The Grammarian (33 page)

All around India, all other British flags were lowered, burned and trampled under horses’ hooves. Officer William Hodson, with his fifty horsemen, rode out to Humayun’s tomb and captured Bahadur Shah Zafar, and later his three sons. At the Kabuli Darwaza gate, Hodson shot Zafar’s sons. His men stripped their bloodied bodies and hacked off their heads. Hodson collected the heads and handed them to Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal emperor, whose empire had once held most of India in its embrace.

On the fourteenth of August in 1947, minutes before midnight and ninety years after the sepoys mutinied, the British at long last lowered the Union Jack on the Tower Residency. The British officers swung axes at the flagpole and destroyed the cement foundation in which it
had been planted so no other standard would ever be strung up there. In Manhattan, Ivan Kerno, the acting secretary-general of the UN, supervised the lowering of the Imperial Indian Blue Ensign and raised in its place a khadi Tirangā. Sarojini was sworn in as the governor of the United Provinces.

Four million people would move as the country divided; two great migrations. Hindus to Delhi, and Muslims to Lahore. And in two weeks, the train cars between the cities would begin to arrive full of corpses, the floors slippery with blood, in their bodies the shards of the axes used to hack the bones and flesh; their murderers believing them to be the children of a lesser god. Everywhere death, everywhere guts and limbs and hair. Wheeled luggage carts were piled high with limp brown and red bodies; blood was mopped off the platforms.

Anjali watched now as the French tricolor whipped in the wind, and it reminded her of her own
Tirangā
and she felt, after so much, through good and ill fortune alike, a sense of pride. She had helped to deliver her country from the tyranny of colony. And sad too, because a country wasn’t something that could really be captured or held in the hand; it was an idea and not a heart.

For years now, she had had only one thought, again and again: she dreamt of a strong and merciful rope around her neck and dreamt not of returning, not of a heaven full of choirs of angels and treasures of gold, but of sweet, silent death, of melting into that earth that had bore long silent witness to her pain for so many long years, and dreamt, open eyed and awake, again and again for the comfort of a quiet demise.

D
AVID PAINTED
B
RUTUS
in the shadows. Amid the weeping of his wife and mother and daughters, Brutus sits, his arm weakly lifted, as if
to acknowledge the victory of the republic. Despite this glory, Brutus’s face is a mask of quiet sorrow. Anjali had gone at last to the Louvre; Alexandre, as a ghost of her own conjuring, accompanying her. She walked along the Champs-Élysées and alongside the arterial river of the great city. She saw the river and the crowds and saw that through all these things—the world wars, the revolts, the struggled-for tricolors of France and India and Ireland—the Seine flowed with slowness. The movements of the people outside for a moment seemed to lose continuity. They moved in finite gestures like rapidly taken photographs, each articulation distinct from the one before it and that one after, each movement only a suggestion of what was to come and not a promise, and then, after such a time of tirelessly fast spinning, the world for a moment seemed still.

I
AM INDEBTED TO
the The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund, the Asian American Writers Workshop and Quang Bao; their early support of this book gave me the gift of time. I would like to thank Erin Lem and Claire Dippel at Janklow & Nesbit, for their committed championing of this book and without whom I would not have met my wonderful agent, Alexandra Machinist, who took this book on only as a labor of love.

I would like to thank my family, especially my Mom and Dad.

I have the good fortune to have the most wonderful friends in the world, all of whom have been a fountain of support, and I would like to thank all of them, especially Antara Kanth, Michael Smith, Grace Lu, Katie Pulick, Sabrina Esbitt, Wendy Kuo, Laura Beck, Joy Meads, Kristyn Caminos, Daniel WK Lee and Grace Kim.

Finally, my deepest thanks to Liz Parker, Kelly Winton and Julia Kent at Counterpoint, who have been wonderful to work with and have provided constant comfort to a very jittery first time author.