‘Please give us a moment,’ Bharati said, no longer smiling. ‘I need to speak to my brother in private, it’s important.’
‘Oh,’ Ram said, ‘of course.’ But he wasn’t taking her seriously.
‘I mean it,’ Bharati said, uncompromising in her rudeness.
‘Yes, madam,’ Ram said, sounding put out for a moment, but he immediately recovered his poise. ‘Shall I fetch us all some drinks?’ And he pointed to the bar at the other end of the garden, where three waiters in turbans were presiding over a display of wine bottles, beer and whisky, and gave Ash a wink as he departed.
‘Oh my god,’ Bharati said, taking Ash by the arm and steering him over to the far end of the garden, ‘that boy is dreadful, poor you. But whatever are you thinking? What are these rumours?’
Ash’s face went hot, and inside he felt sick and cold, as if icy hands were gripping his entrails. So she had found out. Did everybody know?
‘It’s not like that,’ he began miserably, staring at the drink in his hand. ‘It’s nothing. We were just fooling around. It’s no harm. Have you told Sunita?’
‘I don’t give a fuck about Sunita,’ Bharati said. ‘These people are dangerous, Ash, and this is history – or the perception of history. How can you compromise your work by having any dealings with them? Isn’t science supposed to be above politics?’
Ash looked at his twin, puzzled.
‘Surely Father has taught you that,’ she went on. ‘You can’t meddle with this pseudo-stuff. Indigenous Aryan genes – that’s what Pablo says. What are you researching this nonsense for? Did Sunita make you?’
‘Oh,’ Ash said, relieved, and smiled.
‘What are you smiling at?’ she demanded. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Pablo’s got the wrong idea. Actually, my research is looking at it from the other direction – I just haven’t got round to explaining that to Sunita’s father yet.’
She looked up at him through narrowed eyes. ‘I hope to God you are telling the truth.’
‘Of course I am.’ He felt such relief that her anger was directed at the silly project about Aryan genes, and not at his friendship with his bride’s brother, that he smiled again and pinched her arm.
‘You great big deceiver,’ she said. ‘How badly you’ve misled Sunita’s father! It’s really quite funny. Anyway, where is he? Didn’t he show? I can’t see him.’ And then, before Ash had time to answer, she said, ‘And where’s our father anyhow?’
‘Baba? I don’t know.’
‘Ash?’ she said, suddenly all serious.
‘Yes?’
‘Did you know that Ma’s sister was in Delhi?’
Ash could feel a headache coming on. The twists and turns of his sister’s conversation were making him feel vertiginous – and all the while, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ram chatting up one of the waiters. He was trying to think who on earth Bharati might be talking about when she exclaimed again. ‘There he is, the bastard,’ she said. ‘I’m going to fetch him.’ And she pointed over to the far side of the garden where their father was talking to a young woman – one of his students, probably – who was looking up at him adoringly. Bharati shook her head in disgust. ‘These women get younger and younger. He’s such a bloody flirt.’ And without waiting for a response from Ash, she made her way purposefully, scornfully, across the garden towards their parent.
Ash, left alone at last, felt miserable again. Though he was pleased to have his twin back in Delhi, he wondered why she always had to exaggerate minor things. It was his wedding and here she was making dramatic pronouncements about their mother’s sister. Presumably she meant the adopted village sister that their mother was supposed to have fallen out with before they were born. Ash thought of his long-dead mother, whom he knew of exclusively from photographs: smiling out at him from the black-and-white print that hung on the stairs at home. He wished that she was here, by his side, so that he had somebody in his family to discuss his problems with. He couldn’t tell Bharati, who would laugh at him for loving a man like Ram, the type she considered ‘dreadful’. He couldn’t tell his father about the deception he was practising on Sunita. But he had to decide this thing with Ram, one way or the other. It couldn’t go on as it was. And how was he to decide on his own? His mother, he thought sadly to himself, would have been the one to confide in.
Ash looked round the garden for his wife and caught sight of her, standing talking to a man whom Ash knew painted enormous male nudes for a living. She had dressed herself up so carefully this morning: in a bridal-red silk sari, with red colour on her lips and special thick red bangles all up her hennaed forearms, and the sight of her marital attire touched him. A sudden rush of tenderness flowed through him. He pushed his glasses back on his nose. The very sight of her made him feel calm and relaxed, whereas the sight of her brother made him shiver with excitement. Which feeling was right? Which one was better?
He walked over to join her. ‘Where’s your father?’ he asked, after greeting the painter (who had been telling her his theory about the predominance of the lingam in Hindu iconography; ‘Lord Shiva’s phallus has prevailed,’ he said, ‘over the rest of the body’). Sunita looked like she was about to cry. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, and again he felt the same tenderness, and taking her hand in his own, said, in his kindest voice, ‘Shall we go and ring them? Most probably they are stuck at home. Some emergency may have happened.’
chapter 5
Vyasa returned, exhausted, from his son’s wedding lunch. He settled his mother in her favourite chair by the garden window, dismissed the former ayah who had come round to ask him to attend, today of all days, to some insignificant business of hers, and then, to soothe his nerves (and because the coffee they served at IIC was undrinkable), he took the packet of expensive, imported coffee beans out of the fridge, ground some in the machine, and when the silver pot was coughing its delicious aroma into the air, carried it upstairs, so that the whole house was strewn with fragrance. He pushed open the library door to the terrace, sat down at his low stone table and sighed. It wasn’t meant to be like this – surely he didn’t deserve this fate – being cross-questioned by his own daughter on the subject of Leela Bose.
But Bharati had been ruthless. She took no heed of social decorum. She had pushed her way through the party to where he was standing (discussing something important with one of the prettier MA students from the faculty), and said, straight off, without even introducing herself, ‘Guess what I learnt this morning?’
‘What?’ he said, and smiled apologetically at the student for this rude interruption.
‘That one of Ash’s new aunties, Sunita’s uncle’s wife, is our mother’s sister!’ And she looked up at him with disingenuous frankness. ‘Did you know that?’
So, the moment had come – and Vyasa wasn’t prepared for it. For several seconds he was lost for words.
After Meera died, both he and his mother knew – without ever discussing it – that they shouldn’t hide from the children the fact that Meera had a sister, but that it would be better not to tell them anything about her, either. Concealing her existence completely would have created its own drama: Ash and Bharati were bound to find out from a schoolfriend of their mother’s, or a cousin in Calcutta. The much wiser policy was to let them know of her in a vague way, but to give them to understand that the estrangement was permanent, as unfortunately occurred sometimes (not uncommonly) in families, even in ones as loving as theirs. Of course, Vyasa had steeled himself for questions and curiosity. But somehow they had never come. The twins had bought the story – which, after all, wasn’t in itself a lie – and that was that. They had more than enough to ask, and dream about, concerning their dead mother. They had no interest in her long-lost sister.
How ridiculous then that, even though the inevitable meeting between the twins and their aunt was of his own making, Vyasa was still caught without a ready retort when his daughter looked up at him and said – something in her face be
traying that she knew more than she was letting on – ‘And, what’s more, Ma wasn’t the only author of her poems; she wrote them with her sister. Did you know that, too?’
Vyasa pulled himself together. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I didn’t. But, Bharati, is this really the time—’
She took no notice, however. Instead of listening to her father, she scanned the garden full of guests. ‘It’s that woman who fainted last night at the wedding,’ she said. ‘I can’t see her here now but she’s married to Hari Sharma. You must have known that, Baba?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, I recognised her,’ he said.
‘And you must have taught her at Santiniketan?’ she said, frowning up at him. ‘Did you?’
‘I must have. Very likely.’ Their father took a long gulp of beer. ‘It’s hot here,’ he said. ‘Shall we move into the shade?’
The pretty MA student, who had been standing there all this time, listening to this awkward exchange, smiled sympathetically at Vyasa, and said, ‘Shall I get you another drink?’
‘No, no,’ Vyasa answered. ‘I’ll just have a word with my daughter.’ And he drew Bharati aside. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, ‘this isn’t the right moment to have this particular conversation. It’s very difficult for all of us that Leela Sharma is now related to us through marriage. Your mother fell out with her before we were married.’
‘Why did they fall out?’
‘I’ll tell you another time. I can’t tell you now.’
‘When will you tell me?’ she asked childishly, pouting.
‘Later.’
But Bharati refused to give up. She had carried on so relentlessly in this injurious vein that in the end Vyasa used a deliberately derogatory word to describe Meera’s sister, a word that had angered him when he heard his mother use it: he called her a foundling. On top of that, since he did not want Bharati to realise that the poem published in the Delhi Star linked him and the two sisters, nor that he himself considered that he had married the wrong sister, he steered the conversation in a different direction entirely by criticising his daughter for her own sexual behaviour, something he had always sworn he would never do. He had only meant to criticise her for the undue worry she had caused them by leaving the wedding yesterday without telling anyone. But instead he enquired coldly, ‘Who was it you disappeared with last night?’; and Bharati looked up at him as if he had slapped her. She left soon afterwards and he went home with his mother.
But why was she stirring things up like this? he wondered as he sat on his terrace, sipping his coffee. Didn’t she realise, didn’t she feel grateful, that the family that could have come apart with Meera’s death had been kept intact by him and his mother? The children had been given the best, the most loving upbringing possible; nothing was lacking, nothing was amiss. And yet here she was, misbehaving because of Leela Bose. And guiltily Vyasa blamed his daughter for seizing on the one thing in his life that most distracted and dismayed him.
Seeing Meera’s sister at the wedding, Vyasa had at first felt only a youthful, amorous delight: Leela, home in India. The beauty and candour of the time he had spent at Santiniketan swept over him with the freshness not of memory, but of reality itself – as if he was still that bold young man, and she that alluring aloof young woman. He could easily have dropped then and there at her feet and pledged her his love, swooning with the intensity of it. Instead, it was she who fainted, and the ecstatic moment of their meeting was cut rudely short by her departure.
Since then, Vyasa had barely been able to think of anything else; and even though this was what he had planned and schemed for, he felt utterly thrown by Leela’s precipitous re-entry into his life. During the wedding lunch, for example, he had felt thankful that Leela and her husband had stayed away, but he had worried that she might turn up late, and then when she didn’t, he worried about what her absence meant. Vyasa hadn’t felt this lovesick for years – for his career, yes; for his children and their ambitions; but not for a woman. Women seemed to come and go in Vyasa’s life with superb tact. Young or middle aged, sexy or outwardly chaste; it didn’t matter. Somehow they seemed to intuit the delicateness of his position as a widower father, and however hastily he brushed them off, they acquiesced without complaint. Yes, until Leela’s return to Delhi, Vyasa had been managing things – his life, his legacy, his lovers, his children’s lives – superbly.
Even when the poem suddenly appeared in the Delhi Star, he had not surrendered. He had kept his cool. He saw straightaway that it was the only poem he had withheld from the published collection, The Lalita Series. It was clear that Leela had sent it to the paper, and as he winced at the angry feminism of the verses, he knew there was a strong possibility that the whole history of the poems, and the events surrounding their composition, would be exposed to the public. Delhi was a city that loved a mystery about one of its own. There would be an inevitable juggernaut of gossip trampling over Meera’s reputation – and his.
Vyasa was determined to stop this destructive force in its tracks. When the journalist responsible for the article called him for a comment, Vyasa pointed out that Meera was never a nationally acclaimed poet; that her output was small. ‘She only became known for her poems after her death,’ he said, ‘and if somebody is imitating her now, what can I do?’ The journalist had been a little incredulous. ‘Everybody has heard of Meera,’ he countered. But Vyasa was unfazed. The poet Lalita – so he told the inquisitive young man – had written Bengali-besprinkled verses in English. The early poems had whole lines in Bengali script; subsequently she threw in the occasional Bengali word; and the latter poems were entirely in English. But what this meant was that ‘Lalita’ was really read by only a very small coterie of English-speaking Indians, and Bengali-conversant ones at that. That such people had a political and cultural standing in the capital far surpassing their numerical presence in the country, and that a sentimental Bengali professor at Delhi University had put her poems on his reading list, created a false sense of her importance. But the President hadn’t heard of her. The book pirates didn’t bother to distribute her work at traffic crossings. And Vyasa didn’t say this out loud, but he thought it to himself: his wife’s poetry was only really loved by those who had known her personally, or had wished they were her lover, or had felt socially honoured to be invited to her raucous parties, notorious, above all, for the voluptuous beauty of the hostess.
Vyasa had been pleased, until now, with how he had handled things. But sitting upstairs with his coffee, he realised that he hadn’t given sufficient thought to how to manage any crisis that might be precipitated in his daughter, who was actually studying the Lalita poems. He got to his feet, went back into his library, and retrieved the offending copy of the Delhi Star from where he had left it on his desk. Meera’s face stared out at him mockingly. She would have laughed to see how badly he was coping. And what about Leela? What would she think? From the pile of daily papers that he had flicked through this morning, Vyasa found and re-examined the spread of wedding photos in the society pages of the Delhi Star, illustrating last night’s festivities. There was only one of Leela. It was a group shot – he was there too – and it must have been taken moments before she fainted. He studied it carefully. There was a sadness in her eyes, a kind of wisdom, perhaps; and he remembered the calm, self-contained expression that had attracted him so in Santiniketan. And he, had he acquired wisdom? He thought of his youthful arrogance and winced.
Vyasa had grown up hearing tales of his namesake, Vyasa of the Mahabharata, and there was one story in particular he had always admired. It was a tale of male potency; an ancient example of his namesake’s virility; a legend, moreover, which was the key to the epic. The story told of Vyasa’s triple insemination of two sisters and a servant. By sleeping with these women, the Mahabharata’s author had brought forth children and grandchildren – the cousins who waged war on each other – and in this way engendered the cast of his epic. Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi had never revealed to anybody e
lse the extent to which, at one youthful, egomaniacal epoch of his life, he had allowed himself to be guided by this legend. He generally tried not to over-analyse the meaning of that long-ago carnal autumn and self-indulgent spring. And yet what he had done at that time was, in its own way, life-changing.
Vyasa’s infatuation with the legend took its final shape at Santiniketan, his first teaching post. He loved transmitting knowledge to young minds; and when two beautiful sisters appeared in his class, every aspect of his personality – and physique – leapt outwards in response.
Meera, the more vocal of the two, was easily won over. She responded in all the usual ways to his looks, to his words, and, eventually, to his caresses. But it was the other sister, Leela, whom Vyasa yearned for. Leela was tougher. She appeared not to notice Vyasa. This made him reckless, and he dallied ever more frequently with her sister, not leaving the room until Leela returned, filling the space with his smell of sweat and maleness. Leela took no notice.
In the midst of this frustrated courtship, Vyasa developed an embarrassing genital itch, and one afternoon when classes were over, he walked three kilometres out of Santiniketan, on the Ilam Bazaar road, to the new mission hospital in the neighbouring village, run by Methodists. Like all these places, it was designed as a way of making conversions among the local Santhal tribals. But it also served those local people who were too poor to pay the university hospital fees – or who didn’t trust the sub-district hospital in Bolpur. For Vyasa’s purposes the mission hospital was anonymous and clean – and he even found the earnest evangelism charming (given how doomed it was).
Sitting there in the waiting room, along with fifteen poor villagers, Vyasa took out a paper from the pocket of his waistcoat and unfolded it. Meera had given it to him that morning, following a class assignment to write some verse with a mythological theme. Perhaps inspired by Meera’s name, Vyasa had taught a class earlier that term on her namesake, Meerabai, the medieval Rajasthani princess who had renounced her husband and the royal court, to travel the desert singing hymns in praise of the blue-faced boy-god, Krishna. Meerabai took with her a handmaiden, Lalita, and it was she, so the story went, who edited Meerabai’s verses, collecting together these exquisite productions of divine ecstasy and ordering them into a coherent body of work. Every Indian poet needed a pen-name and it was this one – Lalita – that Meera had chosen as hers. It was a clever touch, for the lines wove a story of love and obsession. The last stanza even mentioned him by name:
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