Leela's Book (6 page)

Humayun began to grow suspicious. Meera, who as a fourteen-year-old maiden had charmed the emperor with her wileless ways, was no longer to be found in the palace apartments at the usual times, and he had grown weary of asking after her whereabouts. At last, an old eunuch told him the truth:
Sire
, he said, or something very like it,
she is reading
.
Reading
? said Humayun, spitting out a melon pip. He got to his feet, and demanded to be shown the offending girl at once.

So the eunuch led the king through the fort, along the ramparts to a small room where, behind a stone turret, there was a secret door built into a room over the river. Humayun looked down through a narrow tunnel to where light and freedom glinted and he could hear the gentle lapping of the river’s waters. There, at the bottom of the tunnel, just above the water, sat Meera with her nose in a book.

The monarch confiscated the volume and took it with him to the library. Meera was imprisoned in the masons’ tower. When Humayun reached the top of the library steps – reached the page where Leela had written,
Wishing to rid herself forever of the imprisoning grip of subservience to her master, the serving girl pushed a knife deep into his breast
– he gave a cry of pain, stepped forward, entangled in his own garments, and tumbled back down the smooth stone steps.

He died a few days later, calling out as he went,
Tell her she is free
. But Meera had not cared to wait for his approval. She had already escaped from the palace in a bundle of washing – thrown down into a boat where a cocky-eyed woman named Leela was waiting – and nobody except that snitching eunuch (whose name, by the way, was Vyasa) knew what the emperor was talking about.

Avatar 6: The Ghost

In their next life, Leela (on this occasion, ‘Leila’) came back as the daughter of a functionary at the court of the declining Mughal administration. Meera was her favourite Hindu servant. This time, too, Leela never married but lived on the outskirts of the city in splendid poetic isolation. From the roof of her house you could just see the glint of the river in the distance and the walls of the newest of the Mughal cities, refigured in red, half a day’s walk away to the north. Their house was in an unpopular locality, a place where crows gathered to pick through the refuse thrown there by scavengers who had been through it once already. From the balcony, Leela would watch Hindus tipping the ashes of their relatives into the water, and later, at dusk, see the boys who dived from the bridge, searching through the river with its cargo of flesh and orange peel, for the gold coins that were sometime thrown in too, as good-luck charms. From sights such as these Leela composed the singularly bleak ditties for which the pens of other men became famous, and Meera would watch her, puzzled by the ease with which she drew forth similes of such beauty from sights so morbid.

The day Meera was killed by a British sniper, as she ventured out at dawn to look for food, Leela sat keening by the window, watching her friend’s inert body lying by the side of the road as the vehicles of the British victors moved past and into the city. The siege of 1857 had been lost, the Emperor Zafar had fled south to the tomb of his ancestor Humayun. Leela knew that the killing and looting would begin, and that even an old lady like she would not be safe from the swords and pricks of angry foreigners.

When darkness fell, she pulled back her hair and dressed herself up like a man in a plain dark shirt and trousers, and went out into the street to where Meera lay; and later that night, as her heart filled up and broke with longing, she paid one of the scavengers to carry Meera’s body to the riverside, and performed the rites herself, scattering ghee and water and lighting the pyre of wood with money purchased from the bania in exchange for the three silver rings that Meera had on her toes and her own gold filigree bangle. Then she walked to Humayun’s tomb, where the old king, Zafar, was hiding, carrying the last of her verses: compositions of such unalloyed sadness that the emperor wept all the way to Rangoon.

Avatar 7: Epic Dancers

That life ended sadly. Leela and Meera’s most joyous incarnation, by contrast, occurred in the early 1920s, when they worked the bars and clubs of old and new Delhi as itinerant dancers. By now the scrubland of the city had filled up with pink-faced invaders, with their spacious, airy bungalows, with their crisp sense of order, with their cramped sense of humour. Each night for nearly a decade, Leela and Meera danced out the story of the Mahabharata. Meera twirled as Urvashi before Leela’s ascetic archer, until after one rowdy reception in Arab-ki-Sarai near the tomb of Humayun, a local policeman broke into their makeshift tent. The women he battered to death were discovered the next morning with smiles on their faces, clutching to their bosom Arjuna’s deadly bow. The policeman’s name, I later discovered, was Deputy Inspector Vyasa.

Avatar 8: Migration

Which means there is just one more tale to recount before I embark on the complications of the present. It is 1947. Meera and Leela are each exactly seven years old in the year that India is divided. They were born in Delhi, in the same week, in the same neighbourhood, to mothers who hated each other. Meera’s mother, a Muslim, was tall and thin, always dressed in a plain black cloak, with red-stained teeth and kohl-rimmed eyes staring out defiantly from the moon of her burqa. Leela’s mother, a Hindu, wrapped herself in a sari, parted her hair with scarlet powder, and slotted gold bangles over her plump, oil-smoothed hands.

Both women shared a guru: an undefinable Sufi-cum-Bhakti, a mountain man with a taste for southern belles. He often passed through the neighbourhood, bound for Hampi, thence Haridwar, and back again to the Himalayas; and nine months after one such visitation, the offspring these women had always longed for – could easily have relinquished their marital virtue for the sake of, had visited many different shrines and springs and temples and gurus in the name of – were born, in adjacent houses.

The little girls loved each other, and whatever the admonitions of their mothers, took no notice as wrath spluttered and bubbled in their lane just south of that long and crowded street where the whole city came for shopping, Chandni Chowk. The girls were oblivious of their mothers’ ire; and for seven years, the city’s streets between the Turkman and Kashmiri Gates were all theirs.

In September of their seventh year, a few weeks after they had seen their first carcasses – not of chickens or sheep but of people – the tall thin beanpole mother called her daughter: ‘Come, Mirah’ (she hated the way her daughter’s worthy Arabic name was phonetically indistinguishable from the common Hindu ‘Meera’) ‘pack your toys, we are leaving.’ And she pulled her daughter inside the house from the street, where the girl had been listening to Leela describing how she had seen from the window a man brought back to his home by his uncles, red stains on his white pyjamas. That night, the tall thin beanpole family left the seventh street, taking a tonga through the shuttered streets to the Purana Qila, Emperor Humayun’s old fort built there four centuries before on the site of the Pandavas’ prehistoric palace of Indraprastha. ‘We are going west, to the Land of the Pure,’ the beanpole mother told her daughter, and the child cried and would only go to sleep when her father slipped a nugget of opium between her lips and begged her to be quiet.

The old fort, where Emperor Humayun had tumbled down the steps of his library, stood on a hill in the centre of the city encircled by a wall. Inside, where kings had looked at the stars, and Vyasa’s grandsons had managed their kingdom, there were now rows and rows of tents: refugees bound for Pakistan.

To this place, the next morning, came Leela. With her was a political activist from the Congress Party, a Miss Urvashi, who knew very little about the lies children tell, and thus had listened, and felt deeply concerned, when this girl told her that her Muslim family were leaving for Pakistan, that she had been separated from them and must be taken to the camp
at once
. Miss Urvashi walked her charge through the old Mughal fort, the child’s hand in hers, her own eyes wide with horror at the sight of row upon row of frightened Muslims, huddled in the pathways, their possessions – everything they had to start new lives in that country to the west – rolled into bedding at their feet.

Leela whistled the notes that Meera and she used to identify each other’s movements along the narrow streets near Chandni Chowk, and hearing them, Meera crept out from the tent where she was dozing. Wandering through the crowd, she came to the well that had been dug so many feet deep into the earth, so many years ago, with so many steps leading downwards. Since Meera was too small to see above the crowds of hungry and frightened people, and since the fear of losing Leela choked the reply in her throat, she climbed up onto the walls of the well to look for her and just before she fell – jostled so that she lost her footing and sprawled into the air and down down down onto the sandstone steps below – Leela saw her.

Pulling her hand out of Miss Urvashi’s grasp, Leela ran, pushing through the crowd, tripping over bed rolls, jumping over the legs of grandmothers who had already lived through too much to be leaving the place where they had composed families and quilts and letters and lives, to be leaving it for an unknown edge of the vanished British empire, knocking down carefully saved tins of daal, and pots of steaming rice – and heard the thump as Meera’s body hit the stone forty feet below. If Meera fell too quietly for the other passers-by to notice, everybody heard the scream that Leela made, and everybody claimed to have seen her jump, trying to save her Meera.

Avatar 9: The Present

This tragic end might have brought my tale to a close. But I was determined not to be downcast – I knew that my story had almost reached its dramatic conclusion – that I had to be patient. And so, barely a decade after India achieved its Independence, Leela was born in a small village in Bengal, and Meera Bose in an elegant brick Calcutta townhouse. The Bose family owned the fields that Leela’s parents farmed.

At first I was troubled by this link between them, which seemed too attenuated to be trusted, especially given the talk of land reform, of the old guard being swept away in a fervour of socialist redistribution. This time I decided to intervene directly. I couldn’t allow my beloved Leela to suffer, as she certainly would if she lost her companion, her confidante, her refuge, her succour. I considered my options: a famine? A flood? A plague? All these things were regular occurrences in India. But they were too heavyhanded; I didn’t want to take out the entire village.

So in the end, I simply gave her parents cholera – and in this way Leela, aged three, was orphaned.

She was a sweet child, with curly hair, inquisitive eyes and a steady smile. It would have been a shame to send her to the missionaries, or to put her out as a servant in one of the bigger village houses. At least, this was the opinion of her late mother’s friend, who was married to Mr Bose’s munshi. The munshi was a thin, sober man, with a good head for mathematics, employed by Meera’s father to manage the estates, to make sure the rent came in on time, to weigh each villager’s yield of rice, to divide the crop and to calculate the profit. But he had seven children already; he couldn’t possibly take in another. ‘She’s a pretty thing,’ mused his wife one evening. She spooned some more rice onto his plate. ‘Take her to Calcutta to see Bose-Sahib.’

Meera’s family lived in north Calcutta. There was a courtyard in the middle of their house, and a long, cool flagstone hallway that ran down one side of the house to a library at the end where Mr Dipankar Bose read the papers, dabbled in writing and received his guests. On the afternoon the munshi arrived with Leela, Mr Bose and his three-year-old daughter were sitting in this room, he at his desk with his papers, she at a table under the window with hers. While he studied a bill of transfer, she drew an abstract impression of her family on a piece of headed paper. A jagged purple mass of lines, like a ball of unravelling string, was her mother. Her father was a dynamic streak of yellow. The ayah, the cook and the mali were stubby jabs of red. Even aged three she had a sense of hierarchy and order. But all that was about to be overturned by the arrival of Leela.

Meera looked up from her artwork to see, for a change, a person of exactly her height looking right at her. She held out a crayon, moved along the bench to make room, and as the munshi looked over in approval, the two children bent their heads together, laughing to themselves as they caricatured the grown-ups.

The munshi pursed his lips thoughtfully. Out loud, he said to Meera’s father, ‘I am on the way to the orphanage at Entally. The nuns will baptise her, but what to do? At least she will come to no harm there. At least she will be fed.’ He spread his hands helplessly before him. ‘I would take her in. But you know, I have been burdened by too many children.’ He bent his head. ‘The nuns will look after her.’

Mr Bose had a young, pretty wife who loved him, plenty of money and few real cares. He lived a happy existence, fattened on milk-sweets tinged with nutmeg, kept healthy by pond fish, given meaning by the revolutionary language and equitable aspirations of India’s glorious independence. There were two things that vexed him in 1958: the first was the benighted state of India’s peasant population, with its truly frightening array of noxious gods – whether indigenous, imported or on loan from elsewhere, they were all as bad as each other. The second was a dim sense that while he himself had talked a lot about revolution, about change, about tearing down the old and building up the new – despite drinking numerous cups of coffee with his comrades and drafting a multiplicity of manifestos – he had not actually done anything to foment the rebellion. He stared distractedly at his daughter sitting with her new village playfellow, at the dust falling through the shaft of light coming in through his window (reminding him that the maid hadn’t been in to clean his library today – that the day had passed without him having finished his letter to the
Statesman
on the subject of peasant education – and moreover that it was teatime).