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made-up palace; and later it would become the Mughal headquarters; and subsequently the capital of British India, by then renamed Delhi. Had I foreseen this, I would certainly have moved my Leela on elsewhere. But back then I was innocent of history’s grubby paws, and could not conceive of anywhere more discreet than this scraggle of champak trees and small collection of fish-odourated people.
    With joy I observed Leela turning from a girl into a woman; smiled as I saw what a headstrong young person my imagination had spawned; laughed to myself as I witnessed how my creation had inherited my love of storytelling. For as she ferried passengers across the river, Leela sang songs of the republics ruled by women in the land beyond the Great Himalaya; of the hill tribes to the west where women danced without censure; of the matriarchal rulers of the south, where mothers gave their children money, moral guidance and even the names they carried (… and the fathers, it was whispered, cleaned the house and prepared the dinner). So famed did these rebellious ditties become, so frequently did they turn the heads of the women who heard them – child-brides in fertile red being carried off to their weddings, mothers pregnant with their seventh offspring, grandmothers bent under decades of labour – that they came to the hearing of Vyasa himself, who travelled downstream to take a look at my Leela and gauge the challenge she posed to his avowed mission of peopling the land with the fruit of his loins, with a breed of warriors of particular ferocity.
    Leela was not afraid of the wily old Brahmin. She had a low opinion of his cheap narrative machinations, and she voiced it thus to anyone who would listen. She said she had heard the implausible story he had put about of his mother’s conception (of how his grandfather, the king, entrusted his sperm to a bird, who dropped it into a river where it fell into the mouth of a piscine goddess) and as far as she was concerned, it stank: a fishy tale, invented by Vyasa to make his mother sound high-caste, and his own subsequent conception purer. Leela herself recounted a more prosaic version: that the queen, Vyasa’s step-grandmother, was barren; that the king risked his heirs upon the river ladies who lived in such freedom on the banks of his kingdom; that only an unscrupulous liar like Vyasa could have foisted such an outrageous story on humankind through his deceitful epic.
    By now Vyasa was a sage great in austerities and since it was irksome to have one’s reputation assaulted by an insignificant ferry-woman, he arrived at the riverbank prepared to silence her. But as he watched Leela rowing passengers across the river, returning with her boat, waiting with one foot on the bank and the other on the prow, her toes stained with henna, her hair uncovered, the five-metre cloth of her sari not even attempting to conceal the curve of her bosom; as soon he glimpsed her – this lithe-limbed lass dressed in very little attire, the cold dark water swirling her unstitched cloth like monsoon clouds around her thighs – he had a better idea. At dusk, he approached the bank and called across to where Leela was sitting with her feet up on an island in the middle of the river. Turning her head, catching sight of his improper looks of longing, she cursed him for his attempts to learn her songs and steal her stories, and for his designs to elevate himself away from the amphibious riverstock of his mother.
    Unfortunately, when it came to illustrious matches and the monetary rewards offered by powerful Brahmin sages, Leela’s opinion of the matter made no difference to her father. Vyasa went to speak with him; and by the time I came to know of the matter, Leela was wedded to my foe.
    At first, I took this sharp maneouvre on Vyasa’s part as an attack on my story. Thankfully, Leela wasn’t so easily cowed. She refused – so it was rumoured – to behave with propriety towards her new lord and master. She