The Grammarian (28 page)

He looked at Miriam and saw that her eyes looked bigger and darker, her mouth pinker and fuller than before. She sat down next to him on the bed, and Alexandre felt her lips on his ear, her small hand on his chest. He looked at her and muttered, “You are very pretty.” He felt tears roll down his face. He looked at her: she was like a phantasm, her alabaster limbs like vapors. He took her hand from his chest and gently placed it in her lap and woke up late the next day, curled up on the bed opposite the old Englishman he had seen there the night before. The sun pushed through the curtains and Alexandre felt blinded as he woke.

T
HE NATIONALIST
J
AMSETJI
Tata had designed his hotel to face inland, her back to England, and had ordered spun iron pillars for the hotel’s interior from Paris when he went to see the premiere of the Eiffel Tower some years before at the Exposition Universelle; the fair
had been held to celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Tata had seen Africans for the first time in the
village nègre
, the American sharpshooter Annie Oakley and a small number of Thomas Edison’s inventions.

Alexandre, on a British passenger ship in December of 1911, days before the New Year, months after the Gateway had been completed for the Delhi Durbar, looked upon the city of Bombay as the other passengers made their way on board. His belongings had been stowed in his stateroom on the ship, and he stood on deck looking at the city. He took in the deep blue water of the bay and the Tata’s Taj Mahal Hotel.

F
IFTY
-
NINE YEARS BEFORE
, in 1852, an old copy of
Blackwood’s Magazine
, which an English army physician, Dr. Brydon, had crammed under his helmet, took the brunt of the blow. An Afghani soldier had thrust his sword into the surgeon’s head, chopping magazine pages rather than brains. Brydon escaped the Afghani and fled, finding en route a wounded Indian soldier who lay dying. The Indian offered the young doctor his horse and pointed him in the direction of the British stronghold of Jellalabad. Of the 16,500 army men who had gone into Kabul, Brydon was the only one to survive. He followed the bugle call sounded by the Somerset Light Infantry from Jellalabad. They sounded the bugle every hour to guide those long presumed dead to safety. And on the end of the third day, Dr. Brydon arrived at Jellalabad, mounted on a horse, both he and the horse half-dead and all alone. When this news reached Queen Victoria, she rewarded the Somerset soldiers for fighting for their queen and country by having their regimental colors augmented: J
ELLALABAD
was inscribed over a brick-laid crown.

Alexandre, in 1911, hearing the ship’s horns blow, watched as he pulled away from India, and he could not have known then that the Somerset Light Infantry would march slowly in 1948, and as they did, Anjali would hold Sarojini Naidu’s arm in Bombay. Alexandre did not know then that the light infantry would be the last British regiment to leave India. Anjali would cry on that last day of February 1948 as the first battalion of light infantry would move alongside their Indian escorts: the Bombay Grenadiers, the Second Sikhs, the Indian Navy, the 3/5th Gurkhas, the Mahratta Light Infantry, men with whom they would fight and die in Gibraltar, Normandy, the North West Frontier, the Japanese islands and Mesopotamia. The Indian and British soldiers would offer each other their last royal salute, and the crowd would quiet itself, somber as the band played “God Save the Queen.” In the crowd, sentiment would make way for joy as the standard bearers, carrying the Union Jack and the regimental colors, led the soldiers as they passed under the Gateway of India. The
Empress of Australia
would wait in Bombay’s harbor, great puffs of black smoke rising out of her funnels. The soldiers would board the steamship to “Auld Lang Syne.” Anjali would bend at the waist, leaning hard on Sarojini. In the distance, with the other officiates, she would weep and would not know why.

At the center of the ceremony would be the man that Anjali revered most: Nehru would hold the arm of Major-General Whistler as his troops boarded the
Empress of Australia
. His expression would be stern, but even at that distance Anjali would make out in her hero’s face a melancholy about his eyes. An attendant would hand Nehru a red box. Nehru had wanted this feeling since he was a rich boy without direction or will in Cambridge. His would tremble as he handed
the box to Brigadier John Platt, who would wear a scar on his face since shards of a German Nebelwerfer had hit him when crossing the Garigliano River. Platt had shot tigers in Madras, and in the brown faces of the Indian regiments, could make out men who had served under him during the war. “We are most reluctant to leave behind so many good friends and your great country which our regiment has known and served for so long. At the same time, we are happy for you in your newfound freedom, and I take this unique opportunity of wishing you all good luck and Jai Hind.” The crowd would cheer him on as he opened the box and reached in and lifted out a silver scale-model of the Gateway to India.

The wind would lift the drapes of saris like white sails, smiling women pulling the frayed ends of overworn khadi into their teeth, covering their heads as the sun bore down on them all. Men’s glittering eyes would show like obsidians, and sapphires, like emeralds. Anjali would look out on the crowd; “This is what hope looks like,” she would think. It looks like lightness. Hope is the fearlessness that allows one to pull up the anchors and set forth on an unknown path. She would feel nostalgia for the moment even as it was passing, as if seeing the whole scene in the beauty of a photograph, the sepia grains of white cotton cloth and a pale sky, of sand-colored people, all of them looking up; she saw it all as one might in ten years or twenty.

A
S
A
LEXANDRE WATCHED
the subcontinent move away from him, as he stood on the deck of the RMS
Medina
, the world was nearing in on 1912, the last days of the last month of the year. There it was, haunting, foreign; perhaps from an Atlantic sea breeze—a cold whistle of air in his face and hair. It was hot, cruelly hot in India, but it was
winter in Paris. Alexandre thought, “I’m going home. I’m going to the place they call me Alex, Papa, Darling.”

I
NDEPENDENCE FROM THE
Britain was, for India, nearly four decades away, as were the things that Anjali would come to be reconciled to, once and for all.

13

I
N TIMES OF
contemplation, when the worries of adult life became too much for him, Lautens had once taken comfort in the youthful ruckus of university life. The vigorous debate of young minds, the hope, the joy, the romance and love of young people. No longer. Looking out into the medieval space of the university, Lautens was saddened to see it so quiet, so declawed in this the first year of peace after the war. So many of the boys had died, a million and a half young men. The prices of everything were up, without their young hands to propel the manufacturing industries, now in the care of men past their prime, fathers without sons. There were so many mothers whose boys had taken their last breath on battlefields they’d never been to before in Somme and Ypres, Gallipoli—the Dardanelles running red and black with the blood and guts of the dead bodies of boys. There were bits of propeller blades, shards of skull and tibia bones, bootstraps, fragments of helmets, tattered photographs of children playing in backyards in places like Des Moines and Detroit, a birthday party in Leeds or Dover littering the fields and beaches of France’s northern coast.

Once again, Alexandre found the truth of the matter was in the etymology: the infantry—an army of children.

It had been seven years since he left, and Anjali had written to him sporadically, having obtained his address through his publisher. Shortly after he arrived back in Paris, she had written inquiring after his safe journey home, Madeline and the children, how his work and
studies were going. She told him she had obtained a copy of his book in English through a friend who worked at the Bombay office of his London publisher. He had received others, telling him about her activities and how she lived now with a woman poet-politician named Naidu. She told him that Mohini had two daughters and a son and that her grandmother had died on the first day of 1912.

O
NCE
,
BACK IN
India, he had found Anjali reading Tolstoy in the garden and had said to her, “This is hardly relaxing reading for a young woman!”

And Anjali smiled shyly—for all her defenses, her smile was sweet and disarming—but then her face immediately fell into an affected stoicism. “I fear Tolstoy’s writing is rather erudite for me, but I keep hearing that he is well regarded among the anti-colonialists.”

Alexandre smiled. She always used elevated language when speaking to him. He matched her, as if speaking to his students: “I am afraid I haven’t read enough of his work to offer much meaningful commentary; which of his books are you reading?”

“The
Death of Ivan Ilyich;
it is about a judge who is dying.”

“Ah . . . ”

“There is a French phrase that is used many times, even in the English translation:
comme il faut
, what does it mean?”

“
Comme il faut
, as it should be . . . proper.”

“
Comme il faut
,” she repeated, she beamed at him brightly, “I shall use it.”

He hoped that in not responding to her letters, she too would recall this conversation and remember that his silence was only proper, only the way it should be.

At the beginning, she had hoped hard and even prayed that he would write back to her. And then, after some time, she made herself stop hoping, in the hopes that by giving up hope she would trick fortune and he would write.

D
R
. L
AUTENS DID
not get news of the massacre until after the New Year, until the story of General Dyer had reached the international press and made its way to the Sorbonne-area newsstand. Dyer had ordered his ninety soldiers to fire their rifles into a crowd of Indian holiday revelers. They fired off seventeen thousand rounds.

Sarojini Naidu was reported to have been in the crowd. Years after he read the news, he would still remember that his first thought went immediately to Anjali, but he quickly corrected himself and thought of the general tragedy of the episode.

Anjali would be there, alongside her mentor. By that time, she would have been a proper woman, having shed the shadow of girlhood but unable still to run from gunfire and stampeding horses. The paper said 379 people had been killed.

The Morning Post
in London, which had praised Brigadier-General Dyer’s actions on the grounds that he had protected “the honor of European Women,” gathered a group of thirteen women to present to Dyer a purse of eighteen thousand pounds sterling and a sword encrusted with Indian jewels and inscribed S
AVIOR OF THE
P
UNJAB
.

A hundred years prior, Dyer’s father, Edward, had opened a brewery and sold Lion brand Himalayan-made beer to the English army men, whose stint in India was more parching than they had expected. An advertisement declared it “as good as back home.” Edward’s son Reginald, the man who was born at the hill station of Murree, who was
schooled in Shimla and Bangalore and would become the commander of the Forty-Fifth Infantry Brigade at Jalandhar, was being sent home.

Dyer ordered ninety soldiers to fire their .303 Lee-Enfield rifles into a crowd at the Jallinwalla Bagh, and Anjali heard a chorus of bloodcurdling cries as bodies fell. Months later she would hear that the general had ordered his soldiers to fire into the thickest part of the crowd.