Free Leela's Book by Alice Albinia Page B

Prasad danced all over his Autobiographical misgivings.
    ‘What does Ash Chaturvedi do?’ Hari asked politely as Sunita brought out the dessert (a splendid rice pudding topped with almond slivers).
    ‘He’s a scientist,’ Shiva Prasad’s wife began explaining, as she dolloped spoonfuls into small glass bowls. But Shiva Prasad could contain himself no longer. He interrupted his wife: ‘Ash Chaturvedi is analysing the DNA of our family, you know, every one of us!’
    ‘Whatever for?’ his brother’s wife suddenly asked, shocking everybody (they were almost the first words she had spoken); and Shiva Prasad, realising that he had gone too far with this disclosure, looked to his daughter for guidance.
    ‘Retinitis Pigmentosa,’ said Sunita, and her father had nodded: ‘An eye condition. He will test you, too!’
    ‘I hope not,’ the woman answered back before anyone could stop her.
    But Shiva Prasad didn’t reply. He was thinking how Sunita’s marriage was going to put right everything that Urvashi had disfigured through her union to a Muslim; how this new son-in-law, Ash, was going to prove the genetic purity of the Arya with his DNA project; how Urvashi’s treacherous rejection of her upbringing was going to—
    ‘Where does the Chaturvedi family live?’ somebody else asked. Shiva Prasad looked up. It was his brother who had spoken.
    ‘Nizamuddin West,’ Shiva Prasad said.
    ‘Oh, like your daughter Urvashi,’ put in the childless Bengali wife. ‘Isn’t that what you told me earlier, Ram?’
    There was a terrible silence. For a moment, everybody froze. Then they all began speaking at once. Hari mentioned the vital importance of honeymoons for marital harmony. Ram spoke of the virtues of the new cars available in the market and the dangers of driving those old Ambassadors with their terrible suspension. Shiva Prasad’s wife began to explain how the recipe for gulab jamuns was cited in the Vedas, and how they were serving this most ancient of dishes tomorrow night at the wedding.
    Shiva Prasad himself said nothing. He allowed the conversation to ebb and flow awkwardly around him, for he had nothing to say. It was true: the location of his daughter Sunita’s marital home, just a few streets away from Urvashi’s, was a great disadvantage. The thought of that place made Shiva Prasad shudder. For while Nizamuddin West was a smart-enough residential colony, well planned, with large houses and tree-lined roads; while it had sprung up after Partition, settled by Hindu traders who had fled their ancestral places and come to Delhi when Pakistan was forced into being; it was also an inescapable fact that it took its very name from the Sufi shrine it stood beside, and therefore from the eponymous Muslim saint, Nizamuddin, who had made this place the centre of his cult. And it was no coincidence that the so-called saint had come here during medieval times, along with all those other grasping, bloodthirsty, jihad-minded foreigners, at the point in history that had changed everything for the worse for India’s Hindus.
    If that wasn’t bad enough, the fact that there was a Sufi shrine on the edge of Nizamuddin West meant, naturally, that there were Muslims. Poor Muslims, but Muslims nonetheless. They lived around the shrine, Shiva Prasad knew, in a chaotic jumble of brick houses built any old how, slums that had gradually congealed into numbered houses and properly paved streets with all the craftiness of a colony of underwater polyps extruding their tender tendrils into coral. The poor Muslims worked for the rich Hindus; the Hindus lived in the planned residential area, keeping themselves to themselves and minding their own business. In this way the two classes and religions of Nizamuddin West remained distinct, and everybody understood the status quo. But recently, so the newspapers Shiva Prasad read informed him, the boundaries had blurred. Muslims from the old city, having become unaccountably rich selling halal