Leela's Book (50 page)

Lost as I was in these glorious meditations, I didn’t forget to disguise myself for my final meeting with Leela. Walking after her across the lawns of the fort, I wrapped my head in a muffler, took up a large outdoor brush, and began to sweep the leaves from the path, in the thoughtful (some would say ponderous) fashion of India’s government-employed gardeners. That way, I surmised that, even though I was a little too chubby for the job, she wouldn’t even notice my existence.

I was right. After speaking with her daughter, and collecting the manuscript from my little English typist, she headed away from the crowd, straight for Emperor Humayun’s octagonal stone library – a smile that I hadn’t seen for many centuries lighting up her face. Leela sat down on the top step of the library, and gazed out over the green tree canopy of this capacious fort, the book on her lap. I looked at the library’s solid outline, built by the usurped and usurping Afghan king, with its white marble stars inlaid into the red sandstone; and I thought of my cast, scattered through time like the stars in heaven, and now fixed forever upon the pages of my book.

Then Leela began reading Linda’s typescript, and I watched in pleasure as a look of bemusement, then wonder, displaced her smile. She turned over page after page that I had scripted in my wisdom, and when she finished reading, she looked up and frowned very hard into the distance. Finally, she tidied the sheets together and put them back in the envelope. Then, taking out a pad of paper, she bent her head, and didn’t look up, even as I approached. I saw that she was writing – writing and crossing out and writing again.

But somebody was interrupting this tranquil scene of mutual creation. Twirling my brush with grandiloquent strokes, I stepped into the wings as Vyasa came striding across the lawns to where Leela was sitting. He cleared his throat, and when she didn’t respond, he addressed her in his most tentative tone, ‘Leela?’ She looked up and I could see in one instant from the expression on her face, that though she was open to the world of books and monuments and elephant-scribes and daughters, she would always keep
him
at a distance. I was glad of that.

‘Hello, Vyasa,’ she said.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he said. (I was delighted to see how nervously he was disporting himself.) ‘It’s so nice of you to have come to the lecture.’

Leela paused a moment before answering, and then she said, ‘That last paper was very interesting. The speaker is at university with Bharati, is she?’

‘Is she?’ Vyasa said, but it seemed that another subject weighed more heavily on his mind. ‘Bharati told me about … about …’ He seemed unable to say it. ‘I wanted to say that I am very sorry,’ he said at last.

‘Sorry about …?’

‘Everything that happened,’ he said, trying to keep his voice under control. ‘I had no idea that you had a child. That Meera knew.’ His hand stroked his beard. ‘And then the poetry.’

‘The poetry doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s juvenilia.’ Her voice was wonderfully clear and calm.

She looked down again at the words she was writing, but still he stood there. She looked up again and sighed. ‘Is there anything else, Vyasa?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Yes. Well, the fact that you are …’ He looked at her pleadingly. ‘… Bharati’s mother …’ He was behaving, I was delighted to observe, like a tongue-tied teenager.

He clearly wished that she would say something conciliatory. But she did not speak; and so he said (wise now, to the fact that he might not get another chance like this, to be alone with her): ‘Why did she take the child?’

‘Why? Because she was my sister. Because she felt responsible. But I don’t think there’s any need to speak about the past.’

‘No, of course not,’ he said hastily, although it was evident he felt the exact opposite. ‘But, Leela? I do hope that you and I can be … friends?’

‘Let’s see,’ said Leela, getting briskly to her feet and walking down the steps.

‘Can you lend me one?’ she called out. I looked up. She was talking to me. She was holding out a cigarette.

By now I had swept the leaves and grass cuttings into a huge pile in one corner of the path that ran right round the eight sides of the library. During their conversation I had gone backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out of character. I had even broken into a sweat. It was only when I crouched down before my pile, staring at it for quite a long time – as if it were deeply fascinating, as if perhaps it held the answer to the secrets of the universe – and finally took out a match, that she addressed me. Listening to her voice, I felt my love for her swelling like the throat of a songbird.

‘You need a light?’ I said.

‘Please,’ she replied. She came towards me, the book under her arm, and standing beside my pile of leaves, took the match and lit her cigarette. Then she glanced one final time at Vyasa. ‘We should talk about these things another time,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘but not now. Look.’ She pointed over to the lawns, where Bharati was standing with Ash and Linda. ‘Your children have something important to say to you. Goodbye, Vyasa.’

She waited calmly until Vyasa had walked away across the lawns, and then she turned her eyes to me.

‘If you light that now,’ she said, pointing to the pile of leaves, ‘won’t it create a lot of smoke?’

‘It’s a delicious smell,’ I ventured; and added poetically, ‘The smell of so many autumns in Delhi.’

‘And how many autumns have you known?’ she asked, looking at me in that sideways fashion which I loved, as she smoked.

I paused, as if I was counting in my head. ‘Hard to say,’ I said at last.

‘That many?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you born here?’

‘No, madam,’ I said, and added, bravely, ‘I was born somewhere very far away.’

‘And will you return there soon?’

‘Oh no!’ I looked at her, horrified. Return to Kailash? What a thought.

‘So you will end your days here?’ she asked.

‘Madam, I try not to think about my death. It is, after all, what we do between the time of birth and the certain end that matters.’

‘Are you saying the end is final?’

‘I am saying that the interim is important.’

‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘the interim is of supreme importance.’

As she spoke these words, I knew that she was speaking directly to me, in my godly capacity. She was letting me know that I had done what I could for her; I had been the cause of meetings and revelations. I had tried to reconcile her to the part she played. I had indeed removed many obstacles.

‘There’s no time to waste,’ she added.

‘No time at all,’ I agreed, a little chastened.

‘Goodbye,’ she said to me politely, and I blinked up at her, thinking,
Is this it? Is this the moment? Is this the end of our mortal acquaintance? Am I to say farewell to her so quickly?
The space between us – the air itself, the sunlight, the solid warmth of the sandstone library, the very being of Delhi – tingled with unsung potential.

‘Wait,’ I called after her as she began to walk away. ‘What have you been writing?’

She turned back, and a frown appeared on her brow as she contemplated the figure of her creator. ‘I am writing a book for Bharati,’ she said at last.

‘The Mahabharata?’ I cried, scarcely able to suppress my delight. ‘That text with a million voices?’

‘No!’ she laughed. ‘A book for Bharati. But yes, it will have many voices.’

‘Passed from one hand to the other,’ I dared to say.

‘If you like,’ she said, with the sweetest of smiles.

And then she walked away down the path I had swept, across the lawns of Humayun’s fort, and back to the daughter she had found.

Thank you to Tristram Stuart (who nurtured this book from the beginning), and to Shuddhabrata Sengupta and S. Gautham for years of friendship and wise counsel. Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board enabled my enquiry into the Ganesh legends; meanwhile, the specific issue of Ved Vyasa’s reputation in the Indian tradition was elucidated by Bruce M. Sullivan’s book
a new interpretation
(Leiden, 1989). Nandini Mehta, Dr Arijit Mukhopadhyay, Dr Bhaswar Maity, Taran Khan, Ananda Bannerjee and Nikhat, Ashraf, Yusuf and Sulaiman Mohamedy gave their time, ideas and corrections. Tahmima Anam and Roland Lamb were generous readers; Ellie Steel from Harvill Secker worked hard on the final version; Ben Madden was noble; Jin Auh, Charles Buchan and all at the Wylie Agency made things happen in between. Finally, thank you to three people in particular: Sarah Chalfant, my amazing agent; the formidable Chiki Sarkar of Random House India; and Rebecca Carter, who edited this novel with such divine dexterity.

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