‘We won’t know so many people this evening,’ Bharati heard her grandmother say, ‘but tomorrow for the wedding lunch all your cousins from Bombay will be there. Including Indrani’s daughter who is your age and already has a son.’
‘What’s in your shopper?’ Bharati asked, as Humayun opened the car door, for her grandmother was carrying a plastic bag tied tightly at the top. It bulged with packages.
‘My pills,’ her grandmother said, and retorted, a little sharply, ‘What’s on your arm?’
Bharati, who had climbed into the car from the other side to sit in the middle, looked down in surprise. ‘It’s Ma’s bangle,’ she said, trying not to sound hurt.
‘Ah,’ said her grandmother, and shut her lips tight.
If there was one thing Bharati hated about her sweet, darling grandmother, it was the tone in which she talked about her mother. Generally, the old woman avoided the topic altogether, but occasionally, very occasionally, she let a comment drop, and it was as if a veil had been whisked away, so that the laughing, happy young woman from the black-and-white photos was banished, and in her place Bharati was forced to see the naked outline of her lovely, defenceless mother standing there, unable to answer back, as hurtful accusations were hurled at her: frivolous was one; thoughtless was another; and the word that touched Bharati most deeply, which made her hesitate sometimes about her own actions, even when she was far away in London: flirt. Had her mother been a flirt, even after marrying their father? She had never dared ask; and she had refrained from discussing it with Ash for fear of upsetting him. She turned these words over and over in her head, and all she was left with was a desperate, hopeless desire to question that headstrong young woman who had given birth to her twenty-two years ago, and then – barely had Ash and she opened their eyes and looked around them at the world – disappeared from their lives for ever.
Bharati turned the bangle slowly on her arm as Humayun drove them carefully through the streets of Delhi. Ash sat in the front seat, staring fixedly ahead of him out of the window. Bharati had always thought they looked alike, her twin and she; except that while she had their mother’s grace and bearing, he had inherited her round face, dimples and fair complexion; and what was striking in her was endearingly gawky in him. Somehow you could tell just by looking at him that he was a scientist. That was what their grandmother said, anyway; she liked to mention how he was the exact copy of her famous ancestor who had solved a mathematical conundrum and stunned the whole of British India. As for Bharati’s long eyes, dark skin and wavy hair – here her grandmother spoke rather gratifyingly of an aunt whose beauty had bewitched every eligible man in Benares. ‘That’s where your eyes and hair come from, anyway, my dear,’ her grandmother would say; and Bharati herself had often reflected – as she liked to tell white-skinned lovers in London – that had she been born into a less liberal family, her dusky skin would have been a problem. ‘Really?’ they always answered – sounding suitably shocked, and perhaps a little gratified, by this subcontinental barbarity.
As they approached the end of Lodhi Road, Bharati opened her purse and slipped her hand inside to feel the foil of the condom she had brought with her from London. ‘Isn’t it amazing to think that Humayun was just a little boy a few years ago?’ she said out loud in English at one point (since she knew he couldn’t understand). But nobody answered, and it was the only comment passed between Nizamuddin and the Flying Club.
Because the family had hired no band, no white horse, and had called no entourage, Ash, who was wearing a new, dark, single-breasted suit, his hair still sticking up in that unruly way, looked just like any of the numerous guests who were milling around the entrance to the wedding grounds. But Sunita’s family had been waiting for him, and a shehnai began playing as soon as he reached the flower-strewn archway. He was taken by the arm, a jangle of relatives Bharati didn’t recognise closed around him, and she watched as he was ushered into the garden and over to the stage where his future wife was to be brought out to him, no doubt as resplendent as an apsara in a haze of gold and silk.
Bharati had always hated weddings – the social tediousness, the extravagance annoyed her – and on this occasion the gleam of gold, the excessive amounts of food, the silken, heavily powdered wives of the bride’s family, was particularly distressing. Incredible, it seemed to her, Ash’s capacity for tradition.
It was not yet six o’clock and it was already getting dark. Bharati and her grandmother followed Ash slowly across the lawn, everything lit up by strings of lights – but above all by the constantly swivelling flashlight of the photographer’s assistant – to the stage where the bride’s family was waiting. Her grandmother gave Bharati a sharp nudge: smile. Both families were to be photographed together, in a crowd of jostling saris and jingling jewellery.
From the dais, Bharati stared out over the crowd of silk-clad guests. Tables, spread with white cloths, lined the edges of the garden. Benches and chairs were dotted here and there. Her eyes moved methodically over the crowd, but she saw very few people whom she recognised: as her grandmother had said, the cousins, the aunts, the schoolfriends and the teachers would all be coming, instead, to the wedding lunch tomorrow. Around her, the bride’s family were shouting to each other to keep still for the photographer, and Bharati glanced contemptuously at the assembled group, in their shimmering saris and stiff sherwanis. They all looked atrocious and she leant over and whispered as much in her grandmother’s ear. Standing three places away to the right was a thin woman of around her father’s age, dressed in saffron-yellow silk. Bharati noticed her because of her haircut: it was cut short in that defiantly sharp way that Bharati herself now preferred. No other women at the wedding had hair as short as that. For a moment they gazed curiously at each other – something about the woman was familiar. The next instant, to Bharati’s astonishment, the saffron-sari lady had collapsed on to the person in front of her.
Bharati couldn’t help laughing. There immediately ensued what her grandmother would term a hullabaloo. Several women shrieked. The posed family shot disintegrated. The father of the bride, his wedding turban sitting astride his head like a stately ship, shouted instructions about how to carry the fainting woman away: ‘Out of the wedding garden, out, at once!’
‘I’ll get us some drinks, shall I?’ Bharati said to her grandmother and father, and climbed down from the stage without waiting for their answer. She moved through the crowd, feeling regal and absurd in her stiff, slippery silk. At the drinks table, it turned out that the wedding was dry – the bride’s father was too pious to serve alcohol – but she queued up anyway for a nimbu pani, between a woman wearing such tight bracelets that the flesh bulged around them, and a thin old man with a shawl slung around his bony shoulders.
‘Hello,’ said a voice behind her, and looking round, Bharati found herself staring up at a very tall young man with curly hair. She felt a sudden stirring within her, and frowned, trying to remember where she had seen him before.
‘I think I know you,’ she said. ‘Do I?’
chapter 10
In the first few moments after it happened, Hari didn’t actually realise that it was Leela who had fainted. Since they had arrived at the wedding, he had been so preoccupied by everything that was happening around him that he had barely given a thought to her. In the short walk across the lawns to the nuptial dais, he had spotted a politician from his home town, a Joint Secretary from the Ministry of Commerce, and that man from Kanpur who had made a mint selling software services to Americans (it was all about the time difference). Of course, none of these apparitions mattered in a material way to Hari Sharma, whose days of hassling for contracts, of passing money across desks with the nonchalance of handshakes, of throwing booze and girls at the underlings of ministers, were behind him. But although it was no longer his duty to butter up bureaucrats and cultivate politicians, despite the fact that he nowadays had other men to do this sweaty-palmed work for him, nonetheless, as he looked across the crowd of people a
ssembled here for his niece’s wedding, he felt a kind of grudging admiration for his brother. It was a significant social success to have collected this array of powerful allies together – not just bureaucrats and politicians, but journalists also, businessmen and hotshot lawyers.
Hari thought of what his nephew had told him last night about Shiva Prasad’s political ambitions, and the sadness he had felt then for his brother’s failures gave way to a sense of exclusion: to an equally sad sense of being cut off from his sibling’s thoughts and feelings and ambitions. During the years of their dispute, Hari had missed his brother, and it was only his own sense of stubbornness that had stopped him giving in and throwing over the newspaper project. And so, at their reunion the previous night, Hari had expected embraces, would not have been surprised to find himself weeping, beating his breast, asking for forgiveness (regardless of the fact that it was he who should have been doing the forgiving). It was strange and upsetting then that there was no opportunity for any such drama. Shiva Prasad, in truth, had not really risen to the occasion. It was as if the very thing that linked them – the fraternal tug that had once been as sturdy and immovable as a peepal tree, as instinctive as pain – seemed to have dissipated altogether, and now, as Hari looked over at his brother, he no longer saw the distant and awe-inspiring figure of authority from his childhood: just a banal old man, striding about the garden, bestowing obsequious greetings, and generally behaving like the centre of attention.
As they stood on the stage for the photographs, Hari was pleased to see that the usual vast contingent of cousins and home town connections had not been sidelined at this wedding. Their aged aunt, Pita-ji’s youngest sister, was here, a woman who, like their father, had worked as a schoolteacher all her life, never practising graft, never vying for promotion, year after year producing at least a dozen students who went on to study for degrees at college. The young man in the mauve Western-style suit: he was the son of Hari’s prettiest cousin, who had done unexpectedly well for herself by marrying a graduate from Bombay whom everybody else considered faltu – useless – until he suddenly went into stocks and shares and a year later bought a house in Bandra. And the little old man dressed entirely in white, Hari remembered with a shudder (after some moments of staring and not being able to place him), was the owner of a cloth shop in Amarkantak, who also ran the town’s RSS training camp (which Shiva Prasad had tried, and failed, to make his younger brother attend with him in the hour before school).
It must give such a wonderful feeling, Hari thought as he gazed out at the wedding party, to be able to stand here in Delhi, giving away your daughter like this, to such a respectable family, in such grand style. He felt a little throb of emotion deep inside him at the thought that he himself would never be able to do such a thing, would never have a lotus-eyed daughter of his own to bestow on some lucky bull-like hero. He thought of his brother’s two perfect daughters, Urvashi and Sunita, and once again he asked himself – as he had asked himself so many times before – how could Shiva Prasad have done it? To disown one’s younger brother for a business deal you disapproved of – that was bullying of a stubborn though comprehensible kind. But to renounce the child you had sired because she chose her own husband: what kind of hotheaded foolishness was that? And for no better reason than that the man your daughter loved was a Muslim.
He looked around. Where was Urvashi? He leant across his wife and addressed his aunt. ‘Where is my niece Urvashi?’
Hari’s aunt wrinkled up her face in a grimace. ‘She wasn’t invited.’
‘What? Because of . . . ?’
‘Because of that, yes.’ And the old lady shut her lips tight.
For the first time since returning to Delhi, Hari actually felt sickened by his brother’s ideology. He himself had always had a soft-spot for his niece Urvashi. In the early years of her life he had made a point of visiting the family home whenever he was in Delhi, and he found her to be an open, affectionate child who lisped the word uncle – Chacha – in a way that made his heart melt. She was much less aloof than Ram had been at first; with none of the formal distance acquired in time by her younger sister, Sunita; prettier and more becoming than her mother. Hari’s brother knew this: he had palpably doted on his firstborn. ‘There is no comparable joy in this life,’ he had disclosed to Hari late one night, in the days before they stopped speaking to each other. And Hari had nodded, never suspecting that such a joy, in his own life, was to be denied him.
How stupid his brother was, to have cut off this most wonderful part of himself, and all in the name of religion. Hari thought of the wedding he could have thrown for just such a daughter, of the crores of money he would have lavished on the occasion, of the forts in Rajasthan he would have rented without a moment’s hesitation, the elephants he would have hired to march the guests around on, the filmstars he would have flown in from Bombay to dance at the party, the chefs he would have booked for the reception, the designers he would have requisitioned to dress up his daughter like a nymph from the epics, the jewels he would have chosen.
He glanced across at Ram, a little shyly. There was a man who would soon have to choose his life partner from among the many candidates available to him. Wouldn’t he, Hari, as his new father, have a role in choosing the bride? And this time, when Hari’s eyes roamed across the garden, they ignored the middle-aged men in suits, and searched instead, among the many nubile beauties, for Ram’s ideal companion.
Weddings were the perfect place to find a bride. If Ram could begin looking tonight, Hari himself would make further enquiries, Leela would cast the deciding vote with her unerring sense of moral character – and before a year was out, Mr and Mrs Sharma would be throwing their adoptive son a stupendous wedding party in New York – something truly sumptuous, in one of the museums, perhaps, Leela would know what was currently most stylish. Hari sighed to himself as he visualised a room full of distinguished New Yorkers, with waiters circling round them carrying flutes of champagne, prawns speared through with little sticks, pastries filled with blobs of caviar. They could hire the roof garden of the Met, let off fireworks at midnight, fly a rock star in from Karachi to show the Americans the meaning of open-minded.
‘Namaskar Leela, how are you?’ somebody was saying to Hari’s left. Turning his head and looking down the row of guests lined up for the photo, Hari saw to his surprise that the woman greeting his wife with such familiarity was none other than Professor Chaturvedi’s mother. He couldn’t believe it. Did Leela know the Chaturvedi family? She had never mentioned it. So how was it possible that—
Before Hari had time to finish that thought, the Professor himself, standing next to his mother, also turned graciously to Leela and spoke to her in an intimate tone, as if he knew her: ‘Welcome back to Delhi, Leela.’
Astounded by this interaction, Hari glanced at his wife. She had said nothing in reply to the Chaturvedis’ greeting but nodded politely back at them as if nothing was wrong, as if this familiarity between them was utterly natural and to be expected. Hari felt wholly confused. What was going on? How was it possible that she knew the Chaturvedis?
‘Did you meet at the lecture in New York?’ he whispered in her ear but she shook her head. ‘How then?’ he insisted.
She refused to answer – she was staring straight ahead – and he felt not just puzzled but mystified by this secretive, implacable woman he had married. Why was it that she kept him at such a distance?
Just at that moment, two things happened. An excited murmur ran through the crowd assembled on the dais – the bride was at last being brought across the wedding garden to meet her groom; and a young woman in a green sari, standing just beyond the Professor and his mother, said something to them in a low, ironic undertone, which made Leela glance over with an abrupt turn of her head. Hari, too, turned his head and sized the girl up. He saw at once that she was not at all the right type for Ram, what with her cynical expression and very skimpy choli. Ram needed somebody simple and loving and unaffected. But
he was distracted by his aunt, on his other side, tugging on his sleeve. Hari bowed his head to her – noting wryly that she was the only woman at the wedding wearing cotton – and asked courteously after her health, and the welfare of her sons, before explaining in reply to her questions exactly how it felt to have lived away from India for all these years, and why they hadn’t come back before, and where it was that they had moved to in Delhi.
‘Arre,’ cried his aunt suddenly, and Hari stopped speaking.
The party was in commotion. Men were exclaiming, women were tutting; it seemed that somebody had fainted. And Hari, turning back to Leela, saw to his horror that she had disappeared from view. It was she who had fainted – as silently as a cloud passing across the sky – right onto the woman in front of her, narrowly missing the bride.
Unfortunately, as Ram explained later, she had fainted just at the moment that the photographer clicked the shutter, moments after the bride had finally been seated on the dais, when all eyes in the garden were trained upon them. She had thus fainted in front of Hari’s entire family – not to mention the assembled grandees of Delhi society – and, of course, the Chaturvedis.
Hari went swiftly to her side, kneeling over her anxiously, shouting for somebody to bring some water. His first panicked thought was self-accusing: had his coldness towards her just now wounded her so much? Had he made a huge mistake, in bringing her back here, to India?
But matters were quickly taken out of his hands. The air was filled with voices: his brother, calling for assistance; a grunt as three men lifted Leela off the dais; the cry he made as he ran after them across the garden; a yell in his ear as somebody told him to ring his driver. And before he had time to protest that he was sure she would recover, that he would rather spend the rest of the evening here at the wedding, that there was no need to worry, the large white car that he had bought for her was drawing up at the entrance, they were bundled inside, the doors slammed shut behind them, and the driver was carrying them away down the lane towards the city.
Leela's Book Page 11