local dialect, and illustrated with portraits of the women dressed as marauders from Herat, entering the city in a caravan of Kabuli melons, and leaving in a cartload of indigo-dyed dhotis.

  Humayun began to grow suspicious. Meera, who as a fourteen-year-old maiden had charmed the emperor with her wileless ways, was no longer to be found in the palace apartments at the usual times, and he had grown weary of asking after her whereabouts. At last, an old eunuch told him the truth: Sire, he said, or something very like it, she is reading. Reading? said Humayun, spitting out a melon pip. He got to his feet, and demanded to be shown the offending girl at once.

  So the eunuch led the king through the fort, along the ramparts to a small room where, behind a stone turret, there was a secret door built into a room over the river. Humayun looked down through a narrow tunnel to where light and freedom glinted and he could hear the gentle lapping of the river’s waters. There, at the bottom of the tunnel, just above the water, sat Meera with her nose in a book.

  The monarch confiscated the volume and took it with him to the library. Meera was imprisoned in the masons’ tower. When Humayun reached the top of the library steps – reached the page where Leela had written, Wishing to rid herself forever of the imprisoning grip of subservience to her master, the serving girl pushed a knife deep into his breast – he gave a cry of pain, stepped forward, entangled in his own garments, and tumbled back down the smooth stone steps.

  He died a few days later, calling out as he went, Tell her she is free. But Meera had not cared to wait for his approval. She had already escaped from the palace in a bundle of washing – thrown down into a boat where a cocky-eyed woman named Leela was waiting – and nobody except that snitching eunuch (whose name, by the way, was Vyasa) knew what the emperor was talking about.

  Avatar 6: The Ghost

  In their next life, Leela (on this occasion, ‘Leila’) came back as the daughter of a functionary at the court of the declining Mughal administration. Meera was her favourite Hindu servant. This time, too, Leela never married but lived on the outskirts of the city in splendid poetic isolation. From the roof of her house you could just see the glint of the river in the distance and the walls of the newest of the Mughal cities, refigured in red, half a day’s walk away to the north. Their house was in an unpopular locality, a place where crows gathered to pick through the refuse thrown there by scavengers who had been through it once already. From the balcony, Leela would watch Hindus tipping the ashes of their relatives into the water, and later, at dusk, see the boys who dived from the bridge, searching through the river with its cargo of flesh and orange peel, for the gold coins that were sometime thrown in too, as good-luck charms. From sights such as these Leela composed the singularly bleak ditties for which the pens of other men became famous, and Meera would watch her, puzzled by the ease with which she drew forth similes of such beauty from sights so morbid.

  The day Meera was killed by a British sniper, as she ventured out at dawn to look for food, Leela sat keening by the window, watching her friend’s inert body lying by the side of the road as the vehicles of the British victors moved past and into the city. The siege of 1857 had been lost, the Emperor Zafar had fled south to the tomb of his ancestor Humayun. Leela knew that the killing and looting would begin, and that even an old lady like she would not be safe from the swordsand pricks of angry foreigners.

  When darkness fell, she pulled back her hair and dressed herself up like a man in a plain dark shirt and trousers, and went out into the street to where Meera lay; and later that night, asher heart filled up and broke with longing, she paid one of the scavengers to carry Meera’s body to the riverside, and performed the rites herself, scattering ghee and water and lighting the pyre of wood with money purchased from the bania in exchange for the three silver rings that Meera had on her toes and her own gold filigree bangle. Then she walked to Humayun’s tomb, wherethe old king, Zafar, was hiding, carrying the last of her verses: compositions of such unalloyed sadness that the emperor wept all the way to Rangoon.

  Avatar 7: Epic Dancers

  That life ended sadly. Leela and Meera’s most joyous incarnation, by contrast, occurred in the early 1920s, when they worked the bars and clubs of old and new Delhi as itinerant dancers. By now the scrubland of the city had filled up with pink-faced invaders, with their spacious, airy bungalows, with their crisp sense of order, with their cramped sense of humour. Each night for nearly a decade, Leela and Meera danced out the story of the Mahabharata. Meera twirled as Urvashi before Leela’s ascetic archer, until after one rowdy reception in Arab-ki-Sarai near the tomb of Humayun, a local policeman broke into their makeshift tent. The women he battered to death were discovered the next morning with smiles on their faces, clutching to their bosom Arjuna’s deadly bow. The policeman’s name, I later discovered, was Deputy Inspector Vyasa.

  Avatar 8: Migration

  Which means there is just one more tale to recount before I embark on the complications of the present. It is 1947. Meera and Leela are each exactly seven years old in the year that India is divided. They were born in Delhi, in the same week, in the same neighbourhood, to mothers who hated each other. Meera’s mother, a Muslim, was tall and thin, always dressed in a plain black cloak, with red-stained teeth and kohl-rimmed eyes staring out defiantly from the moon of her burqa. Leela’s mother, a Hindu, wrapped herself in a sari, parted her hair with scarlet powder, and slotted gold bangles over her plump, oil-smoothed hands.

  Both women shared a guru: an undefinable Sufi-cum-Bhakti, a mountain man with a taste for southern belles. He often passed through the neighbourhood, bound for Hampi, thence Haridwar, and back again to the Himalayas; and nine months after one such visitation, the offspring these women had always longed for – could easily have relinquished their marital virtue for the sake of, had visited many different shrines and springs and temples and gurus in the name of – were born, in adjacent houses.r />
  The little girls loved each other, and whatever the admonitions of their mothers, took no notice as wrath spluttered and bubbled in their lane just south of that long and crowded street where the whole city came for shopping, Chandni Chowk. The girls were oblivious of their mothers’ ire; and for seven years, the city’s streets between the Turkman and Kashmiri Gates were all theirs.

  In September of their seventh year, a few weeks after they had seen their first carcasses – not of chickens or sheep but of people – the tall thin beanpole mother called her daughter: ‘Come, Mirah’ (she hated the way her daughter’s worthy Arabic name was phonetically indistinguishable from the common Hindu ‘Meera’), ‘pack your toys, we are leaving.’ And she pulled her daughter inside the house from the street, where the girl had been listening to Leela describing how she had seen from the window a man brought back to his home by his uncles, red stains on his white pyjamas. That night, the tall thin beanpole family left the seventh street, taking a tonga through the shuttered streets to the Purana Qila, Emperor Humayun’s old fort built there four centuries before on the site of the Pandavas’ prehistoric palace of Indraprastha. ‘We are going west, to the Land of the Pure,’ the beanpole mother told her daughter, and the child cried and would only go to sleep when her father slipped a nugget of opium between her lips and begged her to be quiet.

  The old fort, where Emperor Humayun had tumbled down the steps of his library, stood on a hill in the centre of the city encircled by a wall. Inside, where kings had looked at the stars, and Vyasa’s grandsons had managed their kingdom, there were now rows and rows of tents: refugees bound for Pakistan.

  To this place, the next morning, came Leela. With her was a political activist from the Congress Party, a Miss Urvashi, who knew very little about the lies children tell, and thus had listened, and felt deeply concerned, when this girl told her that her Muslim family were leaving for Pakistan, that she had been separated from them and must be taken to the camp at once. Miss Urvashi walked her charge through the old Mughal fort, the child’s hand in hers, her own eyes wide with horror at the sight of row upon row of frightened Muslims, huddled in the pathways, their possessions –everything they had to start new lives in that country to the west – rolled into bedding at their feet.