The Grammarian (14 page)

“Go! Get out!” Adivi strode past the gate, angrily dismissing the beggars with a wave of his hand. Their penury was highly distasteful to him, he who had no problem with the charity of churches but found repulsive their dirty hands and shamelessness and most of all the sense of entitlement that seemed so terribly apparent when they left the gates empty-handed and angry. Poverty was no excuse for poor manners, in Adivi’s mind, and perhaps indeed poor manners and their tasteless display were the cause of it. No, Adivi, like others of his class, had no problem with charity, but to his mind there was a time and a place, and Adivi cared only for those charitable actions that could be considered great. It was only a question of taste.

“Dr. Lautens!” Adivi greeted him, walking down the corridor. “I’m sorry—I should have mentioned your work space would be disturbed this morning—the garden cleaning should be finished in a bit. What with the wedding soon, there is much extra work to do.”

Alexandre smiled. “Not at all! I can work in my room.”

“No! Please, use the dining room? It is a bit cooler in there. I’ll have Mary bring you some tea? Actually I shall join you soon for tiffin.”

“Thank you, Shiva, I will see you shortly then.”

“Wonderful.”

Adivi shouted at one of the servants in the garden to tell Mary to prepare some tea. Alexandre was happy to find that the language was becoming easier and easier for him to understand. He watched as a dispirited young woman with a missing front tooth made her way through the back of the garden to the servants’ quarters adjacent to the kitchen in search of Mary.

I
T COULD HAVE
been a trick of light, a quick, odd look that meant nothing, that moment that Mohini saw herself from the side, walking past a mirror. She turned and faced the mirror, face forward, her shoulders back and brave, and the stab she felt subsided—she was beautiful again, and turned her chin this way and that, and thanked God she could not quite get sight again of that girl she had seen a moment earlier, what could not be and she would never let happen, becoming a less than remarkable girl.

W
HEN
A
LEXANDRE ENTERED
the dining room, a cup of tea had already been set out for him, alongside some biscuits. He could hear the sounds of cooking coming from the kitchen. He set out his notebook and began writing. Alexandre ran his hand over the clean white sheet of paper before him and wrote “Adjectives” across the top. Looking for a moment at the page with a wavering pen, he softly put the pen down and put his head in his hands and sighed.

He heard a giggle. “It can’t be all that difficult, Dr. Lautens.” Mohini stood across the room from him, a white plate holding a cut-open fruit in her hands. She smiled at him.

Alexandre felt the blood rise to his ears. She was wearing what he had come to learn was a
lengha-oorni
, a half sari: a floor-length pleated skirt, a sari blouse and a chiffon scarf wrapped around her waist and thrown over one shoulder. The girl was dressed in greens and blues and a trim of gold. She looked like a siren luring sailors off course. And that moment, Mohini misread his blushing embarrassment as irritation.

Mohini, when men were angry with her, felt that it was as much a failure of her beauty as a failure of action. Hers was an existence of
a glowing halo of goodness, of loving smiles offered, a quiet, sweet disposition—that kind of floating-skirt female presence that betrayed an air of gracious submission to the needs of those around her. And it was an air that was met with a steady commentary on that perfect confluence of her beauty and sweetness, that willing submission that was understood as a loving nature among her relatives and the family friends. That it was as much an impression created with silk and jewels as with kindness was of no concern to Mohini, who understood her beauty to be a manifestation of that intrinsic goodness that she knew she embodied by the way others praised her. “Manam Mahasundari!” her aunts and uncles would say, pinching her cheeks, “our great beauty!” Her parents too saw her beauty as a radiant expression of their daughter’s virtue. Mohini never went by unnoticed, though she tried to give the impression that she didn’t much care if she was; her father’s particular kind of disposition, slightly ostentatious, was fine for a man but distasteful in a woman. And Mohini sought above all else to be a girl of good taste. That she flattered her parents so well was an added pleasure, as lovely as a dusting of gold on the family crest.

“Daddy told me you were studying in here.” She began to walk toward him. “I thought I’d bring you some fruit.”

“Oh thank you, how kind,” Alexandre stood, his fingertips brushing hers as he took the plate from her. Tuberoses were tucked into the joints of her braid, and when she stood close the fragrance hung over them both like a sweet nostalgic veil, and all together, that moment, with the beautiful butter-colored girl and the scent of hot silk and coconut oil and white flowers radiating from her, was so heady it nearly brought tears to his eyes.

Alexandre looked down at the fruit. “What kind of fruit is this?” The curious fruit’s green shell held black seeds covered in creamy, sweet, white flesh.

“
Sitaphalam
—in English you call it . . . ” She looked up, thinking, “custard apple.”

“
Sitaphalam
. . . Sita’s fruit?”

“Yes . . . after Sita in the Ramayana, though I don’t know why exactly it is called that . . . What are you working on, Dr. Lautens?”

“My chapter on adjectives in Telugu.”

“Ah . . . can I help you?”

Alexandre touched the page of his notebook, accusatory in its blankness. He smiled, amused and surprised by her candid offer. Though consultation with Anjali had become the norm, he’d never thought to ask Mohini.

“Well, yes, of course . . . ”

She raised her eyebrows. Alexandre looked at her briefly. He noticed her lower lip was fuller than the top one, which gave her a look of perpetual petulance and innocence. There was such purity in her expression—as if she had no inner machinations. But rather than having the effect of disarming him, Alexandre felt more uneasy around her.

“Very well . . . then, well, in the previous chapter, I discussed the nominal system, basically how nouns operate in Telugu, and well,” Alexandre sat down and continued. He motioned to the plate of fruit on the table, “so that the reader could construct the phrase, ‘the custard apple,’ and basically, this chapter is so that they can start to construct more complicated strings, like . . . ”

“. . . the green custard apple . . .
aku pacca sitaphalam
,” Mohini offered.

“Yes, or the . . . sour custard apple.”

Alexandre looked hard at the girl, in a way that made her feel searched, and she looked down. He continued to look at her face, and he breathed in the dizzying, soporific tuberose. “Will you join me? I couldn’t possibly eat this all by myself.” His arm reached toward her, an alabaster limb with pale blue veins, that naked arm that had held in its embrace many girls, years ago, when he ran through the streets of Paris, a feckless boy Adonis with broad shoulders, dark curls and blue eyes like small planets the color of the sea. Those days, he would lie in repose on a strange bed and watch a pretty girl dress and was never sad to see her go; he loved women and the way they stretched his sensual imagination—their smell and skin, but he had always been a boy who was secretly lonely in his soul, always feeling guilty for making any closer association than his pretty, friendless mother.

Now, Alexandre’s hand wavered near Mohini’s hair, the tip of his finger brushing the edge of a white petal. “
Rajanigandha
,” he pronounced carefully. “The perfume of the night.” He had heard the sadhus say that unmarried girls were meant to avoid its scent. The flowers smelled like night closing in, like an evening in a hot, restless city, like diesel and brave women, and Alexandre wondered for a moment why this posy of a girl would wear something so ruinous in her hair.

Mohini smiled, a slight nervousness coloring her expression, and Alexandre realized suddenly how forward he was being. He colored and withdrew his hand. She opened her mouth to speak when her parents walked in, Lalita a few paces behind her husband, and Mohini rushed toward Shiva and lovingly threw her arms around her father, her bosom lowering as she exhaled.

“I was just bringing Dr. Lautens some fruit, Daddy,” she said as Adivi cupped her face, kissing her forehead.

Adivi always smiled when he saw his younger daughter. Hers was that ephemeral, bright quality of girlhood, her ever-hopeful countenance like a pretty mermaid breaking murky sea waves. Hers was, in that house, a uniquely cheerful presence that broke through the somber air like a singular beam of levity.

Lalita passed through the room, greeting Alexandre, her smile a tense line on her face. She worried for Mohini, seeing things a mother sees, that a woman’s virtue is something that must ever be guarded—even the slightest hint of ill repute and she may never be able to recover. A man could not understand this, not even a father. Once a girl’s reputation is damaged, it is ruined forever and Lalita thought: “In India, we never let a woman forget how she has failed.”

Mohini’s effect on her father was one that was easily visible to Alexandre, like a square of light moving over a dark corridor. Under her influence, Adivi seemed a handsome young father, his face proud and bright with the hope of an irresistibly normal life. And Alexandre, his heart aching, felt sympathy for that father, who, saddled with the tragedy of his older daughter’s plight, chose instead of a derailing affection that happy, easy love and that glowing light of his younger girl’s beauty and promise.

She entered the room as light as a songbird, such a thing apart from her sister’s heavy, lumbering gait. And mesmerized too by her girlish flight, Alexandre could almost understand why Adivi preferred his younger daughter for the easy joy he found in her rather than that surely endless free fall into sympathy and sorrow provoked by Anjali. But then again, Alexandre thought, “Who asked Adivi to choose?” As
a father, Alexandre felt that the love he felt for one child did not make smaller the love he felt for the other.

As a child, frightened by that occasional sound and light show outside his window, the thunder, the flashes of lightening coming from some faraway point in the horizon, silver and green trees dancing violently in the storm in hastily emptied Geneva streets, the rain and leaves thrown against his bedroom window, Alexandre recalled running to the arms of his preternaturally calm father, Maurice’s hand on his head, his ear pressed to his father’s chest, listening to his steady and reassuring heartbeat, and for that memory alone Alexandre could not imagine without extreme sorrow any child being denied her father’s love. He wondered if Adivi was a man without compassion, or if, rather, he was one with such an extreme capacity for it that it was a source of embarrassment. It seemed to Alexandre that the only way a man like Adivi would handle embarrassment—handsome, perfectly mannered, neatly dressed, controlled Adivi—was through anger.

As if to compensate, Alexandre doted on Anjali, smiling indulgently at her when she joined him for coffee or tea, but he feared his attentions came from that repugnant place of pity, and if so, he wondered if this was apparent to the girl. It was like the enraging pity he felt for paupers in the streets of Paris or those child beggars in Bombay, all of them so shameless in their need, those unpolished personifications of modernity’s failings—none of the gloss or sophistication of society—instead writhing and trembling with outstretched hands like pitiful savages before God. And there was Anjali, that constant reminder to Adivi of human fragility, and Alexandre at that moment felt for Adivi, that strong, modern man, more pity than he could ever summon for the man’s eldest daughter.

“Oh, where is Mary? I asked her to see that Dr. Lautens was comfortable.” Adivi frowned. “She’s weeping for that . . . that Clough.” Adivi turned apologetically at Alexandre. “I’m so sorry Dr. Lautens, these servants . . . you see, her minister is sick—no, that isn’t correct—he is dying, and Mary’s son works for him as a preacher. She’s been weeping for him all morning,” he said, irritated.

Alexandre had heard about the American missionary John Clough, the so-called Apostle to the Telugu, who worked in the area with the untouchables and had baptized his first Telugu person sixty years earlier, but he had no idea that Mary had any family other than the one she worked for.

Adivi sighed and turned to Mohini, “Run along dearest.”

Adivi pulled a chair out for himself and shouted for Mary to bring in lunch. Alexandre sucked the sweet, white meat of the custard apple off a black seed and looked up to see Mohini smile at him before she left the room.

“W
HAT BECOMES OF
unmarried girls, Kanakadurga Amma Garu?” Alexandre asked.

The old woman smiled, her expression rueful and weary. “She will inherit half of her father’s money, Dr. Lautens. Half the land, half our family jewelry. Her sister will get the other half of course, but Anjali will also get the house, so she can live here the rest of her life, taking care of her parents, and when we are all gone, the land will be passed back to Mohini’s children.”

“There is no hope that she can get married?”

“I love my Anjali more than anyone in the world, Dr. Lautens, but no one is going to marry a plain girl with a deformity and dark skin,
not even a well-bred one with some land and money . . . ” Kanakadurga paused, smiling, “My Anjali, you see. She has something special. A beam of valor. She is brave, she is intrepid. Once, when the girls were little, before Anjali became sick, I woke up one morning and I heard Mohini screaming—there was a spider on her bed. And Anjali was there—”