Leela's Book (31 page)

Yes – Vyasa married Meera. Life was unkind in its comparisons: it hadn’t been like that for Vyasa of the Mahabharata. After performing his duty as the impregnator of his brother’s two wives, Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa stepped away into the shadows – to observe his progeny and cast, and to write his story. But in the Santiniketan of 1979, stepping away wasn’t an option for Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi. In May, towards the end of the academic year, Meera told him she was three months’ pregnant.

They married in haste – a simple Arya Samaj ceremony in Calcutta, to please her father – and as the heat of the summer stretched on and on, smothering the country, they moved away to Delhi, where Vyasa had managed to find a teaching job at Hindu College. Since the new academic year began in late July, Meera and he spent the time that remained setting up house in Nizamuddin West.

They were blissful months, in retrospect, and not just for their contrast to the horrors that came later. During her pregnancy, Meera seemed to glow with pleasure. Everything about their new life pleased her; and in his eyes, too, this marriage that he had made took on a special sheen of its own: one that compensated, in part at least, for the intellectual disadvantages of marrying oneself off in the first place. Once in Delhi, Meera declared that she had felt as he did about Santiniketan: both of them were city people, both thrived in the urban thrill. And at first, Meera lived it to perfection. As her cheeks filled out, as her belly began to swell, she seemed to embody the perfect wife: witty, desirable, elegant, daring. This was before the days of her poetry recitals, before the tedious coterie of young admirers. She organised dinners in their home, bringing together literature professors with social activists, journalists with the cleverest students from the faculty: setting up encounters and rencontres that ebbed and flowed with ease and passion, as if she was conducting not conversation but a concerto.

There was only one dark spot. During these months neither Meera nor Vyasa mentioned Leela. Since becoming a wife, Meera refused even to speak of her sister. Vyasa’s silence was driven by necessity. He was terrified he might reveal to his wife how, when she occasionally pulled him down onto the marital bed and forced him to make love, it was Leela’s phantom he touched and caressed, Leela’s tongue he dallied with, Leela’s face he saw as he uttered long anguished cries. Serious though Vyasa’s distress at losing Leela was, he concealed it. Or so he hoped.

In the autumn, just a few weeks before she was due to give birth, Meera took the train back to Calcutta. She said she wanted to be in her father’s house for the birth; Vyasa, now in the middle of a busy term of teaching, stayed in Delhi.

A month later, his wife returned. To everyone’s delight she had given birth to twins, a healthy boy and a healthy girl. They named the boy Ashwin – after the mythical twins who were both men and women – and the girl Bharati – in a nod to his work.

But during that month away, Meera had changed. At first she said nothing, and he took her silence for the preoccupations of motherhood: the constant demands of not one but two small mouths, not one but two helpless bodies. It was when she started asking him about his previous couplings that he knew something had gone wrong inside her. She asked tentatively at first; later demanding that he retell these stories, these cruel vignettes, over and over in ever more ghastly, lurid detail. Who he had slept with first, what the other women were like, who cried out most, who gave him most pleasure; but all this was a mere prelude: she wanted him to tell her every detail of that brief and unsatisfactory moment of coitus with Leela. Vyasa was outraged. She was turning his unconventional sexual daring on its head; bringing the horror of bourgeois values into their marriage, to wreck it from within.

As the hard Delhi winter turned to spring – as the twins filled the house with their cries of hunger and frustration – Meera stopped taking care of the children. In the evenings, he would come home to find her slouched on their bed, a glass of gin in her hand. The twins had an ayah, a woman from the basti, and Meera, who spent her days at home, like many other Indian housewives, did no cleaning or cooking. She did not even feed the children. ‘What do you do when I am out? Are you writing?’ he asked one day, more from curiosity than suspicion. She looked up at him slowly, as if she didn’t understand him, as if his words were being transmitted from a very far-off place. His words were a taunt.

It was early spring the following year before they heard the news from her father: Leela had moved away. She had married an unknown man, informing no one and choosing America, of all places, as her home. The depression into which Meera had already dipped – and into which she now plunged like a swimmer – was blamed on her post-natal condition. But Vyasa knew better. It was the shock of being separated from the one woman on whom she had always depended. But he only understood part of what was happening. Later, he realised that the thing that grew inside her during that first year of the twins’ life on earth was much more subtle, much quieter – more frightening – than anything that could be seen from outside.

During this era of his wife’s undoing, Vyasa had a revelation of his own. He was teaching the Mahabharata to class after class of young, desirable students. But now the formative stories of his namesake began to seem a curse. As he stood up in front of a class full of eager pretty faces, he thought for the first time of the women in the epic – cowering as they were shoved into the bed of the dirty, hirsute sage; crying out as they were made to copulate against their will; protesting at being receptacles of substitute sperm – and he felt angry that modernity, diminishing the epic dimension, had bequeathed him this belittling perspective.

In the autumn, soon after the twins turned one, when the air in Delhi was filled with the perfume of raat-ki-rani blossom, and the unbearable heat of summer was behind them, Meera’s mind suddenly warped once more, and this time into an upswing. It was a change for the better, and Vyasa felt such a relief as he had never known before or since. She was coming out of the darkness that had enveloped her at last. She was getting up early in the morning, and dressing once again in that flamboyant way she always had, and best of all, she was playing with the children. He didn’t mind that she began to throw parties that became the talk of the town; that she became famous for the shiver that ran through the audience during her poetry recitations. He could see that she enjoyed the attentions of her many young male admirers. He guessed, and remained unmoved by the thought, that she bestowed more than literary pleasures on the luckiest of these men, as he had already done on other women.

If anything, this new hard paradoxical fragility of hers made him love her in a way that he hadn’t bothered to before. Now, when he took her, he thought of their mutual betrayals – and he mistook the bitterness and loss that they were visiting on each other for a new profundity of feeling.

So misled was Vyasa by this era of their marriage – reading its silence as respect, its despair and duplicities as solitary freedoms – that the tragedy, when it came, was unexpected. It was soon after the twins’ second birthday; Vyasa was away in Bombay on a work trip, and it was his mother who rang him with the news. He took a train back to Delhi and a friend in the police sent a car to meet him at the station. To his surprise he was driven out, past India Gate, and up over the spine of the Ridge. What had she been doing here? This was the newest of New Delhi, with neither the grace of nearby Shahjahanabad nor the space one usually associated with Civil Lines; a dusty, marginal place of slum workers and railway lines. When the car finally glided to a stop, Vyasa looked out of the window and saw the red and blue of a Delhi police station. No, not a police station. A police morgue.

The yard of the morgue smelt sweet, an undefinable smell then, but one that, later, Vyasa would know meant death, inert flesh, the violence of life’s end. He was led towards a room at the back of the yard, and told to wait. Two policemen were lounging with their backs to him in the doorway of the Cold Room. Moving forward, Vyasa saw that they were laughing at a woman who was lying in the entrance. She had enormous breasts, and only her face was covered, by a dirty cloth. She was so white and waxy, she looked unreal, not dead, and Vyasa had to remind himself that she was a human being. Around her, in a heap, were other naked bodies, prostrate on a pile of rags. ‘Train crash,’ the policeman said, and pointed to a man lying at the back of the room, his head turned towards the wall. ‘Vagrant.’ His finger picked out another lump of body, the head tumbled on the vagrant’s legs. ‘Murder, from Karol Bagh.’ The finger moved on. ‘Hooch death in a construction camp. Rickshaw driver, crushed by lorry. Hungry girl, ate dead pigeon off the road.’ The dead were all pale, their skin seemed to have achieved an identical tone in death, they looked related, as if they came from the same family once.

Somebody was calling. Vyasa turned away, and found that the inspector had returned. He was shown into another room. In here it was cleaner. There were only two dead bodies, both on light blue stretchers. One was an old man, also naked but for a piece of white bandage on his toe. His hair was white and wiry, his nose a handsome hook. A man in blue overalls was leaning over him, sewing up the skin on his neck. The string yanked the head up off the stretcher, the man let it fall, yanked it up. The stitches were huge. The head fell with a thud.

The other body was a woman. Her skin, too, was pale. Her face was bruised, she was naked, she had bled. You could see the ruptures on the skin of her arms and legs. ‘We found her on the road near the hospital,’ the policeman was saying. ‘It was difficult to tell where she was from. No identification. An old green sari …’ He pointed to a pile of clothes on the workbench. ‘She came in yesterday morning. We didn’t know what kind of woman she was. No jewellery. No gold. Not even a watch—’

‘And yet not a servant,’ somebody interrupted. ‘Skin too smooth on the hands.’

‘That’s why we put out the Hue and Cry.’

The fender of the truck, Vyasa learnt later, had struck her head, the wheel caught her body, crushing her legs. She would have died instantly. The policeman was still talking. ‘No knowing who the driver of the lorry was. No knowing why it happened.’ He glanced surreptitiously at Vyasa. ‘No further questions. All over and done with.’

The funeral took place the next day at the burning ghats up near the university on the banks of the river. Vyasa had already rung her father in Calcutta but there wasn’t time for any of the other relatives to take the train and come to Delhi, and the white-clothed mourners who stood with him at the funeral pyre were mostly his own colleagues and relatives, as well as a few of Meera’s youthful admirers: the longhaired young men who had come to sit on Vyasa’s terrace to drink his rum and swoon as his wife recited her poems. It was they who wept as Meera’s ashes were scattered into the Yamuna.

Meera’s father betrayed no emotion in front of his son-in-law. The only signficant thing he said was: ‘I will inform Leela.’ And Vyasa nodded.

It took months for him to begin going through his late wife’s possessions. When he did, he found the stack of poems almost immediately. Meera had filed them away, each one dated and numbered, each one signed with the name,
Lalita
. Vyasa sat down and read them through. They were good: youthful, witty, assured, with an occasional turn of phrase that even made him gasp.

Vyasa showed Meera’s poems to a friend (all except one, which he withheld because of its embarrassing content), and the man, who ran a small publishing house, grew excited and voluble and declared that he would print five hundred copies in a special commemorative volume, with a sketch of Meera’s face on the cover, and special footnotes translating the occasional Bangla word into English. The slim cloth-bound book was called
The Lalita Series
. Journalists wrote articles in esteemed literary journals. With the second print-run of eight hundred copies, there was a generally expressed sense of regret at the loss of this promising poet. Comparisons were made to Rajasthani Meera, and to English Keats.

Vyasa longed for some praise from Meera’s father for this act of kindness to the dead, but the old man never brought it up on the occasions when he came from Calcutta to visit. Dipankar Bose doted on the twins; but he had always held himself slightly aloof from the marriage Meera had made – Vyasa felt – and now that his daughter was dead, he did not invite intimacies with the grieving husband. And so, even though Vyasa longed to discuss Meera’s work with Dipankar – the creative breadth her ebullience had masked, the agonies and depths that her depression had exposed – he did not dare. Perhaps he felt ashamed of revealing all that he, the husband, had never quite understood.

Meera’s father passed away some three years later.

‘I suppose you’ll have to tell Leela,’ his mother observed after he returned from yet another funeral, on the banks of another river, in a different city. Vyasa nodded. He commissioned his lawyer to find out from Delhi’s civil marriage registration records who Leela had married.

When the truth came to light, Vyasa was surprised at how jealous he felt. She had made a bad marriage, taking as her spouse a man in import–export called Hariprasad Sharma. Vyasa did a little research of his own and discovered that Hariprasad was the younger brother of a voluble Hindu nationalist called Shiva Prasad who was currently making himself felt as an irksome presence on the fringe of right-wing Hindu politics. Shiva Prasad’s non-resident Indian brother Hari, however, had acquired a range of business interests and a lot of money. Vyasa composed a formal letter to Leela about her father’s sad demise, and addressed it care of her husband’s office in Delhi. He hoped that it might spark some corres pondence between them. But her reply, when it came, was curt; and although he could see that the letter had been sent from America, she left no forwarding address.

He was hurt by her words – the lack of them. And although he did debate with himself whether he should send her a copy of Meera’s poetry collection and tell her how well it had been received, he surmised in the end what her letter made clear: she had no wish to be reminded of that past life, with its over-generous share of sorrow.