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never once (so Vyasa was said to curse) touched his feet or called herself his servant; she neglected to address him as her god; she failed to wait for him to come home in the evening before licking her supper plate shiny clean. Worst crime of all, she refused to bear him a child. ‘I need to conserve my energies,’ she would repeat, ‘for other activities.’ When she did give herself to him, it was the wrong time of month, and the time-release ovarian engine was out of sync. She was a scientific lady who knew the rhythms of her body. Her science paid off. She remained childless.
    Back then, Vyasa had old-fashioned ideas. He was appalled by her absence of maternal instinct and independence of mind; he believed she was tampering with Nature, contravening the Laws of Life; refusing his genes their eternal due. She spat back with sarcastically culled quotes from a handy precursor to the Laws of Manu: You have six choices for begetting a son: Foist him on your wife, take him as a present, buy him, rear him, adopt him or find yourself a better broodmare elsewhere .
    In the end, Vyasa did as Manu advised and got himself a bride who came into the house with bowed head and hymen intact at the age of twelve. Vyasa hoped to teach this recalcitrant elder wife a lesson in Vedic ethics; to spur Leela on to jealousy-induced conception; and to receive, in the meantime, the attention he deserved from a younger spouse.
    But Leela was delighted with the arrival of her special saheli, her girlfriend. She whispered to Meera: I am fed up with men . She explained, over the sound of tinkling bathwater as they lathered each other’s backs and winkled grime from behind respective ears, her theory of female emancipation; she elaborated, as they crouched together in the courtyard sifting rice, upon the methods they would deploy to convert their husband to the light; she was very clear, as they picked up kindling from the forest outside, about the means available to them if he refused.
    Meera, as pristine as she was voluptuous, had been born into the usual, traditional kind of family. When she returned home, twelve months after the nuptials, not yet pregnant, her head full of extremist ideas, her father quit his boasting and sat down to write a complaining letter to his son-in-law.
    But Vyasa was helpless. It was easy for his first wife to strike up an intimacy with wife number two; the river was the channel of their friendship; and Leela, who swam like a nagi, took Meera down to the water the morning after her arrival, determined that she, too, would learn that freedom resided in the waves and the shallows.
    They paddled there, below the old abandoned Pandava palace. At dusk, they wandered through the burnt-out rooms, picking their way over fallen rafters, wondering where it was that Draupadi had lived – ‘with her five husbands, Meera!’ said Leela. At night, Vyasa would return to the hut he had built them just to the south of the palace, and as they prepared the food for dinner, he would begin to recount another of those tales for which he was famous. ‘And how,’ Meera would ask innocently, ‘was it that you fathered the Pandavas’ father and uncle?’ And Vyasa would begin to explain how his mother’s two younger sons were killed by battle and disease, and that she, needing a mate for her daughters-in-law, came to see Vyasa and begged him to procreate with his half-brother’s widows. ‘On the first night,’ Leela interrupted, ‘the first sister shut her eyes in horror at the sight of you, and on the second night the second sister turned pale with fright, and on the third night these two women – who couldn’t bear your advances any longer – sent a servant-girl in their place.’ And Meera would put back her head and laugh, as the tears sprang into her eyes.
    In short, under Leela’s tuition, Meera grew rebellious, and the unfortunate joint husband – unable to impregnate them – was forced, like his grandfather, to foist his