The Grammarian Page 10

  Mohini, when men were angry with her, felt that it was as much a failure of her beauty as a failure of action. Hers was an existence of a glowing halo of goodness, of loving smiles offered, a quiet, sweet disposition—that kind of floating-skirt female presence that betrayed an air of gracious submission to the needs of those around her. And it was an air that was met with a steady commentary on that perfect confluence of her beauty and sweetness, that willing submission that was understood as a loving nature among her relatives and the family friends. That it was as much an impression created with silk and jewels as with kindness was of no concern to Mohini, who understood her beauty to be a manifestation of that intrinsic goodness that she knew she embodied by the way others praised her. “Manam Mahasundari!” her aunts and uncles would say, pinching her cheeks, “our great beauty!” Her parents too saw her beauty as a radiant expression of their daughter’s virtue. Mohini never went by unnoticed, though she tried to give the impression that she didn’t much care if she was; her father’s particular kind of disposition, slightly ostentatious, was fine for a man but distasteful in a woman. And Mohini sought above all else to be a girl of good taste. That she flattered her parents so well was an added pleasure, as lovely as a dusting of gold on the family crest.

  “Daddy told me you were studying in here.” She began to walk toward him. “I thought I’d bring you some fruit.”

  “Oh thank you, how kind,” Alexandre stood, his fingertips brushing hers as he took the plate from her. Tuberoses were tucked into the joints of her braid, and when she stood close the fragrance hung over them both like a sweet nostalgic veil, and all together, that moment, with the beautiful butter-colored girl and the scent of hot silk and coconut oil and white flowers radiating from her, was so heady it nearly brought tears to his eyes.

  Alexandre looked down at the fruit. “What kind of fruit is this?” The curious fruit’s green shell held black seeds covered in creamy, sweet, white flesh.

  “Sitaphalam—in English you call it . . . ” She looked up, thinking, “custard apple.”

  “Sitaphalam . . . Sita’s fruit?”

  “Yes . . . after Sita in the Ramayana, though I don’t know why exactly it is called that . . . What are you working on, Dr. Lautens?”

  “My chapter on adjectives in Telugu.”

  “Ah . . . can I help you?”

  Alexandre touched the page of his notebook, accusatory in its blankness. He smiled, amused and surprised by her candid offer. Though consultation with Anjali had become the norm, he’d never thought to ask Mohini.

  “Well, yes, of course . . . ”

  She raised her eyebrows. Alexandre looked at her briefly. He noticed her lower lip was fuller than the top one, which gave her a look of perpetual petulance and innocence. There was such purity in her expression—as if she had no inner machinations. But rather than having the effect of disarming him, Alexandre felt more uneasy around her.

  “Very well . . . then, well, in the previous chapter, I discussed the nominal system, basically how nouns operate in Telugu, and well,” Alexandre sat down and continued. He motioned to the plate of fruit on the table, “so that the reader could construct the phrase, ‘the custard apple,’ and basically, this chapter is so that they can start to construct more complicated strings, like . . . ”

  “. . . the green custard apple . . . aku pacca sitaphalam,” Mohini offered.

  “Yes, or the . . . sour custard apple.”

  Alexandre looked hard at the girl, in a way that made her feel searched, and she looked down. He continued to look at her face, and he breathed in the dizzying, soporific tuberose. “Will you join me? I couldn’t possibly eat this all by myself.” His arm reached toward her, an alabaster limb with pale blue veins, that naked arm that had held in its embrace many girls, years ago, when he ran through the streets of Paris, a feckless boy Adonis with broad shoulders, dark curls and blue eyes like small planets the color of the sea. Those days, he would lie in repose on a strange bed and watch a pretty girl dress and was never sad to see her go; he loved women and the way they stretched his sensual imagination—their smell and skin, but he had always been a boy who was secretly lonely in his soul, always feeling guilty for making any closer association than his pretty, friendless mother.

  Now, Alexandre’s hand wavered near Mohini’s hair, the tip of his finger brushing the edge of a white petal. “Rajanigandha,” he pronounced carefully. “The perfume of the night.” He had heard the sadhus say that unmarried girls were meant to avoid its scent. The flowers smelled like night closing in, like an evening in a hot, restless city, like diesel and brave women, and Alexandre wondered for a moment why this posy of a girl would wear something so ruinous in her hair.

  Mohini smiled, a slight nervousness coloring her expression, and Alexandre realized suddenly how forward he was being. He colored and withdrew his hand. She opened her mouth to speak when her parents walked in, Lalita a few paces behind her husband, and Mohini rushed toward Shiva and lovingly threw her arms around her father, her bosom lowering as she exhaled.

  “I was just bringing Dr. Lautens some fruit, Daddy,” she said as Adivi cupped her face, kissing her forehead.

  Adivi always smiled when he saw his younger daughter. Hers was that ephemeral, bright quality of girlhood, her ever-hopeful countenance like a pretty mermaid breaking murky sea waves. Hers was, in that house, a uniquely cheerful presence that broke through the somber air like a singular beam of levity.

  Lalita passed through the room, greeting Alexandre, her smile a tense line on her face. She worried for Mohini, seeing things a mother sees, that a woman’s virtue is something that must ever be guarded—even the slightest hint of ill repute and she may never be able to recover. A man could not understand this, not even a father. Once a girl’s reputation is damaged, it is ruined forever and Lalita thought: “In India, we never let a woman forget how she has failed.”

  Mohini’s effect on her father was one that was easily visible to Alexandre, like a square of light moving over a dark corridor. Under her influence, Adivi seemed a handsome young father, his face proud and bright with the hope of an irresistibly normal life. And Alexandre, his heart aching, felt sympathy for that father, who, saddled with the tragedy of his older daughter’s plight, chose instead of a derailing affection that happy, easy love and that glowing light of his younger girl’s beauty and promise.

  She entered the room as light as a songbird, such a thing apart from her sister’s heavy, lumbering gait. And mesmerized too by her girlish flight, Alexandre could almost understand why Adivi preferred his younger daughter for the easy joy he found in her rather than that surely endless free fall into sympathy and sorrow provoked by Anjali. But then again, Alexandre thought, “Who asked Adivi to choose?” As a father, Alexandre felt that the love he felt for one child did not make smaller the love he felt for the other.

  As a child, frightened by that occasional sound and light show outside his window, the thunder, the flashes of lightening coming from some faraway point in the horizon, silver and green trees dancing violently in the storm in hastily emptied Geneva streets, the rain and leaves thrown against his bedroom window, Alexandre recalled running to the arms of his preternaturally calm father, Maurice’s hand on his head, his ear pressed to his father’s chest, listening to his steady and reassuring heartbeat, and for that memory alone Alexandre could not imagine without extreme sorrow any child being denied her father’s love. He wondered if Adivi was a man without compassion, or if, rather, he was one with such an extreme capacity for it that it was a source of embarrassment. It seemed to Alexandre that the only way a man like Adivi would handle embarrassment—handsome, perfectly mannered, neatly dressed, controlled Adivi—was through anger.

  As if to compensate, Alexandre doted on Anjali, smiling indulgently at her when she joined him for coffee or tea, but he feared his attentions came from that repugnant place of pity, and if so, he wondered if this was apparent to the girl. It was like the enraging pity he felt for paupers
in the streets of Paris or those child beggars in Bombay, all of them so shameless in their need, those unpolished personifications of modernity’s failings—none of the gloss or sophistication of society—instead writhing and trembling with outstretched hands like pitiful savages before God. And there was Anjali, that constant reminder to Adivi of human fragility, and Alexandre at that moment felt for Adivi, that strong, modern man, more pity than he could ever summon for the man’s eldest daughter.

  “Oh, where is Mary? I asked her to see that Dr. Lautens was comfortable.” Adivi frowned. “She’s weeping for that . . . that Clough.” Adivi turned apologetically at Alexandre. “I’m so sorry Dr. Lautens, these servants . . . you see, her minister is sick—no, that isn’t correct—he is dying, and Mary’s son works for him as a preacher. She’s been weeping for him all morning,” he said, irritated.

  Alexandre had heard about the American missionary John Clough, the so-called Apostle to the Telugu, who worked in the area with the untouchables and had baptized his first Telugu person sixty years earlier, but he had no idea that Mary had any family other than the one she worked for.

  Adivi sighed and turned to Mohini, “Run along dearest.”

  Adivi pulled a chair out for himself and shouted for Mary to bring in lunch. Alexandre sucked the sweet, white meat of the custard apple off a black seed and looked up to see Mohini smile at him before she left the room.

  “WHAT BECOMES OF unmarried girls, Kanakadurga Amma Garu?” Alexandre asked.

  The old woman smiled, her expression rueful and weary. “She will inherit half of her father’s money, Dr. Lautens. Half the land, half our family jewelry. Her sister will get the other half of course, but Anjali will also get the house, so she can live here the rest of her life, taking care of her parents, and when we are all gone, the land will be passed back to Mohini’s children.”

  “There is no hope that she can get married?”

  “I love my Anjali more than anyone in the world, Dr. Lautens, but no one is going to marry a plain girl with a deformity and dark skin, not even a well-bred one with some land and money . . . ” Kanakadurga paused, smiling, “My Anjali, you see. She has something special. A beam of valor. She is brave, she is intrepid. Once, when the girls were little, before Anjali became sick, I woke up one morning and I heard Mohini screaming—there was a spider on her bed. And Anjali was there—”

  “And Anjali killed it?”

  Kanakadurga smiled deeply, her eyes bright, “No, no. She took it in her hands and took it outside. She did not kill it. She was brave. She took it outside to the garden and released it. She let it live.” The old woman laughed. “Imagine it! A little girl repatriating a spider!” And then she smiled deeply, sadly. “I hope she can find some happiness in the comfort her Shiva’s wealth will afford her.”

  Prithu stood silently at Kanakadurga’s door, holding a small, red box. “Ah, yes, the gloves!” Alexandre smiled at Prithu, who stared back at him, wide-eyed and emotionless. Taking the box, Alexandre opened it and smiled at the crisp white gloves within. He slid them on and stretched his hand out in the fine cotton. “Kanakadurga Amma Garu, I’ve been invited to the Waltair Club next week,” he said, speaking of one of the British social clubs in town. He’d ordered the gloves from an English tailor in town. He showed his hands to Prithu, playfully. “Just the thing, eh Prithu?” But the child remained stoic in the doorway and Alexandre offered him an awkward “Thank-you.”

  ON A CRISP Cambridge evening, over drinks at the Eagle, one of Alexandre’s Cambridge colleagues, Dr. Robertson, had given him the name of a friend in Waltair. “Please, when you are in Waltair, make arrangements to see my friend Anthony Davidson. He’s an old friend of mine from Harrow, and he’d love to meet you. It’s always good to have a contact with home in these parts, Alexandre. I’ve sent Tony a letter notifying him that you will be arriving soon. He would love to meet you.”

  A long lawn unrolled before Alexandre like a red carpet, leading from the road to the club’s main building. Outside on the verandah, under the swinging white punkahs, English soldiers in their dress uniforms were drinking and smoking, sending up spirals of smoke in the early evening sun.

  As Alexandre approached the building, an Indian waiter stopped him. “Sir, can I help you?”

  “I am a guest of Dr. Davidson’s. Eh . . . I have not met him before—would you please point me in his direction?”

  “Certainly.”

  Alexandre was led in the direction of a rumpled Englishman smoking a cigar. He wore a dark red rose in his lapel. Dr. Davidson stood on the verandah of the Waltair Club; his hair was disheveled and his shirt wrinkled, but a little light of the aristocratic shined through nevertheless.

  He smiled deeply as Alexandre approached, stretching out his hand. “You must be Dr. Lautens.” Davidson puffed on his cigar, shaking Alexandre’s hand. He laughed and, pinching Alexandre’s cheek like an affectionate grandmother, said, “My goodness you are a handsome bugger.” And slapping Alexandre on the back, Davidson led him into a large oak-paneled barroom. Indian barmen in white kurtas wove through the tables of Englishmen in suits with trays of scotch and whiskey. A waiter led them to an empty table by the large doors opening onto the back of the club grounds. Looking outside, Alexandre saw the palm trees swaying in the breeze around the bandstand, where a brass section was tuning its instruments.

  Davidson waved off the menus offered by the waiter. “Two gin and tonics,” he said.

  “Yes Sir, Dr. Davidson.”

  Davidson took Alexandre by the shoulder, “So! Dr. Lautens, what brings you to Waltair?”

  Alexandre smiled. He liked Davidson immediately. Alexandre told Davidson about his work and the book of Telugu grammar. Davidson asked Alexandre how he liked India.

  “It is wonderful. It is nice, in a way, to know so few people. It is very peaceful. I’ve been getting a lot of work done.”

  “Oh, how bloody dreadful!” Davidson laughed.

  When the drinks were brought, Davidson took his and raised his highball glass. “Well I’m sure as hell not toasting to work,” he said, smiling. Outside, the sun was setting, painting the sky in reds and oranges. Davidson smiled, nodding toward the skyline: “To India.”

  “To India,” Alexandre repeated, smiling. He looked at the dazzling sunset. He was beginning to feel at home. They spoke of Davidson’s work for the Royal Botanical Survey.

  An Indian horsekeep was pulling two chestnut Arabians, braying into their muzzles, from the stables as a friendly polo match was getting under way on the far lawn. The British boys in their riding kits assembled in front of a restless black gelding, weighing their mallets in their hands and strapping on their helmets, as a child behind them brushed the horse’s mane. Davidson lingered on the scene before leaning back in his chair and taking in the view of the bar. “My goodness, I hate this place,” he said, smiling.

  ANJALI WAITED IN her room for her sister. She felt Mohini moving away from her and wanted dispel her fears that she was losing her. Anjali had sent out for Mohini’s favorite chocolates and arranged them on a plate. Anjali was afraid her jealousy would strangle her alive.

  Mohini had become more and more foreign to Anjali since the announcement of the engagement; Mohini had become that strangest of creatures—a girl betrothed. It seemed to Anjali that her little sister had become an expert in a dance she had never before performed. Mohini, as if by magic, had begun to adopt a wifely manner—helping Lalita run the household. Even her disposition had changed from childish to womanly; a new grace was evident in Mohini, and a secretive smile that spoke of membership to a private sorority. Her interest in the world of ideas and that space beyond the gates of the home had never been great but now was nonexistent.

  Today, Anjali was prepared to play the part of the giddy and coquettish sister. Today she was prepared to gush about her future brother-in-law’s dimpled smile and thick hair, and ready to admire the bridal trousseau, the saris and jewelry. In short, she was ready to attempt to play the pa
rt of a girl. But Mohini was nowhere to be seen, and after waiting for half an hour, the coffee cold, Anjali picked up her cane and thought to go in search of her sister, but then thought the better of it. When they were children, before the polio had withered her leg, she and Mohini, barefoot upon the often-toiled earth of Lalita’s parents’ home, would hide among the trees, the long white home of stucco and stone behind them in the distance. At night in search of their granddaughters, Lalita’s parents made black shadows against the big house, shouting over the endless, blooming grove for the girls to come in for dinner, or settle into bed. The girls would run back to the house. In the air were perfume and fireflies, and on nights when their grandmother had energy and felt indulgent she would teach them how to embroider flowers and birds on their handkerchiefs.

  As she waited for Mohini, Anjali looked in the mirror at herself and saw nearly incomprehensible hideousness; she shuddered in disgust at the image before her. She thought, “My God. How irredeemably ugly.” She thought of that look of repulsion she so often caught in her father’s eyes, how her mother’s gaze would often escape her own, and she understood now why that was so. “I disgust them,” she thought.

  She sat waiting today in her room, hearing female voices echoing through the marble corridors, and didn’t get up to look for her sister for half an hour more.

  AS ALEXANDRE SPOKE to Kanakadurga, he could see Anjali walk from her bedroom into the lavishly furnished receiving room. Her mother and sister were already there, as were other women from the village who were friends with Lalita. Anjali entered, unnoticed, watching them as they made the wedding arrangements, her dark face stoic.

  “I should be there too, celebrating, but it holds no more appeal to me than attending a funeral,” Kanakadurga sighed.