Leela's Book (47 page)

But he wouldn’t say.

He insisted that she dress up warm: a hat to go below the motorcycle helmet, two pairs of socks, his jumper, her shawl. Only once they were out on the road, with her huddled behind him on the bike, did he tell her that they were going to see the birds of Delhi.

‘No!’ she shouted at him through the rushing wind, feeling scandalised. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Yes I am,’ he shouted back, sounding amused at her tone. ‘I know it’s what you’ve always wanted.’

‘Haven’t all the birds been scared away by the fireworks?’ she asked.

But the birds hadn’t gone; and nor did the fog that wreathed the city at that hour diminish his enthusiasm. ‘There are flamingos on the river,’ he yelled as they drove south down an almost empty road towards the Okhla barrage.

‘We’re not going to the
Yamuna
?’ she asked, dread in her voice at the cold and the distance and the endeavour.

‘Of course we are,’ he answered, his voice happy. ‘Like Radha and Krishna. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

Half an hour later he parked the bike on the edge of a mud track, paused briefly to show her the river from this perspective – misty, green with water hyacinths, the hum of the city disturbingly far-off in the distance – and then he led her down to the river, into the reed-beds.

As Bharati shivered with cold, Pablo showed her how to look through his binoculars at a green bee-eater and then a blue-throat and finally a purple swamp hen: ‘The lipstick bird!’ He explained about local migrants, and those birds that arrived at this time of year from the other side of the world. ‘What migrations!’ he said. ‘What odysseys.’

‘What’s that awful shriek?’ she asked. There was a high-pitched cry coming from somewhere in the heavens. ‘Is it a kite?’

‘Better than that. It’s an osprey,’ he said, gazing upwards, and pointed out the gliding shape far above them. ‘They sound like women grieving.’

‘Do they?’ she said, and clung onto him ever tighter.

As the sun rose he showed her the quick, blurred forms of other birds through his binoculars, the names of which she immediately forgot, and as they drove back towards Nizamuddin, he wanted to take her on to the Lodhi Gardens, to look for a smiling or laughing or something dove, but she refused on point of principle, which was that human beings should not be exposed to such cold, at such an hour, for so long, for such frivolous reasons. Her fingers were icy, her nose and cheeks windblown, and even her internal organs felt as if they were being slowly frozen. When they reached Nizamuddin, she insisted on being taken straight to her father’s house where there was a guaranteed supply of constant hot water, as well as the cook’s famously unhealthy fried breakfast, washed down with lots of her father’s coffee. ‘Baba will have left for the fort by now,’ she added quickly, as he turned off the main road into Nizamuddin West, ‘but my grandmother will be there. You can meet her. And I have to go and wish Ash happy birthday.’

When they reached the gate, however, and as he was locking the bike, he said, ‘I can’t just turn up here like this with you and surprise your family without warning them first.’

‘Because you’ve pointed out in print that our mother wasn’t the only author of
The Lalita Series
?’

‘Because you spent the night with me, Bharati.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. Anyway, Ash and Sunita won’t be awake yet. We’ll go and see my Dadi first. We’ll take her some breakfast.’

‘Won’t she disapprove just as much?’

‘I don’t have to tell her where I spent the night,’ Bharati said. ‘And anyway, she remembers you from our schooldays. You came to the house all the time as a sweet little twelve-year-old.’ She laughed at him. ‘With your chessboard and your bird books and your expensive binoculars.’

‘It’ll be obvious.’

‘Too bad. Father did the same in his time. I probably get it from him.’

She turned and led him into the house and he followed her upstairs to meet her beloved Dadi. The old woman, despite both their apprehensions, was on her best behaviour. She sat up in bed, wrapped in a soft shawl, and instead of asking about Pablo’s parentage and prospects, as Bharati had feared, she quizzed him on the birds: ‘Where are the white-rumped vultures?’ she said, as if their decline was his fault. ‘Where have the carrion birds disappeared to? They used to gather in flocks – but they’re nowhere to be seen. And the waterbirds on the nala? And the sparrows?’

‘Oh!’ said Pablo, and the two of them entered an avian realm of superlatives and sorrow, leaving Bharati standing at the window, drinking her third coffee, feeling thoroughly earthbound.

The telephone rang and Bharati ran downstairs to answer it.

‘Bharati,’ said a woman’s voice, which at first she was unable to place. ‘It’s Linda,’ the voice said, and then Bharati remembered.

‘Linda, how are you?’ She smiled at the thought of her scruffy and inelegant English friend. ‘Why are you ringing? What’s happened? Isn’t it the middle of the night in England?’

‘I’m in Delhi,’ Linda said. ‘My paper was accepted by the Living Sanskrit Akademi. I sent you an email. I assumed you already knew. I arrived last night and I’m giving my lecture at eleven this morning. Will you come? Can we meet?’

‘You’re here for my father’s lecture-series?’

‘Yes. He is opening the proceedings, and then I am giving my paper, and then it’s lunch, and then there’s one other speaker in the afternoon.’

‘Excellent,’ Bharati said, not knowing what else to say. ‘How long are you here for?’

‘Oh, a week,’ Linda said. ‘There’s something else, too, but I can’t tell you over the phone.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’ll explain when we meet. It’s very confusing, I don’t quite know if I believe it.’

‘Believe what?’

‘The taxi’s arrived to take me to the old fort,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve got to go. And by the way – happy birthday.’

‘It’s almost time,’ Feroze called through to Urvashi in the kitchen. ‘Hurry up with the tea. We should leave soon.’

They were due at Uncle Hari’s place at ten. He had rung the night before, soon after Ram left, to wish them happy Diwali, and to invite them over for a family meeting. ‘A reconciliation,’ he had said in his urgent way. ‘I want to make things good between my brother and you. The sooner he comes face to face with your husband, and sees what a wonderful man he is, the sooner he’ll learn.’

‘What will he learn, Uncle Hari?’ Urvashi had asked, thinking of the discussion she had just had with Feroze about Ash Chaturvedi’s DNA analysis.

‘How foolish he is not to have seen you all this time,’ Uncle Hari said with a laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Pinki. I have everything under control. We’ll expect you here at ten?’

‘Yes, Uncle Hari,’ Urvashi had answered. But this morning, she could barely think straight for the tension.

‘Should I veil my hair from now on?’ she said, looking anxiously at her husband as she brought the tea over to the table.

‘Absolutely not,’ Feroze said. ‘What gave you that idea? I love your hair.’

‘And you don’t mind that other people see it?’ She poured some more tea for him, and waited for his answer.

He glanced at her. ‘You think I’m a Taliban or something?’

‘No, it’s just,’ she began, and stopped. ‘I thought it was written like that in the holy book.’

‘It’s an extremely oblique reference,’ Feroze said, spreading bright-red jam on his toast. ‘And we are living fourteen hundred years after the time of the Prophet. And clothing is the least important aspect of our religion, in my opinion. Stop worrying about these things. Think about what you are going to say to your father.’

She sat down at the table. ‘I don’t want to see him,’ she said in a whisper. ‘How can I when I know that …?’

‘Look,’ he said, putting up his hands in resignation, ‘it’s for you to decide. He’s your father. Aisha has disappeared and we’ll probably never see her again. If you want to pursue the course of justice with this DNA proof, I will support you one hundred per cent in that. If you decide not to, that is also your decision. I thought you said that the sample may have been contaminated.’

‘Allah will guide me,’ Urvashi said piously, thinking of the peaceful feeling she had got kneeling in prayer last night and pressing her face to the mat and uttering the words her mother-in-law had taught her.

‘No he won’t,’ Feroze said. ‘You have to think for yourself about what is best.’

‘Oh my God,’ Urvashi burst out again. She felt such a clutching and twisting inside her at the thought of seeing her father that she got to her feet and came and put her arms around Feroze, pressing her face into his chest, grabbing at his shirt. As he held her, she tried to breathe deeply, smelling her husband’s scent, his clean kurta, the smell of the freshly ironed khadi cotton, but the sickening inside went on and on. She wanted to weep and scream but the tears wouldn’t come. She felt as if she was falling and the noise that came out of her throat was strangled.
I want my father to love me again
.

On the drive north to Connaught Place she was glad, at least, that they weren’t meeting at her parents’ place. She had longed so much, during the early months of her marriage, to return to the house where she grew up. She had cried to herself at night, as she lay beside her husband in their stuffy bedroom in his parents’ claustrophobic house, wanting to return to that tiny, familiar flat with its smells of turmeric and asafoetida, once the only smells of home that she knew. She hadn’t been back since the day she eloped, and from then on she and Feroze had avoided the southern swathe of the city. They never went further south than Lajpat Nagar if they could help it; they drove the extra distance to the cinema complex in the far south-west rather than go to the nicer one in Saket. Her parents still lived in the same small flat where she had grown up, and it was as if there was now an invisible wall cutting through Delhi along the ring road, between Defence Colony and Greater Kailash, Sarojini Nagar and Safdarjung, separating their two worlds.

She stared out at the endless stream of cars, with their windows tightly closed because of the air-conditioning, at the breezy, cranky buses. They passed the old fort with its moat and boating teenage lovers. The city as a whole felt remote and shadowy and insular to her now that she lived in the tightly circumscribed circle of Nizamuddin-Khan Market-Defence Colony. She realised that the little community she had built up since they moved there – Humayun the driver, Aisha the maid, the tailor in the market – was a precious thing. She prayed again, to Allah, that Humayun and Aisha would be all right. And as they drove onwards she saw India – its huge expanse, stretching all the way from the mountains to the sea – and Humayun and Aisha within it, tiny specks, wandering down a road in a part of India that Urvashi herself had never seen, Kerala or Karnataka or Tamil Nadu, their possessions bound up in a cloth on Humayun’s back.

The car stopped at a red light and a beggar, a woman with a baby, rapped on the glass. Feroze reached down to a pocket by the gear stick and picked up a handful of coins. He opened the window and handed the coins to the woman, and her whining voice filled the car. ‘Ten rupees more,’ she said. ‘My baby is sick; God will bless you with children.’ But the lights turned green, Feroze put the car into gear, and as the beggar moved back onto the kerb, she made a small gesture of irritation.

‘Do you always give them money?’ Urvashi asked, surprised. She didn’t remember him doing so in the days before they were married, during their long drives out of Delhi.

‘Yes.’ He glanced at her and looked back at the road.

‘But they are fakes,’ she said.

He was silent for a moment, and then, as they reached India Gate, he said, ‘I feel sorry for the babies.’ And with one hand he reached out and felt for her belly and kept it there until they arrived on Kasturba Gandhi Marg.

Uncle Hari’s house was set back from the road slightly, one of those colonial-era properties that Urvashi had glimpsed from the outside many times but had never viewed at close quarters before. She felt strangely excited. This was the place where her brother was living now.

The front door was opened by Uncle Hari, who smiled at them both and shook Feroze’s hand and hugged Urvashi for a long moment, then stood back and looked at her. ‘When is it due?’ he asked.

‘In April,’ she whispered, and he gave her one of those big smiles she remembered.

‘Are you scared about seeing your father?’ he said, and when she nodded he answered, in a voice of supreme confidence, ‘You’ll be fine,’ and led them without any further ado across the cavernous hallway, and into a huge drawing room with windows at each end, where her family was assembled. Delicate glass chandeliers hung down from the far-away ceilings. Urvashi saw four faces turned towards them. Her little sister Sunita was perched on a chair in the middle of the room, looking prim and pleased with herself, holding a glass of juice. Her handsome brother, Ram, was sprawled across a chair. Her mother was on a settee, the ample and once-familiar curves of her body wrapped in a mauve cotton sari. And there, beside her, the man Urvashi had doted on: her father.

He was speaking to the room at large, loudly and forcefully, when they entered, and he didn’t stop talking even when Hari led his estranged daughter into the room with her Muslim husband. ‘How anyone can bear to live here I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing there are still families in the area when there is so little in the way of amenities and communal facilities. No vegetable hawkers, no residents’ association.’

‘Nothing is lacking here. We love it,’ Hari answered, and began to say something else, but Shiva Prasad interrupted.

‘Connaught Place itself has changed a lot,’ he said. ‘When I first came to Delhi it was all clean and tidy. Where there’s now that tower block behind, the neighbourhood boys played cricket. During wedding season women would come on tongas to buy saris from Glamour on Saturday afternoons.’

‘Tongas!’ interjected Sunita, presumably amazed at a world without motorised vehicles. Urvashi averted her eyes from her mother’s gaze and sat down on the couch next to Feroze, one hand protectively over her womb. She ran her tongue over her lips and breathed slowly through her nose, trying to calm the fear she felt.