Free Leela's Book by Alice Albinia

relish. ‘You find the language of your forebears inadequate for self-expression?’ Shiva Prasad asked. But the Professor merely leant back, smiled across the table at his interrogator, and when he opened his mouth to reply, what came out was a stream of Sanskrit, uttered in a singsong expression so evocative of ancient forest ashrams that it gave Shiva Prasad a little shiver as he heard it. The awful thing was, his own Sanskrit wasn’t good enough to understand what the man was saying. It was only afterwards, as he played the videotape back, that he realised what Chaturvedi had been quoting: a passage from the Satapatha Brahmana . ‘Hence let no Brahmin speak barbarous language,’ Vyasa had said, ‘since such is the speech of the demons. Thus he deprives his spiteful enemies of speech; and his enemies, being deprived of speech, are undone.’ Vyasa stopped speaking – and there then ensued the worst thing of all, a terrible silence . Later, Shiva Prasad thought of all the wonderful put-downs he could have uttered; the equally fabulous quotations from even more ancient texts; the withering tone of voice he could have used to utter these rebuffs. But at the time he said nothing , and at last the television presenter turned back to Professor Chaturvedi and the conversation between them drew to a close without Shiva Prasad having uttered a single further statement.
    The incident had rankled for some years in Shiva Prasad’s mind. He never mentioned it at home, and when his meek little Sunita came to him with the news that she was to be married to Vyasa’s son, he didn’t mention it then either. He weighed the fact of having been humiliated by Vyasa against the social advantages of the match, and saw that something more significant was required. Something clever had to come of this union, something brilliant, some extraordinary benefit for Shiva Prasad himself in the eyes of the Party. In the end, it was the nascent Arya Gene Project that was the deciding factor in Sunita’s favour.
    On the day when Ash first visited Shiva Prasad’s office, touched his feet, and said, in pure, Sanskrit-inflected Hindi, ‘Sir, my name is Ashwin Chaturvedi, I met Sunita while she was undertaking some work for my father, a writer and professor of—’ Shiva Prasad had interrupted, in English.
    ‘I know of your father,’ he said. Then he paused, seemed lost in thought, pressed his fingers together, shut his eyes; and when he opened them again, it was to announce: ‘You may marry her. On my terms.’
    Shiva Prasad had already been told by Sunita that Ash was a student at the Centre for Biochemical Technology in Delhi. He had learnt from her that the boy had a specialism in genetics; he understood that Ash was amenable to a project of a scale that would outshine the paltry philosophising of Ash’s misguided father. That afternoon, father and son-in-law came to a tacit understanding. Shiva Prasad became convinced that as a science Ph.D. student, Ash Chaturvedi could identify a gene in high-caste Hindus that allowed them to trace their lineage back to the ‘race of Aryas’, who had composed the Vedas thousands of years ago. More than that, he would prove that these noble bearers of Arya civilisation were indigenous to India. And finally, that Shiva Prasad and his family were themselves Aryas par excellence.
    In the months that followed, Shiva Prasad’s confidence in his Autobiography grew once more. He told Manoj to put aside the duties he had hitherto prescribed him, of transcribing each and every one of his magazine columns with the long-term aim of compiling a book called Shiva Prasad Sharma’s Cultural Insights . Instead, they spent the mornings lost in the bliss of dictation. It was the Arya Gene Project that would provide his Autobiography with the fillip it needed; it was this that would bring crescendo, climax, conclusion – the firework or two it required, that extra bit of noise.
    It was this, too, that allowed Shiva