Hari, sitting in the front, looking pointedly away from Leela who was stretched out along the back seat, felt an unfamiliar strain of suspicion mingling with his usual, insurmountable affection.
chapter 11
When Linda was fourteen, she worked as a paper-delivery girl in Brighton. Aged fifteen, she spent all of August in a chip shop. At sixteen, she waited tables in a summer-season cream-teas-only beach hut. Seventeen brought a spell in Topshop. Throughout her eighteenth year she ran an organic burger van in Hove (a local gang slashed the tyres and graffitied the windows), and at uni she was manager of the comparatively tranquil college stationery shop. Thus, by the age of twenty-two, she was more than familiar with work that was poorly remunerated, intellectually unchallenging and socially taxing. But when Linda tried explaining this recently to Bharati, her Indian friend shook her head.
‘You’re doing a fully funded Ph.D.,’ she said. ‘What do you need the extra money for?’
‘I need to save,’ Linda said. ‘The funding’s not enough if I want to . . .’
‘You could spend your Saturdays going to art galleries or the theatre.’
Linda took a sip of beer. It was a cold evening and they were sitting in the student union bar; soon the barman would call Time and Bharati would wander off in her sparkling T-shirt and super-tight jeans to some club or other – and Linda would return to the scruffy hall-of-residence room she called home. She knew there was no point in trying to explain how unreal it seemed, to be given money by the government just to do something she loved so much; that she needed a rubbish job in order to keep things in perspective; that if she didn’t, somewhere deep inside she would start to panic. ‘I like the café,’ she said at last, ‘it has—’
‘What?’ Bharati interrupted. ‘What exactly has it got going for it?’
‘Well . . .’ Linda began. Set at the end of a mews to the west of Euston station, the Nine Muses was not just blessed with an address – 9 Drummond Mews – that lent itself to the kind of punning jokes so beloved of London locals, it was also run by a woman called Liz who was large, practical, red-haired and straight-talking. Her clientele was numerous, regular and demanding, the meals were simple, the ambience pleasing. Linda had grown to admire the nonchalant culinary élan of the Bap, the Sarnie, the Toastie. Eight hours on a weekend buttering scones, chopping up cabbage for coleslaw, slicing cakes and making coffee, made a blissful break from a week crammed full of Sanskrit philology. She amused herself thinking up new ways of cutting tomatoes (little slivers with a sharp kitchen knife; wild and violent chops with a cleaver) and novel means of assembling cheese and pickle sandwiches. She listened to the radio, chattered blithely to Liz, kept an eye on the customers, noting that the place seemed to attract men of melancholy dispositions.
‘Why don’t you come by during my shift tomorrow?’ Linda suggested. ‘I’ll make you one of our super-strength coffees.’
But Bharati, who was snobbish about the institutions she patronised in London – she drank her coffee at an Italian place in Soho – wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘Thank you but I have to pack tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to Delhi for my brother’s wedding.’
‘Are you?’ Bharati hadn’t mentioned it before.
‘Just for a week.’ Bharati sighed. ‘Let me tell you, if there’s one thing that’s intellectually unchallenging, it’s a bloody Indian wedding.’ She drained her glass.
Linda sighed. ‘I wish I was coming too.’
‘Come!’ said Bharati.
‘I couldn’t possibly afford it,’ Linda said. ‘The college has a travel scholarship for postgraduate researchers and I’ve applied for that, but I haven’t heard anything.’
‘Why don’t you apply to give a paper at my father’s Living Sanskrit conference? It’s in Delhi on November the fifteenth. They want to support uptake of the classics among the youth. You’d be perfect.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes!’ Bharati said, ‘Put in a proposal. What harm can it do?’
Linda suddenly felt defensive. ‘Of course I wish I could visit India,’ she said. ‘I long to do that. But I’m reading texts in Sanskrit. I’m thinking about words that were composed thousands of years ago. I don’t know how much help modern India would be to my area of—’
‘Of course it would help,’ Bharati interrupted. ‘You can’t just talk to these non-resident types. You’ve got to go there and see for yourself. Modern India thrives on its ancient culture. The old temples and the forts aren’t just sitting there as tourist attractions. They’re living parts of our political and cultural landscape. On top of that,’ she added, ‘you should taste the kulfi and the chaat—’
‘Kulfi?’
‘Oh Linda, really.’ Bharati looked quite fed up, and Linda – thinking of the country she knew through the words of ancient men (Kalidasa, Panini, Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa) and the modern land she had sensed in hints and snatches (the hefty Indian hero of the film she saw once by mistake in a musical epic at the Mile End Genesis cinema; a spicy balti she had shared with a girl from her Sanskrit grammar class at the Taj Palace restaurant in Brixton just last weekend; an Indian scarf of her mother’s she had worn as a teenager) – nodded. Her friend was right.
The morning after her beer with Bharati, Linda was woken earlier than usual by a knock on her door. A voice, which seemed familiar, was speaking her name. Opening an eye, she realised she had fallen asleep with volume one of the Chicago translation of the Mahabharata splayed across her pillow. Her glasses were perched on the end of her nose, her bosom, wrought by the fervour of something she had dreamt in the night about India, was heaving.
‘Hello, dear?’ said the voice again, a little more anxiously now, and Linda knew at once who it was.
‘Mother!’ she said, sitting bolt upright in bed and gazing around her in horror. Her anxiously beloved, just-turned-forty, very-single parent prioritised cleanliness in all areas of her life, but especially the domestic. The flat where Linda grew up smelt of Pine toilet-cleaner and the lemon spray with which her mother doused the air every morning; it was thoroughly dusted every Saturday so that, on Sunday, her mother could sit back and appreciate the godly effects of these efforts. Linda knew that her hall-of-residence room, which smelt of beer-scented breath, which coughed-up used underwear with every exhalation, which could not disguise the mouldering curry-dinner under the bed, was not a safe place for a woman of Mother’s sensibilities.
So she jumped out of bed, pulled on her café clothes and shouted as she tugged a comb through her hair, ‘Mother! What are you doing here? I’ll be out in a tick. I was just going to work.’
Half an hour later, having sat her mother in front of the Nine Muses’ full-strength brew and slid a plate of cupcakes across the counter, she at last learnt the reason for this pilgrimage to London. Last night, in the queue for the supermarket checkout, her innocent parent had flicked through a parenting magazine and discovered there that it was the duty of single mothers with only daughters to nurture the maternal bond. Nurture, she read, meant close physical proximity, impossible sex-talks, long restaurant dinners, exhausting high-street shopping trips, and, wherever possible, bonding through mutual hysteria: ‘a cleansing cry together’. It was for this that she’d caught the 6.03 to London and forced herself to wait an extra hour on a bench in King’s Cross, before riding the 253 down the Euston Road to see her daughter. ‘Mother!’ remonstrated Linda, and sloshed more boiling water into the round brown teapot.
But her mother was undeterred. ‘I’ve decided to take my annual leave over Christmas,’ she announced as Linda set out the croissants and wiped down the counter. ‘I shall come up to London to be near you. We can go to the theatre. Do you need some new thermal undies? Have you got a boyfriend? Are you happy? Are you taking adequate precautions?’ And looking up bravely from her cuppa, she fixed her only child with a wavering smile.
Linda tried not to blush as she made herself a triple espresso.
Linda couldn’t remember
her father, who had keeled over quite cleanly and died, in 1982, one day when Linda was at playgroup. All her memories were of her mother, and the tiny flat where they lived throughout her childhood, within shouting distance of the seaside. But despite her fondness for her widowed parent, despite the fact that they never argued, despite Linda’s desire never to offend her fragile sensibilities, the woman who had brought her into the world remained inscrutable. She worked as a nurse, yet they had never discussed the mechanics of reproduction. She was an unwavering Christian and yet, at twenty she had spent five anomalous months in India, travelling there on the strength of a job she had got with a Methodist charity. She had loved her husband, and yet they never ever saw his family. Throughout Linda’s childhood, she had pestered her mother for more information about these two topics – her father, the Indian adventure – to no avail. The mental image of her father was obscure. He existed in her imagination as a hazy version of the man from the photograph: clean-shaven, dressed in a brown corduroy suit, standing in the distance on the steps of a church, with a slip of a girl in a simple white dress on his arm, whose barely perceptible bump (Linda) was only just covered by the long lacy veil. But the travels to India took on a life of their own in Linda’s mind. As a ten-year-old, Linda pictured her mother riding through a desert on a purple-painted elephant. As a teenager, she had imagined clouds of opium smoke, naked holy men, and jingly prayer beads. During the stint in Topshop, the vision had been sartorial: red cotton saris, swishing skirts, extravagant beaded throws. Only when she reached the age of twenty herself did she stop thinking about it. It was all too implausible. But she couldn’t help it if the question occurred to her now and then: how did her mother – this woman now timidly drinking her tea, a cornflower blue bobble hat on her head (she had bought it at the Harvest Festival church fair), who found London daunting, who lived for cleaning the house and going to church – have the know-how to travel alone through Asia and get a job there? Not for the first time, Linda was tempted to ask her mother to explain this daring, once and for all. But she was distracted by the arrival of one of her regulars.
He was a harassed-looking man of forty odd, always dressed in faded jackets and chinos that looked like they had been slept in. Linda disliked him because he was immensely fussy about the way they made their coffee; he liked to send back cups that weren’t strong enough, or ask for extra jugs of hot milk, or insist on a sprinkle made from pure cocoa rather than the drinking chocolate that ‘ruined everything with its added sugar crystals’. This morning he carried a briefcase bulging with papers. Pushing his way into the café, he nodded absently at the women, plonked himself down at the table under the window and began leafing through his papers with an air of desperation. Mother, Liz and Linda regarded him dubiously from the elevation of the bar.
‘He doesn’t usually come in till the afternoon, does he?’ Liz said.
‘What’s he brought all that paperwork out for, on a weekend?’ Mother added, more loudly.
‘Shush, Mother,’ Linda said, refilling her mother’s teacup and turning away to make the chinos-man his macchiato.
Because she had her back to the door, she thus missed the visually arresting arrival of her favourite customer: a middle-aged Indian man who dressed on the outside in a grey duffel coat and sandals with socks, and on the inside in long colourful shirts (startling orange, blue or yellow – he made her think of an African parrot), who liked to sit at the table under the window, who only ever ordered a large glass of water, a cappuccino, and an egg and bacon bap to follow, and who, as she brought his order over, seemed to emanate the whiff of something spicy – the aroma of camels, palm-trees, glinting surf. She had nicknamed him ‘the Dictator’ because he would spend the morning sipping his coffee, nibbling his bap and whispering into a dictaphone that he always carried with him, and then leave in a hurry to avoid the lunchtime crush.
‘Who is he?’ Linda’s mother asked in an anxious whisper.
But Linda didn’t reply. She was watching the Dictator march up to the table where the harassed-looking gent with thinning hair was already sitting, and place himself in the spare chair under the window. As the women looked on, he arranged his possessions on the table top, called over to Linda to bring ‘the usual’, and turned on his dictaphone.
The harassed-looking man began to protest: ‘Actually, do you mind, it’s just that—’
But the Dictator took no notice. He held the dictaphone up to his mouth, leant back in his seat, clicked Record and started talking.
‘I say, hold on a sec,’ began the man, and Linda held her breath. She feared very much that there might be an altercation.
But chinos-man no longer sounded angry. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and, leaning over, addressed the Indian man directly.
‘Where are you from?’ he said.
The Dictator glanced up. He pressed Pause. ‘From?’
‘Where are you from?’ the other man persisted, ‘Are you . . . ?’
‘India,’ the Indian said. ‘I’m from India.’
‘And what are you doing?’ asked the other.
‘I’m composing,’ the Dictator said, in a tone of great irritation. ‘I am composing a work of literature.’
‘Ah,’ said chinos-man, and sat back. ‘In the writing trade?’
The Indian man put down the dictaphone and fixed his interrogator with a disapproving glare. ‘You could say that,’ he said.
‘Really.’ The other man leant forward again. ‘A writer. I need one of those. An Indian. Do you sell your work here?’
Linda couldn’t quite hear the Dictator’s reply, because she was back behind the counter now, toasting the bap and frothing milk for the coffee. She scrambled the egg extra fast, assembled the coffee in its cup plus sugar crystals, and carried the whole lot over on a tray, eager to hear their discussion.
‘So,’ chinos-man was saying as she put the tray down on the table, ‘I’ll give you twelve weeks to get me a book. I handle all rights. You rake in the royalties.’
The Dictator looked dubious. Chinos-man held out his hand. ‘I’m Bill,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Bill Bond, but my friends call me William.’ He placed a business card on the table. Literary Agent, it read, Specialist in Foreign Literature.
He tapped a second cigarette against the tabletop. ‘Now it’s your turn,’ he said, and added encouragingly, ‘Who are your characters?’
Linda had no time to listen to the answer, however, because by now the café was filling up with customers. For the next two hours, as she cleared away coffee cups and totted up bills, and Mother sat at the counter reading a series of yesterday’s tabloids, Linda heard only snatches of Bill’s conversation with the Indian.
‘This might come in handy,’ she heard Bill say at one point, pulling some stapled sheets of A4 out of his briefcase. ‘Notes for New Writers: a little publication of my own. I give it to all my new recruits.’
‘Dear sir,’ the Dictator replied loftily, ‘I’ve been in this game far longer than you. I’m not sure you should categorise me as a “new writer”.’
Linda could see that Liz, who was usually tolerant of the establishment eccentrics, did not share her fascination with the two gentlemen in this instance. The fact that they had not even ordered so much as a second coffee was trying her patience.
Things came to a head at one o’clock, by which time the café was crammed with customers seeking a table.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Liz said, ‘what’s taking you so long?’
Bill and the Dictator both began speaking at once.
‘We were just doing a deal on a book,’ Bill said.
‘I was telling him about Leela,’ put in the Dictator.
‘He is in the grip of his artistic inspiration,’ Bill added.
‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ Liz said, ‘I think it’s time to wrap things up.’
The Indian pointed to the dictaphone. ‘I have to get this onto paper,’ he protested.
�
�He needs a typist,’ Bill objected.
‘I suppose I could do it,’ Linda said suddenly.
Everybody turned to look at her.
‘Linda, what are you saying?’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How can you do it? And who knows what these tapes contain?’ She had gone quite pink.
‘They contain a wonderful story,’ said the Indian confidently. He looked to Liz for guidance. Liz looked at Bill. Bill looked at Linda. Linda found herself nodding. ‘She’s a postgraduate,’ Liz said. ‘A student of literature.’ And that settled it.
‘So you listen to what I’ve recorded here,’ the Indian man said, holding up the dictaphone for her to see, ‘type it up, read through it correcting any mistakes, and have it ready for when I return from Delhi—’
‘Delhi?’ said Linda.
‘I’m going to India for an important wedding,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back at the end of the month.’
And then he got to his feet, wedged his Notes for New Writers under his arm, and, waving at them all, was gone as suddenly as he had come.
‘Linda dear,’ Mother said, her cheeks now quite florid. ‘Do you think this is entirely proper?’
chapter 12
The sight of his brother’s wife fainting had both sickened and annoyed Shiva Prasad. It was not just the woman herself – whom he instinctively disliked – but also something more visceral about what she represented, that empty, yearning womb, that childlessness. Looking up at Sunita, sitting on the wedding dais in all her golden finery, a memory came back to him of his youngest daughter as a baby, gurgling with pleasure as her grandmother tickled her belly. She had been content and docile as an infant, and she was content and docile now – as content and docile and compliant as any father could wish for. And so it infuriated him to remember how, for at least a year after she was born, a debate had raged about her in the family. It was Shiva Prasad’s own mother who had insisted that he should give Sunita away to childless Hari: That is the tradition, she kept pointing out; that’s how brothers have always helped each other. You have three, he has zero. With two healthy children already, what do you need one more for?
Leela's Book Page 12