The Grammarian (6 page)

And the children. Subba Rao, with the same tone he had used earlier with the luggage handlers, tried to protect Alexandre from the tens of children who flocked around Alexandre, palms out.

“Mister, money, please mister.”

“Englishman coins please Sir.”

“Sir money please.”

“Just one coin Englishman!”

“Sahib, please sahib!”

Again Subba Rao fired off in his mother tongue with the colorful addition of English scolding and insults, pushing them away from him, yelling over his shoulder, again in polite deference, “So very sorry, Dr. Lautens. My most sincere apologies, Sir. The carriage is quite near, Sir.” Lautens felt a violent, frightened sympathy for these children, with their large, dark, sunken eyes, their scrawny wrists and hands thrust toward him, or tugging at his clothes: “Where do they go home?” he thought. “Who will watch over them, these small children?”

He sighed with relief when Subba Rao pushed them away. And Alexandre turned and saw them behind them, a cluster of browns and reds and grasping hands.

The coach was beautiful, of an old European style with handsome, large horses strapped to it, the carriage wooden and plush with red cushions and silk curtains.

“You please sit inside and rest Sir, while we load the trunks,” Subba Rao said, his arm extended toward Alexandre to help him into
the body of the coach. Alexandre sat there while the men loaded his belongings, and admired the station from the outside. The children had caught up with them, surrounding the carriage, their hands pushing through the curtains, Subba Rao yelling at them. When the luggage was loaded, and the driver swatted at the lead horses’ muscular rumps with a leather whip, the children ran after them for a few yards before the horses picked up speed. Subba Rao saw Alexandre looking backward at the children with naive sympathy.

Waltair had strong Dutch tones, as per its history, and was lined with palm trees, which gave it an air both stately and exotic. The coach made its way through Waltair and Alexandre fished in his breast pocket for his cigarettes. The red, white and blue flag of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie had been taken down some one hundred years prior, when the British had annexed all the Dutch settlements in India. The VOC flag was replaced by the red flag of British India. Near the flagpole on Waltair’s Dolphin’s Nose—so called because that bit of land jutted out into the sea in the shape of a porpoise’s snout—was the Dutch-built lighthouse and fort.

From Bombay to Waltair, Alexandre had been privy to so much impressive foreign architecture of late that he took in the fort in calm, studying the grandness of the place through swirls of cigarette smoke. Nearby, there was a cemetery. Thirteen Dutchmen who had lost their lives two thousand miles from the nation of their birth were buried on a hill overlooking the indifferent ocean that had brought them to India. Alexandre looked out upon the hill of Christian graves, deserted but peaceful, high above the city.

He had sweated through his clothes and the cool sea wind felt good on his skin. Below the hill, on the beach, the washerwomen who wore
their saris cinched around their knees were laying out sheets over the sand to dry. With the arrival of the British, the Dutch left Waltair, and the presence of the French in the surrounding areas had dissolved into small, disconnected pockets—Pondichéry, Karaikal and Yanam on the east coast, and Mahé on the west.

The heat was more agonizing than any he’d felt in Bombay or the stops in between, and though the air was salty and the ocean near, the breeze did little to comfort him. The town, from first glance, was a medley of golds and reds, drier than Bombay, and dusty. The buildings were often beautiful and sometimes sat next to the straw and grass huts of the poor. Unlike the neighborhoods of Europe, poverty and wealth lived next to each other in India. The town’s structures were a riot of pastels, whites and ivories. Buffalo, goats, pigs, chickens, horse-drawn coaches, pedestrians, cyclists all convened on the roads of Waltair, together, like a great mass of mottled humanity and beasts great and small, all converging in the light of a late afternoon upon some point in the horizon.

4

A
LEXANDRE HAD BEEN
in England the year before the last, doing research in the libraries of Cambridge in summer and early fall, and while there met with English philologists, many of whom were at the forefront of Indian language studies, having at their disposal the conveniences of colony. Silk-bound copies of Schleicher’s maps of the Tarim basin, a handwritten note from William Jones. Love and life forgotten in that library to the comfort of a beloved and solitary labor of sound, word, syntax, grammar. The quiet comfort of study, half-empty cups of tea, hours of his life spent behind endless shelves of books. His stay in England was one of stately buildings, their medieval style so familiar to him, wildflowers, riots of yellow leaves in autumn, quiet reading rooms, outside their windows damp green grass, the sweet smell of rain in the air. His Cambridge colleagues, many of whom by virtue of their studies in religion, anthropology, history and of course linguistics had friends in this part of the world, had helped him fix his stay in India. It had taken three months of letters between Paris, Cambridge and Waltair to make the arrangements.

Alexandre, the most promising professor in the Sorbonne’s philology department, was given a paid research sabbatical. His department had commissioned him to continue his interest in Dravidian studies, to write a grammar of Telugu.

The world grew smaller through the reach of empire, and Alexandre was told that Indians were nothing if not hospitable.

H
IS KURTA DIRTY
with the city dust, Alexandre arrived at the sprawling residence of the family of Shiva Adivi. Adivi was a man that Alexandre had been told was an aristocrat sympathetic to Europeans, a man with family money in fields of wheat and coffee, rice and fabric mills. And to own rice in south India was to own gold. It was the common starch of the land, and everyone, from street beggars to those with royal blood, sat down twice or thrice daily to a meal centered around a steamed vat of white rice.

The home was a grand one of the old fashion with an inner court.

It was from the coach that he descended, on the occasion of his thirty-fourth birthday, into the place where he planned to stay until he had a viable manuscript for his Parisian textbook publisher.

When Lautens arrived at the daunting mansion—cut in white marble and with guarded steel gates—he was at once impressed and comforted. Subba Rao shooed beggars from the gates of the home as the striking white guest took in the house. Servants in red waistcoats and spotless white cummerbunds welcomed him and waited for instructions from Subba Rao before moving, then took his cases and called the family. His trunks being taken to what was to be his room, he sat on a stone bench in the garden to wait for Adivi and his family. Bougainvilleas climbed the pillars supporting the house in explosions of orange and pink. There were lime and guava trees, and tomato vines heavy with orange and red fruit. Organized squares of rose beds and jasmine were separated with concrete pathways that met at a semicircle of marble where stood a wrought-iron gate outside of which Alexandre could see the city.

From some near corridor, Alexandre heard Subba Rao shouting commands in Telugu. Alexandre was gratified that he understood the
order for coffee, and the female voice answering back in equal irritation. Alexandre rose when he saw the family.

Adivi was a handsome man, with refined features and a strong nose and the full mustache preferred by the men—or was it the women?—of India, large piercing eyes with heavy lashes and a neat, stern mouth. He, too, was wearing a kurta, though his was much finer than Alexandre’s, cut from silk. Some varieties of silk here were so fine that they ruffled under the gentle touch of a woman’s hand.

Behind Adivi, equally regal, stood four women: one old, in a simple white sari of cotton, with a look of benevolence and world-weariness upon her handsome face; the next, likely Adivi’s wife, a lovely woman in purple and blue, with a refined and womanly bearing and a long, aquiline nose; and lastly, two females not yet women, no longer girls—in those few, tender years after childhood. The first of these was a young woman of a beauty so intense that upon seeing her, Alexandre caught his breath. Her sister had the shadow of her father’s strong features though they did not suit a woman—she had an intelligent and suspicious air and was leaning her weight heavily on a cane.

“Dr. Lautens, I presume.” Adivi held his hands up together in the customary Hindu greeting, his English refined with British tones.

Alexandre mimicked the gesture, to which he too had become accustomed, and bowed slightly to the women. Then Adivi smiled widely and offered Alexandre his hand. Their palms met in a hearty shake. Behind them, near the gates, the servants continued unloading his cases from the coach. Subba Rao stood at the entrance of the garden, and Adivi told him to caution the other servants to be extra careful with Alexandre’s books. Bowing, Subba Rao left the garden area and walked toward the gates of the home. Adivi turned to his family, introducing him.

“A great man of letters, Dr. Alexandre Lautens. Dr. Lautens, this is my mother—”

“My name is Kanakadurga,” the old woman interjected. She smiled, proudly, broadly. Her English was fluent and deliberate. Hers was a bright and astonishingly open face, and Alexandre smiled, boyishly and unguardedly, as he looked at her.

Adivi continued, “She is our daughters’
nainaamma
, grandmother; it literally means ‘father’s mother’—we have this distinction that doesn’t exist in English.” Adivi chuckled, “In some matters we Indians are superior.” The old woman smiled sweetly and pressed her hands together. Alexandre had been told old women were referred to in Telugu as
amma garru
, “respected mother.”

“Welcome, Dr. Lautens,” Kanakadurga smiled, and she walked toward Alexandre and took his smooth white hands in hers, which were wrinkled and the color of cocoa. “It is our family’s great fortune to have you here,” she continued as Alexandre blushed.

“My wife, Lalita, and these are my daughters,” Adivi continued. Now closer than at his first inspection, he took in the beautiful girl’s face—the perfect gold skin, the large, dark eyes and delicate nose and mouth. About her face were thick knotted plaits of deep, inky black. “This,” Adivi cupped the girl’s face in his hands, his eyes warm with paternal pride, “is Mohini, my younger daughter . . . and this,” he continued, still holding his younger daughter’s face and motioning with his chin, “is my elder daughter, Anjali.” The women all pressed their hands together once more, and he stepped back. “Oh and this,” Adivi pointed to a sleeping sheepdog in the shadow of a tree, “is Byron.” Adivi’s mouth pursed as he heard harried clanging in the kitchen. “I apologize for the noise, Dr. Lautens, one of the peasant families nearby
has had a death in the family, and my mother,” he gave a sidelong glance at Kanakadurga, “has asked the cook to send over some rice and milk.”

Adivi came eye to eye with Alexandre and smiled deeply and warmly. “My home is your home, Dr. Lautens, my family is your family. Your presence here is a very high honor for us. The servants will show you to your quarters, and after you have rested, you will please join us for our evening meal.

“Prithu!” Adivi called, and a boy servant answered from the outer corridor. The little boy listened to Adivi’s instructions in wide-eyed, emotionless silence.

Prithu showed Alexandre to his room—it was splendid and simple, with a bed and dresser and desk made of teak, a deep and intricate rug in colors of burgundy and brown on the floor. The walls were left blank, which gave the room a light and spacious feeling. Alexandre lay down on the bed, stretching his tall body for a few moments. He was grateful at last to have some moments of his own, and he splashed cool water from the stainless steel bowl on the desk onto his face and changed into a suit, unsure of what dress was expected of him and wanting to err on the side of formality.