Read Leela's Book for Free Online

a beauty.
    Without mentioning a word of it to anyone, I simply dropped her into Vyasa’s tale, at one of the few places in the epic where a character didn’t have a name – Vyasa’s own bed, as it happened – as the amorous slave-girl he impregnated by mistake (after his late brother’s widows had had enough of him).
    Avatar 1: Fish
    Of course you remember the story: Vyasa’s fish-born mother conceived him out of wedlock, and then went on to marry a magnificent king, by whom she had two useless sons, one of whom died young in battle and the other of sickness even before fathering heirs upon two wives, the sisters Ambika and Ambalika. Vyasa’s mother, who, like every woman, longed to hold her offspring’s offspring in her arms (and in this way secure their kingdom), summoned her surviving son and demanded that he foist his sperm upon the sisters. Go on , she said, It’s up to you now . And so it was: Vyasa went to bed with his dead brother’s wives.
    Unlike most authors, Vyasa was not vain about his own appearance. He described it in disarming, disgusting detail: his appalling ascetic’s odour, his hideous hair, that gleam in the eyes that seems to afflict the country’s holiest of men. Ambika, whose turn it was first, cowered when she saw him approaching. She shut her eyes tight and refused to open them again until Vyasa had withdrawn himself from her presence and left her to incubate their baby alone. But the sage was not amused by her obvious displeasure. He cursed her as he left – and, true to his word, their child was born blind. Ambalika, who went second, did not like the great epic-touter either. She turned pale with repulsion when he showed his naked body to her, and this time the sage bestowed on their offspring a deathly pale complexion. But these two ill-begotten children were not enough for Vyasa’s mother. She wanted a third, and since neither Ambika nor Ambalika wished to sleep with Vyasa again, they sent a substitute, a servant-girl dressed up in royal robes.
    This was where I came in. This was where I inserted my precious Leela. It seemed like a brilliant ploy at the time, a subtle and subversive way to inviegle my character into his Mahabharata. Only later did I realise the scale of my error.
    Vyasa, you see, was quite taken by Leela: he wouldn’t leave her alone, he harried her with kisses, he pestered her with inappropriate advances. She ran from him, threw herself onto the hard stone floor of the temple where the idol of Ganesh was standing, and screamed at the statue with its dull eyes and absurd fat belly. Save me from this monster , she implored. What have I done to my creation? I said to myself as I watched her. You’ve pimped me to your enemy , she seemed to scream as she lay there. And if there had been blood in my veins it would have run cold.
    I did what I could to wrest back control. I stowed the servant-girl away on a skiff carrying Kashmiri saffron downstream to where the Yamuna joined the Ganga, and sent Vyasa off into the wilderness to indulge in some enforced meditation.
    Life expectancy for servant-girls was not very long back then. She lived out the span of her mortal life unharried by Vyasa, and though I bitterly mourned her departure – my first creation, so short-lived, so thwarted – to my delight she was soon reincarnated: this time into the bosom of an inconspicuous and low-caste fishing family who lived in long wooden boats on the banks of the River Yamuna in an out-of-the-way place called Indraprastha. She was born not long before the war that ended Vyasa’s story.
    Avatar 2: The Wife-Life
    Unfortunately, Vyasa had already had the idea to steal Indraprastha as a location for his epic. At first, I didn’t notice. It was such a nondescript little village (I thought), a mere collection of huts on the banks of the Yamuna (a lovely stream with its snowmelt, mountainbreeze and cold, deeply flowing water). But as it happened, Vyasa’s grandsons had lived there in their