Leela's Book (26 page)

Like a true strategist, Vyasa stifled dissent, popularising the convenient though ridiculous notion that what is not found here is found nowhere. All lies! There were many variant accounts of Vyasa’s own behaviour outside the Mahabharata. Some ancient commentators I spoke to pointed out that the old lecher slept with his dead brothers’ wives – was not that against Dharma? Others cried that he had fathered offspring whose actions led directly to the cataclysmic bloodshed of the war. Still more drew attention to his failures as a priest and negotiator. These voices denigrated Vyasa. Why, they asked passionately, was Vyasa honoured? And yet for centuries, for millennia, their questions and accounts have been silenced by the power of the Vyasa Propaganda Machine. But no longer.

For too long now, Vyasa has held this tale in the palm of his hand, tweaking uncomfortable episodes, twisting embarrassing accounts. He has become the judge and the jury – and the criminal! – of India’s great epic. How is that fair? And what about the victims?
Where was their story?

Standing in the wedding garden, watching Vyasa converse with his odious female sidekick, I reminded myself that centuries of antagonism had led to this moment; that the intellectual propaganda I was witnessing in Delhi was thoroughly in line with everything I knew about Vyasa’s endeavour to push me into the margins; that ever since I wrote down the first word of the Mahabharata, Vyasa had been on a quest to manipulate Indian history. But now Vyasa’s hegemony was teetering on the brink of the abyss. To bring the action to its crisis, I needed to enlist the help of my arrow-carrier, a boy I had always intended as Leela’s protector.
Pablo
.

There were, it must be admitted, some problems along the way with this character’s incarnations. The first problem lay in his name. When I slipped him on to the battlefield, somewhere towards the middle of Vyasa’s Mahabharata, he was barely fifteen years old, and fresh as the flocks he once tended, with pleasing curls and a long strong nose. I gave him a good name, made up of three strong consonants: puh, buh, luh: PABAL, or PUBLI, or PABLO. But this was an era of Sanskrit theology, my grasp of that over-polished language was always very faulty, and I soon found that despite the nice combination I had chosen for him, my character was a linguistic lacuna; there was no such word in the whole of the Sanskrit language.

For centuries, P—o was unable to feature in my drama as anything more than a whisper, a shade, a ghostly figure of fireside stories and riverside rumour. In some places the people called him The Pale One, in others they named him The Dim, and elsewhere The Faint. P—o’s greatest gift, at this epoch, was to enrich the imagination of humans as a figure of folklore. In the coastal regions to which he futuristically belonged, P—o gained some renown as the tall curly haired netter of a thousand fish; thereafter P—o was given provincial status as a fishing deity; and local newly-weds would visit the shrine (today the foundations of the Municipal Corporation) to dab the pale stone visage with red paste and offer pennies in exchange for a firstborn son. Who knows how such legends arise.

It wasn’t until 1498, when Vasco da Gama touched down in Calicut bringing the name with him – along with the common cold, St Anthony’s Fire and other nasty Occidental diseases – that at last my Pablo came to earth as the fruit of a seaside union between a lustrous loud-mouthed fisherwoman and a burly Portuguese sailor (with a nasty habit of sucking garlic in the morning to ward off the Indian evil eye and migratory European vampires). The sailor’s name was actually Paulo but they’d called him Pablo in the Spanish way to distinguish him from the other Paul on board, Vasco’s brother, and this was the name that the father gave to his India-born son.

Paulo had come from a small village near Lisbon where his wife laboured bottling tomatoes for the winter months and skimping on supper to feed the six children her husband had sired between 1488 and 1495. Having docked for a spell on these coconut-fringed shores, Paulo soon discovered that his brand-new fish-fed baby boy, with his large interested eyes rimmed by his loquacious mother in mustard-seed kohl, was ample compensation for the scrawny old-world offspring he had abandoned to the 1496 tomato blight; that the fresh sea fish she fried far outweighed the horror of thrice-cooked sea biscuit on the arduous return journey; and so he was happy to put off his homecoming by visiting the small salt-sprayed hut to fuck the mother and bounce the boy on his knee; and as for the boy, when he was four years old, his father sent him south to Cochin, and when he was ten, north to Goa, according to the movements of the Portuguese governors. Thus was Pablo trained up to be of his papa’s people.

Except that baby Pablo missed the sea. He visited his mother on every feast day, and when he came to man’s estate, happily swapped the prickly velvet, lambs’-wool pyjamas, and under-spiced food of the Portuguese for the muslin freedom of the airy-around-the-genitals dhoti and pungent-on-the-tongue fish. In short, this sperm product of a migrant militant became –
dah-dah!
– a local.

Thereafter, things were more straightforward between Pablo and his creator. In one life he dallied with chronicle-writing for the Mughals; in another he drew cartoons that pilloried the new and even more foreign King Emperor; in another he … But here I must stop myself for I gave Bill Bond my word that I would not continually backtrack through these fascinating prior existences. In short, wherever he went, whichever way his peregrinations took him, I was utterly unable to persuade him to fall in love with Leela. Perplexing. He was nice to her, of course; he supplied her with paper for the books she was writing in the age of Humayun; smuggled her food when the British laid siege to her city. But he never fully inhabited all the nuances I had intended with the word ‘protector’ – not in this life either – as I discovered this evening.

I had done my research beforehand, and had been pleased to learn (from Rat) that Pablo was working as a journalist for a local Delhi paper. Since he always did have a flair for words, a head for puzzles, and since it had come to my attention that in this, her ninth life, Leela did not know that Vyasa had published their poetry in Meera’s sole name, nor that he had chosen to suppress the poem that directly alluded to his questionable behaviour, I put two and two together – and generated a noisy local scandal in Vyasa’s backyard. Long ago – before Meera’s death, during a previous visitation to Delhi – I had heard her recite a poem called ‘The Last Dictation’. I copied it down and stashed it away, knowing that the truths it revealed would one day come in handy. How right I was. I bided my time, and then, once I judged that Vyasa’s twins were ready for my great denouement, I posted the poem anonymously to Pablo at the newspaper he worked for; and this piece of paper was the catalyst for my drama’s unknotting.

To unknot it further, I located Pablo at the wedding, watched his under-the-table antics with little-Bharati, and followed him home to Nizamuddin, where the people of the basti – more attuned to the existence of the supernatural than those at the wedding – fled from my presence, crying of mischievous demons and cantankerous spirits. Once the fire had broken out in the kabariwallahs’ settlement, my ploy to contrive a meeting between Leela and her protector was simple. Divining that my beloved needed his help, I shouted ‘Fire!’ as I stood below Pablo’s window, ‘Fire! Death! Destruction!’ When that provoked no reaction, ‘Scoop!’ I yelled – and after a moment, his terrace light came on and I could see him standing and staring down through the dark to where the yellow and green flames had turned the streets below his house into a glittering, glimmering spectacle.

On the morning after the wedding, Bharati woke up to find herself staring into the face of a young man she didn’t know. She lay very still, a little scared, confused by the deep brown ponds of his eyes. Was he the one from Peshawar?

Then he spoke – ‘I’ll make some coffee and get the papers from the terrace’ – and she frowned, remembering: her brother’s reception. Delhi. Last night. Pablo? The memory of what they had done, of how she had behaved, came back to her in swathes of clarity. Did she really do that, at her brother’s wedding? Certain images were distinct – the embraces, the writhing, she was sure of that – then they got back to his flat, undressed, got into bed, she remarked how cold it was, and he apologised: no heating, no air conditioning. What happened after that?

‘Last night …’ she said. ‘What did we do after we got home?’

‘You fell asleep in my arms.’

‘I did?’

He got out of bed. She heard him walking outside onto the terrace, and she lay on her side, wrapped in the sheet, thinking. After a while, he returned to the room, dressed in jeans and a shirt, and carrying a tray, with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. She sat up and pulled the sheet prudishly around her breasts as he handed her a glass of coffee. It smelt sweet and very milky and she wrinkled her nose.

‘It’s south-Indian filter coffee,’ he said, ‘from Coorg. Try it.’

Bharati took the cup and sipped; and her warm breath made clouds of mist in the morning air.

Pablo was kneeling down in front of his clothes cupboard. She watched as he rifled through it and she felt, to her relief, that she approved of her choice. She hadn’t been mistaken. He hadn’t been cast in an over-flattering light by the intensity of the evening or her own familiar insatiability. There was something distinctive and particular about him; something to do with the way he moved, or the way he looked at her when he talked.

Pablo looked up and caught her studying him. ‘Put this on,’ he said, hiding his embarrassment by holding out a much-washed blue kurta. ‘It’s colder this morning.’ He threw her the shirt, and then he opened the bundle of newspapers.

‘There was a stampede last night in the basti, and a fire,’ he said. ‘The people saw a demon and I filed a story. It’s been printed.’ He held up the paper. ‘They cut a bit.’

‘A stampede? What kind of stampede?’ She pulled on the shirt as she spoke, slithering boldly into it, pleased again to be showing off to him her perfectly naked body.

But Pablo wasn’t interested in admiring her legs. He handed her the newspaper and she sat down in bed again, tucking in the covers, turning her eyes to the piece with his byline above it.

Pablo’s article described, in quite long sentences, what he called the ‘psycho-sociological phenomenon of India’s urban poor’. ‘This is the second such disturbance to take place in the low-income areas of Delhi this year,’ she read. ‘The phenomenon is believed to be connected to slum dwellers’ mental and economic disenfranchisement from the fast pace of technological progress in the rest of India, and the social inferiority and lifestyle stress that they experience on a daily basis.’

She frowned again, feeling somehow annoyed that these dramatic events had taken place without her knowledge. She stared down at the words he had written, trying to take them in, but soon closed the paper and handed it to him. ‘So you went out after we got back?’

He nodded.

‘Leaving me here asleep? I can’t believe I’ve come back to this crazy city.’

He nodded again and picked out a guava from the bowl of fruit he had brought in on the tray from the kitchen. He peeled off a thin layer of skin with a knife, cut the guava neatly into eighths, placed four of them on a small plate which he handed across to her, and then he said – in a hurt but curious kind of voice – ‘What have you got against Delhi?’

She shrugged as she bit into a piece of guava. ‘Take your pick. The stupid politicians, the unfairnesses, the caste system, the traffic’ – she waved her hand towards the window – ‘the drain. It’s endless.’

‘And your answer to all that is just to get up and leave?’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s your country, Bharati, and you don’t even see the good things.’

‘What good things?’

‘The people, the history, the energy, the culture.’

‘Oh
really
,’ said Bharati, sounding scornful.

‘After you finish your studies, you should come back here to work, really get to know it.’

‘And you know it so very well yourself, do you?’

He nodded. ‘Thanks to my job.’

‘Ah, yes, your wonderful job. And last night, during the fire and the stampede, did you have time to reflect on the people, the history, the culture?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And guess who I met.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I have no idea. Lord Krishna.’

‘Leela. Leela Sharma.’

‘Who?’

‘She’s married to Hariprasad Sharma, your brother’s new chacha.’

‘What was she doing there?’

‘Looking for something, I think she said. She’s an interesting woman. Not what you would expect.’

‘You mean, not as terrible as the rest of Sunita’s family.’

He smiled and didn’t answer. Then he said, ‘I believe they’re childless. They’ve come back to India because Hari has made Sunita’s brother the heir to his entire fortune.’

‘Wow,’ Bharati said sarcastically.

Pablo got to his feet and came to sit next to her on the bed, his long legs in their blue jeans stretched out before him, so that even through the bed covers she could feel the warmth of his body. She thought for one moment that he was about to kiss her, but instead he began talking again.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that Sunita’s father works for one of the worst right-wing think tanks?’

She sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, they’ve come up with some spooky ideas in the past, but the latest thing is genes. They want to identify an Aryan gene in Indians. They think that genetics will allow them both to single out the true Hindu elite of this country, whose origins go back to the priests who first composed the Vedas three thousand years ago, and to reintegrate into the Hindu family those Indians who call themselves Muslim or Christian today but whose ancestors were converted – forcibly, they believe – during the past thirteen hundred years. They want to rescue their long-lost Arya brethren.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘It’s true. But the point is Shiva Prasad believes Ash is going to do it for them. He thinks Ash is going to lead a private research project into the Aryan—’