The Grammarian (30 page)

The wrought iron bars of Anjali’s jail cell prevented entry and egress of human bodies but not of light, which swept through the dank, hot, little cell and illuminated the faintly blue whitewashed walls. In the display of squares of light that moved across her cell as the sun set, Anjali carved a map of India with a nail on the wall, the paint chips cracking and flecking off, revealing a pale green undercoat.

In jail the only comfort she found was in the solace of her own mind—her memories and her imaginings, the fantasies of places and stories and people. There was no more stirring a description than that of the foliage—Alexandre once told her of leaves like gold, or as red as falling sheets of fire covering the East Anglian countryside. Anjali would look up at the grey ceiling of her cell and would close her eyes and see a dreary, grey English sky, and then look down and imagine at her feet fields of pyrotechnic leaves. Or, lying in her hard bed at night, she would sing softly, remembering that Sarojini, who had seen the lakes of Switzerland and the Tuscan hills, had once told her that there
is no more compelling sound than that of the human voice, and when hundreds strong it can be no more ignored than choirs of angels, or an onslaught of arrows.

In Anjali’s life, she would walk to Dandi, for a stretch holding the frail arm of Gandhi, and alongside Sarojini, an unarmed army in white. She would walk with her cane and sometimes stop to cry; it was no easy task for her. That day, Anjali’s rough cotton sari flapped like a flag in the wind, but not that white flag of surrender; she sought no mercy. Just that bolt of white fabric wrapped around her, she marched along the sea barefaced and so nearly naked, the strong sun like a baptism of light. She felt weightless and after so long, tethered no longer by family or custom. The air smelled of salt; she felt the rolling ocean inside her chest. “This must be what it is to be young,” she thought. They would marched alongside villagers and industrialists, at a steady pace to the sea, at long last lifting up salt crystals baked on rocks at the line where the land met the wide Indian sea; Sarojini would cry out “Hail, Pilgrim!”

A
NJALI WOULD BE
jailed again, for having taken an axe to the Kali Temple in Munshiganj to force open the doors to untouchables. Approaching the temple in the May heat, Anjali felt the weight of her weapon. It was made of steal and wood and she carried it as if it were a natural extension of her body, an elongation of her right arm. She looked up to see a statue of Kali-Devi, the fierce one, for whom Rama had collected 107 blue lotuses, and looked at herself, reflected in the mirror work of the temple, axe in hand, and felt as though her own body were engulfed in flames. Anjali’s hands throbbed, reddened in pain; she was sweating all over, exhausted, her face, hands
and feet dirty with dust and exertion as she wielded that axe and threw it down against the steel chains and locks on the doors, cutting down the wooden doors with all her might. And as she turned to face the crowd, the doors behind her busting open, her hair loosened by her exertion, she yelled, howled from her heart, tears streaking her cheeks, a violent wildness loosed from within, her whole body twitching with strength and power; she trembled with that freedom found inside, and the women behind her found Anjali a swarthy Madonna, axe in hand, dazzling and brilliant. For a moment, the life had turned on inside of her. A heartquake; a rumbling, shaking, explosion of life.

That particularly soaring feeling when her soul was as free as the day she was born, she felt it fly inside of her like a birthright, like a flag staked on a new land, before all the shackles of duty and tradition were laid on her body like weights.

As the policemen took the axe from her hands, Anjali laughed as if intoxicated and surrendered to them easily, her eyes flooding again with tears as she saw inside the temple a blinding, golden-limbed statue of the goddess, a garland of heads about her neck, in her hands: tridents and swords.

A
LL THROUGH HER
life, at times of pain, or fear, she would retire in her mind to that perfect moment of floating in Alexandre’s arms in the sea as girl, her view from all sides an endless sky of tear-inducing blue.

Everything girlish was gone and what a horror, when it happened that she realized it, that childhood was over. Alone again in her jail cell, Anjali pressed her knees to her chest and wept and tried to once again remember that moment in the sea, but this evening she could no
longer recall how it felt. That such a thing could be lost frightened her the most: losing something never had.

At night she dreamt she was adrift in the sea, everything around her blue, palm leaves and vines in her periphery, her eyes full of grey sky, streaked through with glowing veins of lightening and a pale veiled moon, fearsome darkness and seabirds encircling her.

Anjali was tired. In jail the difference between sleep and wakefulness was not so distinct, and at night she slept poorly and during the day was often nearly half-asleep. She felt an emptiness inside. The Naidus had taken her in, but her relationship with them—however affectionate—was fraught with formality. She missed the intimacy she had had with her grandmother, that woman she could talk to without fear of looking weak or arousing pity. Anjali had long had a small and secret wish, one she felt was too absurd to say: she had long wanted to be a mother, and she would sometimes feel a flicker in her breast, a pang that reverberated in a hollow space.

She thought of the woman who had become a surrogate mother to her: Sarojini, who for all her maternal affection, for all her passionate oratory as the president of the National Congress, was a quiet and retiring woman at home. She had so many of her own concerns, and Anjali felt ridiculous burdening so important a woman with her own trivial feelings. Sarojini felt she had abandoned her poetry for politics, and at home she would tell Anjali she was afraid of losing her voice. Sometimes, in the evenings, Anjali would find Sarojini bent over a notebook, tapping a pen against her desk.

One night, Sarojini, again trying to write under the light of a burning kerosene lamp, saw Anjali out of the corner of her eye, that burdened gait en route to the restroom. Sarojini looked up, “When I was
young, I could write an entire poem in a day. When I was thirteen I wrote an epic and a play in one month . . . ” She smiled, tired, the flame of the kerosene lamp flickering in her eyes. And like that, Anjali saw the flame reflecting in Sarojini’s eyes as if it were coming from deep within the older woman, whose once-Greek profile was softening with age. When she was married she was tiny, looking as a child does, but now she had also a woman’s weight and a wizening streak of silver spun throughout her otherwise black hair. “Anjali, I feel as though the muse has left me . . . ” Sarojini sighed and put her pen down, extinguishing the lamp. “I’m going to sleep.” And Anjali, no less lonely for that conversation, too retired to her small room in the Naidu home and lying down looked up at the ceiling.

She had given in long ago to an orphan’s affliction: she searched for her parents everywhere. She saw them in her dreams and in crowded markets: her father’s profile in the faces of strangers, her mother hiding just outside her vision, in the shadows.

O
NE DAY
,
DURING
a monsoon, as Anjali knelt on her bed under the cell window, the jailor came by. “Adivi, you have mail,” he announced, and he dropped a package into her cell through the iron bars. Anjali let her legs fall from the bed, sitting up; grappling for her cane, she placed a half-read copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
on the bed. Prison allowed her to become ever more substantial, literarily speaking; she wanted to read more of the great works of great men, men of letters and poetry, and yet it was through that window, the small glass square, that she would throw her gaze when the stories were not enough. She sought there the city sounds that allowed her at night in jail to sleep. Anjali wiped her hands on her shawl and
scrambled to the floor, taking the brown-paper-covered package into her hands. It was heavy for its size, she thought. Sarojini’s address was scribbled on the back.

Anjali tore open the paper wrapping and ran her fingertips over the gold-lettered title of the book inside. “
Lautens’s Grammar of Telugu
,” she whispered to herself. She opened the book and ruffled the gold-edged pages. Inside, it said, “as translated from the original French by Ian Paulson, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Philology.” Anjali pressed the book’s open pages to her breast; tears rolled down her cheeks. She smiled deeply as she turned the pages, reading sentences in English with the curving Telugu script below, and below that the transliteration in Roman characters. She looked at the table of contents and read the headings: 1) Nouns and the Nominative Case System, 2) Verbs 3) Adjectives and Adverbs. There were seventeen chapters in all. After briefly flipping through the pages, she turned to a page toward the front of the book entitled “Author’s Note”:

Anjali read the introduction slowly, and with joy. She took in each sentence carefully, as if, between the lines of his academic work, she could glean something of Alexandre, whom she missed. The last paragraph read:

Anjali read the paragraph again and then silently reprimanded herself: she was looking for her name.

T
HE FIRST
E
GAS
Moniz was praised in the Lusiad for defending Portugal. “The valiant Egas, as a god appears / To proud Castile the suppliant noble bows / And faithful homage for his prince he vows.” Egas pledged fidelity to King Alfonso, the first king of Portugal, against the invading Moors in the 1100s.

In 1874, António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz was born in Avanca, Portugal; by the time he accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine seventy-five years later, he was known simply as Egas Moniz, yet another hero for Portugal, as per his godfather’s wishes. His uncle, an abbot, was his first teacher, and in later years he would continue his schooling at Paris and Bordeaux. By 1911, he was an accomplished neurologist, the head of medicine at the University of Lisbon.

Running late in the autumn of 1919, Alexandre dashed through the buildings of the medical college toward his office. He was working more now, as his academic star continued to rise. Since returning, he suffered Madeline gladly. He no longer felt content in their home or marriage but felt unaccountably ill at ease and felt his unhappiness was penance for some undefined betrayal on his part. His children were no longer babies and had lives of their own; their happiness was dependent no longer on that of their parents. Something had changed in Madeline—she was no longer his bride but his wife. The last traces of girlhood had fallen away from her; she was a real woman now, slightly
thicker, slightly greyer, and more concerned with how the house was kept and if the children were doing well in school and if her dresses were good enough for the spring season than with him. He knew she was proud of him. She talked up his achievements at parties and to her family, but if it weren’t for these instances, he would not have known she noticed that he was accomplished, a rising academic star. It was not just her, of course, for he had changed too, and there were days he loved her more and days he loved her less, and those days too when he felt like being cruel.