LEELA Read online

  This is Suketu Mehta, on Leela Naidu. ‘When I first moved back to Bombay I was staying in a sort of Gujju ghetto on Napean Sea Road, an old building with a lot of garbage strewn around. I thought I would have a dinner for some of the people I was meeting. Leela Naidu came and sat down on a sofa early in the evening. At some point she stamped her exquisite chappal-clad foot hard on the floor. She did not get up from the sofa. Someone brought her her wine there and someone took dinner over to her. She sat unmoving through the evening and into the night. One by one, the guests drifted away until it was only Leela, sitting on the sofa. Finally, she asked whether it was now only the family. I said it was. She lifted her foot. Beneath it was a cockroach, which she had squashed to save me embarrassment in front of my dinner guests. We both regarded the flattened bug. Then Leela said, “I think it’s fainted.”’

  There’s a Leela-shaped hole in my life.

  Jerry Pinto

  Mumbai

  An arid day in August 2009

  PROLOGUE

  I am fortunate to have begun writing this account of my life at a time when no one believes that there is a single truth or a single version of a life. Had I been writing some decades ago, I might have been forced to offer an extended apologia for my decisions. But my friends tell me that literary critics have now come to the conclusion that no one can give a full account of their lives any more than anyone can document every moment in the life of a universe. It seems to me that a great many trees would have been saved had they come to this conclusion earlier and the doorstop-sized biographies and autobiographies to which we have been subjected might simply have been pared down to what matters. And had they paid attention to ancient wisdom, they would have known that no human being may be summed up in words. The Talmud puts it beautifully when it says, ‘You do not kill a man, you kill a universe.’ Nor does one sum up a person, not even the person one is.

  So this book is about what matters to a certain Leela Naidu. I qualify that because I believe that the person narrating this is the Leela I am at this point. I may have been another person earlier and I may change yet again. The person I was earlier may have had another view of the life she led; the Leela to come may see things differently. I give her leave to do so.

  With that mad visionary William Blake, I believe, Joy and woe are woven fine/ A clothing for the soul divine./ Under every grief and pine/ Runs a joy with silken twine.

  I believe this to be true of every life and mine has been no exception. To tell one’s life fairly then would be to tell the sorrows and the joys in equal measure.

  I have had my fair share of pain. I was married twice, once to Tilak Raj Oberoi of the Oberoi family that has done much for the hospitality industry in India; and the second time to the poet Dom Moraes. The marriages did not work. I do not flinch from the memories I have nor do I consciously relive them. (What dreams bring is another matter.) I do not see what use it would be to recount my ‘trials and tribulations’, except to add yet another narrative of feminine pain to the ones that are already extant. I offer no disrespect to those women. I respect the choices they make in the narratives they shape out of the raw material of their lives. I expect the same respect for the choices I make.

  I would willingly bare the scabs on my soul were I to suspect that there would be some value in so doing. When I was beginning my career in cinema, the socialist writer and columnist Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, who wrote some of Raj Kapoor’s early films, said to me, ‘You are too young to be an actress. You have not suffered enough.’ I suppose I could have asked him how much I was supposed to suffer before I could qualify. I suppose I could have offered to sleep on a bed of nails for a month or to wear a hair shirt. I suppose I could have asked whether he had suffered enough to be a writer. I like to think these witty retorts were only held back by my respect for his seniority but I suspect that I was simply left dumbstruck by the notion that there is a certain value to suffering.

  There are some religious traditions, I know, that place a high value on suffering. I myself was born into a family that did not make too much out of organised religion. My father was a Hindu by birth, my mother had been born a Catholic. They left me to choose, stipulating only that I should make my decision when I was seven. When I did, I opted for Sufism.

  I remember the conversation I had with the Abbé Pierre, the religious preceptor at the private Catholic school in Geneva to which I was sent.

  ‘In India,’ he told the class once, ‘they revere crocodiles and venerate fish. Their gods are wood and stone.’

  If ever there was a misreading of the inclusive tradition of Hinduism, if ever there was a more narrow-minded reading of the representation of the Ganga as a crocodile and the Matsya avatar of Vishnu, I have yet to hear it.

  I was young but I was ready to stand my ground against such notions. ‘But, Monsieur l’Abbé,’ I said. ‘The statue of the Virgin Mary in the chapel is also made of wood.’

  He spluttered his contempt of this remark. Of course, his statue was only a representation and a mnemonic, a reminder of his beloved Mother Mary. It was not an idol, it was a way of focussing attention on the Divine. I believe that even as he said it, he knew he was digging a hole for himself, so he changed the subject.

  ‘Have you been baptised?’ He asked.

  I told him that I had not.

  ‘Then why is it that the only child I see in the chapel every day is you?’ He asked.

  I could not put it into words but I think he knew that I responded to the shelter and the silence of the chapel. I responded to the beauty of the faith that had built it, not to the crudeness of that very faith’s attacks on those different from it. We eventually grew to be great friends and when I told him that I had decided to be a Sufi, he asked why.

  This time I had thought it out. I remembered the candles that the Sufis lit in their room in Geneva. I remembered the candles that represented the major faiths of the world—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, tribal faiths—and one for the unknown religions. Ali Khan, the cousin of Sufi teacher and celebrated musician Inayat Khan, initiated me into Sufism. When he visited Geneva I would accompany him on the piano. I thought of the warmth he generated, the extraordinary generosity of spirit. But while I recognised these things with a child’s instincts, I had not the vocabulary to express them. As the Bible says, when one is a child, one speaks as a child.

  ‘Everyone else wants me to choose one apple when I love all apples,’ I said. And as I said it, I knew I needed another metaphor.

  ‘One apple is generally enough for a little girl like you,’ he said.

  ‘Everyone else wants me to choose one colour when I love all colours,’ I said.

  He harrumphed again, but we remained friends and I still visited the chapel.

  A friend of mine has suggested that it is also because of my wandering life. I was born in Bombay, and by the time I was seven, I had lived in two other cities: Paris and Geneva. The Sufis, he suggested, were also wanderers. But I think what attracted me to Sufism was its passionate commitment to love, not the agape of the New Testament, but love in the here-and-now, God as the beloved who must be sought, who can be found, and who often leaves one for a while to experience the sweet sorrow of parting. And there was the music and the celebration of God that it so beautifully expressed. Pain is the antithesis of celebration.

  I remember asking my father why we should feel pain.

  ‘If a child puts her hand in the fire, she feels pain and she learns that she should not do it again,’ he said. Well, yes, but how does one know what will hurt and what will not? The only way is to find out for oneself.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I have discovered that, as a species, we do not learn from the mistakes of others, especially in matters of the heart. Perhaps it is the belief that we all have when we are young, the belief in a personal exemption from the workings of nature or karma or what you will. Perhaps it is that we cannot believe that we will be so foolish, so foolhardy, so ill advised as the p
erson we are reading about. Whatever the reason, humankind does not learn from history and I believe that the readers of angina monologues learn nothing.

  This then is my story in the way I should wish to tell it. There are other versions because there are other people in whose minds I have a presence. This is the Leela I know. She had an eventful life by her own understanding of it and she thinks you might like to hear about it.

  Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins with the immortal and oft-quoted lines, ‘All happy families are happy in the same way, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.’ With due respect to Tolstoy, I am not sure whether that is how it works. It suggests that happiness is a bland monotonous state and unhappiness is the only state worth investigating. Or writing about.

  Of course, Indians are only now discovering that they had unhappy childhoods. It was perfectly common for adults when I was growing up to talk about how their parents were tyrannical, cold aloof presences (‘they taught me values’) and how their schools were chambers of horrors (‘it toughened me up’) and then to add with a reminiscent and sentimental sigh, ‘Ah, the golden days of childhood.’

  People did speak like that. And they did not see the contradictions. I would often wonder at it. Every child is a bundle of feelings, the most important ones of which are helplessness and self-interest. If your father beat you for every minor misdemeanour and your school made you take cold baths at some unearthly hour and then forced you to do physical exercise that verged on hard labour, both these feelings must be outraged. No child wants to have values beaten into him or her; no child wants to run around a playground fifty times even if it builds them into wiry Spartans. But to say any of this would mean to cast some doubt on one’s parents and no one doubted their parents when I was growing up.

  Nor did I doubt mine.

  Suffice it to say that I was happy and that I am perfectly willing to accept that this is only nostalgia. But as for presenting my parents in the best light possible, I don’t think I need to do that. They were good parents and good people to begin with. But if they had had flaws, I would have still loved them for that is the nature of the child. And as an adult one should know that to look for perfection in others is somewhat silly when one is constantly reminded of one’s own imperfections. As an adult looking back, I can only remember being treated with respect. Neither of them ever beat me or inflicted any cruel or unusual punishment on my person. When they felt the need to correct me, they appealed to my sense of reason and my sense of right and wrong.

  So I will begin randomly with a naked Russian in a French garden.

  2 July 2009

  ONE

  THE NAKED COUNT ON THE LAWN

  I do not remember much about her, but my mother told me that her mother had eyes that were the blue of forget-me-nots. I like to think of her sitting in her salon, looking out over her garden, perhaps sipping a cup of camomile tea when she heard the door-pull on the front door.

  A minute or so later she heard a thud.

  She went to the door and found that the maid who had answered the doorbell had fainted clean away.

  Outside, a tall man was standing. He seemed abstracted, as if he were thinking of something else. He was also completely naked.

  The French have a word for my grandmother’s response. With perfect sang-froid, she invited her visitor in and provided him with my grandfather’s dressing gown. Then she offered him some tea and petit fours and they began to converse as though it were an everyday occurrence that a tall white man should turn up nude on one’s doorstep.

  After a seemly interval, she asked her visitor’s name.

  ‘I am the Count Yousoupoff,’ he said and there was a moment’s silence as my grandmother digested this information. ‘I did not shoot him,’ he added softly.

  The Prince Felix Yousoupoff (or Yusupov) will best be remembered by history as one of the men who killed Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the ‘mad monk’ who held Russia to ransom since he had convinced Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra that he could cure their son and heir of the haemophilia that he had inherited through Queen victoria.

  Having decided that Rasputin’s influence over the Tsarina made him too dangerous to the Empire, a group of nobles apparently lured Rasputin to the Moika Palace, which belonged to the maternal family of Prince Yusupov, who had taken on his mother’s name to prevent it from dying out. The more fanciful accounts of Rasputin’s death state that he was served cakes and vodka laced with enough cyanide to kill ten men. Now, as far as I know, cyanide is supposed to be a swift acting poison but according to the legend, Rasputin was not affected. He is even said to have started munching and swallowing the crystal glasses in which the vodka had been served. Yusupov is then said to have gone upstairs, fetched his revolver and shot the siberian cleric through the chest. Rasputin fell. A half an hour or so later when Yusupov returned to check the body (or as some versions go, Yusupov came back for his jacket), Rasputin sprang to his feet and began to throttle Yusupov, who fled in horror and told the other conspirators.

  Heavily drugged by this time, Rasputin attempted his escape. He bolted outside and ran across the courtyard toward the gate, threatening that he would tell everything to the Tsarina. Another conspirator shot three bullets that passed Rasputin, then he shot two more which hit the monk. The conspirators then clubbed him unconscious and flung him into the icy Neva River, but there was no splash. Rasputin had fallen on the ice (it was winter at this time), so they went down and cut a hole in the ice and stuffed him through it into the icy water. They were finally satisfied that the ‘Enemy of the State’ was dead.

  Three days later the body of Rasputin—poisoned, shot three times and badly beaten—was recovered from the river and autopsied. The cause of death was drowning. His arms were apparently found in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice.

  Of course, historians have challenged almost everything about this story. And here was Yusupov sitting in my grandparents’ villa in the shadow of the Jura Alps and saying that he had not done what legend said he had done.

  Then there was another knock on the door and a clamour. I can imagine my grandmother girding her loins for a further incursion of strange men. But it was only the distraught keepers from the château opposite. They reclaimed the Prince, who had slipped away from them.

  ‘I will return,’ he said, bowing in an elegant Gallic fashion. The Russian court was as French as it could make itself.

  ‘Please do,’ said my grandmother, relieved that it was simply a madman with delusions of grandeur.

  Later, she found that this was no pretender to royalty and fame. It was indeed the Prince Yusupov who had visited her. That day was a Thursday, the day when Rasputin had been killed. Every Thursday, when he was haunted by Rasputin’s eyes that had turned fluorescent green from the arsenic he had ingested, he would visit her for a while and they would drink tea together and he would sit silently, trying perhaps to sort out the past.

  That is the earliest story told to me that I remember. The other one that concerns my grandfather came to me in a roundabout fashion when I was a young girl of about eight, living in Geneva. Those were more innocent days and parents did not hesitate to send their children out, unattended. One day, at the park, I saw an old man staring at me intently, but with a trace of confusion in his eyes.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘Marthe?’ He said.

  ‘That is my mother’s name, sir,’ I said.

  The confusion cleared. ‘So it is her daughter,’ he said, ‘Marthe’s daughter.’

  ‘Do you know my mother?’ I asked, excited.

  ‘I knew her, little one, but only as the daughter of my employer. It has been many years now …’

  But I was having none of it. I dragged him off home and although Maman responded with her customary good manners, I could see an unspoken ‘Oh mon Dieu’ hovering on her lips as I dragged an elderly stranger into her living room.

  My g
randfather Mange had, in his time, been the sole importer and purveyor of American threshing machines in Europe. It was at his factory that the old man had worked.

  He chatted about my grandfather of whom he had many fond memories. He told me how my grandfather had been a great shot of wild game and how the French army had wanted him to join up in the First World War, even though he was well into his forties and fast nearing the outer limit of the age for conscription. However, my grandfather was committed to the notion of non-violence and he had instead offered his Rolls Royce and driver to fetch and carry supplies to the front, the old man said.

  Indeed, I had heard of stories of my grandfather’s valour. He had never fired a shot throughout the war, but he had risked his life to rescue the fallen and the wounded from the no-man’s-land between the German and French lines in the Vosges. He had been buried alive thrice and after he had been dug out the third time and was recovering in hospital, some generals who wanted to give him a medal of honour visited him.

  My grandfather refused the medal. ‘I am proud that I have never fired on a German,’ he told the generals, ‘I am proud that I have never killed someone’s father or someone’s son or someone’s brother.’