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

had fled south to the tomb of his ancestor Humayun. Leela knew that the killing and looting would begin, and that even an old lady like she would not be safe from the swords and pricks of angry foreigners.
    When darkness fell, she pulled back her hair and dressed herself up like a man in a plain dark shirt and trousers, and went out into the street to where Meera lay; and later that night, as her heart filled up and broke with longing, she paid one of the scavengers to carry Meera’s body to the riverside, and performed the rites herself, scattering ghee and water and lighting the pyre of wood with money purchased from the bania in exchange for the three silver rings that Meera had on her toes and her own gold filigree bangle. Then she walked to Humayun’s tomb, where the old king, Zafar, was hiding, carrying the last of her verses: compositions of such unalloyed sadness that the emperor wept all the way to Rangoon.
    Avatar 7: Epic Dancers
    That life ended sadly. Leela and Meera’s most joyous incarnation, by contrast, occurred in the early 1920s, when they worked the bars and clubs of old and new Delhi as itinerant dancers. By now the scrubland of the city had filled up with pink-faced invaders, with their spacious, airy bungalows, with their crisp sense of order, with their cramped sense of humour. Each night for nearly a decade, Leela and Meera danced out the story of the Mahabharata. Meera twirled as Urvashi before Leela’s ascetic archer, until after one rowdy reception in Arab-ki-Sarai near the tomb of Humayun, a local policeman broke into their makeshift tent. The women he battered to death were discovered the next morning with smiles on their faces, clutching to their bosom Arjuna’s deadly bow. The policeman’s name, I later discovered, was Deputy Inspector Vyasa.
    Avatar 8: Migration
    Which means there is just one more tale to recount before I embark on the complications of the present. It is 1947. Meera and Leela are each exactly seven years old in the year that India is divided. They were born in Delhi, in the same week, in the same neighbourhood, to mothers who hated each other. Meera’s mother, a Muslim, was tall and thin, always dressed in a plain black cloak, with red-stained teeth and kohl-rimmed eyes staring out defiantly from the moon of her burqa. Leela’s mother, a Hindu, wrapped herself in a sari, parted her hair with scarlet powder, and slotted gold bangles over her plump, oil-smoothed hands.
    Both women shared a guru: an undefinable Sufi-cum-Bhakti, a mountain man with a taste for southern belles. He often passed through the neighbourhood, bound for Hampi, thence Haridwar, and back again to the Himalayas; and nine months after one such visitation, the offspring these women had always longed for – could easily have relinquished their marital virtue for the sake of, had visited many different shrines and springs and temples and gurus in the name of – were born, in adjacent houses.
    The little girls loved each other, and whatever the admonitions of their mothers, took no notice as wrath spluttered and bubbled in their lane just south of that long and crowded street where the whole city came for shopping, Chandni Chowk. The girls were oblivious of their mothers’ ire; and for seven years, the city’s streets between the Turkman and Kashmiri Gates were all theirs.
    In September of their seventh year, a few weeks after they had seen their first carcasses – not of chickens or sheep but of people – the tall thin beanpole mother called her daughter: ‘Come, Mirah’ (she hated the way her daughter’s worthy Arabic name was phonetically indistinguishable from the common Hindu ‘Meera’) ‘pack your toys, we are leaving.’ And she pulled her daughter inside the house from the street, where the girl had been listening to Leela describing how she had seen from the window a man brought back to his home by his uncles, red stains on his white pyjamas. That night, the tall thin beanpole family