Leela's Book

by Alice Albinia

  Hitherto, the family – grandmother, brother, and, by extension, Sunita’s father, mother, grandparents, siblings, cousins – had been furious. Bharati had ignored their emails, phonecalls, letters, faxes. They thought she might come home for the summer but instead she had stayed in London, working on her dissertation, even though it wasn’t due until the following year. They had inundated her college with messages, sent letters to the library where she was known to spend long hours in a favourite cubicle at the top of the building (there was a Dickensian view over London, over the scurrying lawyers of Chancery Lane). But Bharati, who was preoccupied with Indian poetry – and in particular with writing about, analysing and understanding her dead mother’s verse – had continued to ignore them. Her tutor had called this first chapter of her MA dissertation ‘an exquisite exposition of a particular time and milieu in Indian poetics’, and Bharati had emailed these comments to her father, who, she felt, had not been altogether encouraging about the topic of her thesis. She wondered if he wasn’t jealous of his late wife’s small but perfectly formed poetic oeuvre, and she planned to show him how the poems her mother had written were ‘the quintessence of the darkening mood in late 1970s India: passionate, radical, disillusioned, playing on the juxtaposition between the golden age of Indian independence, that had seemed to stretch from 1947 into the future, and the State of Emergency imposed in 1975 by Nehru’s daughter’.

  In London, Bharati proved her difference from her upbringing, by setting herself apart – not from her British contemporaries – but from the life she had left behind in Delhi. In London she:

  Slurped bitter with actors in Hoxton;

  Sipped absinthe for tea;

  Sucked the penises of men from Jamaica;

  Snorted cocaine from the stomachs of obliging boyfriends;

  Smoked aniseed cigarettes with pink paper tips;

  And lived like the bohemian she was born to be.

  Until she left Delhi, Bharati was cocooned in the rewarding existence of being the desirable, clever daughter of one of the city’s most preeminent thinkers. But in London she was seen as a sex-siren intellectual who had stepped straight from the pages of the Kamasutra. She always got good marks, and the tall, pale Englishmen on her course – who read Spivak and Said, who lived in rickety flats strewn with Euripides and Beckett – queued up to kiss her, to lick her, to most enthusiastically bed her, and then – always, always – to take her home to meet their parents over plates of pretty sugared biscuits and tepid, sugarless tea. In London, Bharati discovered, to her pleasure, she was infinitely presentable. (That was when she started broadening the field a bit, checking out the men who moved, silent and unseen, through this sea of pale faces: the Colombians who worked in the kitchens; the Nigerians with their forthright attitudes; best of all, the Pakistanis.)

  Her twin brother Ash, by contrast, had always been a good boy. While it came naturally to Bharati to rebel, Ash seemed to go the other way. Even as a four-year-old, he objected to the liberality with which they were raised: on Janmashtami, their grandmother loved to tell her, he actually asked to go to the temple. When she had her first boyfriend in school, he took her aside to lecture her on woman’s virtue. He found it upsetting when she went to parties in tight, ripped jeans and see-through tops. He protested against the cavalier manner in which she had disappeared to London without establishing where she would stay, on what kind of scholarship, and why she would be gone for so long.

  In London, Bharati often spoke of her twin to her boyfriends. The English ones answered solemnly: ‘Filial guilt. He feels the death of your parent. He is mothering you.’ Bharati wasn’t so sure. And the French boyfriends tended to disagree: ‘La mort, qu’est-ce que c’est? C’est rien,’ said the one called Jean-Claude. ‘What about poverty, or disgrace, or despair? What is an absent parent to all that?’ But Bharati held her ground when it came to her brother: ‘He’s never recovered,’ she said quietly. She saw her brother’s lack of interest in parties and dancing and girlfriends as a long-drawn-out mourning. Later, she mused to a different lover (it may have been the one from Peshawar): ‘I study my mother’s poetry and exorcise this grief. With science, my brother retreats ever inward.’ It came out pretty well in Urdu. And the boyfriend, beneath her, fervently agreed.

  Bharati had made only one female friend in London – she and women didn’t get on in general – an English girl called Linda: skinny, tomboyish, freckled, barely five-foot-one, and yet, unprepossessing as she was, somebody who was continually saying things that made Bharati laugh. The first time they met was in the student bar, almost a year earlier. Bharati was there with her then-boyfriend, an Englishman called Nigel, celebrating her birthday. He was serenading her – singing her Happy Birthday – when five female voices on the next table joined in. Nigel and Bharati turned to look. It seemed she wasn’t the only birthday girl in the room. There was another one – Linda.

  Despite buying each other drinks that night, Linda and Bharati might not have made friends had they not bumped into each other the following week. It was a bright winter afternoon and Bharati was standing in the street stridently dumping Nigel – he was so tiresomely enamoured – when she noticed Linda leaning against the wall that divided the Union building from SOAS, clutching a stack of books to her chest, and smiling.

  ‘What?’ Bharati said, breaking off in mid-tirade.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Linda said, ‘that there are more efficient ways of doing this. You could push him into the road. Somebody might run him over if you’re lucky.’

  Bharati nodded, trying not to giggle. ‘You’re right.’ She contemplated Linda’s hair – golden-brown, unruly, never brushed; like something you might see on the head of a vagrant child at an Indian railway station – and her sunburnt complexion. She wore nondescript blue jeans and a very plain coat indeed. But her face was full of laughter.

  ‘How about a cup of tea?’ asked Linda.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ Bharati said, and, leaving a battered yet grateful Nigel sitting on the pavement, she followed Linda into the Union bar.

  Apart from their height, they didn’t have much in common. They had both been raised by single parents – though even Bharati could see that an attentive father, good-natured brother, hands-on grandmother, throughout-infancy ayah, full-time cook, part-time maid and mornings-only mali was not in quite the same category of singleness, exactly, as a lone, Bible-thumping mother in Brighton.

  Linda was doing a one-year MA in South Asian Languages and Culture. Where this interest came from she didn’t say, but when Bharati pushed her, she admitted that her mother had wandered off to India in her youth and, since she was now too Christian to tell her daughter about her experiences, Linda was having to find out for herself.

  That afternoon they exchanged email addresses. ‘Chaturvedi?’ said Linda, staring at the name Bharati had written in her notebook. ‘There’s an author on my reading list with that name. Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi. I haven’t read his book yet but—’

  ‘He’s my father!’ Bharati said.

  ‘Your father?’ Linda repeated.

  ‘The very same.’ Bharati laughed at the wide-eyed look of wonder on Linda’s face. ‘It’s no big deal, you know, having a father who’s an academic.’

  To Bharati’s initial consternation, during that first year of their friendship, Linda began to read Bharati’s father’s books. She ended up writing her MA dissertation on the development of script in India, and her supervisor encouraged her to expand it into a Ph.D. To Bharati’s even greater surprise, whereas when her father spoke about his work, her mind turned, of its own accord, to other more palatable and exotic subjects, with Linda it was different. Somehow, the way Linda described her interests – the transition from oral to scripted culture, the rise of Buddhism, what it meant to write something down rather than to memorise it – made it sound much closer to her own concerns with poetry and the transmission of ideas than Bharati had ever imagined Sanskrit and archaeology and ancient texts could be. S
anskrit, a field that Bharati had hitherto assumed was populated by legions of earnest, bespectacled men – transnational replicas of her father’s earnest, bespectacled colleagues in Delhi – seemed, in London, to be something rather different. These days, as her friend talked excitedly of Western scholarship’s misreading of Indian epic, Bharati wondered whether she had misunderstood her father, all these years. The thought even crossed her mind that the department in which Linda was doing her Ph.D. might house a nice, handsome scholar whom she, Bharati, could go to bed with.

  Sitting in her bedroom in Delhi, Bharati thought about her awkward English friend. She should have persuaded her to come out to Delhi for the wedding; it would greatly improve things to have some faux-pas-prone guest to wreak havoc with the bridal party. ‘How can you work on Indian literature without ever having been there?’ she had asked her recently. ‘Through books,’ Linda had said. ‘We’re not all dripping in money, like you.’ The gauche pleasure of Linda’s company had helped Bharati survive her first London autumn and the onset of another. Indeed, she thought – forgetting about Linda – if there was one thing she was pleased about in coming home to Delhi, it was the weather. Autumn in Delhi was perfect: not too hot, not too cold.

  But her father was calling her from the hallway, and strolling downstairs, Bharati found that he had set the table with his favourite coffee cups and treasured Italian espresso pot. In the place where Bharati always sat was the pull-out section from one of the newspapers, and on the front page was a photograph. It was of Bharati’s mother.

  Bharati was not unused to seeing her mother’s picture gracing the cover of artistic journals. There was one shot in particular they always used, taken by a photographer friend from Calcutta, who had died of drink very young. It showed her leaning forward, one hand under her chin, an almost stern expression on her face, her lips slightly parted. Her dark straight hair was so long it framed her face and neck. Bharati had this picture up on her wall in London. It was, people often said, 1970s India at its most glamorous.

  But she had never seen an article about her mother in a daily newspaper. So she sat down, picked up the paper, and read the piece through. When she finished she turned back to the beginning, looked at the name of the journalist – Pablo Fernandes; there was something about it that was familiar – and then she read the article again, lingering over, and returning to, certain words: ‘a voice from beyond the grave’, ‘a mystery co-author or a malicious modern fraud?’ Finally, she pushed the paper away. ‘What’s this, Baba?’

  Her father, whose hair was now completely grey (he wore it long, tied behind his head in a way she had only recently grown to like), leant back and stretched his hands above his head. ‘Somebody is imitating your mother’s poetry, that is all,’ he said. ‘But I thought you ought to see it.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why would somebody do that?’

  A hand reached down to stroke his beard; it was something he did when he was upset. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But many people were in love with your mother, and jealous of her, too.’

  Bharati pointed to the space missing from the left-hand side of the page, where he had cut out the poem. ‘The poem’s not here,’ she said. ‘Where is it? Can I see it?’

  He took the paper from her and there was a moment of silence. ‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘I archived it. It must be in my office at the university.’

  ‘But I’m writing a dissertation on the poetry. I need to see it now!’

  Calmly, Bharati’s father poured out the coffee. ‘I’ll get it for you tomorrow,’ he said, and handed her the cup. Then he went on, in a musing kind of way, ‘There you are, studying your mother’s poetry; there Ash is, marrying the child of a man whose politics his father detests. In a sense your brother is the family rebel. Being Ash, he does it with the minimum of fuss, without upsetting anybody.’

  Bharati felt her face flush with anger; she had been feeling so glad to be back in her father’s company; why was he undermining her work in this flippant way?

  She heard Ash’s bedroom door banging shut upstairs as he went into the bathroom.

  ‘Baba.’ She spoke suddenly, in the rapid way she had inherited from him. ‘Ash’s marriage. What a strange thing; you didn’t try to stop it?’ She had always been frustrated by her twin’s apparently non-existent sex-life; his baffling lack of interest in all the delectable ladies she had pushed his way during college; her dawning suspicion that there was something unemancipated about him sexually. But they had never talked about it – while she was daringly open about everything with her friends, somehow with her twin it was different. In this one most important area of her life and his, she had skirted gingerly around the topic, as if raising the subject of sex might bring down some evil blight upon them. And thus, Bharati concluded dramatically to herself, if Ash had an unhappy marriage, it would all be her fault.

  ‘Stop it?’ Her father shook his head. ‘She is a good person. She comes from a different kind of family, that is all.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ She spoke firmly. ‘Her father is a Hindu fascist.’

  ‘Ash and she chose each other. It was nothing to do with me or you or Mr Sharma. She will become open-minded. She will make him happy.’

  Bharati shook her head. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  Bharati had met Sunita once, just before she left for London, before Sunita had become Ash’s girlfriend. Sunita had been dressed predominantly in pink. She wore thick make-up, a shade lighter than the skin on her hands, tidily applied lipstick and had carefully painted nails. She had presented Bharati, bafflingly, with a small statue of the god Ganesh, made from a plastic that had been liberally sprinkled with sparkly dust during some point in its creation. Bharati had looked at it and fought with the desire to laugh. ‘To wish you luck in London,’ Sunita said. Then Sunita asked about the city, what it was like. It seemed she had read a crime fiction book that was based in north London; she explained at great length to Bharati the precise method the man used to kill the female rape victims – a bread knife: ‘Incisions,’ she said, and shivered. During the conversation, Bharati had glanced over at Ash, and raised one eyebrow. But Ash seemed distracted that day, and at one point, apropos nothing, had spoken hurriedly and in great detail about one of his scientific experiments. Afterwards, Bharati asked him: ‘So you have met Sunita’s parents?’ ‘Yes,’ Ash said. ‘Her father has been very helpful to me, very welcoming.’ And the next thing Bharati knew, her brother and this woman were to be married.

  There was the sound of feet running downstairs and Ash stood before her at last, sleepy in his bedclothes, hair sticking up, blinking at her through his glasses, head tilted to one side, smiling.

  ‘Oh, Ash,’ she said – and knew that she should have come home sooner, and not allowed herself to become so absorbed in her London life. She thought of her roll call of lovers, of the parade of things she had said and thought and done. She found herself hugging her brother, trying to hold back the tears. She was suddenly overwhelmed by emotion: seeing her mother’s photo in the paper; her father’s scolding; above all, her twin brother’s wedding, an occasion of such significance, which she had treated with disdain – flying in on the day it was actually taking place.

  Ash patted her hair. ‘What can be ailing our brave explorer?’

  Bharati laughed. ‘I’ll miss you when you are married.’

  ‘Miss me? Where am I going? You’re the one who goes away.’ He let her go and sat down at the table.

  After her father had drunk his coffee and gone upstairs to his library, Bharati sat for a moment, watching her brother. Soon he would be married, and this intimacy would be lost. She vowed to behave this evening. She would be pleasant to Sunita always. She would do her best.

  In the afternoon, following her grandmother’s instructions, Bharati dressed herself up. In order to do this she drank three more cups of her father’s coffee – he always brewed it too strong – and by five o’clock, the time of their departure, she felt manic
with the caffeine unloosed in her bloodstream. When she came out of the house with her grandmother, Mrs Nalini Chaturvedi, on her arm, Humayun was already waiting in the garden. She knew that, since the brief moment when they had met this morning, her appearance had changed to radical and pleasing effect. In a green silk sari, with her wavy short haircut showing off her neck, her mother’s bangle and thick gold necklace that had belonged to her mother before her, she looked, she believed, something like a starlet from Bombay. She had transformed herself, under her own volition, with the help of shampoo and creams, kohl and gold, thanks to the istriwallah who ironed the sari and to Ash himself, who chose the jewellery from their mother’s collection. In the end they had settled on just one of the gold filigree bangles, and the necklace that looked to Bharati like something a warrior would have worn going into battle. The gold looked good against the green silk of the sari. But her father’s coffee had destroyed her equilibrium. She felt the need to fuck, to get this excess energy out of her system.

  Bharati looked down from the step at Humayun, who was waiting there with all the patience of a feudal servant; and yet, no: she checked herself. There was something solid and well-made about him, which was unusual in the emaciated servant class. She smiled, feeling the effect of her greatly enhanced, glossified beauty in the look of astonishment he gave her back. Next to her, Bharati’s plump grandmother – who ate too many sweets, who was wearing a pale silk sari, whose long silver hair was bound up behind her head in a tight coil – tightened her grip on Bharati’s arm.

  Her father and brother came out of the house, and Bharati, clasping her bespangled purse in her bangled hands, hoping silently for a quick wedding, helped her grandmother down the steps. Her father’s mother had made it clear that grandmother and granddaughter would stand beside each other at the wedding, greeting guests and behaving with decorum. Still, Bharati prayed that she wouldn’t have to watch her brother sitting uncomfortably among his obnoxious in-laws for too long, and that she wouldn’t have to endure too many gossipy comments about her mother’s posthumous poem.