LEELA Read online

  Ouch, I thought.

  I didn’t say it, of course. I have always been rather bad about commercial matters and poor Dom was not much better.

  But there were a couple of occasions on which I was paid for the translations I did. The first time was after A Matter of People. we were in New York when I got a call from Krishna Singh, who was the editor of the UN’s film projects. He suggested that I do a simultaneous translation into English for twenty films that had been made for the International Year of Women. Each of the films had been made by an important director from the country and dealt with how women were faring in that country. The films were roughly from what is now called the Global South, from South America, Africa, South-east Asia and Asia.

  I asked if I could sée the films first and later, I was glad that I did. The directors of all the films were supposed to be in the control room of the huge auditorium and they were supposed to be cueing me. Unfortunately, contact between the control room and the podium at which I was sitting broke down and I was suddenly left looking at films in languages as diverse as Swahili and Hindi without any cues. Of course, I could do the ones that were in English, French or Hindi, but what about Malay? Spanish was not such a problem but Portuguese?

  I had a choice. I could run from the stage, shrieking that no one should be expected to do a job like that without working equipment or I could make an educated guess about when I should start and when I should stop. I didn’t have much time to choose, mere seconds, and even before I had consciously come to a decision, I heard my own voice reading the first lines.

  The next three hours or so—each of the twenty films was about ten minutes long—passed in a bit of a haze. I was trying desperately to remember what I had seen of the films and match them to the script in front of me. I was watching the screen intensely to follow the body language of the women speaking. A woman’s shoulders rise slightly when she speaks to a camera and they return to normal when she has finished what she wants to say.

  When it was over, I was thoroughly exhausted. Then suddenly, there was a bubble and gurgle and squeak of voices as the directors gathered around me on the stage. I studied their faces for signs that they were forming a lynch mob. But all was well; they merely wanted to congratulate me. When they had found themselves unable to communicate with me, they thought that all was lost. But I battled my way through it and Carillo Flores, Under-Secretary General of the UN, came up to say that I had done a good job of it.

  Several years later, when I was in Delhi and Dom went off to Sri Lanka to do a story for Stern magazine, I found that I had forty-five rupees in our joint account in the bank. But then, deus ex machina, a formidable lady turned up at our doorstep and asked if I would do some simultaneous translation for an international seminar on World Free Press. One of the speakers was Eamon de Valera, president of Ireland, and co-owner of one of the Irish Press newspapers. He was going to speak in French. I agreed, assuming that a president would rarely allow himself the liberty of extempore speech. The best of them sound like they’re making it up as they go along, but almost every word is devised by consultants and weighed by spin doctors. So I arrived at the Ashoka Hotel, and was seated in a cabin with headphones placed on my head.

  ‘Where is my script?’ I asked.

  ‘There isn’t one,’ said a nervous young woman in a silk sari and too much perfume.

  Before I could ask another question de Valera was off and I was too. He spoke simply, eloquently and while he did refer to Ireland, he only did so when it was apposite. His was the voice of the moderate, the man who has run a newspaper but has also run a nation. It was also the voice of a man who could speak for an hour at a time.

  Later, he came up to thank me for my translation.

  ‘Well done,’ he said.

  I was … I have been trying to figure out what I was. I don’t think I was chuffed when Ionesco or Walter or de Valera thanked me for a good translation. I think I was grateful. There’s a difference.

  Yes. I was grateful.

  Could it be the French side of me or was it that Hamburg in the winter of 1973 was truly depressing? It seemed grey and bleak and humourless. We were there to interview Günter Grass for Voices for Life and it was with relief that we drove out of the city and into the German countryside to Wevelsflatte where the author lived.

  The young man who was our guide spoke poor penn’orth of English but when he discovered where we were headed, he began to look more and more discomfited. Finally, when we arrived, he refused to go into the house.

  This made things difficult because he was supposed to be Dom’s translator as well but he simply refused. Grass came out to find out what was going on. He invited the young man in for refreshments.

  ‘Nein,’ said the young man sullenly, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes.

  Finally, he was persuaded to come in but he began a brusque conversation with Grass in which he seemed to be suggesting that Grass was a communist. Finally, Grass turned to me and asked me if I could speak French. I said I could and we all repaired into his sixteenth-century farmhouse, leaving the young man to sulk outside.

  Grass was charming, a gentle and kindly man, sensitive and artistic. We spoke for a while and when the work was out of the way, he asked us where we planned on having dinner.

  ‘Back at Hamburg,’ said Dom.

  ‘Hamburg is like a student’s hostel. It will be closed by the time you reach,’ said Grass. He directed our guide to a local ratskeller where we could have a meal.

  The three of us did go there. Across the room sat a German family, pink and white and truculent. The woman in particular kept glaring at Dom. She called the owner over to her table a couple of times and lectured him, pointing at Dom.

  Finally, I could stand it no longer.

  I called the owner over and told him to tell the Frau that if she pointed again, I would be very glad to pour a jug of water over her head. We were two Asians in a Caucasian world and the sense I got was that she wanted us out of there as quickly as possible so that she could go back to her pink-and-white world. Mein host was very embarrassed but he was helpless to deny one of his best customers—the Frau and her family were rather porcine—and he could not offend us either.

  ‘Now, I have a real treat for you,’ said the young man and drove us through the dark evening to a big barn that was brightly lit. Inside, there were hundreds of young men and women. At the door, a young man, blonde and blue-eyed and Nordic, gave our guide a stiff-armed salute. I began to suspect the worst as we walked into a world full of the dream children of Adolf. We were seated at trestle tables while our guide climbed on to the stage and sang Uber Alles and some mountain songs.

  The leader came over, a middle-aged man with a scar down one cheek.

  Are you enjoying yourselves with my children?’ he asked.

  ‘You have many children,’ I said.

  ‘Thousands,’ he said, ‘thousands. We climb mountains and we grow strong. We will come back and make Germany our own again.’

  Suddenly our guide’s refusal to have anything to do with Grass began to make sense. Grass was seen then as a communist. He was seen as someone who had stood against the Third Reich. While this vastly enhanced his status as a writer in the international community, it didn’t do much for his position among the neo-Nazis who wanted to wear jackboots and hate people for an accident of birth.

  I told Dom that I couldn’t bear it and wanted to leave. He agreed and we made our departure hastily.

  The newspapers tell me that Grass has admitted that as a very young man he was part of the Nazis. I cannot reconcile the gentle man we met with the jackbooted boys swilling their beer in that hall.

  SIXTEEN

  LEELA NAIDU, EDITOR

  Ramnath Goenka had been Frank Moraes’s last boss and perhaps he felt that he owed Dom something. Over a Marwari thali, he gave us our marching orders.

  ‘You,’ he told Dom ‘will be the editor of the Sunday Standard.’

  So that was Dom put in ch
arge of the Sunday edition of the Indian Express.

  ‘And you,’ he turned to me, ‘will be my communications manager.’

  I must have looked a little surprised. I had not applied for the job. Neither of us had discussed a job for me with the old man. But when you are confronted with an autocrat at the dining table, you have very little choice.

  ‘I have no experience of that kind of thing,’ I said.

  ‘I have these Marwaris who sell my newspaper as if they were still in the cloth markets of Calcutta,’ he snarled. ‘You will be better than them, at any rate. You can’t be much worse.’

  So that was how Dom Moraes and Leela Naidu ended up working for Ramnath Goenka in the one thousand nine hundred and eighty-first year of Our Lord.

  Oddly enough, my first job as a communications manager had to do with designing the empty first floor of his Express Towers at Nariman Point, Mumbai. It was a rather wonderful space, since it opened out on to a Grass bed that had been placed on the terrace around it. The building had been designed by Joseph Allen Stein, the man who came to India in the 1950s and made it his home, building the Triveni Kala Sangam arts complex, the India International Centre and many other prestigious structures. I suspect that Margaret, his wife, an architectural botanist (!) might have had a hand in the decision about the grass bed.

  There was a whole lot of unused furniture in the godowns of the old Express buildings and I excavated the lot. There were some really elegant trestle tables, spare and simple. I brought those in and teamed them with some chairs which had wrought-iron legs. I thought it all worked together quite well with the cork screens lined with khadi that I used to partition the huge space. I felt that the screens would create some divisions, but also retain the transparency and democracy that I thought were part of a press office. But then the chairs that were placed around the conference table began to vanish. Everyone wanted four chairs in their cubicles and each morning I had to send scouts out to bring the chairs back to the conference table. In order to stop the chair-poaching, I asked for moras (Indian cane stools) so that everyone got a couple of chairs and a couple of moras.

  That was easy. What was difficult was the hostility of the old guard who resented me immediately. I understood what they must have been feeling. They probably saw me as a society lady who had been foisted on them because she had once been an actress and her husband was a poet. I tried to involve them but they refused to cooperate. The only support I had was from L.K. Jha who as our business correspondent, perhaps, understood the importance of advertising and would tell me what stories he had planned so that we could drum up a little support around them.

  ‘You can’t pull these people along. You can’t push them along,’ Goenka said impatiently when I talked to him. ‘Just go on and do what you want.’

  That was easy for him to say, but it got difficult to do a one-person job when I could see a whole bunch of people who were supposed to help me, sitting back and smoking cigarettes and trying to make sure I failed. By this time, my mother was also ill and that meant I had two parents who needed looking after. It was during this period too that my mother was hospitalised. She had to undergo two operations for the cancer of the lymph nodes. She was being treated by Dr Praful Desai, head of the Tata Memorial Hospital. I spent each night with her at the Hospital. At six in the morning, the nurse would come for a blood sample. When it had been drawn, I would follow her to the duty station and see that it was labelled properly.

  ‘They mean well, Leela,’ said my father, ‘but they might mix up the vials or mislabel them. Any false results at this time could be dangerous.’

  I would make sure my mother had her breakfast and then cross town to Nariman Point to work at the Express. Then I would come home to make lunch for Daddy and then go back to work. After that, I would come home to give Daddy his dinner and go to Tata Memorial for night duty. It was gruelling and I didn’t even have time to notice whether Dom was having problems or getting on well at the Express. But then I suspect it was the former for by the beginning of the following year, Dom had resigned.

  ‘Go, go,’ said Goenka to him. ‘I’m keeping Leela.’

  ‘She won’t stay if I go,’ said Dom.

  We were already in a state of rapid decline so after a little thought I decided it would be best to resign too. When I resigned too, everything went back to its normal pace.

  Not even a month had gone by when Nari Hira, who had turned his company, Magna Publishing, into something of a byword with Stardust and Society, turned up in a three-piece suit. It was March and he did seem a little over-dressed for a man who had just recovered from a cardiac operation. Sipping his iced water, he told me that he was looking for an editor for Society.

  ‘Isn’t shobha De the editor?’ I asked.

  ‘She has resigned.’

  ‘And her second-in-command?’

  ‘He turned the job down.’

  Oddly enough, Shobha herself had featured me on the first cover of Society. Nari Hira had read the story and decided that I was the person who could replace her. I have no idea what had made him think so but he refused to explain any further.

  ‘I am not a regular reader of Society,’ I warned him.

  ‘Which is why I want you to edit it. I want you to create the kind of magazine you would read,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not really interested in society ladies and parties,’ I added. I thought this might frighten him but he said I could remake the magazine in the shape I wanted. This was carte blanche editorial control and I thought I should enjoy it.

  And so I made a list of articles we should do and people who should be interviewed. When I arrived at the office, I was escorted to Shobha’s cabin and peacock chair. This, I took to be a piece of irony, either on Shobha’s part or on the part of whoever had designed it. I surveyed my new Domain and found that three hostile pairs of eyes were fixed upon me. But I had a job to do and I assumed that journalists would not have the same pettiness as mid-level marketing managers so I explained what I thought Society should be like.

  I explained that in my view of it society did not mean only high society. We should feature a cobbler just so long as the cobbler had an interesting story to tell. And then I shared my list of ideas with them.

  They all declared that they loved the ideas, but it was going to be difficult to accommodate them since they had locked in all the stories for the next two issues.

  ‘Well,’ I said, determined to look on the positive side, ‘I suppose we can all work on this list in the meanwhile.’

  They looked a bit green, but it was difficult for them to be too obstreperous all at once.

  I thought about things for a while and then went to see Mr Hira with my list. He noticed that I had J.R.D. Tata, the charismatic Industrialist and aviator, on my list of people to be interviewed.

  ‘Do you know J.R.D.?’ he asked.

  I did, of course. His wife, Thelly, was a good friend and he had been my Uncle Jeh for a long time.

  ‘Have you been to his house?’

  I had, of course.

  ‘Then if he agrees to an interview, we’ll put him on the next cover.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be possible,’ I said, all innocent and dewy-eyed.

  ‘Why not?’ He asked.

  ‘You see, my staff says that the next two issues are locked in.’

  ‘I think you will find that some pages will have suddenly become vacant,’ he smiled, in saturnine fashion.

  And so it was agreed that I should interview J.R.D. Tata, who had not been interviewed since Life magazine had in its heyday, done a profile on him. We went to his house and shot him with the children he had ‘adopted’. These were the children of his staff, whom he was educating. The cover picture, which was taken on the lawn of his home, had him surrounded by these children. It was quite a different story from the business boilerplate that had been published about him.

  Another story idea that caused some more pages to be unlocked was an interview with Dr
Praful Desai who was the director of Tata Memorial Hospital and the chief surgeon there as well. He had treated my mother for cancer and called her his platinum brick because she never complained through two major operations and chemotherapy as well. We did a long interview in which he spoke movingly about the shortage of medicines, the shortage of doctors and of the way he had often thought of euthanasia for his terminally ill patients who were kept alive artificially.

  As soon as Nari Hira went off to his nest in New York, the old guard began to wail. Their resistance took the form of non-cooperation. I’d suggest an idea and either the staff would tell me it had been done before or it wasn’t interesting or someone would agree to do it and then produce excuse after excuse for not doing it. They rather liked their society ladies and the sickly scent of too much perfume. So I did the only thing a fella could do; I left. I did not even pick up my last salary.

  The next time I became editor was in 1982. Darryl D’Monte, a journalist and Dom’s cousin, told me that a certain Alok Mandelia had asked him to create a monthly features magazine. There was no other brief but Mandelia had a name for it. It would be called Keynote. Darryl suggested my name and I was hired as managing editor. I hired the poet Manohar Shetty as the editor.

  Mr Mandelia was a bit surprised.

  ‘You’re mad. He’s running a restaurant and he comes to the office for only two hours a day. How is he going to edit?’

  ‘He will do his work,’ I said, although I was getting varicose veins in my eyes from proofreading copy.

  David Davidar was one of the young men who came to pay homage to Dom. When he heard that I was managing editor of Keynote, he announced that he would leave his job with the Christian Science Monitor and work with us as literary editor.

  Mandelia was often indisposed which was why I had a free hand. He would sometimes object to the seriousness of the magazine but I would point at our circulation figures which seemed to be rising. This irked him. He would have preferred, I often thought, to have the magazine fail so he could prove that people really did want to read gossip. But when there was nothing else, he would ask why I did not write an editorial.