Leela's Book Read Free Page A

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.

3
    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