Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  They walked back across the drain and went to a house where Humayun’s mother had once worked. The Hindu man, Professor Chaturvedi, seemed pleased to see Humayun, asking after his mother and her tailoring business in some detail as they spoke together in the hallway. Aisha stood outside in the shade of a large glossy leaved tree, overcome by shyness. But Humayun, who had spent many afternoons waiting in this house after school for his mother to finish work, found it unchanged. He was not fazed by its strangeness; rather, the feeling it had always induced in him was a slight, pleasurable feeling of vertigo, so crammed was it with strange rural objects and pieces of mud sculpture and wooden masks hanging from the walls, of men with twirly moustaches and orange turbans, and Hindu ladies with large wondering eyes and red bindis on their foreheads. On a table in the hallway where they were standing, there was even a clay pot such as those his grandmother used in the village, for keeping water cool. ‘She can come in every day for two hours,’ Humayun told the Professor – who opened his hands out wide in a helpless gesture: ‘But we don’t need an extra servant, now that my daughter has gone to London.’ ‘She can wash dishes,’ said Humayun, ‘and mop the house.’ There was a pause, and then he added, knowing that this point was indisputable: ‘Just as my mother looked after your two children, so she will be a good companion for your mother.’

  ‘Who is this girl?’ the Professor asked at last, watching the young man’s determined face, and Humayun said: ‘She is my cousin. She is a good girl, I guarantee.’

  At Mrs Ahmed’s, he adopted a more triumphant tone. ‘I have found you the ideal maid, Mrs Ahmed,’ he told Urvashi – who, not yet pregnant, was spending a very long time in the kitchen practising simple meat dishes. ‘She can clean the house and do the laundry. She can make daal and vegetables and other little things that are too tiresome for your mother-in-law to send over’ – at present one of Humayun’s tasks was to drive every afternoon to Mr Ahmed’s parents’ house in Old Delhi to collect that evening’s meal, prepared by their aged cook. ‘Her parathas are excellent,’ he continued. ‘She knows everything about korma.’ He even added, extravagantly, ‘She can teach you how to make shami kebabs.’

  Aisha stood on the doorstep as Humayun arranged the terms of her employment. She could smell the thick, cloying odour of Mrs Ahmed’s perfume. This house was even more resplendent than the last. Mrs Ahmed was wearing flame-coloured silk, and each time she ran her hands through her long, long, silky hair, her bangles jingled. The house gleamed with fresh white paint.

  Since then, almost a year had passed. Aisha’s innocence had touched Humayun from the first, but during the ensuing twelve months he watched with satisfaction as her confidence grew. He remarked to himself how her body seemed to alter with her new composure. Under his gaze, her breasts, still hidden beneath layers of fabric, seemed subtly to swell. He wanted to run his hands through her hair. But he kept his desires to himself, for Aisha was young; and lest the other servants in this colony should gossip to his mother, he was careful to limit his interaction with his cousin in public, collecting Aisha from the graveyard early in the morning on the way to work, and taking her home after dark.

  He hadn’t broached the subject of marriage with the three women concerned – neither his mother nor Aisha herself, nor Tabasum Khatoon, Humayun’s prospective mother-in-law – and his mother at least, would take a lot of convincing. There had to be some forceful way in which he could do it; but given his mother’s temper, he didn’t yet know how; and the only other person he had mentioned it to was his cousin Iqbal, and Iqbal’s prognosis of his success in this matter had not been good. ‘She’ll never let you,’ he had said. ‘Inshallah the thing will turn out for the best.’

  Humayun was thinking this over as he walked along the path that ran parallel with the black and winding drain that carried the city’s sewage away into the river. The drain was invisible from the housing colony in Nizamuddin – there was a park, a high wall, and a line of trees screening it from view – but you could smell it, despite these attempts to pretend it wasn’t there. The houses that stood here were the oldest in Nizamuddin West, and even though they were large – two or three storeys high, each divided from its neighbour by a wall and a garden – in the time since they were built, the amount of sewage in the drain had swollen from a trickle to a flood, and the people who lived here lived with the stink.

  All of Delhi was built like this, his mother had once told him: pockets of airy, quiet residences where the rich people lived, and right alongside, pushed into the crevices the rich people didn’t want, the busy scrum of everybody else’s existence. She was proud of the tiny, independent space she had made for them both, her little house on the edge of Lodhi Road; but as Humayun walked, he looked up at the big wide houses, with their drawing rooms, and dining rooms, and their succession of bedrooms with bathrooms en suite, lived in by doctors and engineers, and he tried to imagine how it would feel to live in such a house with Aisha – with all that white space on the walls, all those steps to run up and down, all those doors to walk through and cupboards to open.

  The Professor lived in one of these houses, and this morning, as Humayun passed the gateway, he saw that there was a taxi outside, its engine running.

  ‘Humayun!’ shouted a female voice. Looking up towards the house, Humayun saw Bharati, the Professor’s daughter, standing in the doorway at the top of the steps. She was dressed in tight jeans and had cut her wavy hair daringly to chin-length. Her dark blue jacket was slung around her waist and the white T-shirt she was wearing showed off her smooth round shoulders. As he walked towards her, he could see that the T-shirt ended above her navel.

  She beckoned to him. ‘Humayun,’ she said, ‘my father says he sees you every now and then. You are working in Nizamuddin as a driver?’

  Humayun raised his eyes to her face. She was three years older than him, and when he was not even yet at school, had forced him into her father’s study to learn English words which she read out from a blue and white grammar. She had tried to teach him things, showing him a map of the world, pointing out ‘Italy’ and ‘Spain’ and explaining about the Mughal Emperor whose name Humayun bore (and about whom Humayun had, of course, already been told). Once, she had even arranged for him to be taken to the cinema with them in central Delhi; Humayun had felt ill from embarrassment. Everybody could see he was the family servant. ‘He works for you?’ the man at the ticket booth had asked, but she denied it. ‘He’s a friend,’ she said, turning away. ‘Here’s your ticket then, young friend,’ said the man as he handed over the small yellow rectangle of card, and Humayun had felt ashamed of who he was.

  Later, when Humayun’s mother no longer worked full-time for the Professor, he occasionally caught sight of Bharati in the market, buying mangoes from the fruitseller, or arguing with the master tailor about the cut of a shirt. It was she, not the usual filmstars, who filled up his dreams; late at night when he should have been asleep, he imagined unpinning those tiny blouses, caressing that smooth skin, filling up the warm dark cavities of her body which beckoned to him like the sea sucking at pebbles.

  As he stood listening to Bharati speak, these pubescent fantasies came back to him in shameful jabs. She was speaking fast, explaining that she had just this morning arrived back. ‘From America?’ Humayun ventured in English. ‘From London,’ she corrected in Hindi, and added: ‘I haven’t been in Delhi for over a year.’

  He put down the pails. ‘Shall I bring in your cases?’

  As Humayun climbed the steps with a case in each hand, the Professor came to the door. ‘So you’ve met my daughter already,’ he said. She smiled at them both, and Humayun’s eyes strayed haplessly over the skin of her midriff.

  Looking up, he saw that the Professor had been watching him, and feeling both ashamed and defensive, he said, without thinking about it beforehand, ‘I might be getting married.’

  ‘You might be?’ said the Professor, with a smile.

  ‘I am hoping, inshallah.’

>   ‘To whom?’

  ‘To your maid, Aisha.’

  ‘Why, that’s wonderful, Humayun,’ said Bharati, and she added, ‘You know that your Ash-bhaiya is getting married today?

  ‘In fact,’ she went on before he could answer, ‘that’s why I am here.’ She turned impetuously to her father. ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have a driver to take us to the wedding, and to bring us back?’

  The Professor ran a hand over his bearded chin. ‘It might.’

  ‘So,’ she said, tapping one finger against her lips.

  Soon, Humayun had promised to be back after work, to pick up the family and drive them in the Professor’s car over to the wedding grounds beyond the old airport. Bharati waved at him from the top step as he walked back towards the road. ‘See you at five this evening,’ he heard her call.

  After dropping off the kebabs at his mother’s, and telling her about his work for the Chaturvedis (anything to sidestep her questions about the Ahmeds’ domestic arrangements – he had so far only mentioned something vague about a shy little maid coming in from somewhere across the river), and collecting the milk from Mother Dairy, Humayun returned to Mrs Ahmed’s house and told her about his work that evening. She stood in the hallway, her eyes filling with tears as she listened to his story – Aisha had told Humayun the rumour she had heard from the Chaturvedis’ cook, that Mrs Ahmed had been banned from attending her sister’s wedding because her husband was a Muslim – but in the end, after Aisha brought her a cup of tea, she agreed that Humayun could leave work early, and that after Aisha had done her evening work at the Chaturvedis’, Mrs Ahmed herself would go to collect her, and she would wait here for Humayun’s return. ‘She mustn’t walk home in the dark,’ Humayun said: ‘Delhi is no place for young girls.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I will go and get her myself,’ Mrs Ahmed assured him. She then proceeded to outline her complicated plans for the day. They involved a great deal of driving. First, Humayun had to take her to her mother-in-law’s to pick up some household items that the old woman would need when she came to stay during Ramzan; then he was told to drive to Khan Market where a grocery shop stocked a particular brand of haleem spice that Mr Ahmed liked; and when they got back to Nizamuddin West, she made him wait outside the Islamic bookshop in the market. She spent a long time inside, speaking to the staff and browsing the bookshelves, and when she came outside again she was carrying a large paper packet which she held defensively in her arms and wouldn’t let him take from her, even though Mr Ahmed had specifically commanded Humayun not to let his wife carry bulky packages in her condition.

  It was three in the afternoon by the time Humayun and Mrs Ahmed returned home. Mrs Ahmed was wiping the perspiration off her brow with her headscarf, and proclaiming herself ‘very very tired’. Humayun carried the groceries inside, covered the car with a dustsheet (she wasn’t going out again that day), and waited until he heard his employer walk upstairs for her afternoon nap.

  When he came round to the back of the house, to the kitchen door, he saw Aisha through the grill, sitting on a stool next to the stove, peeling potatoes for the evening meal. She was wearing her favourite yellow chiffon suit and she looked so young and delicate that he suddenly longed to take her in his arms. He pushed open the door and said: ‘Today I decided that we should get married.’

  She looked up. A bowl of daal was soaking in water by the stove, and the pan in which she had boiled Mrs Ahmed’s tea stood with the strainer still in it, on the marble floor.

  ‘Married?’ In the moment before she pulled the scarf over her head and hid her face, her eyes moved to his, and he was startled by their expression. Terror or happiness? Perhaps both. He wasn’t sure.

  The house was silent. In the distance were noises of the quiet afternoon, somebody pushing a handcart, the creak of a gate, men calling to each across the rooftops. Mrs Ahmed was upstairs, asleep; Mr Ahmed was away at the printing works and wouldn’t be home until evening. Humayun took the bowl of potatoes out of Aisha’s hands and placed it on the floor next to the pan. Then he came close to her. His hands made contact with her shoulders – the fingers of his right hand moving down her back, tracing the ridge of her spine, as the fingers of his other hand moved upwards to clasp her neck. He put his face to hers, smelt cooking oil and soap, and kissed her lips. At first her body went rigid, attentive; then it relaxed slightly in his grip. He thought he felt a tremor move through them both, and he took her by the hand and pulled her after him through the mesh door that led to the alleyway at the back of the house.

  This room where he was supposed to come and pray was dark and stuffy. There was a mattress, placed there by the Ahmeds in case he ever needed to work late – but his mother’s house was so close he always went home anyway. He locked the door behind them, pushed aside the prayer-mat which Mrs Ahmed had ordered for him, unrolled the mattress and spread out the sheet. Then he pulled Aisha with him down onto the bed, and suddenly, everything happened in a rush. His hands that had never touched her before, felt inside her shirt, felt her breasts, felt down to the springy hair between her legs. He couldn’t see her face, and for a moment it was Bharati Chaturvedi’s semi-naked body standing in the sunshine on the steps that he saw as his fingers moved over her skin. But when he felt Aisha’s own fingers, clasping his back, tenderness overcame everything, and soon he was pulling at the elasticated waistband of her salwar, pinning her down with his weight, parting her legs with his knees. He tried to push himself into her; again and again he tried, and at first there was resistance – he made a wordless grunt of exasperation; and then, just as suddenly, he was in; and the spasms of love and protection followed each other so quickly, so overwhelmingly, that it was all over in an instant.

  Afterwards, as he lay there in the dark with Aisha, Humayun could hear the azan in the distance. He felt her shiver, and then there was the warm wetness of her tears on his neck. ‘I’ll tell Mrs Ahmed today,’ he said, putting his arm around her and feeling her body, so thin and tiny beside his own. ‘I’ll tell my mother that we’re getting married when I get home tonight.’

  He got up, feeling shy suddenly, and resolute. ‘You must hurry,’ he said, ‘Mrs Ahmed will be asking for you. You will be late for work at the Professor’s. I must go there straight away and take the Professor and—’ He stopped. ‘The Professor and his children to the wedding. Mrs Ahmed will pick you up from there in the evening.’

  He knelt down and reached for the box of supplies that Mrs Ahmed had given him, and pulled out a new Lifebuoy soap, still unopened in its white and red packet. He pointed to the door, beyond which was the toilet, tap and bucket. ‘You can wash yourself in there,’ he said. ‘I will be back after the wedding.’ He put his face close to hers, kissed her hair, and got up from the bed.

  ‘Shall we have three children?’ he asked almost shyly, his face half-hidden in the shadow, as he unbolted the door. ‘Two boys and one girl would be best? Two smart boys and one little girl just like her mother.’ And when she didn’t answer, he pushed the door open, and said as he was going out, ‘Don’t leave the Professor’s house till Mrs Ahmed comes to get you. I’ll see you when I’m back from the wedding.’

  chapter 9

  Bharati, who had touched down at Indira Gandhi International Airport early that morning, watched Humayun walk away down the street, and followed her father back into the house. She was glad to have been the means of securing Humayun this extra employment, superfluous though she knew her father thought it, for he was one of the few Delhi dwellers who actually enjoyed driving in the city. But it would be good to have a chauffeur for the evening – it looked smarter – and Humayun, moreover, was special. He was the only child of Raziya, Bharati’s former ayah, a Muslim widow from the settlement that abutted the nearby Sufi shrine, who chewed paan and wore brashly coloured cotton saris, and had been fond of Bharati and her twin brother Ash, in a brusque, preoccupied kind of way. She stopped working for them full-time soon after they turned ten – it was said that she had saved en
ough money to open a tailor’s shop near the shrine – and anyway, by now it was their grandmother, their father’s mother, who became responsible for their upbringing, and she was a much more demonstrative person who was fond of telling them stories from the epics and reminiscing about their father’s childhood.

  Bharati was not looking forward to meeting her grandmother, whose disapproval of Bharati’s casual attitude to her own twin’s wedding had been freely expressed in the course of several expensive international phonecalls. She was right, Bharati knew; one could easily judge the attitude of the sister by the contents of the suitcase that Humayun had just carried lightly up the steps: containing as wedding offerings no Swavorski crystal, no auspicious statue of Ganesh, but only a stripy blue cook’s apron for her brother and a copy of The Female Eunuch for his wife.

  Bharati had taken a taxi from the airport, and driving silently past the beginnings of new flyovers, in between taxis and autorickshaws newly painted green for the compressed natural gas they now ran on, into the sweet hectic hub of the city she had not visited for over a year – she found that, little by little, with the warm odour of sweat in the taxi, and the sight of mist rising from the road, she was already shedding her epidermal London armour. As she breathed in the scent of the chameli bush by the pathway, the smell of turmeric in the hall, and exchanged glances with the photograph of her mother on the stairs, she felt herself losing what defences she had constructed during her recent, triumphant odyssey through the bizarre tics and peculiar trials of that diminutive island they called Great Britain.

  Bharati walked upstairs and sat on her bed, the narrow hard little childhood bed with its printed cotton ochre quilt and flat, dense pillow. She had left this room an innocent, sheltered, upper-class girl and come back – she felt – a woman. Downstairs, her father was calling her name.