Leela's Book Read Free Page B

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.
    The following morning was a Saturday, and (ever the tactician) Hari took the opportunity to drive down to his office in South Delhi – supposedly to make sure everything was in order, but really to give his wife the chance to unpack and get acquainted with her new surroundings. ‘Will you be all right?’ he said as he left. ‘Do you need anything? The driver is here. The cook will leave at seven. The maid should be done by then too. There’s—’
    ‘I’ll be just fine,’ she said, blowing cigarette smoke into the air and smiling.
    He watched her as she stood in the middle of the garden. Smoking was a new habit; Hari had yet to voice his disapproval.
    It being so near Diwali, there was a festive spirit in Delhi’s exhaust-filled air, and Hari’s Saturday excursion took longer than he meant it to. When he arrived home at six, the house was empty. ‘Where is Mrs Sharma?’ he asked the cook, who was making curd in the kitchen.
    ‘She went out,’ the cook said.
    Hari walked through to the high-ceilinged drawing room, which overlooked the garden, mixed himself a gin and tonic, and settled back into one of his newly upholstered pale khadi silk chairs. The familiar warmth of alcohol would settle his nerves. He felt tense sitting here, like a shy young groom awaiting his bride.
    The maid had lit only two of the silk-shaded lamps, and the light they cast in the early-evening shadow, across the faded Persian carpets and embroidered settee, was pleasantly dappled; it reminded Hari of the sal forests outside the village he grew up in, where his father had taken him every Sunday morning, explaining about the mahua tree and how this land was sacred to its indigenous inhabitants who had lived there since time began. Hari was pleased with the effect he had created in this house, with its amalgamation of different epochs of his marriage – the paintings from their modern art-daubed apartment in New York, the Mexican ethnic artefacts gathered during a trip across the border, the bits and pieces collected from travels to London, Geneva, Venice, and transplanted to New Delhi. Things had moved on considerably since that morning three years ago in New York, when Leela revealed that her father had left her the Delhi property.
    Hari had been taken aback. ‘But your father died, what, in nineteen eighty-five? Almost twenty years ago.’
    Leela stirred brown sugar into her porridge. ‘There were tenants in the building till just now. The issue has only just been resolved.’ She unfolded the crisp, lawyer’s letter, and passed it over.
    Leela said nothing more, and during the next fifty trips to Delhi, Hari stayed as usual in the Imperial Hotel. But it was the house that set him thinking. Does a house represent a root? he wondered, late at night, lying on his side in New York, in the enormous double bed they still shared. Was a house enough to bring his wife back home?
    The night Hari met Leela he was at a crowded garden party thrown by the company he worked for. He had been in a strangely febrile mood. For the past few months he had been obsessed by the idea of setting up his own business. As he approached his boss (soon to be his rival), bearing a small box