Leela's Book by Alice Albinia Read Free Book Online Page A

for his harem. Once ensconced in the fort, however, she developed a debilitating addiction. She could not stop reading tales of intrigue and battle, of spice merchants and river crossings, of avenging lovers – all provided in volumes smuggled across the Yamuna from one of the less reputable sarais, and written by a woman named Leela on paper the ink of which smudged as you turned the pages.
    One such story was a yarn of two lovers, both women, deceiving the husband who held them captive. It had been translated into Persian from an unspecified local dialect, and illustrated with portraits of the women dressed as marauders from Herat, entering the city in a caravan of Kabuli melons, and leaving in a cartload of indigo-dyed dhotis.
    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