LEELA

by Jerry Pinto

  I asked my ex-colleague who said, ‘Darlin’, you can be breathless or you can be breathy but we have to get this done by tomorrow evening or Run Run Shaw will have my guts for garters.’

  Run Run Shaw? His was a name to contend with in Hong Kong in those days. He was all things to all people and some of those things were said to be downright unpleasant. It was rumoured, for instance, that he had once set up a fight to the finish between Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee on a deserted beach. And he made films that could be titled Hand of Death or Five Fingers of Death or King Boxer or Iron Palm or all of the above at the same time, as one film was.

  I was not always the beautiful warrior princess with a vocabulary of grunts. Once I was the young girl who seemed to constantly need rescuing from a whole bunch of bad guys. I tried to inflect my dialogue, but it is very difficult to give ‘help, help’ too many different interpretations.

  We would work at it like slaves, barely coming up for breath. We weren’t paid much—shaw probably knew that much of the talent was moonlighting since he was believed to know everything that happened in Hong Kong—but he did send us hot towels and food. And the work was fun, it had something to do with film and I had some pin money at the end of it.

  FOURTEEN

  TRAVELLING WITH DOM MORAES

  When Dom was working on A Matter of People, I went with him. My self-respect would not allow me to be a supernumerary, an extra piece of luggage, but as it turned out, I would be his unpaid secretary making endless notes and translating his mumbled questions to puzzled people across the globe.

  I remember Khushwant Singh writing somewhere that he once asked Indira Gandhi how she had managed to understand Dom’s questions.

  She replied, ‘Oh, Leela translated.’

  I did indeed, but it was not an easy job. While Mrs Gandhi seemed to be willing to cooperate in the writing of her biography, perhaps because her father’s biography had been written by Dom’s father, Frank Moraes, she seemed laconic to the point of being monosyllabic. Dom would ask a question. Mrs Gandhi would look at me. I would translate it into audible English. Mrs Gandhi would twitch an eye a little and say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Dom would wait. So would I. The silence would extend into discomfort. Then he would rouse himself to ask his next question, again inaudible.

  But there were times when he was quite, quite audible and that inevitably meant trouble. When we were passing through Kinshasa, Dom packed our bags. From time to time, he would take it upon himself to show me how things could be done. For instance, he would insist on shopping even if this was not always a good idea. Once, when he had been staying in paying guest accommodation in Chelsea, he told me that he had almost been evicted from the house, that the police had come in because the owner suspected that Dom had murdered someone and left the body behind to rot.

  The suspicion was compounded by the fact that he was away at the time when the police broke down the door to get at the source of the foul odour. It was easily found: a huge piece of cod, rotting in the bathtub.

  ‘The man at the shop told me I should soak it in water for a while,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t you ask how long that “while” should be?’ I asked.

  ‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he said.

  ‘Why in the bathtub?’ I asked.

  ‘It was a huge piece and I didn’t have any vessels large enough,’ he said. Which meant the cod went into the bathtub, as all large pieces of fish that need to be soaked do in the world of men. Then of course, he had forgotten all about it. But this was the man who had once got into a bath with his clothes on so I suppose a forgotten fish was nothing extraordinary.

  In Hong Kong, he decided that he would make us an omelette. This did not seem like something he could ruin very easily so Mimi, our Chinese maid, and I left him to it. When M le Chef had finished with his creation, he came out of the kitchen, poured himself a drink and ordered Mimi to dish up.

  Mimi came out of the kitchen looking worried. When she served it I knew that something was the matter. The omelette was a strange shade of grey-green.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Oh, I put in some port,’ said Dom airily. He lived under the misapprehension that anything could be improved by the addition of alcohol in good measure. I went into the kitchen to check on the port wine. There was, I remembered, at least half a bottle.

  When I came out of the kitchen, Dom was looking disconsolately at his omelette.

  ‘It isn’t very good,’ he said.

  ‘Oh Dommie,’ I said and took a bite, determined to try and like it. Then I was forced to concede defeat.

  ‘Perhaps we should have sandwiches,’ I said. ‘And Dommie, it is never a good idea to use half a bottle of port in an omelette.’

  ‘I used eight eggs,’ said Dom.

  I looked at him.

  ‘Eight large eggs,’ he said.

  On another occasion, when we were living in New York with forty-eight pots of African violets (don’t ask) he invited friends over for dinner and insisted that he would cook. As far as I knew, his experiences in cooking lay in making a Poet’s Stew.

  This, according to Julian Mitchell, who was his contemporary at Oxford, was an impressive affair. Among the ingredients: leg of lamb marbled daintily with fat, grapes, artichoke hearts, fresh herbs, and two bottles of full Devonshire cream.

  ‘This was rather expensive in the dead of winter,’ said Julian ruefully, ‘But Dom would have no substitutes. It was hothouse grapes, asparagus and imported artichoke hearts and good French wine.’

  ‘Red wine?’ I asked.

  No, it wasn’t red wine. It was white wine, because red would change the colour of the stew.

  ‘The girls,’ Dom often told me, ‘would do the menial work. They would cut the onions and peel the garlic and such.’

  Then after some herbs had been added—Dom was fuzzy about these details—it would be left to simmer as more wine and spirits were consumed by the visiting poets.

  ‘Including Allen Ginsberg,’ Dom said, ‘that was the time he tried to touch Auden’s feet.’ Ginsberg failed to get Auden’s blessings but he enjoyed the stew.

  ‘How did it taste?’ I asked Julian.

  ‘The finishing touch to the stew was half a bottle of French cognac that would be poured over it and it would be flambéed,’ said Julian. ‘Since everyone would have been drinking all evening, do you think anyone cared what it tasted like?’

  That day, I went out in the morning and spent the day in the quiet of The Cloisters. When I returned it was to find that my kitchen had been turned into a disaster area. I could not tell why we had run out of sugar and why the mixer was smoking like a funeral pyre in a rainstorm and the refrigerator was weeping all over the floor.

  ‘What happened to the mixer?’

  ‘It’s not a very good piece of machinery, is it?’ Dom asked.

  ‘No, it is an extremely good piece of machinery when it is doing what it is supposed to be doing,’ I retorted. ‘I rather suspect it has been put to other uses.’

  ‘Well, who would think it would be unable to grate nutmeg?’ He asked rhetorically. ‘And it made a frightful noise, Polly.’

  I approached the cooking range. From a khaki-coloured soup, a few desolate chicken bones protruded. They looked like they had been worked over by a venomous axe murderer. That’s why the chicken crossed the road: to get away from the axe murderer.

  ‘I got the chicken cut up for me,’ said Dom, as if absolving himself of avian felonies.

  ‘Who cut that for you?’ I asked.

  ‘The pizza parlour down the road.’

  I could not imagine why Dom had gone shopping at a pizza parlour for chicken.

  ‘They put chicken on their pizzas, Polly,’ he said condescendingly.

  ‘Which is why they don’t sell it to customers.’

  ‘I persuaded him,’ said Dom.

  Later, I discovered that the persuasion had taken the form of fifty dollars, rather a princely sum in the 1970s. He had gon
e to the pizza parlour because he was loath to cut up a chicken.

  I mopped up and Dashed out to D’Agostino’s to get the makings of a salad, some cold cuts and cheese for a cheese board.

  Naresh Trehan, the cardiac surgeon, and his wife Madhu were our guests on that fateful evening. Dom presented his strange curry to all of us with the air of a magician producing a dodo from a hat. But he knew his food and it took only a bite for him to know what he had wrought. The sugar in place of the salt was the least of that curry’s woes. But we didn’t have to eat it and settled down to the salad and cold cuts and cheese.

  At the end of the meal, Dom invited them back for his birthday. The Trehans began to look a little hunted.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll get Leela to cook.’

  They did come back and brought with them a pain d’épices, a honey cake made aromatic with spices. It was already sliced and one segment had ‘Only for Dom’ marked on it with icing sugar.

  After the meal, Dom reached for his slice and bit into it. His face went a bit green. It was a slice that was laden with salt instead of sugar.

  ‘There is much to be said,’ I told him later, ‘in leaving things to the experts.’

  But our nation lives on the myth of the Renaissance Man, something the Bengalis took to their hearts and everyone else seemed to want to emulate. Obviously, that morning in Kinshasa, he was going to demonstrate his skill in The Correct Way to Pack a Case. From what I could make out, this meant throwing everything one can lay one’s hands on into the suitcase, asking a passing person such as a conveniently placed spouse to sit upon it and then locking it and drinking a beer.

  ‘There, Polly,’ he said. ‘That was quite easily done.’

  It was indeed, if you didn’t mind clean clothes dumped in with dirty clothes, and everything creased beyond recognition at the next stop. But when a man wants to show you how things are done, I have learnt, it is best to simply wait him out. Most of the time he will grow bored halfway through the job and the damage can then be undone. But Dom had finished this job and I was not allowed to touch the suitcase without suspicious questions.

  I was glad to be leaving Kinshasa. Mr Miller, the Irishman in New York who checked over our accounts, warned me that it was the second most expensive city in the world.

  ‘And the soldiers,’ he said, ‘Beware of anyone who wears a uniform. They are always ready to shoot. It won’t take much to upset them enough to shoot your husband …’

  As I contemplated early widowhood, he sighed deeply.

  ‘… or you.’

  When we arrived at the airport, Dom, buoyed by his success at instant packing, checked the luggage in. And we presented ourselves at the airport without our passports or our laissez-passer, an all-purpose document issued by the United Nations that was supposed to get us from country to country. Dom had packed it into the suitcase.

  ‘Où sont vos passports?’ Asked the fat officer behind the counter. (Why are they always fat?)

  ‘Dans le airplane,’ said Dom, airing his mouldy French. ‘Mais nous avons un laissez-passer.’

  ‘Laissez-passer? Quel pays est-il?’ Asked the officer, who seemed to think it was a nation of some kind. I noticed that he was in uniform. And that he had a gun. Mr Miller’s words did not seem very funny.

  ‘Pas un pays,’ Dom tried to explain that it was not a country and then collapsed. ‘The United Nations.’

  ‘Et qu’est-ce que c’est?’ Asked the officer, unimpressed. I found it hard to believe that he had not heard of the United Nations but he was probably simply responding to Dom’s high-handedness. (He had a gun.) after all, we were at fault. (He had a gun.) We should have been apologizing for packing our papers in our luggage. (He had a gun.) Instead Dom lost his patience. It did not take much.

  ‘What is this fucking bullshit?’ He demanded of the air, of me, of the officer, of the fates.

  ‘Moi, je ne parle pas l’Anglais mais je comprend le “fucking” et “bullshit”,’ snarled the officer, outraged. He seemed to be about to reach for his gun.

  I jumped in to prevent the incarceration of two United Nations representatives and a possible International kerfuffle.

  ‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘He is not speaking to you. He is speaking to me. He always speaks to me like that.’

  And I kicked Dom in the ankle. This made him growl further imprecations at me, which convinced the immigration officer that he was dealing with a lunatic.

  ‘Cochon. Salaud,’ he snarled. Then he looked at me. ‘Pauvre petite.’

  I suppose a good feminist would have resented such patriarchal pity but I just wanted to get on the plane. So when he waved us through, I grabbed Dom’s arm and yanked him along.

  ‘Next time, you pack,’ said Dom as he closed his eyes and prepared to sleep off his exertions.

  I took a very deep breath.

  In the Philippines, Dom and I were invited to a dinner party in a mansion. An overenthusiastic maid had polished the granite stairs with Mansion Polish and three dinner guests slipped and fell in one night. One of them was me.

  The local UNDP officer had a drunken surgeon staying with him and I was taken there. I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a Graham Greene novel as he fumbled around, breathing clouds of raw whisky into my face.

  ‘Nothing wrong with her,’ he said, thumping me on the thigh and sending an arrow of pain down into my ankle. ‘Good strong bones. Just a sprain.’

  But the next day my foot was a balloon. Dom had to leave on the next lap of his trip so he left me behind. Chino Roces came to see me, bringing his wife Pachita with him. He was one of the best-known journalists of the Philippines and had valiantly fought the Marcos government’s subversion of the Constitution. He now has a bridge and a Street named after him in Manila. He also had an odd sense of humour.

  ‘I shall tell everybody that Dom beats you,’ he chortled. Then he wheeled me through the lobby of the hotel, saying, ‘This is what her husband does to her.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked.

  ‘To the chap who tends the football team,’ he said.

  I tried to relax but another surreal experience was awaiting me. A tiny, rotund man looked at my foot and tut-tutted a bit. Then he announced that he couldn’t quite tell what was wrong but he knew how to find out.

  ‘When any of my footballers come in with a foot like this,’ he indicated my foot which now looked like an alien life form surgically attached to me, ‘I simply twist the foot right around.’

  I tried not to squeak my horror at this.

  ‘If they faint, it is a fracture. If they do not faint, it is a sprain.’

  I wondered what had happened to the good old-fashioned X-ray. Surely Wilhelm Röntgen had not died of a carcinoma of the intestine for naught?

  ‘Go ahead,’ shouted Roces. ‘She is a strong lady.’

  I wished I could be treated like a fainting violet sometimes. It might be … a supernova of pain disrupted all thought processes.

  ‘See,’ said the physiotherapist from purgatory with a grin. ‘It is only a sprain. Rub some horse liniment on it and you’ll be fine.’

  I was taking no pain killers and I was not about to subject myself to the burn of horse liniment. He also recommended two days of bed rest and dips in the hot springs, which didn’t seem that bad. I decided that I would then go back to Bombay to be with my parents. Pachita gave me one of her delectable mango cream cakes for my parents.

  ‘Make sure the security guards do not open the box at the airport,’ she said. I have always made it a policy to cooperate with guards as far as is possible. So I opened the box when they asked me to.

  ‘Ah Madame, a cake,’ said one. ‘But it might contain a bomb, might it not?’

  And he plunged his finger into it, and scooped out a healthy chunk. When he had licked his finger clean, he waved me through to the next level of security. There, again, the box was lifted off my lap as I sat helplessly in the wheelchair and another searching finger
investigated its luscious depths.

  ‘For drugs, Madame,’ said the guard.

  When the third test began—I forget the excuse for this one—I abandoned the cake and simply flew home to rest for a bit.

  After a couple of days, I flew out of Bombay again to Nairobi to join Dom. I hobbled along, mainly on one foot, making the best time I could, all the way through the Rift Valley, to the Victoria Lake. This, of course, is the land of the Masai, a naturally elegant people, who balance on one foot as they tend their flocks. Nothing like them to make you feel even clumsier as you hobble past. And there was nothing like the Indians settled there to make you feel ashamed. Whether it was the group of Indian businessmen swilling beer at the next table in the Hotel at Lake Victoria or the Indian shopkeeper, they were all rude to the Africans, treating them with distaste and arrogance. But it was at Entebbe, from the window of an Air Afrique airplane, that I watched racism at its worst. I was looking out of the window of the aircraft as it emptied, when I saw our Belgian pilot kicking a worker.

  Not metaphorically kicking but actually, literally kicking him.

  ‘Monsieur,’ I shrieked. ‘Stop at once.’

  He looked up.

  ‘Would you care to fall out of the sky, Madame?’ He asked politely.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then I must kick these pigs or they will add water to the fuel and your plane will fall out of the sky before it lands.’

  He went back to kicking his ground staff. I felt horribly inadequate. Surely, there was some other way of convincing the workers not to endanger human lives without resorting to dehumanizing them? But then wherever I have travelled, men seem capable of contempt and inhumanity. The greater the difference between the man with the whip and the man with the scarred back, the greater the ease with which one can mistreat the other.

  At Entebbe, a wonderful young man climbed aboard. He was wearing a boubou, one of those dramatic robes of many colours. He was with an assistant of some kind and both of them settled down in the seats in front of us. After we were airborne, the young man proceeded to take off his boubou. His assistant tried to remonstrate with him but to no avail.