The Grammarian (24 page)

“Don’t worry too much about her my boy . . . she’s probably just been sent away to some spinster aunt until this ‘scandal’ blows over. Indians are gossips . . . once their neighbors and relatives have something else to talk about, you know, once some unmarried girl finds herself with child, or someone’s cousin is caught drunk making a scene at the social club, her parents will call her back.”

Alexandre looked out the window, expressionless.

T
HEY HAD DINNER
that night. He, Anthony and Madhuri, and as Alexandre watched the two of them banter, and the affection and humor between them, he missed the women in his life. Anthony and Madhuri used the familiar “you” form between them,
nuvvu
, like
tu
in French. A linguistic undressing. Despite the disparity in age between them, they seemed like young sweethearts, and Alexandre felt a pang of jealousy.

After dinner, Madhuri and the maid cleared the table, and Anthony and Alexandre went to the sitting room to smoke.

“Dear Doctor, you look pensive this evening . . . you hardly spoke during dinner . . . is something on your mind?” Anthony smiled deeply, his cheeks red. “Surely you are not still worrying about that girl?”

“Oh, it is nothing, Anthony.”

“Oh, come now, Alex! You’ve been here, what? A week? Friendships move faster in India. We are old mates now! Tell me!”

“Well . . . ” Alexandre smiled slightly, “I was wondering, well, I have a question for you Anthony but it is rather untoward—”

“You were wondering how I’ve managed to stay so handsome all these years?” Anthony laughed from his belly.

Alexandre laughed too, and then asked, “You wife . . . Patricia, right? Does she know about Madhuri?”

Anthony laughed again. “Oh, Alex. God bless. Old Pat knows about Madhuri . . . well, of course she thinks she is only my cook. No, she doesn’t know the exact nature of our relationship, no . . . Pat is a good woman; she’s the mother of my boys, she laughs at all my jokes and she can drink me under the table. As long as she has a little extra money to put on the horses, and cake and cider for her knitting circle, she’s happy. Me, I need whiskey and a pretty girl in my bed. Believe me, Alex, Madhuri is the best thing to happen to my marriage. Pat and I have never been happier. Come on boy, you are French! You of all people should understand!” he laughed before settling into a dry cough.

Alexandre smiled, and his eyes lifted to see Madhuri walk in, and he watched her rolling hips under her pink sari. She went to Anthony and held his face in her hands and kissed his cheek, wishing him a good night. He clasped her small brown wrists.

“Good night, my darling,” Anthony replied sleepily, smiling deeply, his old eyes twinkling in the lantern light.

She turned and looked at Alexandre and said, “Good night, Dr. Lautens.”

A
LEXANDRE WENT TO
his room and tossed a newspaper onto the desk and drew back the sheets on his bed. As he undressed, he looked at the small Ganesha idol on his desk, and he changed into cotton
pajama pants. He stood bare-chested in front of the mirror and ran his fingertips lazily over the lines where his pale chest met his sun-baked forearms and throat. He sighed.

He had just read in the paper that the Nepalese had a new king, a child who was only five years of age. A little boy king photographed for the newspaper in regal, oversized robes. Alexandre fell onto the bed and looked at the ceiling, thinking about his children and their last Christmas together and why he was in India.

At the Adivis’ home he would hear Kanakadurga doing private
pujas
in the prayer room across from her bedroom. She would sometimes refer to Sanskrit as
Deva Bhasha
, God’s tongue. Alexandre found the room exotic and frightening. It smelled of incense and the coconuts Kanakadurga would break while she chanted, her hands pressed together, rocking. He would hear her sometimes in that room, her voice low and trancelike in prayer, “Avaneesh, Avighna, Balaganapati . . . Gaurisuta . . . Heramba . . . ” In Kanakadurga’s puja room, a wild-eyed idol of Kali looked at him with her tongue out. Ganesha was muted, his elephant eyes wide and serene; silver tins of turmeric and bindi were among the coconuts and fresh flowers. There were framed paintings of beautiful Lakshmi in her lotus, Saraswati holding her lute, a blue-skinned Krishna spying on nut-brown milkmaids. a gold Nataraja Shiva balanced on a dying serpent. In the center of the room was a picture of Hanuman, Rama’s faithful monkey warrior, holding his chest open, Rama’s name written on his ribs and blood and flesh and heart. “His love for Rama and Sita was questioned,” Kanakadurga had told him once, “and in response, he tore open his chest, so all of Ayodhya could see that they were literally in his beating heart. There was also a photograph of Adivi’s late father, Anil, a man whose face
echoed his son’s but was softer. “He wasn’t as handsome as my son, but he was a kinder man . . . ” Kanakadurga had said, smiling sadly, “so often beauty and cruelty seem to go together.” Fresh flowers rested against Anil’s photo, and there was red talcum powder dusted on his sepia forehead.

Now, in his room in Anthony’s house, Alexandre got up off the bed and went to his desk and held the small marble elephant god in his hand. Like his father, he had never been religious—attending church only on Easter and Christmas. He liked the community that religion provided—the sense that he belonged to a family of man, and was not too proud to bow before a god or speak to one at night when his heart was distraught. But not for him the proscriptions on life. Not for him his mother’s kneeling nightly like a child seeking a new toy or forgiveness for cheating at jacks.

Kanakadurga had given the little Ganesha to Alexandre on the morning he left. “The remover of obstacles and the patron of scholars. Sometimes, when I feel myself lost, when I feel away from myself, I sit and I say the
ga
eśa sahasranāma
, the hundred and eight names of Ganesha. I feel the rhythm of his names in my blood. It calms my heartbeat.” He smiled as she handed it to him, her kindly eyes deeply wrinkled, bright and watery. She was not one to cry, but she held his large white hand in hers, which were small and brown. She clasped his hand tightly and pressed it to her soft cheek. “My friend,” she said.

His Ganesha was round and cherubic, and he held an axe and rope in two of his hands, and a lotus and a sweet in the others. Alexandre remembered Dr. Bonventre introducing him to Devanagari. Bonventre drew a slash after
deva
, “God, plus city . . . the language of the
city of God
.” Bonventre whispered in quiet awe and smiled—an indulgent,
sweet, unscholarly smile, like a boy dreaming. “It will take you all your life to learn Sanskrit. But you should. In the Hindu mythology, Sanskrit is made of all the sounds of the beginning of the universe. It is a most beautiful calculus.”

11

W
ALKING WITH THOSE
women, it occurred to Anjali how they were just women like the women she had always known: daughters, mothers, wives, most of them in saris. They were the respectable women of respectable men, not lawless rebels or society’s rejects. And Anjali hoped that she would not find herself an outcast yet again.

T
HEY WERE ALL
there, hundreds of them, many of them men in white khadi, like an endless army of widows, but neither somber nor funerary. This was not a military procession of strong young soldiers wearing armbands of black. Anjali turned and saw the crowd closing in on her as if suddenly rushing, all of them, and felt terrified; never in her life had she seen such a crowd. The women pushed and wailed, carrying frightened babies against their breasts, the men shoved, their hands straining forward even if separated by several feet from the door, among them all children seemingly without parents or means; Anjali thought that the English were at least a civilizing force on so miserable that swarthy mass. She saw the baby-faced white officers, their stoic faces betrayed only by that glimmer of terror in their eyes and the thin, transparent lines of sweat trickling down their temples, suggesting discomfort as they attempted to manage the crowd in the spotless uniforms of the Indian Imperial Police. Standing outside that afternoon, tentative, Anjali waited as the other women filed in, eager to hear the fiery, young freedom fighter, this woman said to rival her male
counterparts in passion and intellect. And then, with her awkward gait and with that long-carried burden of solitude, pushing past a thousand onlookers, Anjali walked into the courtyard of the University of Madras. There were red paper stars fixed to the gates: the college was preparing for Christmas.

She saw from inside the gated walls of the college how they were: how deplorable, how selfish, how ruthless and how barbarous, how jealous and greedy, how small they all were, how ugly the most beautiful, how poor even the wealthiest among them, how sick even the young and robust; just human, pathetically human, a million incarnations of flawed, so fragile, each of them as volatile as fire crackers, each needing only a single, catalyzing spark to explode and explode again, in a brief shimmering display of rage and fury before that silent demise of death, disappearing into the ether of that pillaged and plundered earth.

One blond officer, whose icy blue eyes were wild with fear in the face of angry old Indian women, met Anjali’s gaze. Anjali for a moment saw him, herself and those all around, not for what they had but for what they didn’t, their secret stories of loneliness and fragility, of anxiety and fear. And Anjali, as quickly as she felt the repulsion, felt depthless sorrow and pity and compassion and thought how variously vulnerable they all were, how sometimes wretched. She decided then, while covered in sweat and dust, the dizzying heat bearing down upon her, to love them then, in spite of herself, in spite of those twin candles of rage and fury that burned equally brightly in her; because they were just like her, selfish and small and foolish, but trying, and in trying became godlike, to shake the shackles of human existence.

She turned to see her heroine mounting the podium. When Sarojini ascended the steps, she turned to the British flag behind her and
removed it from the wall; turning it upside down, she tacked it back up. “Ladies and gentlemen, the empire is in distress.”

Anjali, now in the confines of the hall, closed her eyes as she imagined the night she was banished. She was still smarting from her father’s scolding as she walked out into the garden in the purple evening light. A pitying servant had quietly handed her a tray with sweets and a cup of tea, and began to pack her bags. She left in the morning.

Alexandre’s face had somewhat faded from memory, but Anjali did in fleeting memories recall that hair, those eyes, that soap-scented skin and remember feelings of being illuminated from within. Love makes one present. Now, in quiet moments, she sometimes felt she had only the past.