The Grammarian (19 page)

Alexandre’s tunic clung to him, and his wet hair fell back over his head in slick, dark curls. His skin and eyelashes sparkled in the early light with drops of seawater, his eyes shimmering in amusement. He seemed to glow in the light, and she thought him never more beautiful than at that moment—alive and free in the water, his skin pale against
the darkness of his hair, his body tall against the bright orange and gold of the sun moving up, steady against the horizon. He cradled her head in the crook of his arm as a groom might hold a bride or a mother her child.

She looked up at the grand stretch of blue and gold sky, having never felt more joy, at peace with life, more full of hope for all her dearest held wishes. The fishermen continued to call out to them, their bodies ebony and midnight blue against the bright sunshine, their wooden boats covered with colorful sheets and their green and black nets. They yelled out to them, laughing at the ridiculous girl, in wet clothing no less obscene to them than nudity, the strange European man with her. She felt wonderfully outrageous. She couldn’t believe herself.

He did not know why he did it; he only knew that not before in his time in India had he felt more himself, more free in this stifling land with its strict codes. He held the girl in his arms. He lifted her body into the sea and for a moment imagined releasing her.

The morning sun bounced its light off their skin, and the sea and sand: everything was bright with the evanescing promises morning brings, and her skin shone gold as his did in silver, the water crackling with sun, the fishermen lifting up nets full of fish like bags of silver coins out of the generous and yielding ocean.

When the girl’s hair fell out loose over the water she seemed for a moment lovely. He saw her for a moment as the girl she could have been, had circumstances and fate been different. Her expression was different, as if for the first time she had forgotten pain.

She could feel the strength in his arms, his enormous strength written across his broad chest and the taut line of his lips, she could feel the sinews and the veins in his forearms and hands, she could
feel the pulsing heat of his blood under his skin washed away again and again by the cold water of the sea. She felt as light as air, utterly weightless, her body trembling with joy and she wanted to put her head under the water so she could cry for all the joy, and love she felt at that moment. She thought for a moment of drowning so as to never have to live this life as before, because she now knew what it felt like to be awake.

Dawn became morning and he carried her back to the shallows and they walked back to shore. She looked at him in his wet clothes. It was the first time she had seen the striking linear beauty of a man’s body and she blushed. They squeezed the water from their clothes and hair. He shook the sand from his pant legs.

Rajiv, the driver, was leaning against the carriage smoking, wearing an expression of scorn. Alexandre turned to Anjali and raised his eyebrows mockingly. She smiled, as if they shared as secret.

He helped Anjali back into the carriage and felt sad, knowing they would soon return home. Inside the carriage, she leaned her body weight against his for a moment before retreating to her side.

Alexandre knew that soon enough, life would take him away from this place, that part of his duty of studying these languages he loved was sharing them with his fellow scholars—he would not have all his life to listen to the Indians barter at the vegetable stand in Telugu. But today he had brought a girl joy, and he would remember that. He would remember this morning, remember the exhilaration and the joy of those long, wet moments: the colors of blue and gold, and the sound of the mighty ocean, inhaling the ever-present perfume of Indian jasmine, so different from that of the Grasse jasmine his grandmother had once grown in her garden.

He watched the villages pass them by, India in browns and the pastels of the sunrise, the whites of the men’s clothing.

“Dr. Lautens . . . ” she gasped at last, as if she’d been holding her breath.

He turned to look at her; her skin was glowing, her hair in wet tangles over her shoulders.

She looked at him, her eyes wide with gratitude. She wanted to thank him, but could not find the right words.

They sat there in the coach, no more than a mere foot apart. His affection for her was at once fraternal and fatherly and something else; what a failure of words, he thought. In Europe, he could affectionately clasp her hand in his, with its lunar transparency. He could perhaps look into that plain, dark face and see that sister soul in her.

And yet, sitting next to her, in this stateless state, that nation without words that exists in the space between two people, how silly those things seemed: countries and maps and borders, empires and colonies, those absurd constructs of his world, that world of men, like the winnings of two boys playing a board game, moving toy trains and ships around the perimeter of a square. “My words are failing me,” he thought.

“I thought it was terrible that a girl with such an affection for water should also be afraid of it; you spoke so poetically about the Ganges—the lotus flowers and the dolphins; it seemed a pity to me that it should be your only experience of being in water.” He looked at her with immeasurable kindness, a sort of sweetness that made her skin warm. He touched her hand lightly. “Well, you are quite safe Anjali; and I’m sure we needn’t tell your parents.” He smiled, his face the radiant and warm expression of his feeling that he had just done something terribly kind.

They came to a stop, waiting for some cattle and their herd to cross the road, and Alexandre turned abruptly and took Anjali’s face in his hand. He looked at her, his face full of affection. He almost kissed her forehead, but he stopped himself.

As they made their way back to the home, they spoke of the times and of the politics of the day.

They passed the British administrative bungalows, the Indian soldiers acting as guards at the gates, the railway station.

Alexandre motioned at the station halfheartedly. “Whatever you think of the English, they have given India the best railway system in the world . . . ”

“There are things more important than trains,” Anjali replied.

But her heart wasn’t in the argument, not then. She was too consumed with the sudden beauty of everything around her, that blue sky like the cobalt of her grandmother’s Krishna idol, the sun passing through the coach, shimmering through the branches and leaves of the trees that lined the roads, the pristine quality of the morning air. Anjali felt as if everything around her was blossoming. The light, the sea, the sky, the feeling of joy that was rupturing inside of her: the shimmering beauty of a new life made her heart ache—an utterly new feeling of girlish hope.

They stopped talking until Alexandre said quietly, “We are home.”

Alexandre looked hard at Anjali. He thought for a moment of saying that he knew it must be hard to watch her younger sister get married. But her face was so pure with happiness that he stopped himself and thought to let her have this moment.

And Alexandre looked at Anjali and for the first time really thought about the difference between sadness as a state and sadness as a quality, and how as a quality it could change a girl and make her an old
woman, make the very light shine less brightly off her skin so that she seemed to be older and less luminous than the child she actually was, and even the timbre of her voice was that grave and sometimes trembling voice of a woman who had seen at least eighty monsoons and eighty summers in this scorched-earth land that was India. For the moment she seemed like a girl.

And this isn’t the way life is supposed to be, not this, this hopelessness, this girl on the outside looking in, and it broke Alexandre’s heart. For Alexandre, to see someone in such a state of sorrow left him only two options: he could look away, pretending he didn’t see, and allow her that privacy of heartbreak, or he could embrace her, and nearly against his will Alexandre momentarily enfolded her in his arms.

Lautens turned and saw the house, looming at the end of the road. As they pulled up, he waited a pregnant moment, expecting Rajiv to open the doors. But Rajiv leaned back heavily into his seat and, turning, looked at Alexandre sternly.

Alexandre grimaced in an expression of irony and then he smiled and released the door locks. He stepped out and reached back in for Anjali’s hand, helping the girl out. “Come,” he said.

He could see her cane resting on a chair in the front garden. “Let me fetch that for you,” he said, and he walked over briskly to get it.

Handing it to her, he held her arm as she steadied herself.

“Dr. Lautens, thank you,” Anjali smiled an easy, glittering smile. “After we bathe, I can ask Mary to bring out lunch to the verandah, if you’d like.”

Alexandre felt a sudden spasm in his chest. He saw in Anjali’s eyes a look he had seen so many times in his youth, before he met Madeline. Anjali’s eyes were bright with love; it was the last thing he expected
from her. Alexandre hung his head for a moment, before answering coldly, “Actually, Anjali, I’m rather tired. I think I need to rest.” A cloud fell over Alexandre’s face as he turned on his heel in the direction of his bedroom.

H
E DECIDED HE
would avoid her for the rest of the day, after which things could return to normal. She was a smart girl and would begin to understand things as they really were; she would shake off her infatuation. Had he been a cruel man, he might have handled things more directly.

I
F SHE HAD
known men better, perhaps Anjali would have registered Alexandre’s look of dread. But her heart was soaring, so she took Alexandre’s claim of fatigue as the truth. She thought nothing of it. Watching Alexandre retreat, Anjali smiled deeply and felt her face get hot as she looked down and began to walk to her room, calling along the way toward the servants’ quarters, “Mary! Bring hot water for my bath!”

Mary’s voice was caught in the echo of the marbled halls, “Yes, Miss!” Many of the guests had eaten lunch already and were taking naps; despite how full the home was, it seemed quiet for the moment.

Before she began her bath, Anjali found Prithu and gave him a few coins to go out and purchase a string of jasmines for her hair—the flower vendors were still out on the main road. Anjali had a momentary strange thought.

Mary brought in a large steel bucket of hot water. Anjali closed the door behind her and began to undress. She saw her legs only when she would catch a glimpse of them when she dressed and bathed, but these
glimpses amounted to little more than a brown blur of a familiar body in motion, but today she looked at them, for suddenly they didn’t seem important enough to avoid. The muscle atrophy had made the affected leg thinner, and thus it seemed longer too. It disgusted her still, but she allowed herself to skip her fingertip along the strange shape of her calf. She smiled, remembering briefly what it was like to walk without her cane that morning.

As Anjali began her bath, she felt her muscles relax and she let her mind wander. She wondered about the flower vendor—what of his family and his interests? How could he have anything real when he was on the road holding a basket of marigolds and jasmines all the time? Then she remembered the fishmonger feeding the street dog and smiled.

But for her, for Anjali that day, everything was now different. That haunting feeling of absurdity was gone. There seemed too a line tethering her to the world in a warm embrace of possession. She saw beauty now in the crystalline water of her bath and even, as she washed it, in her own unremarkable hair. After washing herself of the saltwater and sand, Anjali dressed herself in an orange sari. She took the white blossoms Prithu had left on her dresser in her hands, inhaling them deeply before pinning them into her braid.

She called Mary to bring some curries, yogurt and rice out to the garden. Anjali sat in the garden, expecting Alexandre to come out for lunch as he customarily did.

A
LEXANDRE SAT ON
the edge of his bed, smoking. A moment of guilt had washed over him, but it dissipated as quickly: he reminded himself of the mercurial nature of schoolgirl infatuations. He reminded himself of the simple kindness of his intentions.

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