It wasn’t until she was at the end of the Dictator’s tapes, however, that she saw how closely his story was related to Bharati’s. Why had this strange man felt compelled to speak a magical tale about Bharati’s father Vyasa into a dictaphone and given it to her totranscribe? Should she warn Bharati? She was about to ring her mum – who had been so against her doing the Indian man’s typing in the first place – and ask her advice, when she got an email: her paper had been accepted by the Living Sanskrit Akademi. She was on her way to Delhi!
‘Ganesh himself,’ Linda said, ‘probably represents a pan-Indian deity, older even than the Vedas, worshipped by people from pre-Aryan times, and later standing for the overthrow of elite Sanskrit hierarchy and mindless repetition in favour of true understanding through writing.’
And so when she rang her mother, instead of expressing her anxiety about the typing, she was instead full of excitement and talk about the Indian trip and how she would read her paper in front of Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi—
‘Oh, Linda!’ her mother blurted out. ‘If you go to Delhi and give that lecture, you will come face-to-face with your father!’
‘What are you talking about, Mum?’ Linda asked. And then it all came out: that the man who got her mother pregnant in 1979 was a Sanskrit academic; that though she knew his name, he had no way of knowing where she disappeared to or that she had a child; and this was why baby Linda was brought up as an English girl, the daughter of the childhood sweetheart her mother had hastily married upon her return from India.
‘Mum! Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I wanted to, Linda,’ her mother said, ‘and after I saw you getting interested in India, I came to London that time to tell you. But I couldn’t. Supposing your father didn’t want to know you, after all these years?’
And mother and daughter wept down the phone to each other, overcome at last.
‘What this suppressed history illustrates,’ Linda said in conclusion, ‘is that Ganesh the scribe was there to pull things together. The Mahabharata – so gargantuan, so all-encompassing – is the work of numerous minds over many hundreds of years. Acommunally owned text, an expression of countless histories, court chronicles, beliefs, practices and religions, the work of many minds over a long and diverse epoch of Indian history, written over hundreds of years, the epic has such a great diversity of character, place and action, is such a mixture of traditions, orthodox and unorthodox – that it is impossible to fathom in one sitting. Ganesh and his pen make sense of it. By writing the Mahabharata down, Ganesh ushers a new age into existence.’
chapter 18
My aim has been to reunite siblings, to bring together mothers and daughters – to remove from my characters’ lives the obstacles that impinge on their happiness – and to expose Vyasa’s wrongdoing. I couldn’t help congratulating myself as I stood in the fort, looking at my characters gathered together in Indraprastha. I surveyed the scene, with its exquisite torrents of emotion, and recalled, in a pleasurable aside, all those grandiose phrases, which, in his over-weaning pride, Vyasa had forced me to inscribe in the epic about the Pandavas’ palace. (The flowers that rained from heaven; the trees made of gold; the jewels brought here from a mountain north of Kailash to adorn the walls.) I relished how effectively the words of Linda had upstaged Vyasa – how cleverly she had reinstated me, under Vyasa’s unknowing auspices, into the heart of Indian history and tradition. I saw from a distance Bharati introducing Linda to her brother, and then I saw Leela walk towards them. An expression of doubt crossed Bharati’s face, a hint of fear lit up Leela’s – and at last, to my eternal joy and unending satisfaction, Bharati held out her arms to her mother. I would savour that sight for aeons to come. For a moment Pablo, Linda and Ash watched, breathless, as the two women embraced, and then Bharati abruptly freed herself, glanced round at everybody with a defiant expression, and started gesticulating as she untangled from her sister the complicated story of a newly discovered English sibling and a strange Indian author’s dictaphone. And I stood and watched them, safe in the knowledge that the story she was describing was mine.
The last words I spoke into the dictaphone were: This story is for Leela. And so, as Linda obediently handed over the typescript to my heroine, I rejoiced in how completely my characters had done what I had planned for them. If there was one anxiety left it was poor Ash, caught between Sunita and Ram, unable to unite these two sides of himself. But I trusted that Leela would befriend him and help him find his way. It was about time he had a mother too. My only task now was the book itself.
Lost as I was in these glorious meditations, I didn’t forget to disguise myself for my final meeting with Leela. Walking after her across the lawns of the fort, I wrapped my head in a muffler, took up a large outdoor brush, and began to sweep the leaves from the path, in the thoughtful (some would say ponderous) fashion of India’s government-employed gardeners. That way, I surmised that, even though I was a little too chubby for the job, she wouldn’t even notice my existence.
I was right. After speaking with her daughter, and collecting the manuscript from my little English typist, she headed away from the crowd, straight for Emperor Humayun’s octagonal stone library – a smile that I hadn’t seen for many centuries lighting up her face. Leela sat down on the top step of the library, and gazed out over the green tree canopy of this capacious fort, the book on her lap. I looked at the library’s solid outline, built by the usurped and usurping Afghan king, with its white marble stars inlaid into the red sandstone; and I thought of my cast, scattered through time like the stars in heaven, and now fixed forever upon the pages of my book.
Then Leela began reading Linda’s typescript, and I watched in pleasure as a look of bemusement, then wonder, displaced her smile. She turned over page after page that I had scripted in my wisdom, and when she finished reading, she looked up and frowned very hard into the distance. Finally, she tidied the sheets together and put them back in the envelope. Then, taking out a pad of paper, she bent her head, and didn’t look up, even as I approached. I saw that she was writing – writing and crossing out and writing again.
But somebody was interrupting this tranquil scene of mutual creation. Twirling my brush with grandiloquent strokes, I stepped into the wings as Vyasa came striding across the lawns to where Leela was sitting. He cleared his throat, and when she didn’t respond, he addressed her in his most tentative tone, ‘Leela?’ She looked up and I could see in one instant from the expression on her face, that though she was open to the world of books and monuments and elephant-scribes and daughters, she would always keep him at a distance. I was glad of that.
‘Hello, Vyasa,’ she said.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he said. (I was delighted to see how nervously he was disporting himself.) ‘It’s so nice of you to have come to the lecture.’
Leela paused a moment before answering, and then she said, ‘That last paper was very interesting. The speaker is at university with Bharati, is she?’
‘Is she?’ Vyasa said, but it seemed that another subject weighed more heavily on his mind. ‘Bharati told me about . . . about . . .’ He seemed unable to say it. ‘I wanted to say that I am very sorry,’ he said at last.
‘Sorry about . . . ?’
‘Everything that happened,’ he said, trying to keep his voice under control. ‘I had no idea that you had a child. That Meera knew.’ His hand stroked his beard. ‘And then the poetry.’
‘The poetry doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s juvenilia.’ Her voice was wonderfully clear and calm.
She looked down again at the words she was writing, but still he stood there. She looked up again and sighed. ‘Is there anything else, Vyasa?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Yes. Well, the fact that you are . . .’ He looked at her pleadingly. ‘. . . Bharati’s mother . . .’ He was behaving, I was delighted to observe, like a tongue-tied teenager.
He clearly wished that she would say something conciliatory. But she did
not speak; and so he said (wise now, to the fact that he might not get another chance like this, to be alone with her): ‘Why did she take the child?’
‘Why? Because she was my sister. Because she felt responsible. But I don’t think there’s any need to speak about the past.’
‘No, of course not,’ he said hastily, although it was evident he felt the exact opposite. ‘But, Leela? I do hope that you and I can be . . . friends?’
‘Let’s see,’ said Leela, getting briskly to her feet and walking down the steps.
‘Can you lend me one?’ she called out. I looked up. She was talking to me. She was holding out a cigarette.
By now I had swept the leaves and grass cuttings into a huge pile in one corner of the path that ran right round the eight sides of the library. During their conversation I had gone backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out of character. I had even broken into a sweat. It was only when I crouched down before my pile, staring at it for quite a long time – as if it were deeply fascinating, as if perhaps it held the answer to the secrets of the universe – and finally took out a match, that she addressed me. Listening to her voice, I felt my love for her swelling like the throat of a songbird.
‘You need a light?’ I said.
‘Please,’ she replied. She came towards me, the book under her arm, and standing beside my pile of leaves, took the match and lit her cigarette. Then she glanced one final time at Vyasa. ‘We should talk about these things another time,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘but not now. Look.’ She pointed over to the lawns, where Bharati was standing with Ash and Linda. ‘Your children have something important to say to you. Goodbye, Vyasa.’
She waited calmly until Vyasa had walked away across the lawns, and then she turned her eyes to me.
‘If you light that now,’ she said, pointing to the pile of leaves, ‘won’t it create a lot of smoke?’
‘It’s a delicious smell,’ I ventured; and added poetically, ‘The smell of so many autumns in Delhi.’
‘And how many autumns have you known?’ she asked, looking at me in that sideways fashion which I loved, as she smoked.
I paused, as if I was counting in my head. ‘Hard to say,’ I said at last.
‘That many?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you born here?’
‘No, madam,’ I said, and added, bravely, ‘I was born somewhere very far away.’
‘And will you return there soon?’
‘Oh no!’ I looked at her, horrified. Return to Kailash? What a thought.
‘So you will end your days here?’ she asked.
‘Madam, I try not to think about my death. It is, after all, what we do between the time of birth and the certain end that matters.’
‘Are you saying the end is final?’
‘I am saying that the interim is important.’
‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘the interim is of supreme importance.’
As she spoke these words, I knew that she was speaking directly to me, in my godly capacity. She was letting me know that I had done what I could for her; I had been the cause of meetings and revelations. I had tried to reconcile her to the part she played. I had indeed removed many obstacles.
‘There’s no time to waste,’ she added.
‘No time at all,’ I agreed, a little chastened.
‘Goodbye,’ she said to me politely, and I blinked up at her, thinking, Is this it? Is this the moment? Is this the end of our mortal acquaintance? Am I to say farewell to her so quickly? The space between us – the air itself, the sunlight, the solid warmth of the sandstone library, the very being of Delhi – tingled with unsung potential.
‘Wait,’ I called after her as she began to walk away. ‘What have you been writing?’
She turned back, and a frown appeared on her brow as she contemplated the figure of her creator. ‘I am writing a book for Bharati,’ she said at last.
‘The Mahabharata?’ I cried, scarcely able to suppress my delight. ‘That text with a million voices?’
‘No!’ she laughed. ‘A book for Bharati. But yes, it will have many voices.’
‘Passed from one hand to the other,’ I dared to say.
‘If you like,’ she said, with the sweetest of smiles.
And then she walked away down the path I had swept, across the lawns of Humayun’s fort, and back to the daughter she had found.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Tristram Stuart (who nurtured this book from the beginning), and to Shuddhabrata Sengupta and S. Gautham for years of friendship and wise counsel. Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board enabled my enquiry into the Ganesh legends; meanwhile, the specific issue of Ved Vyasa’s reputation in the Indian tradition was elucidated by Bruce M. Sullivan’s book Krs.n.a. Dvaipa¯yana Vya¯sa and the Maha¯bha¯rata: a new interpretation (Leiden, 1989). Nandini Mehta, Dr Arijit Mukhopadhyay, Dr Bhaswar Maity, Taran Khan, Ananda Bannerjee and Nikhat, Ashraf, Yusuf and Sulaiman Mohamedy gave their time, ideas and corrections. Tahmima Anam and Roland Lamb were generous readers; Ellie Steel from Harvill Secker worked hard on the final version; Ben Madden was noble; Jin Auh, Charles Buchan and all at the Wylie Agency made things happen in between. Finally, thank you to three people in particular: Sarah Chalfant, my amazing agent; the formidable Chiki Sarkar of Random House India; and Rebecca Carter, who edited this novel with such divine dexterity.
Leela’s book
Alice Albinia
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READING GROUP GUIDE
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Alice Albinia on writing her novel, Leela’s Book
Ten years ago, when I was living in Delhi, I had the idea to write two books. Both of them were shaped by the heat of a Delhi summer. The first was about a chubby Hindu god; the second about a cool mountain river. The river idea slipped into my mind while I was reading a translation of India’s most ancient and sacred Sanskrit text, the Rig-Veda. In my notebook, I wrote down ‘Indus’, ‘Aryans’ and ‘Alexander’. Those three words led to journeys through Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Tibet, and archival investigations into the history of the Indus valley, once the celebrated territory of the Rig-Veda, now the backbone of Pakistan. This was how I came to write my first book, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River.
The other idea I had that summer also emerged from a reading of a Sanskrit text: the Mahabharata, India’s devastating, adventurous epic about a warring family. I noticed something very simple and seemingly overlooked. While popular versions of the Mahabharata included the framing narrative about how the author, Vyasa, called on the elephant god, Ganesh, to be his scribe, scholarly versions of the epic always excised this section. I began to wonder why. These thoughts led to my novel, Leela’s Book.
I began to collect translations of the epic. At the Sahitya Akademi in Delhi I photocopied reams of text in the translations by Kisari Mohan Ganguli and M.N. Dutt. On a visit home to London I bought all three volumes of the unfinished Chicago translation. On a journey to Calcutta I visited the publisher P. Lal and brought a stack of his brightly coloured, cloth-bound ‘transcreations’ of the epic back with me to Nizamuddin. I thought a lot about the recording of texts in ancient times, about cultural inheritance and tradition, about the retelling of well-loved stories.
Above all, I began to think about Ganesh himself, and how he might have responded to the task of writing down this massive book. Did he even like Vyasa’s story? Did he find the assignment daunting, or exciting, or thankless? The shelves of my flat filled up with the Mahabharata in its variant translations, but none of those volumes would yield up any answer.
Instead, a story about Ganesh, creation and subterfuge began to take shape in my mind. Every afternoon when I arrived home from the literary magazine where I worked as an editor, I sat down at the desk under my window and wrote out the section of the book called ‘Ganesh’s Narration’. The heat of that summer was crucial; it kept me there, under the ceiling fan, with just my imagination to distract me.
Since Delhi was built around Indrap
rastha, the city and its mythologies became central to my story, as did the idea of womanhood in this culture where the Mahabharata’s proud women, fierce goddesses and ancient matriarchies compete with other more generally pervasive notions of feminine submission and piety. By the autumn of that year I knew two things: that I would have to leave Delhi for the Indus valley, and that in the meantime I would wind around Ganesh’s narration a modern-day story of the characters he had invented in a spirit of mischief and retribution.
Now that both books are written, I can see how much they fed into each other during the years I was travelling and researching. The very last journey I made for Empires of the Indus was to the source of the Indus in Tibet, a week-long walk north of Mount Kailash. I remember standing in the snow after the journey was over, looking at the stark outline of the sacred mountain and thinking how strange it was to know the Mahabharata better than the English epics Beowulf or Paradise Lost, and southern Pakistan better than northern England. My stranger’s gaze was useful, but it also gave me a sense of dislocation. Then I remembered the significance of the mountain I was looking at: it was here that Ganesh wrote down the Mahabharata. It was time to return home and finish my novel.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. There are many parallels between the lives of the characters in the Mahabharata and those in Leela’s Book. What connections can you find? How are these episodes altered in the modern world?
2. Many of the book’s dramas come from the clash between two separate people or ideas: between Ganesh and Vyasa, between Hindu and Islam, etc. Can you identify other such dichotomies?
3. The Mahabharata is a huge epic covering generations of Indian history and myth. By contrast, the majority of the action in Leela’s Book takes place in a mere few weeks. How does the abbreviated scale of Leela’s Book affect its impact?
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