Leela's Book by Alice Albinia Read Free Book Online

heirs upon the local washerwomen.
    As for Meera, towards the end of her life, she became so haunted by a foreknowledge of the child-bearing, shit-cleaning, bangle-jingling existence of wifehood that she knew awaited her in future incarnations, so terrified did she grow of relinquishing the bliss of the present for the monotonous future, that on her deathbed she wailed, beat her breast and begged the gods to let Leela remain with her always.
    Avatar 3: The Buddha’s Pen
    And so it was to be: Leela and Meera reincarnating together for ever after. Nevertheless, I feared the damage this era of Vyasa-scripted epic might do them. And so, at first, as the centuries passed without them putting in an appearance, I felt relieved. But on the ages stretched, and soon I began to get nervous at their absence. Where were they? Wallowing bare-breasted in the warm salt water of the southern seas? Re-born without my knowledge into the forest peoples of central India? Had they dispensed altogether with the hassle of reincarnation by passing Go, collecting two hundred heavenly rupees, and clocking up their time in nebulous nirvana?
    No. Only after all memory of the Pandavas’ city – of Vyasa and his story – had faded from the Indian imagination did my prudent characters return to the Yamuna. By now a new philosophy was in the ascendance, and Indraprastha was being transformed, under the Buddhist dispensation, into a brick-built city called Indapatta. Leela and Meera graced this brand-new era of handwritten scriptures, of breathless tales from places outside India, of the breaking of corrupt and obsolete idols, working as scribes, turning the utterances of this latest holy man into something long-lasting. Their existence was by and large peaceful. Much later came the rumour that they had left for Tibet, trading exotic carnelian for nuggets of pure river gold, and later still I heard a report that a monk called Vyasa had been knifed through the back as he penetrated a trainee nun in a cemetery on the Black and White Faced Mountain.
    Avatar 4: Wanderers
    Their coming and going remained mysterious. Life number four, for example, I heard tell of early one morning, just as I was settling down to a tepid dinner of bread (roti) and dripping (gaomedha) in a cobwebby sarai down by the river. A woman was recounting the scandalous tale of a local princess, Leela, and her handsome handmaiden, Meera. She told how Princess Leela had everything that a woman could possibly desire – saris, servants, fruits brought for her delectation from the furthest side of India – but that she had renounced it all in the name of poetic creation. Fleeing the court accompanied by her maid, she was even now wandering as a kind of minstrel, singing hymns in praise of the elephant-headed god (yes, that is what the woman said, I promise). Of course, with hindsight – in retrospect, during the journey from one rumour to the other – some details of this story were changed in other gods’ favour. Later, I heard that the Rajput princess was called Meera ; that the palace was in Rajasthan , not Dilli; that the object of her devotions was blue-faced Krishna . But it doesn’t matter: I breathed a sigh of relief, and rejoiced in my characters’ independence.
    Avatar 5: Scriptures
    Soon the wind began to blow in from the west, bringing with it a new type of people: from Samarkand – from Kabul – from all those arid places west of Taxila. They came to the Yamuna, erected forts for their wives, tent cities for their soldiers, and penned bittersweet poems tinged with sadness at the loss of the snow, the mulberries, the mountains of the lands they had left behind them. One of their sons was named Humayun, and he, like all the others before him, took over the site of the Pandavas’ castle and fitted out a palace there with a splendid library.
    Meera was the young daughter of one of Emperor Humayun’s courtiers. Her beauty came to his attention, and he requested her specially