Leela's Book (44 page)

Bharati frowned at the dim sense she had of not quite understanding anything any more. ‘My friend Pablo thinks you wrote the poems together,’ she said. ‘He was the one who made me ring you.’ And before Leela could reply, she said, ‘But my father says that this unknown poem – you know the one that was published in the
Delhi Star—
’

‘“The Last Dictation”.’

‘Yes, that it’s a fake. That somebody was imitating Meera out of envy, or something.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

There was silence for a moment, and then Bharati asked, anxious now, ‘So what do you think about the poem?’

‘It isn’t fake,’ Leela said, looking straight at her, and Bharati was struck by her candid expression, by her long dark eyes. ‘We wrote it together …’

‘Right,’ Bharati said. ‘So you wrote all the poems together, or just that one?’

‘All of them.’

‘So …’ Bharati began. So her mother wasn’t the sole author of
The Lalita Series
after all; it was just as Pablo had said. ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked. ‘And how come your poem is about Vyasa, when that’s my father’s name, and …?’ She didn’t want to say it out loud: that the Vyasa of their poem was nasty and lecherous and egotistical. She didn’t mean to ask the next question either, but something about Leela Sharma’s whole demeanour put the worry in her head and the question came out without her being able to stop it: ‘Did my mother
love
my father?’

As soon as she said it, she knew that it was a betrayal, and that if her father heard this conversation – or her grandmother – their dismay would shame her. For a moment the question hung there unanswered, and Bharati felt shocked by the thoughts that were veering into each other in her head, one interrupting another before she had time to unpick the meaning of the first. The question she had just asked made her think of her mother living in Delhi with her twins, away from her sister in New York and her father in Calcutta, and then the way she suddenly died, and the hints Bharati had gleaned during her childhood from people outside the family, which she had wilfully refused to explore, not even with Ash, about the nature of this sudden and tragic circumstance. And so, before Leela could answer the first question, Bharati asked another one. ‘Did my mother mean to die the way she did? Was it deliberate?’

‘Oh, Bharati.’ A tear slid out of Leela Sharma’s eye.

‘Well?’ Bharati said. ‘Was it?’

Leela shook her head and brushed the tear away. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was in New York by then. But my father told me – he said that she was—’ She stopped and cleared her throat. ‘Has Vyasa talked to you about this?’

Bharati shook her head.

‘How can I talk to you about it then?’ Leela said. ‘We were so happy – she was so happy – when we were growing up. She was such a happy person.’

‘And then she stopped being happy?’

Leela began to sob now, and Bharati, who hated crying, felt a tear run down her own cheek at the thought of her dead mother, and looked away from Leela in disgust. She stared instead at the archway they had just passed through, where two thin men – from the ticket booth, probably – were lounging, talking to each other, eyeing up all the pretty girls passing in and out of the gardens in their new Diwali clothes, and she thought of something her ayah had said to her once, about how difficult her mother had found it looking after twins.

‘So what was it that made her sad? Was it being a mother?’

Leela turned to look at her. ‘No, it wasn’t that. You mustn’t think it was that.’ She wiped her face with the end of her sari. ‘When I talked to Father about it later he thought it began after our mother died. I think so, too. While we were at university in Calcutta, our mother got cancer and it came on so very suddenly we didn’t even know she was ill until afterwards. They didn’t want to worry us and so she died like that’ – Leela clicked her fingers – ‘and of course we never had time to ask all the things you want to ask of your mother, which you would think of asking her if you knew she was dying. Meera resented our father for that. But we weren’t children when it happened – we were students. It made us feel like children again, I suppose. Meera especially. From that time onwards there was a kind of sadness about her, not always, but every now and then.’

‘My friend Pablo wanted me to speak to you,’ Bharati said, ‘because he said you needed to tell me something.’

‘Is he the journalist? Pablo Fernandes? The one—’

‘Who wrote about the poems, yes. He’s in Calcutta. He went to Santiniketan yesterday. And he rang to tell me he had found out something important.’

‘I see,’ said Leela.

‘He said he’d been to a hospital,’ Bharati went on.

‘Bharati.’ Leela took a deep breath and knotted her fingers together. ‘I didn’t come here today to tell you this.’

‘I need to know, don’t I?’ Bharati said, ‘If Pablo knows, I need to know.’

‘Oh, Bharati. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.’

‘Forgive you for what? Tell me what it is, quickly.’

‘I haven’t told you before, because I didn’t want to upset you and the people around you. Meera knew, and our father knew, but nobody else did.’

‘
What is it
?’ Bharati said.

‘I made Meera a promise when I left, and that’s why I’m telling you this now. I hope you will forgive me—’

‘For fuck’s sake!’

‘You see, the thing was, we both got pregnant at the same time. Your mother was married, and I wasn’t—’

The expression on Leela’s face as she made her confession was half-pleading, half-defiant.

‘You haven’t got any children.’

‘I haven’t got any now.’

‘But you had some once?’

‘I had a child.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Meera took her.’

‘Her?’ Bharati got to her feet, pushing at the air with her hands as if she was trying to make the words that Leela had just spoken disappear. ‘
No
.’ And then she screamed, so that pigeons flew up from the steps of the tomb. ‘No! Don’t come here like this, talking like this about me and my mother. Who are you?’

She walked away from Leela along the lawn and stood looking at the tomb, and then she looked back at her mother’s sister, with her wavy hair so like her own, her eyes so like her own.

She walked back to where Leela was sitting. ‘Why don’t you just say it clearly?’

Leela looked up at her, her eyes full of tears.

‘Say it!’

‘You are my daughter, Bharati.’

‘And who is my father supposed to be?’

‘The same as Ash’s father.’

‘What? Both of you, with him?’ She stared at Leela Sharma. ‘All three of you, all at once?’ The implications of what this woman was saying were disgusting: how could her father have sired children by two different women, by two
sisters
? It was too shocking to be real. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Bharati cried.

‘It wasn’t like you think,’ Leela Sharma interrupted.

‘So how was it then?’ Bharati said. ‘You can’t even say it out loud! You come to me after twenty years and you still can’t say this thing clearly. Are you so ashamed?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Leela said, ‘I’m sorry. I have always wanted it to be known and if I haven’t told anyone it’s because—’

‘Because what?’

‘Because I didn’t want to make your life more difficult.’

‘So instead you did – what? Gave me away and disappeared to America?’

‘Yes,’ Leela said, bowing her head.

Bharati stood looking down at her. ‘How can you have deceived me so much? You
liar
.’ She thought of her father. Her lovely father. Could he really have done a thing like that? It wasn’t possible. But if it was true, and he hadn’t known during all this time any more than she had, then he too had been tricked. ‘You deceived Baba! Both of you lied to him, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’

Leela nodded. ‘We didn’t tell your father. But—’

‘So you
abandoned
me,’ Bharati said.

‘I didn’t.

‘Why have you appeared now? What exactly do you want?’

‘I didn’t plan this,’ Leela repeated. ‘I didn’t come here today—’

‘Did you love my father?’

‘No.’

‘Yet he is my father. Something happened, didn’t it?’

‘It’s difficult to explain,’ Leela began. ‘I would have done anything for Meera. I never loved your father, I never—’

‘But you slept with my mother’s lover—’

‘It wasn’t like that—’

‘And then you got pregnant and my mother took your baby.’

Bharati walked away again in disgust, and this time she circled the tomb in a wide arc, stepping across the canals, passing a crow drinking from a tap, and a man peeing in a bush, going up to the wall at the end of the gardens that backed onto a slum connected to the railway station. She thought of climbing over the wall as she had done as a teenager and jumping down into the pile of grass that the gardeners left there and escaping from this woman and the things she was saying. She could go back to Kavita’s place this evening and get stoned with her and stay stoned until she left for London on Saturday morning. But there was no point in running away. There was no point in doing anything other than what she did: which was to walk slowly back round to the front of the tomb again, walk up to where Leela was still sitting on the grass, and say, ‘It’s been hard growing up without a mother. And now the knowledge that I had one, somewhere else, and that she didn’t want even to meet me …’

Leela looked up when she heard Bharati. ‘I did want to see you, of course I did. But after you were born I had to make a choice. The most important thing was to protect you in the way that I was protected.’ She shook her head: ‘Perhaps nowadays it would be easier to live unconventionally, but when you were born it wasn’t like that. You know what Meera’s parents did for me – imagine if they hadn’t. Imagine how difficult your life would have been if Meera hadn’t taken you with her.’ She was pleading now. ‘What kind of life would you have had with me? We would have struggled. You wouldn’t have gone to a good school, you wouldn’t be at an English university. You wouldn’t have had your brother, or your father, or his mother. You would have just had me.’

‘Don’t be so fucking patronising,’ Bharati said. ‘Your father would have looked after you.’

‘He was old, he died soon after—’

‘You could have lived near us, been like a surrogate mother, an extra auntie.’

‘I couldn’t have.’

‘It wasn’t very brave of you, was it? To rely on these men to fend for your children?’

‘How do you know what’s brave or not?’

‘Why shouldn’t I know, for fuck sake?’

Bharati crouched down on the grass. She felt as if the inside of her – the tender, feeling part – had been scoured. There was an ache that hadn’t existed before. She shook her head. Did she believe it? Leela Sharma was telling lies.

‘What hospital did Pablo go to at Santiniketan?’

‘The one where you were born. The Santhal Mission Hospital.’

That was the hospital Pablo had mentioned too. Pablo would return tonight and affirm everything Leela had said.

She put her head in her hands, overwhelmed by the unfairness. ‘It’s horrible of you not to have come to find me before,’ she burst out, her voice hurt like a child’s. ‘You lied to Baba about his own children. How can you have done such a thing?’ She began weeping, tears and gasps pulling apart the words she spoke. ‘You lied to everyone. You let me think my mother was
dead
. You let me mourn for a dead mother – Oh my God!’ She put her head back and screamed at the sky. ‘You let Ash and me think that we were twins! You let us think that. Don’t you care about anything? Haven’t you got any feelings at all?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Leela said. ‘It was a huge, terrible mistake. Meera and I thought it was the best thing for you. It would have been a scandal for your father if it ever got out: two girls pregnant at the same time, two sisters, at that—’

‘So it was like in the poem?’

‘It was like in the poem, yes. Like in the epic.’

‘But why didn’t you come back and find me? She died when we were two years old. We were
babies
still.’

‘Of course I longed to.’ Leela put out a hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Meera’s death was very difficult for me. It made me see only bad in the world for a long time, and only sadness. I didn’t think you would want a mother like that. And then my father died … all I had left was my husband Hari and I thought—’

‘BUT YOU HAD ME!’ Bharati shouted, pushing her hand off, and this time an old man who was passing with his stick and his old-man’s thoughts looked round in surprise, and to her annoyance she recognised him as the retired judge who lived in the house that backed onto theirs and devoted his dotage to growing marigolds which he transplanted in springtime to the communal park.

‘Yes, I had you,’ Leela said, shrinking back, ‘but I didn’t want to inflict myself on you.’

‘But you just have.’

Leela began to cry again, and Bharati listened to her sob, and did nothing to help her or comfort her. Gradually the crying stopped. They sat side by side, not looking at each other, in silence as the sun began to set, and one by one the picnicking families and romancing couples and exercising geriatrics started to leave the gardens.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Leela asked, breaking the silence. ‘It’s such a bad habit, but …’.

Bharati shook her head. ‘I’ll have one too.’

Leela handed her a cigarette and the matches, and as soon as Bharati lit up she felt a wave of calm.

As she was finishing her cigarette, one of the men from the ticket booth came over to ask them to move towards the exit. Bharati got to her feet. She felt not just calm now but superior – numb, perhaps. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I’m having dinner with my father. Ash has gone to celebrate Diwali with his marvellous new in-laws.’

‘Will you tell Vyasa?’ Leela asked.

‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’

‘This evening?’

‘Probably.’

‘When shall we speak again?’

‘I’m going to London on Saturday.’

‘Oh, Bharati.’ Leela got to her feet too. ‘Please don’t leave like this. Can we meet again? I would love more than anything in the world to meet you again.’