Leela's Book by Alice Albinia

kisses him / And charms him with her ardent moans .’ He looked up: ‘These Bengalis!’
    His levity had the desired effect. Finally, at last – as needed to happen – the two men laughed.
    But then Uncle Hari sat down opposite him, and Ram saw that the elder man’s smile had vanished. His uncle turned the drink slowly in his hand and took a sip. ‘Did my brother ever hold a position in the Party?’ he asked at last.
    Ram shook his head. His father’s expectation – continually disappointed – at being favoured by the party was one of the themes of his childhood. He distinctly remembered, as a ten-year-old, vowing that he would never grow up to be a man like his father: constantly waiting on the Party for favours and promotions that never materialised, forever leading his family with him up false avenues of hope, telling stories that infected their mother, too, so that she whispered to her children that their father was just about to be asked to stand for election to the Lower House, and had only to decide where to contest from: a constituency in Madhya Pradesh (where he hailed from) or Delhi, where the family was now settled. Ram alone, it seemed, understood the truth: that his father was far too ideological to be a politician; that he had no real sense of how things worked; that his school-going son knew better what made the wheels of the world turn than he did. As a teenager, taken along to Party meetings (and the Party was then in its infancy as a political force in India), Ram saw with a jab of humiliation how the big bosses smiled condescendingly on Shiva Prasad for his passionate pronouncements, and humoured him in his vision of himself as a political actor, but that when it came to actually getting things done, there were other, more pragmatic people that they turned to. Shiva Prasad was disappointed time and again, and nobody else in the family saw it for what it was. Neither Ram’s mother nor his sisters dared to look each other in the eye and speak the truth: that their father had spent his entire life waiting for something to happen that never would.
    Ram had not spoken of this to anybody before, but now it all came out, and Uncle Hari listened, not with a gleam of satisfaction, but with a sad look of sympathy, that of a younger brother mourning the mortification of the elder.
    ‘You must not forget him, Ram,’ said Hari. ‘You must still visit.’
    It was nearing midnight by the time Hari and Leela said goodnight to Ram and walked across the hallway to their bedroom. As the hand of his watch moved northwards Ram became impatient; but he didn’t move from the couch until the bedroom door had shut behind his aunt and uncle and he was sure that they had turned in for the night. He waited a minute further, and then he ran outside and up the steps to his special suite of rooms along the roofline, pushed open the door to his bedroom and switched on his new laptop, brought over by Uncle Hari from America, which was waiting for him on the bedside table. Uncle and Auntie slept one floor down at the other end of the house. Nevertheless, Ram took the precaution of locking the door.
    Ram dialled up the Internet connection, logged onto Delhiwallah’s House of Sin, entered the prebooked cyber room, and waited. Fifteen seconds elapsed. Then a message: ‘Are you there, Man-God? It’s me, Manhattan Mania.’
    Ram had had boyfriends ever since he was six years old, and he had been having sex since the sultry afternoon of Gandhi-ji’s birthday (it was a school holiday) when he did it with the son of his parents’ mali. But this one – this shy Internet lover whom he had never met in person – was special. They had come across each other in the House of Sin six months ago: ‘Let me touch you,’ Man-God (Ram) had written, and Manhattan Mania , who had clearly never done anything like this before, typed back: ‘Gently then.’
    It had begun like that. They would meet at midnight in their chatroom twice a week