The Grammarian (17 page)

Alexandre woke up, his heart pounding. He ran his hands through his hair, wet with perspiration. He lightly touched his eyes. He turned over in the sweat-soaked sheets, trying to calm his racing heart and fall asleep.

8

T
HE SOUND OF
women’s laughter infused a lighthearted, crystalline quality to the air; the wedding preparations were under way and friends and relatives had descended on the house. There were daily trips to the railway station to greet arriving relatives. Adivi’s sisters were there, Lalita’s aunts, cousins on both sides. There were bags of marigolds, roses and strings of jasmines brought to the house by specially contracted flower vendors. They had been left in burlap bags in the garden, and their heavy perfume clung to the very walls and walkways of the home.

The astrologer set the time of the wedding ceremony at 10:39 in the evening. The rooms in the house were full with the sounds of company—friends and relatives and some of Adivi’s business partners. Everyone was to wear new clothes—Lalita had purchased dozens of new saris and suits for the guests.

Alexandre liked the simple logic of Telugu families. Families were conceptualized in generational lines—all of Lalita and Adivi’s siblings and cousins were aunts and uncles to Mohini and Anjali; all the maternal aunts were Peddamma or Pinni—Elder Mother or Younger Mother, depending on their age in relation to Lalita’s; and all the paternal uncles were Pethnaana or Chinnananna, Elder Father or Younger Father. All of their parents were grandparent to the girls—in addition to Kanakadurga, their Nainamma, there was also Vijawada Nainamma and Hyderabad Tata—all of Lalita and Adivi’s aunts and uncles, and
some tens of other relationships that seemed so simple and uncomplicated to the Adivis’ but rather the opposite to Alexandre—he had no relationship with the in-laws of his cousins’ nor with his great-uncles, and he envied in Indians a bit these huge, seemingly warm families in which everyone knew everyone. He found the number of people overwhelming. Cousins, cousins of cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and more cousins of cousins. Alexandre struggled to remember all their names but enjoyed the energy all those relatives brought to the house. He met Adivi’s three older sisters: Usha, Bharati and Hema, all of whom shared their brother’s strong brows and commanding eyes, his sense of humor and generosity and his coarse, curly hair.

A
DIVI WAS THE
youngest child of five; four girls and then him. Ten years separated Shiva from his oldest sister, Usha. As a child, he had always been closest to his second oldest sister, Draupati, who had been through all his boyhood like a second mother to him, doting over him, celebrating his achievements in school; she had been less girlish than his other sisters, who guarded their hair ribbons and powder tins jealously. As children they would sneak out the house in the afternoon when everyone else was napping after lunch to play cricket, the other boys on the pitch sworn to secrecy. No one could know that one of the Adivi girls, in her
salwaar kameez
, was running around like a boy. She could run faster than half the boys and bowl better than almost any of them. Shiva would always take a special joy in seeing the incredulous look on the faces of boys new to their game when his sister would bat. One afternoon, they had returned home late because Adivi had bloodied the nose of a boy who had pulled his sister’s hair, and Kanakadurga was waiting for them, her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed.

“Amma, I was having so much trouble with my Hindi lessons that Shiva walked me to the Hindi master’s home for some extra help!” Draupati said, her eyes surprised—they had expected their mother to still be napping.

“Really? You bothered the Hindi master during lunchtime?”

“Yes Amma, I’m sorry, but I have an exam tomorrow!”

“Huh.” Kanakadurga eyed her lying children up and down, seeing Draupati’s disheveled hair and her son’s look of nervous deception, and smiled. “Well, get inside then and keep studying.”

“Yes, Amma,” Draupati and Shiva answered, their faces beaming with gratitude at their mother’s willful ignorance.

Kanakadurga and Anil were considered wildly permissive to allow their daughters to wear
salwaar kameezes
, and in truth Anil didn’t wholly approve, but his wife insisted and on certain aspects of the girls’ care he deferred to her judgment.

Draupati died when she was twenty-six years old. The police inspectors didn’t dare tell the girl’s husband, Raja, or her parents that Draupati’s body had been reduced to mangled red ribbons between the train’s steel tracks and its wheels. The basket of eggplant and tomatoes and squash she had carried from the market was emptied all over the tracks, the police officers sliding on the slippery flesh of crushed vegetables, their skins bruised, seeds and flesh bursting as they examined the scene. The morning was windy and grey, the sky cracking with silver as the sun tried to push through, single drops of rain falling to earth as the sky threatened to break. Had she been a peasant, the body would have been quickly cleared, allowing the next train to pass through unencumbered, but because of her parents’ station and their friendship with the chief constable, Mr. Blackhall, who would sometimes stop by to have
a glass of scotch with Anil, they did a complete investigation. Blackhall posted two of his officers at the perimeter of the scene to keep Draupati’s frantic, utterly hysterical mother and her pale, shaking father from seeing their dead daughter, whose body he was grateful was at least partially hidden by the tall, vividly green grass that came to the knees of his men. Shards of her pale purple sari were tangled in the grass; and later they would find her black-beaded wedding necklace wrapped around a bolt on the train tracks. Raja stood nearby, his arms limp by his sides, looking rather helpless as silently he wondered, “What now?” They could still smell the grease and smoke from the train, the smell of burning steel, and ever since that scent made Kanakadurga nauseous.

“Anil, she must have simply not heard the train.” Blackhall forced the Adivis, with beseeching eyes, to maintain eye contact with him, to not look over his shoulder, to not try to make sense of the scene, that low grey light, that wind in the grass so strong that Kanakadurga’s hair was being whipped out of its braid, and the caps were flying from the policemen’s heads.

A week later, Blackhall brought the cleaned bridal necklace with the idea of personally giving it to Kanakadurga, unfolding it before her in the white cloth he had put it in. When she saw the gleaming black beads she screamed, “No, no! Dear God, no!” as if she had seen a ghost. And every day since, Kanakadurga would think to herself at least once, “How could she have not heard the train? Why was she out alone, running a servant’s errand?”

When the news of his sister’s death reached Adivi at his sixth-form junior college, he went to his room, free of the company of the other boys, excused by his professors, and wept silently for the loss of his beloved Draupati, his fists shaking, and he would think, making sense
not even to himself, how much he hated that vain, effeminate, spiritless, bloody Raja. Later that week, he received a letter of admission from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he would never go, because now he could not bear the idea of leaving his other sisters.

A
LL AROUND
A
LEXANDRE
was noise—the preparation of the food, the arrangement of rooms and stringing of flowers—a joyous cacophony that was at once foreign and familiar to him, as if the simple effervescence of human joy made this environment less exotic to him. And in a quiet corner, Anjali. She was on the periphery of a group of women in colorful saris, smiling but not participating in that merriment, the winking jokes about a life she wouldn’t have: that conjugal, married, normal life.

Mohini was, as if from a storybook, a nervous, blushing bride and primarily concerned herself before her wedding with the preparation of her hair and the selection of saris and jewelry that had been decided upon by herself and her mother. That glowing halo of levity that she walked in continued, and those aunts and cousins, themselves all long before married, cooed as they kissed and squeezed the beautiful bride. It was apparent that Mohini welcomed the life that was coming to her—the marriage, the family, the children—that sweet, contented and sometimes even joyful life.

F
OR HIS PART
, Alexandre had been left alone out of deference for his work. He took meals with the men, as the dining had been split into two rounds: first the men and then the ladies and children. He sometimes joined the men after dinner for a drink. Alexandre, for the first time, partook in that peculiarly segregated kind of Indian socializing:
the women spent most of their time in the kitchen or out in the garden, the men in the living room or the sitting room, where a bar had been assembled with Italian wines, Irish whiskeys and gin and vodka. “Customarily,” Adivi began, “one doesn’t drink at Hindu weddings, but certainly we can raise a glass the night before.”

A
NJALI SAT DOWN
on her bed and held the envelope up; she rarely received mail, except around the time of her birthday, when sometimes she would receive cards from relatives who lived far away. But the handwriting on this envelope was not familiar to her; neither was the name in the return address, S
MT
. S. N
AIDU
, in Hyderabad. It was addressed to K
UMARI
A
DIVI
A
NJALI
. Anjali hesitated; mail for her was rare and the pleasure was to be delayed. The envelope was a simple white; a stamp bearing Queen Victoria’s face in profile was affixed to the right corner. Anjali glanced up, making sure she had closed the door to her room behind her. She ran her fingertip over the seam of the envelope and slowly ran the gleaming blade of her father’s envelope opener across the top, splitting the envelope open cleanly, pulling out a folded, cream-colored sheet with fine, floral handwriting on it, starting, “Dear Miss Adivi, I wanted to thank you for your article.”

Anjali pushed herself back on her bed, resting her upper body against the wall, her legs up on the bed. She smiled deeply, in a way she rarely did, in a manner that revealed a warm girlishness. It was a wholly unexpected and rare thing: fan mail.

She continued to read. “I refer of course to your article ‘Free Women in a Free India,’ in the August 1911 issue of
Jai Hind
. What a rare and precious thing! A young woman like yourself who cares about the future
of her country, with so luminous an intellect, with so clear a voice! Our country’s struggle for freedom can only be fortified by young women like you, my dear, and I hope you continue to lend your mind and heart to our collective cause. Should you be able, I would love for you to attend a talk I shall be giving at the Andhra Ladies Association in Hyderabad in December, as my special guest. I hope you will be able to join me; I should love to lay eyes on the face of this young woman who speaks so passionately for the freedom of Mother India.
Vande Mataram
.”

Anjali’s mouth was open in wonder; it scarcely seemed possible. Her eyes raced to the bottom of the letter; it was signed Sarojini Naidu, a name Anjali was very familiar with—the so-called Nightingale of India, the tiny female poetess who had won the Nizam’s scholarship to attend Cambridge years earlier. Sometimes Anjali would listen to Sarojini recite poems on All-India Radio in her grandmother’s room after the radio dramas or a concert of classical music broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall.

Without pause, Anjali took up pen and paper, copying the return address from the letter onto a fresh white envelope. She started, nearly shaking with excitement and joy: “Dear Mrs. Naidu, my gratitude for your note cannot be put into words. And I am in no small degree self-conscious of how my own humble words must seem so poor, so inadequate in comparison with your own. Alas, I cannot compare to a poet of such note as yourself. With profound thanks I accept your invitation to the Christmastime event at the University. I look so very forward to meeting you. Sincerely yours, Adivi Anjali.”