Leela's Book (25 page)

‘But, sir,’ Humayun said, and as they pushed him towards the room at the back of the thana he heard his own voice rising: ‘Don’t you understand? My fiancée is Aisha. I am engaged to be married. Tell me what you’ve done to her!’

A door in the corridor opened and Humayun felt himself being pushed from behind. He sprawled into the dark room, tripping on a chair so that he lost his balance and half fell, half tumbled to the floor. Somebody turned on the light. Humayun lay there for a moment and he remembered how he had pulled down Aisha’s salwar that afternoon, how the warmth had flowed between them in their first private moment together; and as the chicken-loving policeman loomed over him, and Humayun scrambled to his feet, he tried to balance this vision with that of Aisha in her yellow suit, being led away by another man and violated.

‘Did you fuck her?’ the chicken-loving policeman said, making a lewd motion with his hand. And then Humayun did something stupid, something that, even at the time, he knew he would immediately regret. He lunged for the man, grabbing him by the shirt, and then they were on him. One of them hit him round the head.
Sister-fucking terrorist
, he heard them shout. Another punched him in the chest. He felt a pain in his leg and back where a third was kicking him.

They spent a few moments seeing to his incapacitation, and then they dragged him to the cell at the front of the station, and locked him in.

The alert reader may have noticed, while I was sitting and talking through my project with the literary agent Bill Bond in London, that circumstances had forced me to effect one key transition. I, Ganesh, had taken human form.

It happens to gods at strategic moments in history. Krishna did it; Jesus tried it; and I, too, took my turn. In the beginning, up on Kailash, I debated with myself only briefly about the type of avatar I should choose. A holy man? A warrior? A merchant? No. I needed to be able to influence events, to get my errant characters back on track, to wrest control from Vyasa. And how to do that? Through my pen. This was the truth I had taught Vyasa. This was the way I would observe my characters across multiple lives, and pursue them through numerous ages, and eventually get them together as one grand cast. I dabbled in it across the centuries, leaping down to earth to be the scribe of courts and sarais and mushairas, to preserve literary traditions, to transmit cultural ideas … and always with my elephant’s eye on my own cast of characters.

But now that the time of their great meeting had arrived, I realised the stakes had been raised. I couldn’t be just any old scribbler. I was determined that everything would happen just as I had planned it. I had readied myself for the crisis (prepared the ground with hakims, astrologers, christenings – all the right and proper proper names) until everyone I needed was walking the streets of my city, masquerading under the identities I had chosen. It was time to make them mine again.

‘Of course, when I say I need an Indian writer … I mean, you do write in …
English
?’ said the eager agent when we met at the Nine Muses café, a look of doubt suddenly crossing his school-boyish features.

I sighed. If he only knew. Yes, I wrote in English, but the
pain
of it, the
sacrifice
.

When I began the narrative exploration of which the following is the fruit – the sugary, gram-flour laddu – I of course had very little idea about what I was letting myself in for. I am now in a position to inform the Reader that my principle task during the tracking of my cast across the yugs was the problem of keeping pace with exactly how to record their exploits and activities. That is, I did not wish to vote, as Vyasa did, for the elite and high vehicle of Sanskrit. No, my aim was more demotic. I wanted my story to be disseminated in every script that was being scribbled in the land now known as India, all of them. And that changed the dynamic completely.

For thousands of years my task was fairly straightforward, merely a matter of migrating across the country from tribe to tribe, town to town, readjusting myself to the ins and outs of a basic set of scripts and tongues. Right to left and left to right. North to south and east to west. I learnt Brahmi and Kharoshti, Maurya and Shunga, Gupta, as the emperors grew in stature and demand. I was ready to master Munda and Kolarian; or Persian to soothe the Sultans; and so from the loins of Sind-Hind-Ind sprang a dynasty of people infused with the love of a good line and the thrill of an intricate plot. I was the first to admit that the collusion of cultures breathed into my story glorious dimensions the likes of which had never been seen before.

The Europeans, meanwhile, had been arriving: the French, Dutch, Portuguese and English, on and off for years. None of us took much notice at first; but slowly, steadily, insidiously, they began marching us down the great long straight Roman Road of no return, and we fell for it without fully understanding how, or pausing to reason why. The Roman letters came and saw and conquered, little by little, drip by drip – a printed sign here, a paper notice there, a transcription, a contract, even a translation or two (of the Ramayana, the Gita – though they have never to this day scaled the heights of the mountainous Mahabharata). All these things were small enough to go unnoticed in the hectic vortex of busy India, until the British forced upon us English education, and then our minds became Miltonic, iambic, full of loony vowels and foggy climes.

But I, at least, retained the desi aroma. I had Leela on my side, didn’t I? That’s what I told myself, anyhow.

‘The people still love me,’ I whispered to Bill as he looked on sceptically. ‘The ones who don’t speak English do; all those who prefer the thick vowels and agile consonants of the mother and father and brother cousin sister tongues still do puja to Ganesh. But how can I answer their prayers? When I can barely sing their songs, feel the rhythms of their rhymes, trill their prose? I had a multiplicity of tongues, and I abandoned them, to write in English only!’ And I added (overcome with self-doubt, prone by nature to exaggerate my woes): ‘I have become a vernacular illiterate! There! It is true.’

‘And a good thing too,’ said Bill, taking out a draft contract. ‘Now, run me through your characters. Pronto.’

Bill, you see, is an Englishman born and indelibly bred. His instincts are racy, his sense of structure hinges on the cliffhanger (I quote from those now much-thumbed
Notes for New Writers
). He wished for none of this sensitively explored, infinitesimally detailed, psychological study of character. No. He has banned interior monologue, pathetic fallacy, poetic ambiguity. His creed is: 1) character exposition:
Boom!
2) Plot plan:
Wham!
What he likes best are broad sweeps of local colour, clouds of unusual odours, plenty of exotic women. ‘Strictly no disjointed postmodernists, limbless cripples or impoverished persons,’ is Bill’s mantra.

I began to explain. ‘There’s Meera and Leela whom we’ve talked about already, there’s Vyasa and his mother, Shiva Prasad and his wife. Then there’s Bharati, Sunita, Urvashi, Ash and—’

‘Wait up,’ Bill said, holding his head in his hands. He had been trying to take notes and his pad of paper was a mess of scrawlings. ‘Bharati, Sunita, Urvashi and who?’

‘Ash,’ I said. ‘The genealogist.’ I looked over at him and added (a little defiantly), ‘I need some help keeping track of my characters’ origins. You should try reading the Mahabharata. It is
obsessed
with lists of sons of sons of sons of. Aren’t you following?’

He shook his head. ‘All these previous lives!’ he grumbled. ‘It could go on for ever.’

Of course, it wasn’t Bill’s fault he was slow to catch on. But at least you, dear Reader, will have gathered by now that these precious products of human striving take longer than a lifetime to accumulate. Character, like culture, is cultivated gradually over millennia. It is formed by historical reaction – something like dominoes, or osmosis, or the migration of ospreys along an interlinked series of watercourses, gathering plumage, shedding it, changing in flight. Characters I invented at the beginning of time have lived and relived their lives, winding their way in and out of history, right up to the present, adapting, growing, maturing – but with always a glimmer of their original being. You have seen this already in my first and most important character, that wondrous lady Leela.

O my Leela, my heroine, my muse
; the quintessence of my creation, that triumph of rebellion from Vyasa, the best that I gleaned from my under-rewarded, conspicuously sidelined act of literary transcription.

Having resolved that direct divine intervention in the scenes of my creation was the only way I could ensure that the plot would come to fruition in Delhi, I sped across the heavens, dreaming of Leela all the way. I allowed myself to wander indulgently through her eight successive lives: recalling how unequivocally she refused Vyasa’s advances just before the Bharata war, how prettily she danced out the epic with her sister, how wilfully she plunged to a watery death in the refugee camp at the Purana Qila. The further we flew through the clouds, the more my mind was intoxicated by our propinquity. When we landed at Indira Gandhi airport I barely noticed the changes to my beloved city – the Yamuna, a once beautiful mountain goddess, now shrunk to a black sewer – so caught up was I in the idea of her existence.

Without any time to lose, I went straight to the wedding, to witness and intervene if necessary in my characters’ collisions. I was pleased, of course, that Ash was marrying Sunita with exquisite good grace and according to my express intentions, though this was mere background music, incidental detail to the central drama. I stood amidst the throng, eating a substantial vegetarian meal and patiently awaiting Leela’s arrival. And when at last she entered, dressed in wheatfield-crocus-sunspot yellow, my heart went pitter-patter. I would have known that sweet fragrance, that beautiful haste, that defiant glance anywhere on earth. Her voice seemed to reach across to me like a tendril of forgotten language – a rush of remembrance, strains of half-forgotten songs. She was ushered onto the stage, and I trembled. Jealously, I watched the movement of her head as it turned towards her husband, the brooding of her arms as they clasped each other, the sweet promise of her wavy hair. I longed to stand beside her; I watched with envious eyes as others did; as others eyed the woman who by divine right of creative things was mine, all mine.

Now, I have never, in the whole history of mankind’s narration, known it to happen before, so there was, on reflection, no reason to expect it to happen then; but somehow it did. A form of recognition passed between the creation and the creator. She happened to gaze out across the crowd – glorious Leela, lovely Leela, fragrant as frangipani, amla, jacaranda – our eyes locked together, and before I could prevent it happening, I had revealed myself to her in all the glory of my godhead – in my numerous representations: elephant-head, arms holding a lotus, an axe, a rope, a trident, a rosary, a plate of sweets, one hand raised up in blessing, Rat at my feet, a mottled ear, a parasol, a saffron-coloured dhoti, four faces … Even I began to feel dizzy; and as this vision flashed before her, naturally, she fainted.

I felt consternation. What had I done? In my human form I wished to influence events, but not like this. My aim was to make Leela strong. Filled with dread, I wandered the wedding crowds, eavesdropping on conversations, smiling when I saw my characters fully inhabiting the roles I had carved out for them (Sunita, so shy and retiring, a punching bag for spectators to define themselves against; the passive player they are probably most like, but pretend they would never be), my happy elephant-features wrinkling with worry when I realised that at least one of my cast – Urvashi the Truthteller – hadn’t made an appearance at all.

That worry, though, was as nothing to the shudder of anger that went through me when I overheard the following comment. ‘A god with a blue face?’ said a voice behind me. ‘An elephant-headed scribe? Phantoms of trees and mountains? But it is precisely the inherent ridiculousness of Hinduism which is its own best defence. Who could argue with a religion as silly as that?’

I whipped round in horror. The woman who had just uttered these words chuckled – and then turned for affirmation to a man whom I recognised, in one horrified heartbeat, as Vyasa. My enemy! My nemesis! Of course I had been expecting him; I knew what he had done to Leela and Meera in this life; but still, I felt the strength drain from me – I was in danger of collapsing there and then. No, dear Reader, this return to Delhi was
not
a mere lissom frolic through the pages of some happy-go-lucky fiction. It was the culmination of an epoch-old battle between two opposing forces. It was the final chapter of our mutually effacing carnage. It was war.

Before we go any further, I would like to remind you that I have not been alone in my attempts to wrestle control of this text from the Great Dictator. Even before Vyasa came to me with his writing project, he had attempted to pass on the Mahabharata to five separate pupils. All of them learnt the text, but only one was allowed to transmit it. Why? Because one pupil’s version was too censorious of Vyasa’s grandsons; another’s didn’t stress Vyasa’s valour. Vyasa discarded the unfavourable portraits and chose that which presented him as a hero – rather than the villain that he is. The Mahabharata that has come down to us is truly epic:
a vast and sycophantic distortion
.