Free Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami Page B

became alarmed and begged Vishwamitra to stop defying the laws of the universe, which decreed that human beings should shed their worldly skin before leaving earth. Vishwamitra gave in to their pleas, but because he had promised Trishanku that he would send him to heaven, he stopped the king in the void between heavenand earth and created another heaven around him. And so the poor king was condemned to hang upside down between worlds, unable to do anything other than wait for the universe to end. And so, when somebody is neither here nor there we say that they have attained Trishanku’s heaven, not a very pleasant state of being at all!”
    Leela waited for Akka to add an example of a real person who resided in this state of perpetual indecision—this was how she ended each of her story sessions. Yesterday, when she had told the story of Lakshmana, the faithful brother of King Rama, who left his wife and a life of comfort to serve his older brother in exile for fourteen years, Akka had pointed at Leela and said, “Your father is a lucky man to have such devoted younger brothers. Why, if not for them, goodness knows what your father would have done in his time of difficulty.”
    At the mention of her father’s “difficulty,” Leela had blushed. Was it her fault that her father, Hari Shastri, had strolled down the street in London on which Rosa Schweers had lived? That a potted geranium which she had been watering had fallen off the windowsill and hit Hari on his head? That Rosa had come running down the stairs to help the unfortunate young man get up? That Hari, on opening his eyes, had seen a pair of charming breasts threatening to spill out of a lacy nightgown (Rosa had a weakness for that garment), topped by a pretty, anxious young face and, as her mother had often told Leela, had promptly fallen in love? And, carried by that tide of affection, had married Rosa Schweers, a casteless German woman of no known family? Was it Leela’s fault that shewas the product of that union? Leela wished that she had the courage to fling these questions at her grandmother. But the old lady terrified her almost as much as she inspired a desperate need for approval in Leela’s small heart. Leela wanted more than anything to see a look of pride in Akka’s eyes.
    Beside her, Narayana nudged Vishnu and whispered something. Vishnu shot Leela a look and giggled.
    Her grandmother’s dark eyes turned to her favourite child. “What is it, Naani, what are you and your brother laughing about? Let us all hear this joke,” she said indulgently, stroking his thick, curly hair.
    Narayana wriggled about and shot his brother sly grins but kept his mouth shut. Vishnu, however, could not keep quiet. “He says that our Leela is up-in-the-air like that upside-down king, Akka.” He covered his mouth with his hand and giggled again.
    “Like Trishanku?” Akka asked. “And why do you say that, Naani, my pet?”
    Leela glanced from her cousins to her grandmother, not sure whether she was supposed to feel flattered or upset by the comparison.
    “Because she is also half here and half there, that’s why,” Naani explained. “Like the Anglo-Indians of Cox Town.”
    Leela felt as if her heart would burst with shame and hurt. To be compared to those people, so reviled by good Hindu families like her own—it was unbearable! Tears burned twin trails down her cheeks as she rose to her feet and ran to the drawing room, where her father usually spent his afternoons, alone, lying on the divan readinglaw journals or the newspaper, while her mother rested upstairs in her darkened bedroom.
    Rosa was always resting; everything made her ill or nervous—the dust, the heat, the food, the old neem tree outside her window, which she had had trimmed so thoroughly that it listed to one side away from the house, as if in weary disgust. Most of all Rosa was sick of the people in this house, particularly her mother-in-law, Akka. Her dislike was reciprocated with much