Leela's Book Read Online Free PDF Page B

will show how Vyasa disrespected ladies, failed to dissuade his descendants from mutual carnage, gave students of literature headaches with his prose.
    Alas, it took an aeon to get the story out. Vyasa was a meanderer, and the sluggish river of his poetry had many tributaries, oxbow lakes and stagnant pools (not to mention too many narrators). With its gigantic cast, mindbending time span, and extensive locations, his Mahabharata was far too large, even for India. Elephantine. But I tugged and I pulled and I urged Vyasa onwards – until at last the bawling progeny of his experiences and dreams came slithering out through his labour pains, into my waiting pen.
    The thing that set these literary efforts of ours apart from any ordinary act of authorship was that while we were up on Kailash (he talking, me scribbling), down below on earth everything Vyasa spoke of was actually coming to pass . That much everybody knows: Vyasa’s characters peopled India. But the thing that nobody else has yet been apprised of – the glorious twist that I have waited until now to reveal – is that Vyasa’s Great Poem was also the fertile seedbed for my own imaginings: for my own invented cast.
    Vyasa, like all dictators, was paradoxical. He guarded his story jealously, refusing to let it be published during the lifetime of his grandsons, for they, of course, were in it, and reading it, would have known what was going to happen next. And yet, despite keeping a very strict eye on the whereabouts of the manuscript – regulating exactly who could learn which sections when – he never once stopped to check what I had written. Perhaps, having thought through those one hundred thousand shlokas twice already, he hadn’t the energy to read them again. Maybe, illiterate bard that he was, he had no way of checking. Or possibly he credited me with more godly honour than is my divine due. In short, I would still be feeling guilty today, were it not for the fact that, without my specific actions, certain important people – the top quality fabric of the story I am about to unfold – would never have seen the limey light of day.
    So there we were. Vyasa – with his version of events. And me – all outward concurrence and inward dissension – with mine. And Vyasa never noticed my interpolations until it was far too late.
    In truth, at the beginning, my people were shadowy types, marginal jottings, easily overlooked. They slipped between the pages of Vyasa’s text, namelessly traversed the hallowed Vedic scene of ancient Bharat, touched the hem of the holy Pandavas, proffered handfuls of water, vaginas of sex, prostrate bodies for the killing or selling to the waiting, warring clans. Local and imported slave-girls, elephant-riding mlecchas: the barbarian underclass of Aryan dominance, this was my clay. But I was determined to cast them right. My text was their dramatic debut; they were my directorial cue. And I had my eye on posterity. What I needed was a winning formula, a human team of characters who would grow to person-hood within the pages of Vyasa’s book, and then reincarnate across the centuries, each successive life giving each individual character the time and space to practise traits and eliminate tics, to perfect qualities and hone actions, until they had mastered my mode and message. (And yet, all too quickly, they slipped from my grasp and started dictating plot twists of their own.)
    But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us go back to the beginning. Back to those infantile Kailash days. Allow me to unveil my leading lady.
    Leela, lovely Leela, came to me one morning in a haze of undiscovered alphabets as I lay sweating on the hillside after a thankless fit of wordsmithery. She emerged fully formed from the froth and foam of my subconscious with the vagueness of a summer dusk: naked, soft, pulsing with promise, her breasts as delectable as monsoon mangoes, her stomach a gentle curve, her cow-lash eyes impossibly elongated. I had birthed