Leela's Book (23 page)

Leela looked out across the crowds of people. ‘Do you know Raziya?’ she asked at last. ‘She was ayah to Professor Chaturvedi’s children in Nizamuddin West.’

But it was the old man’s turn to sound contemptuous. ‘Which Raziya?’ He shrugged. ‘You only know one? But there are so many.’

Pushing her way impatiently around the huddled families and subdued children, over legs and bare feet, Leela crossed the courtyard, ignoring the saint’s marble grave, and entered the narrow passageway on the further side that led round the deep, open well with its scum of green murky water. When she reached the northern gate, she slipped on her shoes again, lit a cigarette and looked around her. The street was dark but there was a light coming from a small office a short distance away near the main road. She smoked quickly as she walked, not caring if anybody saw her, and when she reached the streetlight where the insects danced, she stubbed the cigarette out and called to the three men she could see through the dirty window. According to the board outside, it was the Nizamuddin office of local Congress activists; they were playing cards and drinking rum, but a small man with hennaed hair came to the door, and she described the ayah to him, reiterating the point about Raziya’s employment at the professor’s. The man consulted with his colleagues. ‘Try the tailor’s shop on the right-hand side,’ he said when he came outside again; ‘just opposite the butcher’s shop.’ He slapped a mosquito away from his neck. ‘But be careful. The people are saying there is a demon about.’

She laughed, and the man gave her a look of affront.

‘It was your accent,’ she apologised in Bengali. ‘I haven’t heard it for so long.’ Her explanation was only half untrue; in America, Hari and she had almost always spoken in English, but here in Delhi she felt her mother tongue, Bengali, and the Hindi she had once known, unfurling inside her, reaching up through her lungs from some dark hidden place, freeing up more and more of her early life like the tendrils of a plant reaching out towards the light.

She said goodbye to the man and made her way along the darkened street where the butcher’s shop was supposed to stand. All the shops were shuttered, and many of the signboards were written in Urdu script, which she had never learnt to read. But on the way back down the street she saw a shop sign with a hand-painted picture of a woman in a billowing salwar kameez, and from the scattering of coloured threads and little oddments of cloth on the ground outside, she guessed that it must be the tailor’s. The shutter was down but the light was on inside, and when she drew close she could hear the clattering of a sewing machine. She walked up the steps and tapped on the metal. ‘Raziya,’ she called, ‘Raziya.’ She rapped again, and the sewing machine paused. Leela spoke louder now: ‘I need to speak to Raziya.’

‘Who is it?’ The woman’s voice was cautious.

‘A friend.’

There was the noise of a shutter being unbolted and pushed upwards a few feet, and when Leela crouched down, she found herself looking into the eyes of a woman of about her age, who was wearing an austere blue cotton sari, the end of which was pulled up to almost cover her hair. The woman’s eyes widened when she saw it was Leela.

‘You looked after the babies. The Professor’s children,’ Leela said in Urdu.

The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t remember you,’ she said, drawing herself back, sitting on her heels.

‘We went to Humayun’s tomb. I gave you some jewellery, that gold. You must remember. You looked after the twins. Twenty years ago.’ Leela leant in, so close that she could see the wrinkles around the other woman’s eyes, and the proud line of kohl. ‘Do you have the jewellery still?’ she whispered. ‘I would like it back. I can give you money for it.’

The jewellery was ornate and finely worked – but more than that, it was Leela’s link to her childhood, to her dead mother, to that part of herself that she had all but excised. When she had given it to Raziya it was all she had. Now she could buy it back with just the cash she carried on her. She wanted it badly: as a gift for Bharati, a way of establishing the link between them. But when the ayah spoke, her words were barely audible. ‘I sold the gold. I stopped looking after children. I cannot help you any further.’ She looked beyond Leela, out into the street. ‘Now you must go.’ Then she moved back, pulling the shutter down so that it clicked into place on the ground, and Leela could hear the noise of a heavy padlock securing it in place. But they both remained there on either side of the shutter, two women, crouching and listening, disappointment in one heart, fear in the other; and before she got to her feet again, Leela said softly: ‘Was Vyasa’s wife happy? Was she happy as a mother? Can you tell me?’

But Raziya made no reply, and Leela was suddenly ashamed at herself for having come here like this. It was not the woman’s fault that she had done what she did; Leela had used the gold to tempt her. But again she wished she had that jewellery. She had a yearning for it – her inheritance – and to hear more about the children Meera had left behind. She stepped down from the tailor’s shop and continued along the street, her mood slipping in that familiar way, from defiance to sadness. She reprimanded herself for her self-indulgence; and the thought of those intimidated people, cowering from superstition in the shrine, came back to her like a taunt.

The road she was on skirted the outside edge of the basti, through an area even poorer and more neglected than the rest. Leela felt an apprehension about crossing through this place dressed as she was in her glowing wedding silk. Nor did she yet have a clear idea of what she was going to do or say when she reached Vyasa’s house. She walked on as far as the crossroads where the buffalo stables jutted out into the kabariwallah settlement. Then she saw the burning.

The flames were spreading quickly, licking at timber and plastic as the air filled with heavy black smoke. Buffalo, scorched in the heat, had begun to bellow. People were stumbling out of their homes, carrying children and hastily gathered belongings. The wind drew a plume of filthy smoke towards her so that she had to stop and cough and wipe her eyes. When she straightened up again she saw men sloshing small buckets of water over the blaze, swiping angrily at the flames with blankets, their faces slick with sweat from the heat and exertion. But the fire was spreading easily through the houses, embracing small television sets and crackling with joy as it set upon dowries and precious clothing collections. There was a small group of women, standing with the children and babies pulled out of their beds in the middle of the night – all so thin and small, with tiny limbs and alert eyes – and Leela wondered suddenly if she had appeared to Meera’s father like this, fragile and helpless, on the day the munshi brought her from the village. Both parents had liked her eyes: large black ponds of gaiety that belied her brush with death.

A small child, a girl, stood alone on the edge of the crowd, her mouth puckered up with tears, and Leela, seeing that she had been forgotten, stepped forward and picked her up. She was very light and wore a long yellow dirty shirt. ‘We’ll find your mother,’ Leela said, kissing her dry, tangled hair. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, but the child only began to cry. ‘Sssh,’ Leela said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But there was a shout from behind them. ‘Let go of her!’ It was a woman’s voice, and then a second joined in: ‘That lady is stealing our children!’ And suddenly a crowd of angry women had surrounded her, tugging the girl out of her arms, shouting that she was abducting their children to take them to an orphanage, or to sell to rich Saudis, or to send to the brothels of Bombay. ‘I was trying to help her,’ Leela heard herself saying, but the women only shouted louder, jostling her with their hands as Leela tried to back away, her arms raised in self-defence.

‘Hey!’ It was a man’s voice now, reprimanding and commanding. ‘Leave the lady alone.’ The women turned, and saw a tall young man waving a notebook in the air at them as he approached. He was too young to be an official, or anybody of importance, but he spoke with such a show of authority that the women retreated to a distance.

‘Quickly, come this way. The whole basti is in hysteria,’ the man said in English to Leela, and she followed him along the small lane that led up out of the basti towards the colony where Vyasa lived. A little further on she sat down on the wide doorstep of a shuttered shop, still trembling from the women’s anger. ‘I’m going to stop here for a moment,’ she told the man, wiping her face with the end of the sari. She looked up at him. ‘Thank you.’

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘Let me get you a cup of tea,’ he said, and she watched him return to the fire with his notebook.

She sat there alone, thinking of the people she had seen in the shrine tonight: how exactly they resembled the poor people from the dreams and memories of her childhood, how despite everything Hari said, some things hadn’t changed in India. She remembered how her father always gave coins to the beggars who came to the door of their house in Calcutta. She closed her eyes and remembered the terrace of her parents’ house, and the light that flooded in through the windows in the morning, and the scent of tulsi between her fingers, and the smell of the rough block of soap that stood in a dish on the bathroom floor and always made her think of her mother. She thought of Father after their mother’s death, and how hard he had tried to dissuade Meera from studying at Santiniketan. He was determined that she and Leela should go to Delhi University. He said he was going to open up his house in Delhi for them, and put them in touch with friends who had formed part of the literary circles of his youth. He grew excited by his memories of studying there himself. He told them about the streets around Chandni Chowk, and a haleem maker he had known with a long white beard whose entire family had gone away to Pakistan, and a thick, treacly sweet you could buy there on winter nights. He spoke of the awe-inspiring mosque, the poetry recitals he had attended in Civil Lines, the qawwalis he had heard at Nizamuddin’s shrine on Thursday evenings. He wanted his daughters to see the country they had inherited, he said, and they should begin with the capital. Afterwards they could go to Bombay, and the Western Ghats, and Tamil Nadu. But first they must go to Delhi, as he had. It was his conviction and he spoke of it often.

Leela opened her eyes and saw the young man returning. She and Meera
had
eventually come to Delhi – but not in the way that their father had wished.

The young man was carrying two small glass bottles of lemonade with thin straws poking out the top. ‘No tea shops were open,’ he said as he handed one to her, and she smiled.

They sipped the sweet cold liquid, and after a while he said, ‘You were at the wedding this evening, weren’t you? Ash Chaturvedi’s wedding.’

She looked at him and raised an eyebrow and smiled again, this time at his earnestness. ‘I was the one who fainted.’

‘You did,’ he said, ‘I saw.’ He smiled back at her. ‘You’re Meera’s sister, aren’t you? Leela Bose?’

She put down the lemonade bottle. ‘How do you know?’

‘I wrote the piece about the Lalita poem. I did some research.’

‘What kind of research?’

‘I was the one it was sent to, “The Last Dictation”.’

‘Why you?’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t you who sent it?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘But you wrote them together?’

She got to her feet, suddenly very tired. The poems didn’t matter. Why was he asking about the poems?

She looked away, watching in silence as a fire engine arrived at last from the Lodhi Road end of the basti and was manoeuvred into place. The heavy blasts of water were poured onto the flames and there was a loud, slow hiss as the fire was extinguished.

‘Why are you out in the basti so late?’ the young man asked next. ‘Did you come to see the fire?’

She hesitated. ‘I came to find something I lost.’

‘And did you find it?’

‘I’ve only just begun looking.’ She stared at the outline of the charred and broken houses. ‘Why are you out so late?’ she asked.

‘I heard the noise and came downstairs. I live on the edge of the basti.’

‘So you are going to write about the fire?’

‘The fire and the demon.’

‘And about a Hindu woman caught stealing Muslim children?’

He laughed. ‘No.’ After a moment he added, ‘I would like to write more about the poems, though. Would you tell me about them? I’d invite you to my house for a coffee, but there’s somebody sleeping there and I don’t want to wake her. The coffee shop at the Oberoi Hotel might be twenty-four hours, though. And there’s an all-night tea stall at Nizamuddin East railway station—’

‘I don’t want to talk about the poems,’ she interrupted, and then, seeing the disappointment on his face added, more gently, ‘But thank you for your interest. I have to get on now.’

‘Good to have met you.’

She pulled the shawl around her shoulders. ‘Thank you for rescuing me.’

‘It was my pleasure,’ he said gallantly. Then he took a business card from his wallet and handed it to her. ‘In case you change your mind,’ he said.

Leela took it from him without looking at the name, which she remembered from the article – Pablo Fernandes – and put it in her bag. She stood for a moment longer before leaving, gazing at the people surveying their ruined houses, and then she gave the journalist a final wary nod and walked on down the lane to the edge of the basti. Here the slum suddenly gave way to wide, leafy streets, generously set with large, airy homes, each with a garden and a gate and at least three floors. She found Vyasa’s house easily, despite her tiredness: it was on the road facing the drain and his name was written on the gatepost. She stood in the street, looking up at the house, thinking how, in comparison with those in the basti, it was a miracle of solidity. The garden was full of trees: bamboo and frangipani, an ashoka, and somewhere nearby was a raat-ki-rani, filling the night with its flowers’ perfume. She leant against the wall of the public garden opposite, which bordered the drain, took another cigarette from her handbag and lit it, listening to the lowing of the night trains passing through Nizamuddin railway station, and to the tap of the chowkidar’s stick in the distance, and to the occasional competitive yelping of the neighbourhood’s dogs. She knew that she ought to ring Hari – but the more tired she felt, the more her mind turned to the things she tried to forget. She pulled the shawl tighter round her shoulders, and just at that moment, a light came on in Vyasa’s house.