Authors: Alice Albinia
‘We’ll see,’ she agreed.
She looked down again at the newspaper in her lap. A smiling stewardess had placed it in her hands as they boarded the flight. It was a Delhi tabloid, the
Delhi Star
, with yesterday’s date on it, Thursday 8 November 2001; a paper which Hari’s money had helped to finance. For the past seven hours she had let it lie there unopened, as if by ignoring it she might be able to defer the moment of return indefinitely; just as during the past twenty years she had avoided any news from India: no stories of her aunts (she had none), of the Congress Party (she wasn’t bothered), of the fate of its poets, its radicals, its rivers (she blocked out these things she loved with scrupulous, ruthless care). Hari, for his part, had always done his best to bring these chaotic noises to her door. When his work took him into Jackson Heights, he would return to their apartment near the Met tenderly bearing boxes of guavas or mangoes; she knew from the smudge of red on his forehead and a particular glassy look in his eye that he had visited the temple. It was even worse after his journeys back to Delhi: then his clothes smelt different, his speech sounded foreign, and the temple-look had taken hold of his person, so that as he unpacked brocade silk saris for her from his suitcase, and sandalwood soap, and news of his brother Shiva Prasad’s latest outrage, and breathless accounts of the effects of economic liberalisation, she always knew what would follow. ‘Shall we go back in the autumn?’ he would plead as he placed the empty suitcase back in the closet. ‘Just for a holiday? To Kerala? Or Goa?’ But each time she shook her head. ‘There’s nothing for me now in India, you know that.’ And he would nod, resigned to this empty verdict, until the next time.
As the pilot’s voice came over the tannoy, warning the passengers to fasten their seatbelts for the descent into Delhi, Leela lifted the newspaper in her hands, weighing it, as if its heft might tell her something. Then she bit her lip and fixed her eyes on the front page, where there was a story about the deal Pakistan’s military dictator had done with the Americans, and a photograph of India’s right-wing Hindu Prime Minister: a man whose thick-set, sleepy-looking face belied his sinister, sectarian politics. A column along the bottom told of a cultural détente between the two neighbours involving the exchange of important antiquities. It was just as she had thought: under the glitter, the same old India.
‘There’s an article about Professor Chaturvedi’s wife,’ Hari observed, without looking round from the window.
‘Is there?’ Leela said. Her heart began to pound.
‘She wrote poems,’ Hari observed. ‘Her husband – Professor Chaturvedi – had them published after she died.’
‘Really?’ She flicked quickly through the inside pages, her eyes glancing over photographs of Delhi’s highlife, at the news from the provinces. She turned to the back, to the finance and cricket. ‘I can’t see it,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
‘It’s in the Culture section,’ Hari said. ‘A new poem by her has just been discovered. What a literary family my niece is marrying into. You will find it interesting to meet them at the wedding, I am sure.’
‘Indeed,’ Leela said. The article was by a journalist called Pablo Fernandes who explained how, for three brief years during the late 1970s, Meera Chaturvedi had spun a series of poems richly interlaced with references to India’s epic culture, shot through with veiled references to the poet’s own experience, and then, two years after producing twins, Ashwin and Bharati, and twelve months or so after her Muse deserted her, died when a speeding truck ran her down early one morning in Delhi while her husband was away in Bombay. A small collection of what was believed to be her life’s work had been published after her death. So this poem – this new discovery – shed a ‘fascinating light’ on Meera’s
oeuvre
. Pablo Fernandes made much of the scoop: how the envelope received at the newspaper offices in Delhi contained just one sheet of paper – the handwritten poem itself. There was no covering note, no return address, nothing. The poem, entitled ‘The Last Dictation’, was a nine-shloka verse in the anustubh metre, signed by ‘Lalita’, the poetic persona that Meera had adopted. But ‘most intriguing of all’, were certain lines – ‘
As we write, defend our children, / This last poem is our weapon, / A sisterhood of blood and ink: / Proof of our collaboration
’ – which seemed to hint that Meera was not the sole author of this work. ‘It looks to be one of India’s most teasing literary connundrums,’ Pablo Fernandes wrote – before concluding with a description of the poet herself, a woman whom many described as a Khajuraho carving come to life. There was a black-and-white photograph of her to prove it.
Leela stared down at the picture of her sister, all long, dark hair and flirtatious eyes; the caption even called her a ‘literary siren’. Meera had died so long ago that Leela had learnt to contain the catastrophe of her loss, to hide it from the world, to hide it even from Hari, who had never been told that she once had a sister. But the picture had caught her off guard, and the sadness coursed through her as if the death was still fresh. Quickly, she bent her head towards the poem, and her eyes moved along the lines, seeing but not reading the verses, tears blurring the words she knew by heart, which Meera and she had written together.
She looked up suddenly, wondering whether Hari had somehow discovered that Meera Chaturvedi was her sister, whether this surprise wedding wasn’t, in fact, a clever trap, a way of bringing her back into contact with everything she had banished so successfully for the past two decades. But she could see that her husband had already forgotten about the newspaper article. He was tensing himself instead for the joy of the moment when the plane’s wheels hit the runway: was already anticipating pulling off his seatbelt, pulling out their luggage from the overhead locker, pulling her by the hand into the city.
She closed the paper and leant back in her seat. Who could have sent the poem to the paper? Surely not Vyasa. She shuddered at the thought of the man, with his seductive smile, his hair pulled back behind his head, his eyes that had a habit of softening when they rested on women he favoured. For years she had put him out of her mind, had tried to forget his brusque, confident way of speaking in public, and those whispered confidences, so striking in their contrast, which he had used like a charm on Meera. But now Hari was forcing her to remember. More than that, he was forcing her to be part of Vyasa’s family. As they flew onwards through the sky, ever nearer to Delhi, Leela asked herself why she had allowed Hari to persuade her to return to the land she grew up in – when for years she had worked so hard to forget it.
She remembered the moment when Hari broke the news. It had been typical of him – of his sense of efficiency, of his dread of coming face to face with her displeasure – to choose a cellphone conversation as the means of imparting something so momentous. It was half past eight in the morning; she was walking her usual circuit through Central Park. ‘I’ve reached the office,’ Hari said, and Leela knew at once that he had something important to tell her. ‘I’ve just heard some interesting news,’ he said. ‘The father of my niece Sunita’s fiancé, the man she is marrying just before Diwali, a huge society wedding in Delhi, is—’
‘Who?’ Leela interrupted.
‘Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi,’ Hari finished at last. ‘And he is speaking tonight at the New York Public Library.’
‘What?’ Leela stopped walking, the phone still pressed to her ear, bewildered by hearing that man’s name in Hari’s mouth.
‘He’s giving a lecture,’ Hari said, confident now that he had her attention. ‘On the Mahabharata. It’s just the kind of thing you like, isn’t it, Leela? He’s a very well-known professor. And his son is marrying my niece.’ He paused, evidently pleased with the effect of this revelation. In the silence that followed, Leela turned this new information over in her mind. It seemed implausible that Hari had only just found out about this wedding. What else was he plotting?
Indeed, when Hari spoke next, he sounded nervous. ‘There’s something more I have to tell you, Leela. My nephew, Ram – Sunita’s brother. I need someone I can trust to manage the business. I am making him my heir. He is such a good boy. I know that you’ll like him. You will like him, won’t you? He’s a hard worker, an ideal son.’
‘Your heir? A son?’
‘Yes,’ said Hari, growing excited. ‘It would make a change to fill our lives with young people, wouldn’t it, Leela?’
And the old, assertive Hari returned: ‘It is not so unusual for brothers to take each other’s children. We could go and collect him. We could move back home. Back to India. I want to live there, Leela. We could move into your house on Kasturba Gandhi Marg. We could all move there together. You, me and Ram. We will be like a family together.’
Leela had stood looking up through the grandeur of those tall, silent trees in which she had instinctively taken comfort when she arrived in this city, remembering the deal they had done when they married: that she would emigrate with him, bringing all her culture and poise to bear on his business, and that he, in return, would never ask about the time before they were married, would never – above all – force her to return to India. Like many of their compatriots, Hari pined for the place he grew up in; yet for twenty-two years he had honoured this arrangement.
Hari was still talking. ‘I would go to the lecture myself,’ he said, ‘but I have an important dinner this evening. Can you go instead? I’d like you to meet him.’
‘Who?’ she asked, still disbelieving.
‘Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi. We should get to know him, now that he’s going to be family.’
And so the sickening feeling came back to her that, once again, Vyasa was dictating the course of her life. The mere thought of Vyasa – of everything he had done – filled her with rage. But she said nothing further to Hari; and although she still felt angry, sitting on the plane with the paper folded in her hands – while she wanted to scream that she had been doubly betrayed, to weep that she would not set foot in her motherland however much he begged her – she knew, too, that the reason why she had agreed to come back had nothing to do with her husband and everything to do with Meera. Once, long ago, she had made a promise, and she could not leave India a second time until that promise had been honoured.
The day Hariprasad Sharma brought his wife back to India was the sum and pinnacle of all his achievements. For the month leading up to their departure from New York he could barely sleep from excitement.
‘It will be Diwali just after we arrive!’ he said as he showed her the tickets.
‘The wedding is two days after we land,’ he explained as he unlocked her jewellery.
‘I’ve done up your house,’ he confessed a week before their departure. ‘Leela? The place your father left you?
‘Leela?’ he said, when she failed to respond. ‘Aren’t you excited?’
No, Leela was not excited. She packed a small bag. A saffron-coloured sari. A sheaf of papers. A couple of old LPs.
They were met at the airport by his driver, who took them straight into the centre of Delhi on a suitably genteel route: along the empty road that led out of the airport terminus, past multinational hotels serving visitors in the city on business, into the calm diplomats’ enclave of Chanakyapuri, through India Gate’s ceremonial sandstone vistas, along the wide, bungalow-lined avenues designed by Lutyens (Hari loved the Raj incarnation best of all Delhi’s avatars) and due north-west along the street once known as Curzon Road, but which, since Independence, had been renamed Kasturba Gandhi Marg after the wife of the Father of the Nation.
Finally, Hari led his wife up the path to the secluded, two-storey house with its massive garden behind, whose construction dated back to before Independence, to the time when Connaught Place was built, to the creation of New Delhi. He was aware that his hands were trembling. The last time they stood together in front of this door was in 1980, when he had just asked this beautiful, English-speaking woman to marry him. He had already learnt that she was the only one living in this spacious residence which she was borrowing from her father who lived alone in Calcutta. She had explained that she had a job teaching at a school in Delhi. He had expected to find out so much more about her. But just as she had never invited him into the house, so she had never opened her past to him. And now, here they were, two decades later, having returned in this triumphant way to India.
Hari stepped aside and allowed Leela to enter the building first. But he followed eagerly after, for he couldn’t wait to show her how wonderfully her father’s gift to her had been transformed. ‘A very rare location,’ his architect had said, when Hari told him about it. ‘A house on Kasturba Gandhi Marg? Impossible! Like gold dust.’ When his nephew Ram suggested they live somewhere more modern, Hari shook his head. It was the heritage he wanted; and the link to Leela’s past.
Over the past year, he’d had the house renovated from top to bottom: the kitchen ripped out, new units fitted, the roof terrace whitewashed and filled with plant pots, the Burma teak woodwork stripped and waxed, the terrazzo floor polished. Chandeliers now hung from the ceilings. Works of art from their house in America were splashed across the walls. Magazines and newspapers had been splayed out in a fan on the table in the hall. In the garden, steps led straight down from the terrace to a lawn that it had taken three malis eight months to tend, as if each blade of grass was a helpless newborn baby. The old ficus tree cast some perfect shade, the raat-ki-rani provided the sweet smell of autumn, and all along the edge were bougainvillea and jasmine, a gulmohar tree and an ashoka. A brick path led through the lawn to a red sandstone bench, above which was an alcove with a small stone statue of the god Ganesh. This space, so near Connaught Place, yet peaceful and secluded! Away from all the bustle and commerce and pollution!
But the pièce de résistance – Hari took Leela into the bedroom to show her – was a wardrobe full of new saris: silks, georgettes, chiffon, Banarsi, and his favourite, Bengali tangail cotton. He had chosen them personally. Hari couldn’t stop smiling. His wife, back in India. His dream had come true.