Authors: David Leavitt
The Indian Clerk (14 page)
I
T IS THREE DAYS after New Year's Day, 1914, and Alice Neville—twenty-four years old and newly arrived in Madras—is sitting
by herself in the dining room of the Hotel Connemara, doing battle over a slice of cake with a crow. Behind her a turbaned
waiter flaps at the crow with a plumed fan, trying to drive it back to the window through which it flew. Every time the waiter
shoos it away, though, the crow spirals up to the ceiling. Then, as soon as the waiter has turned around, it descends again
to try to eat the cake. It seems to take a mischievous pleasure in the game. So does the waiter, who brandishes his fan like
a sword. So does Alice, who's trying not to laugh. Not far away, at a round table, much too large for them, three English
ladies wearing hats decorated with elaborate floral displays arch their eyes in disapproval and anxiety as they watch Alice
banter with the waiter and the crow. Then a second crow flies through one of the long windows, and aims with gladiatorial
precision at their table. Instantly all three get up and scream. They are dressed, Alice sees, in the fashion of twenty-five
years ago: high waists cinched by corsets, bustled skirts hemmed half an inch above the toe. Alice, by contrast, wears a flowing,
jade-colored dress that brushes the ground. Flat shoes. ("Heels are a disaster when traveling," her aunt Daisy told her.)
No corsets or stays. Her hair is still wet from the bath. She has no hat on and, perhaps most scandalous of all, she is sitting
by herself in a room all the other occupants of which, with the exception of the trio of ladies, are men. Alice is a more
proper girl than she pretends: for example, she has never gone to bed with any man other than her husband, and never intends
to. Still, she takes a certain pleasure in raising eyebrows.
Now she puts a cigarette in her mouth and the waiter, before she can even ask him, bends down to light it for her. His proximity
provokes in her a mild frisson of pleasure that she makes no effort to disguise. After all, the waiter is handsome and dark,
dressed in a white robe with red and gold sashes. His attentions to her must outrage the trio of ladies. No doubt they have
already marked Alice as a "new woman," even though today in England the "new woman" is no longer new. In fact the term is
rather
démodé.
Yet if, as she suspects, these ladies have lived all or most of their lives in India, it's to be expected that they should
be a bit behind the times. Why, for all they know, she might be an adventuress researching a travelogue, someone like the
writer who calls herself "Israfel," whose book about India is lying open on Alice's table next to the embattled cake slice.
Israfel writes in the guise of a man. (Alice knows she's a woman only from Aunt Daisy, who travels in the same circles as
the pseudonymous scribe.) For Israfel, the Anglo-Indians are contemptible "ivory apes" with complexions like "kippered herrings
or boiled soles." The typical colonial woman has "never read anything, heard anything, or thought anything; and instead of
this blissful state of vacuity making her quite charming, it only makes her dull." By contrast, how reverently Israfel describes
Indian women "in gaudy saris, with silver anklets clinking lazily on their dusky limbs, silver studs in their noses, and lustrous
soulless kohl-ringed eyes"! Israfel marvels at a nautch dancer's "tinseled skirts glorious with mock jewels." She asks: "Do
you think she will ever wear a false fringe and high-heeled shoes?"
Alice, certainly, would never wear a false fringe or high-heeled shoes. Like Aunt Daisy, she is an advocate of dress reform.
For if a woman did wear high-heeled shoes, how could she tramp around Madras, as Alice intends to do, and would have done
already, had the hotel manager not so strenuously urged her, instead, to ride in a
gharry
driven by a hotel retainer, a man named Govindran, as dark and skinny as his horse ? "It is not safe, an English lady alone
in Madras," the manager told her, and entrusted her to Govindran—too ugly and devout, presumably, to pose any threat. And
so she has explored Madras not, as she hoped, alone, and on foot, but, rather, in a rickety carriage driven by an old man
in a dirty turban who—when she tells him that she wants to get out and look around a bit, drag her skirts, for a moment at
least, in the dirt of India—squats on the ground next to his vehicle and chews a leaf that stains his few teeth red. Govindran
is her closest companion on this voyage, more so than the waiter who protects her from crows, more so, even, than Eric, whom
she has hardly seen since their arrival. When she asks Govindran a question, he nods neither yes nor no but waggles his head
in a way that seems halfway between the two. In his company, she has gazed up at pyramidal temples encrusted with delicately
painted, bas-relief multitudes: deities, horses, elephants. With astonishing ease, even languor, he has maneuvered her around
the swift-running, barefoot rickshaw-wallahs (everyone who does anything in India, it seems, is a wallah), and warded off
the clutches of beggar children reaching into the carriage to grab what they can, and parted the crowds of humans and cows,
the latter usually more colorfully decorated than the former, as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. Once he stopped, and
they watched as a cow, bejeweled and belled and tied to a post, placidly ate its hay. From its behind, grassy cakes of dung
fell blithely, from between its legs a urine stream of stunning pungency splashed against the dirt. Everywhere in Madras there
are cow pats to step around gingerly, and puddles of cow urine, which, according to Eric, the local people mix with milk and
drink.
As for Eric, he's off all day giving his lectures at the University Senate House. Like most of the English buildings in Madras,
this one is huge, ostentatious, and, in Alice's view, ugly in the way that only Victorian architecture can be. How much she
prefers the narrow streets of Triplicane, the Parthasarathy Temple with its cake decoration deities and the low houses and
the doors over which, for good fortune, contorted crosses are painted! Swastikas, they're called. This is the neighborhood,
she knows, in which Ramanujan lives, perhaps behind one of the swastika-marked doors. The Senate House, on the other hand,
is a Victorian hodgepodge, combining Italianate spires with onion domes and minarets willy-nilly. Its walls are solid British
red brick, and though there is the occasional nod to the Indo-Saracenic—in the massive central hall, the stone pillars are
carved, like the temple facades, with deities and animals—the final effect is akin to that of her grandfather's sitting room,
in which the Indian rugs that he hauled home from his stint in Jaipur underlay a motley of stools and velvet fenders and hulking
cupboards stocked with Royal Worcester. Everywhere in that room there were ceramic jars and frilled draperies and lace antimacassars
stained a pale yellow by years of hair oil. From the wallpaper, patterned with pansies, a faint but persistent odor of boiled
beef emanated. In her diary Alice has written: "My grandparents' sitting room was exemplary of British colonialism, the exotic
spoils subdued and made ordinary by what was piled atop them." She aspires to write. She aspires to be a second Israfel.
Now, at last, the waiters seem to have got the crows out of the dining room. (Why doesn't the hotel just hang beaded curtains?)
The Anglo-Indian ladies stand uncertainly by their table; it seems that in the course of the fracas, a teacup was upset, and
now several of the waiters are laying fresh linens and putting out silverware. From the look of them, two of the ladies are
in their late fifties, but the third is Alice's age or even younger. Alas, she wears an expression no less censorious than
those of her elders. Through spectacles, she peers at Alice with a frank disdain that Alice answers by boldly ordering something
to drink. The waiter she thinks of, now, as hers brings her a glass of yellow juice over chunks of ice.
Despite it being January, despite the fans, despite the open windows, the air is stifling. She takes a gulp; something viscous
courses down her throat, at once tart and almost unbearably sweet. Aside from Alice and the ladies, the dining room is nearly
empty, which hardly comes as a surprise. Who, after all, would want to partake of afternoon tea in such sultry weather? Of
the few men scattered about the place, reading their newspapers, none is drinking tea. The ladies alone are drinking tea.
They are buttering crumpets. "Now some women do not dress," Israfel has written. "They pack." Alice's neighbors, in Israfel's
words, are "packed in the sort of way that necessitates the footman sitting down on the lid when he locks the trunks." No
doubt they will eat fish and roast mutton for dinner. Last night she herself asked the chef to prepare a native dish for her
and Eric—"what the locals have" was how she put it—but the chef, whose dark skin had fooled her into assuming him to be an
Indian, turned out to be an Italian, and so they were served spaghetti.
Now, from the purse that rests beside her chair, she pulls out a sheet of paper and a pen. She hopes her neighbors will think
she's writing a chapter for her travel book, a chapter about
them,
when in fact it's just a letter to a friend; a female friend.
Dear Miss Hardy,
In all probability my husband has already been in communication with your brother. Nonetheless I trust you will not
object to my writing to inform you personally of our safe arrival in Madras. Although the time that you and I spent together,
in the weeks before my departure, was brief, I can say with assurance that from the moment of our first meeting I felt toward
you an affection sisterly in nature.
Is that too much? The truth is, at first glance, she found Gertrude unnerving, sitting, as she was, with her legs gathered
up over her brother's rattan chair, her dark skirt smoothed over her knees, a white cat in her lap. She was smoking, blowing
smoke rings at the ceiling with self-conscious lassitude. Her long hair was plaited and subdivided into distinct systems,
held in place by a complex and efficient system of pinning. When Hardy introduced them—"Mrs. Neville, Mr. Neville, my sister,
Miss Hardy"—Gertrude untangled herself and stood, gaunter than her brother and a bit taller. All bones. Thin enough to make
Alice feel ashamed of her uncorseted hips, the slight rounding of her belly, the unseemly protuberance of her breasts. Yet
what was most disturbing about Gertrude—it hit Alice only then—was her left eye. It didn't move with the right one.
I pray you will not take offense at my familiarity, nor, I hope, object if, during my stay here, I write on occasion to share
with you those aspects of our adventure that might fail to engage my husband's attention. Mathematicians are more brilliant
than most of us, but heaven help us if Mr. Baedeker were to ask them to write his guides!
A good line. But will Gertrude think so? Gertrude, she knows, writes verse. Caustic and clever verse. Verse of a sort that
betrays a certain—well—ambivalent feeling about her life as art mistress at a provincial girls' school:
There is a girl I can't abide.
Her name? I'll be discreet.
I feel I'd need some
savoir dire
Should I her parents meet!
She says "I never could do Maths.
When Daddy was at school
He could not add!" I'd love to say
"Then Daddy was a fool!"
When Gertrude showed Alice these verses, published in her school magazine, Alice smiled wanly. How could she admit that she
herself could never do maths ? She, the wife of a mathematician ? Gertrude, Alice suspects, despised her at first, because
she was everything Gertrude was not: feminine, fertile, beloved of a man whom she, too, loved. Or perhaps Gertrude despised
her because she assumed that Alice must by necessity despise tweedy, twiggish Gertrude. This would have been ridiculous. The
truth is, from the start, Alice only admired Gertrude—her wit, the humor at once cool and cutting. Here was a woman, like
Israfel, who did not suffer fools gladly, a woman thin as an exclamation point, and just as emphatic. There was this to be
said for invisibility: Gertrude could observe the world from the hidden safety of corners into which Alice, with her large
hips, could never possibly fit.
I am sorry to say that I have not, as yet, had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ramanujan. However, Mr. Neville is to meet him
to-day. Indeed, I suspect that Mr. Ramanujan may be the reason why my husband is late returning to the hotel for dinner!
Is that cruel, reminding Gertrude of what she, Alice, has that Gertrude never will? Or, more accurately, what Gertrude has
chosen never to have? For if she is a spinster, Alice suspects, it is mostly by choice. Like her brother, Gertrude considers
herself far more hideous than she actually is, which is perhaps why, instead of finding a job in London, she has elected to
live enisled among pupils whom, if the girl in the poem is any example, she loathes totally:
In dictée I got minus two;
There's not a verb I know;
I always write the future tense
Of 'rego,' 'regebo.'"
Her brother is just as strange. A few months before she and Eric boarded the ship for India, he came to tea at their house
with Littlewood: two good-looking men, both short of stature, one blond and the other dark. They behaved, she later told Eric,
like a married couple, finishing each other's sentences. "Don't tell Littlewood that!" Eric replied.
All through that tea, Hardy ignored her. More than anything, he reminded her of a squirrel, alert and bustling and timid all
at once. He talked only with Eric, and only about the Indian, whom he claimed might be another Newton. Littlewood, at least,
made an effort. He said he thought the William Morris wallpaper "very aesthetic." He complimented her dress and told her that
she would be invaluable to her husband on the journey.
Please tell your brother that I send him my warmest regards and that he may rest assured that my husband and I will do all
we can to persuade Mr. Ramanujan to come to Cambridge. That said, I feel that I can confess to you, Miss Hardy, how deeply
discomfited I am at the prospect. Like you and your brother, I do not consider myself, in any puritanical sense, to be a Christian.
Yet does our decision to live outside the bounds of organised religion give us the right to treat another's piety as superfluous
or absurd?