LEELA Page 18

  Bobby Bedi was not amused.

  ‘Can’t we have some mince?’ asked one crew member.

  ‘Has no one in India heard of a salad?’ asked another.

  ‘Let me into that kitchen and I’ll cook myself a boiled egg,’ said a third.

  Bobby looked like he might even have allowed that had he not seen me wiggling my eyebrows frantically. I had visited the kitchen and had watched as cockroaches wandered around in the manner of much-loved domestic animals. And so it fell to my lot to visit the market and buy some fresh vegetables. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t getting some delightful greens, since we were suffering from the cold that these veggies love. It could only be that the khansama didn’t know or didn’t care.

  On the way to the market, I noticed an agricultural institute set in the middle of some stunted trees that looked like … olive trees? Indeed, they were olive trees and there on the windswept plain of Pachmarhi, they were slowly dying of frost-bite. But the gardeners could be suborned and so I got myself some baby cabbage and romaine lettuce from the vegetable gardens of the Institute. Then we took a large unused flower bed and turned it into a kitchen garden. From then on we could have salads.

  After we had managed to get rid of some of the cockroaches, I taught the khansama how to make an ersatz mince stew with local herbs. But the salad was a bigger battle. First, I had to teach the man how to make a solution of pinky water so as to rid the veggies of the germs. Next, I had to teach him not to wash the vegetables in water from the tap again. Then, I had to establish the principles of a basic vinaigrette.

  ‘Nimbu aur tel?’ he asked, his brow furrowing over the idea of lime and oil. ‘Nimbu aur tel?’

  ‘Nimbu aur tel,’ I said.

  On another occasion, we had a fire. One of the big klieg lights caught fire over my head. The crew rushed me out but the electrician, a young man, had eyes only for his precious equipment. In his mad dash to save it, he gashed his hand on some rusty barbed wire. The British crew and I rushed to him with their first aid boxes but it was a deep slash. The only thing we could do was to pull the edges together and seal it with black masking tape. (Sounds horrible? It works as a temporary measure.) We sent him off to get stitched up properly—of course, there was no doctor on the set—and then went off for a break. After this whole tamasha, we found Arundhati weeping on Pradip’s shoulder. But she wasn’t concerned about the electrician. She was worried about her stuffed animals.

  And so when I watch her pleading for the disenfranchised and the marginalised, I think back to the Ruthless Ms Roy on that sundrenched plateau in Madhya Pradesh and I wonder whether it is easier for us to sympathise with anonymous masses than with the actual people we are confronted with in real life. The poor are an abstraction for whom we can all feel an ambiguous benevolence. The smelly, sticky, importunate person in front of us? Now that can be a different matter altogether.

  Perhaps I am misjudging all of them, but I often feel that a production house can be judged by the way it treats those who have no voice: the extras, the dancers and the animals. One day, Rani seemed to be a little quiet. I saw a tear run down her cheek. I asked the mahout what the matter was.

  ‘Rani is hungry,’ he told me.

  The arrangements that had been made for the elephants were extremely rudimentary. So I stopped work and said that I would only start again when they had been fed. I suppose one might say that it was unprofessional but it has always been my way of protesting. Finally, I had to send one of the spot boys off to the town myself to get huge bunches of bananas, and two huge jerry cans so that they could be watered regularly.

  ‘And jaggery please, Madam,’ said the mahout.

  ‘Jaggery?’

  ‘It is good for sunstroke.’

  Elephants, I later discovered, have no sweat glands and therefore can suffer from sunstroke if they have to stand around in the sun for hours as Raja and Rani were made to do. The elephants munched their way through the bananas and the jaggery and we all went back to work.

  The day before they were to leave, the mahout came up to me and said, ‘Rani would like to take you for a ride.’

  I climbed on to her knee and then perched myself on her head, behind her ears and we set off into the forests of the Sahyadris. If you have ever ridden an elephant through the jungle, you’ll know this was a very special experience. Once you’ve aligned your spine and let the rhythm into your body, it is the perfect way to experience a forest. Rani had perfect manners; I never had to even duck my head as we walked through the green and gold of a forest morning. An hour later, we were back and a day later, we bid each other a sniffly goodbye.

  I don’t think terribly many people ‘got’ Electric Moon. It was the opening feature film at the Bangalore Festival of Films in 1992–93. We had a press conference and a gimlet-eyed lady stood up and asked me, ‘What is the meaning of this incestuous relationship you have with your brother in the film?’

  I almost goggled at her. But I recovered enough to say, ‘Madam, it was very virginal.’

  NINETEEN

  SEASON OF MISTS AND MELLOW

  FRUITFULNESS

  ‘You must be ready for this kind of thing now that you are in the autumn of your life,’ said the young doctor. I gritted my teeth against the pain in my hip and decided to ignore him and his clichés. Autumn of life? I was born in 1940. Anyone who wants may calculate my age. Then if they want to call me old, they have my permission. But ‘autumn of life’? That was adding insult to the injury I had done myself by falling and breaking my hip socket and femur.

  But later that evening, as I read Keats in bed, I rediscovered the ‘Ode to Autumn’:

  Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

  Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

  To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core …

  After I had managed to turn myself into a cliché—women my age are supposed to fall; it’s practically de rigueur—I was taken to St. Elizabeth’s Nursing Home. The doctors came and chirruped bluffly at me and I was wheeled into the operation theatre and wheeled out again with five hundred and fifty grams of metal holding my right leg together.

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  I had begun to recover and here was a young woman. Her face was vaguely familiar but nothing came back.

  ‘I was your student.’

  French? No.

  ‘At Bal Anand.’

  That was a very long time ago, but in the same country at any rate. No, in the same area. St. Elizabeth’s is not far from the home of Nandini Mehta, sister of Pupul Jaykar, both of whom were close to Jiddu Krishnamurti, who has been described as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. (To me he was also one of the old souls whom I met, someone who was obviously enlightened.)

  When I filed a suit for custody of my twins and lost, Pupul Jaykar called me and in her gruff but caring fashion, gave me my marching orders. I was to go and see Krishnamurti, she said. At that point, I simply took down the address, noted the time and made my way there.

  ‘Ah,’ said Krishnamurti, when we met, ‘The mother.’

  I was a little startled by this.

  ‘I saw you and your daughters in the gardens of the Oberoi in Srinagar,’ he said. ‘You were on your hands and knees with the children.’

  I remembered.

  I had given both my daughters magnifying glasses and we were exploring in the garden, discovering ‘a world in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower’, as Blake puts it in that glorious poem, Auguries of Innocence.

  Priya announced that she wanted to go to the bathroom. As the twins were toddlers, I thought it would do no one any harm if she were to go out in the open.

  ‘Just find a place where no one can see you,’ I said.

  So Priya went up to a Chinar tree and lowered
away. By her childish logic, if she could not see anyone, no one could see her.

  Krishnaji handed me a tissue. It was only then that I realised I was crying. I wept on and on, quietly.

  ‘Let it all come out,’ he said. But his kindness was veined with a total honesty. ‘You will always see your children through a glass wall,’ he said.

  It was not the remark an ordinary person might make to a woman who has just had her most precious ones taken away from her. But then Krishnaji was no ordinary person. He was compassionate but he was also relentless. He was preparing me for what he saw and he would offer me no false hopes. He was not going to pat me on the head and say that it would be all right.

  I cried for a long time.

  When I returned home, I told my father, half-teasing, half-serious, ‘I’ve found myself a grandfather.’

  We met regularly after that, Krishnaji and I, whenever we were in the same city. Dom was rather dismissive of what he called ‘Leela’s godman’ but I finally managed to introduce the two of them at the Hotel Pierre in New York.

  There was a bit of a twinkle in Krishnaji’s eye. ‘Frank used to tell me that he was allergic to all gurus,’ he said. ‘I suspect you are too.’

  Dom was disarmed and they got along well after that. When we were working on Voices for Life, I suggested his name as one of the people who might contribute. Krishnaji agreed to be interviewed but asked for the money that the UNFPA would pay to be donated to his school at Ojai in California.

  I took Heff, Dom’s son, to see him once.

  ‘Leela says you can cure anything,’ said Heff, peering up into that aquiline face with the impertinence of childhood. ‘My nose bleeds.’

  Krishnaji laid his hands on Heff and that was the end of the nose bleeds. But it wasn’t that which drew me to him. He had the rare ability to give you his full attention and the even more rare ability to generate a genuine companionable silence. I met him once in England, where I had gone with a friend who was undergoing treatment at osterley Park. He was staying with friends in Wimbledon so I went there to meet him. I found him watching a documentary on the slaughter of baby seals. He seemed deeply moved.

  We went for a walk in a park, full of nannies and their charges. After a while, we sat down together, each of us silent, watching the children play. I could see a toddler heading towards a fountain. The sunlight was refracting through the spray and the little one was delighted. She wanted a rainbow and she was going to get one. Fat fingers outstretched, she began to climb the edge of the fountain.

  I was on my feet and running even before I knew it.

  I reached her just as she discovered the truth about rainbows and the temperature of water in Wimbledon in the month of June. I picked her out, wet and outraged at her dunking, but none the worse for that.

  Her nanny turned up, moments later, horrified at how quickly her charge had taken advantage of a few minutes of inattention. I restored the child and advised a change of clothes, a hot drink and a nap and returned to Krishnaji.

  ‘You really want to be a mother,’ he said and he said it with that extraordinary mixture of compassion and understanding that was his alone.

  The last time I met him, I was forty-one. My mother had died that year, after battling cancer for a year. I dressed her in one of her favourite dresses and put a few lilies in her hands, which was all the crematorium would allow. Then I escorted her body to Chandanwadi. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they deal with death so much. Perhaps it has something to do with the low pay and bad work conditions. As her body vanished behind a leather curtain, one of the ghouls beckoned to me. I looked in his direction and for some reason that I have never been able to fathom, he raised the curtain to let me see my mother’s slim feet enveloped in flames. I was over four months pregnant and felt as if someone had twisted a dagger in my belly.

  I came home and a few days later began spotting. Later that night, I miscarried. It was a baby boy. He had long toes, like Dom.

  ‘Do you want a shoe box?’ I was asked.

  A shoe box?

  ‘To take your baby home in,’ said the nurse.

  My mother had seven miscarriages. Seven boys died. I was the only survivor. At this low point, I thought about her and about her last miscarriage.

  October, 1946. Mumbai was very hot and perhaps to get my mother away from the muggy heat of the city, Daddy organised a trip to Lahore where Sarojini Naidu’s sister was the principal of Gangaram College. After that we were supposed to go on to Kashmir. For the first half of the journey, we travelled by train, in a coupé, a bed-sit on wheels. From Lahore, we travelled by car. Daddy had organised two majors from the British army to escort us. From Rawalpindi, landslides had made the road rough and bumpy. Mummy was heavy with child. Although she was feeling ill, she never said a word. By the time we reached srinagar, she was bleeding.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘My mother is bleeding.’

  The two majors, who had cleared the road, were horrified. They rushed us to our hotel and called the best doctor they could find but she miscarried again.

  ‘Little one,’ said the doctor, ‘you should not be in the room.’

  I was told to sit on a bench at the end of the corridor. The doctor came out with something small in his arms, pathetically small.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he told me.

  I closed them and the scent of the pine floor filled my nostrils. A lovely clean scent which was soon mixed with the smell of iron, a smell I did not like instinctively.

  My mother was weak, lying in the bed, her translucent skin even paler.

  ‘A storm is brewing,’ she said.

  I knew that that meant the wild mushrooms would be out. So I went to the kitchen and got myself a wicker basket. I spent that evening looking for mushrooms under the stones on the lawn. I wanted her to have the mushroom omelettes that she loved. I would take them to her and she would tell me which were poisonous and which were not. She had learnt about mushrooms from her father.

  Each evening, the chowkidar (watchman) watched as I went looking for Mummy’s mushrooms. After a week he gave me a little jumper with red pompoms on it, a jumper he had knitted for me through the long quiet watches of the night.

  My mother was touched and wanted to give him a gift.

  ‘Not at all,’ he refused, ‘I knit for all my children. My wife can’t knit.’

  If there is a lesson in that, it concerns the incidental kindness of strangers.

  By the second day, my mother must have been tired of mushrooms and mushroom omelettes. But she bore with me and ate them with every expression of delight. She must have known it was my way of trying to do something for her. She allowed it because she knew I had to heal too.

  I thought of her as I contemplated the offer of a shoe box.

  I did not know what to say. I did not know if I could go to the crematorium again. Dom was in Madhya Pradesh, where he was working on Answered by Flutes, though he would fly home the next day.

  ‘What will you do with him otherwise?’

  ‘We throw them away with the used bandages,’ she said.

  Dom whisked me off to Bhopal to cheer me up. Flying was not a good idea. One of my legs swelled up until it was twice the size of the other. Then Daddy began to have his mini-strokes. He began to get weaker and weaker and complained of memory loss. But he still played chess with his customary brilliance and when young scientists came to visit him, they marvelled at the lucidity of his thought processes. I could see how much he loved those visits. His eyes lit up when he was surrounded by brash young men, all trying to impress the legendary Dr Ramaiah Naidu.

  At forty-one, this can be a heavy burden to bear and when I met Krishnaji again, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation, I burst into tears.

  He did not stop me from crying but he did ask politely, after I had blown my nose, why I was crying.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I carry this pool of grief within me always. I suppose I’m crying for the w
orld. The wars. The children. The hunger. The disease.’

  It sounded silly even as I said it. What good would crying do?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But it all comes out only in your presence.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he replied. ‘Let it all come out. I still have some tissues left.’

  In 1962 when Nandini Mehta asked me if I would help at Bal Anand, the school she ran for underprivileged children, I wondered if Krishnaji had had a hand in it. I was delighted to be asked to help but, as I told Nandini, I had no formal training in teaching.

  ‘You like children,’ she said. ‘That’s a very good beginning. The rest you will pick up as you go along.’

  ‘Perhaps I could help them improvise some plays,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a good place to start,’ she replied.

  I began with drama but I was soon teaching them painting as well. I discovered that I did not have any teaching to do. I simply left them alone to produce their masterpieces. I discovered for myself the truth of Pablo Picasso’s words, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.’

  Then there were field trips to be taken. We went to Juhu beach together and discovered that when the tide receded, it left behind a huge canvas of undisturbed sand. The children created masterpieces with sticks in their hands as I watched and felt something unwind a little inside me. We went to the circus on another day and then came back to talk about it, to write about it and to draw pictures. Dabboo, one of the little ones who would try and crawl into my lap whenever I sat down, wanted to draw the tigers outside the cages.