The Grammarian Read online

  “Well, move aside, boy,” Tata muttered, putting one leg out.

  “Sir, I am sorry, the Watson caters to European clientele only.”

  Tata rose to his height outside the coach, and Adivi followed suit. “Have you any idea who I am?” Tata was a modest man and rarely resorted to such shows of arrogance, but his pride was injured and he resented being embarrassed in front of his friend.

  “Mr. Tata Sir, I do realize who you are, and I apologize, but I cannot let you in Sir. I am on strict orders from Mr. Watson himself.”

  “Tata,” Adivi said, standing next to his friend, “do not waste your time with this coolie.” He pushed forward, only to have the doorman lay a hand firmly on his arm.

  “Sir, you cannot enter.” The doorman looked up, seeing other coaches with white clientele arriving. “Sir, please. I do not want to embarrass you. Please be on your way. I have to cater to these arriving guests.”

  Adivi felt the blood rise into his face; he grabbed the doorman’s wrist. “Get your bloody nigger hand off me!”

  Tata stepped between them. “I demand to speak with Watson now. We have tickets to see the Lumière exhibition, and we will bloody well see it.”

  The doorman spoke to a coolie in rushed, irritable Marathi and then bowed slightly to an English couple arriving. “Madam, Sir,” he acknowledged, holding the door for them. The coolie had scrambled inside, and the doorman asked Tata and Adivi to wait.

  Some white guests arrived, the ladies in evening dresses, the gentlemen in suits. Outside, posters boasted the Lumière screening: “Only engagement in India! Living Photographic Pictures in Life-Size Reproductions by Mssrs. Lumière Brothers on the night of July the 7th! See the moving picture show that has caused a sensation in Europe! Audiences jumping in their seats! Only at the Watson Hotel, Kala Ghoda, Bombay. Screenings at 6 PM, 7 PM, 9 PM, and 10 PM.”

  Some long minutes afterward, a tall British man with dark hair opened the hotel doors and spoke with the doorman, who pointed at Tata and Adivi. Raising an eyebrow and inhaling, he turned to Tata. “Mr. Tata. My name is David Brown; I manage the staff here at the Watson. I have been informed of your situation and I regret to inform you gentlemen that under no conditions are Indians allowed as guests of the hotel.”

  “We have tickets,” Adivi snarled. “I have come all the way from Waltair to see this exhibition.”

  “Sir,” Brown touched the tip of his mustache. “I am quite busy this evening as you can imagine. The Watson will be happy to refund you the price of your ticket. If that is all . . . .” Brown turned back to the hotel.

  “That is not all, Sir!” Tata had never felt so angry. “Now, I demand to speak to your superior!”

  Brown clicked his heels, turning back. “Sir, I am not going to ask you again. You must leave the premises immediately, or I shall be forced to summon the police. If either of you have any intentions of getting inside the Watson, I would be happy to take your name down for the next time we have an opening for a dishwasher.”

  BOTH MEN REMAINED silent on the trip back to the Esplanade House. Tata’s regal profile looked forward in defiance; Adivi gazed out the window, allowing them both the privacy of their shame. Tata reached into the breast pocket of his suit, pulled out the tickets and slowly began to tear them, the pieces falling like snow to the floor.

  The only Indians that night who would behold the Lumière films would be the servants working the night shift, who slept in the hallways of the hotel and saw bits of the 10 PM show when the English waitresses called them to go to the storeroom to bring up more ice or gin.

  “THEY ARE REAL bastards,” Tata muttered finally, his head shaking in disgust. “Real bastards.”

  “Do not take it to heart, Tata. One idiot who owns one hotel. He can go to hell.”

  Tata shook his head; his hands trembled with anger. “No. No, my friend. Their time is up.”

  Adivi spoke softly. “He is just one idiot, Jamsetji.”

  TATA AND ADIVI returned to Esplanade House and ate their dinner quietly, talking about the stormy monsoon rains outside, which had caused the coach to sway on the return trip. Lighting and thunder illuminated the walls of the dining room and punctuated their conversation with loud claps.

  “Shivani!” Tata called the cook to bring in coffee after the meal, and this too they took quietly until Tata said softly, “I shall build a hotel near Watson’s. Grander, more beautiful, open to all except him.” The line of his mouth was straight but the corners inched slightly upward. He finished his coffee and sighed. Tata stood up. “My friend, you will excuse me. I am quite tired tonight. You will ask Shivani should you need anything else. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Adivi offered, his sad eyes gazing out the windows of the Esplanade House, nature offering a show that was grand but not the one he had hoped for that evening. He walked to his room and lay down, still dressed, listening to the thunder. He turned his head toward the window, looking at silvery lines of lightning before closing his eyes. He conjured the image of a steely and intrepid locomotive emerging from the cloud of its own smoky exhaust.

  Adivi put his hand on his chest. His heart was still broken.

  1

  EN ROUTE TO THE PRESIDENCY OF FORT ST. GEORGE, SOUTH INDIA, OCTOBER 1911

  IT ALL SUITED his sensibilities so, the silver tea sets that made a merry tinkling with the to and fro of the train, the quiet efficiency of the stewards, the reading car with its collection of newspapers. He had been, upon arrival in Bombay, determined to keep faithful to European dress; he thought it a burden worth bearing—as a European and especially as a Parisian—to be, at all times, a picture of style and elegance, whatever the inconveniences posed by travel or heat. After some days in the cars of this country’s great black steam trains, however, and finding his finest suits falling victim to perspiration marks and oil stains from the station foods, he succumbed. The train stopped in Pune for several hours, and he left the station and purchased an ill-fitting but comfortable, lightweight kurta: a long, summer-weight white jacket, with a pair of slacks cut from the same fabric.

  Seeing him in Indian dress, one of his fellow passengers, a British engineer, raised his eyebrows and said, “Ah, Dr. Lautens, you’ve gone native, I see,” and Lautens peered over his worn copy of de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale and grinned.

  “What are you reading, Dr. Lautens?” the engineer asked.

  “The Bible,” Lautens replied, smiling.

  In his bag were other books too. English and Hindi dictionaries, a book of Sanskrit roots, the Griffith translation of the Ramayana and the Fauche one, for purposes of comparison, and Loti’s L’Inde (Sans les Anglais)—his wife bought the latter and gave it to him, saying that he would at least have one other Frenchman traveling with him. It seemed so improbable to him this feeling—that here, this place not remotely stark or stoic, here, with a hundred people seemingly always around him, this place, a soaring urban space all bucolic at its blurred boundaries and where untethered animals mingled through the aisles of the city, the half-naked sadhus with the long grey beards and the Hindu rosaries, and that nearly ever-present splash of sunshine, exposing everything, and the constant sounds of the train: the roar of the engine, the boys walking through with coffee and tea, the old women fruit vendors, the endlessly inquisitive natives, here where the humidity, heat and dust all clouded the periphery of Alexandre’s vision with the sheer crowdedness of the place—but there it was: he felt lonely. It was so foreign a sentiment to him that when he long lastly defined it, he found it surprising. And yet being neither a native nor an Englishman (his countrymen were few—and concentrated in French possessions like Pondichéry), he preferred to maintain a distance from everyone and remained wary, as he long had, of quickly forged friendships.

  It was his fourth day on the train journey to the South—that great expanse of salty-aired land that still posed a mystery to most Europeans with its tribes and closed societies, its culture like a picture stopped in time. He b
reathed it in—India always smelled like it was burning, that hot dust and kerosene and petrol smell, as if under the earth was a smoldering fire, just there, beneath the surface. From Victoria Station in Bombay, and then away from the Arabian Sea, to Pune, Secundrabad. In Hyderabad he would transfer to Madras on the Southern Mahratta Line, and from his next stop in Warangal he would ride along the Bay of Bengal to Waltair.

  THE BRITISH ENGINEER always left his food half-finished. “The food and the bloody heat conspire to kill a man here. It is impossible; if you want my advice, stay away from the food and out of the sun, though of course I suppose one really can’t avoid either completely. I try to eat only to the point of not being hungry; the rest I leave.” He rested his fingertips on the rim of his hat; he always wore his hat and a three-piece suit, no matter the heat.

  Though Alexandre had never considered himself a glutton, or even a gourmet, he had found that the thing he missed with particular intensity was the food of his country. Longing for the foods of home—completely unattainable in this part of the world—made him feel at times as if his mind was going. And hours went by before he could force away this useless reverie and bring himself back to the reality of the train: the brown faces that watched him in his window seat, his attaché case with his journals, books, and the first several pages of a manuscript in progress. Inevitably, the train’s food steward would come around with the dinner thali—a main dish, usually of vegetables, surrounded with rice and small dishes of lentils, greens and pickles. This food offered its own particular satisfaction, and though it had begun to bore him now, he knew someday he would miss it too. At first he found it overly spicy, but he had grown accustomed to it, somewhat, and washed the heat down with heavy, white dollops of yogurt and fresh mango slices or jackfruit. The fruit here was unearthly in its sweetness and its richness, and it offered him a unique delight that was unmatched in Europe.

  Tired as he was, and as thoughtful and pensive an adult as he had recently become, there was, just beneath the surface of his conscious thinking, in Alexandre, a kinetic, adolescent shudder, the boyish thrill of adventure to unknown lands. Since Bombay, he could not control his restless right foot and an ever so slight upward turn of the corners of his lips; all in all, he rather loved the view of that continual show of village after village outside his window, which Alexandre, new as he was to the subcontinent, found endlessly fascinating but which his train companions blocked from their sight by drawing the window shades down and concerning themselves instead with the imported newspapers from the places they called home: a white stone home off St. James Park, or those English villages with gardens of tea roses, those places that smelled in the summer of the salty North Atlantic.

  Just now, as they passed through the fertile villages around Bijapure, a steward came around, in his steady hands a silver service carrying cream, sugar, tea and biscuits.

  “No, I said one biscuit not two,” the British engineer shouted. He waved his hand dismissively over the tea and biscuits set down before him and looked at Alexandre, sighing as if exhausted and shaking his head disapprovingly.

  The steward looked bored, not shaken in the least by the engineer’s sharp upbraiding. “I’m sorry, Sir,” he said, removing one of the biscuits amidst the engineer’s fussy, fluttering fingers.

  “These people need instruction to perform even the most menial task, it seems sometimes!” the engineer said, looking at Alexandre, his long tapered fingers delicately holding the teacup.

  Alexandre was supremely put off by such a sort of feminine fastidiousness regarding food, and for his part found no fault in the steward’s service. Alexandre averted his eyes from the engineer’s, taking deep pleasure in denying the Saville-Rowe dandy his companionship. Alexandre threw a meaningful, sympathetic glance at the tea steward.

  Alexandre was not an Englishman; he shared with these people only his skin color. And there being no other Frenchman on the train, Alexandre at that moment declared himself a man without a nation, simply himself, Alexandre Lautens, and felt suddenly a wild and intoxicating freedom. He was a scholar, not a soldier, and he felt bound only to the kingdom of scholarship, of ideas, not those lines on maps that only men obeyed. All of those men, some small and some great: presidents, popes, despots, dictators. Even so stupid an animal as a pigeon had more freedom, not bound by the laws imposed by border guards where France met Spain. But a man must find his papers, those credentials given by other men, as if identity were not a birthright but a government issuance, merely a collection of yellowing papers.

  Sitting in that train in a country utterly foreign to him, at that moment, Alexandre had successfully shaken off the shackles of society no more imagined than a prisoner’s steel handcuffs. His body did not betray that newfound lightness, nor the soaring freedom he felt, but his eyes under his thick, dark eyebrows glittered with the color and sparkle of cut sapphires. Smiling at the engineer, Alexandre snapped a biscuit in half and pushed a piece in his mouth, eating happily, ravenously, the way his children ate oranges on Christmas morning.

  THIS FOREIGN LAND went by, and drowsiness set on Alexandre as the world outside turned dark. It was odd, he thought, how quickly one could retire from the life he knew and held dear. Even the essentials of existence had quickly fallen away like the peel of a fruit, and soon he was left only with the meat, left only with himself. Two months ago, before he embarked on this voyage, he could not have imagined a life without Madeline, without her pale, long form and messy brown hair across his pillow. He remembered how her hips felt in his hands. Rose water and baby powder on her skin, and on the bedsheets, on Matthieu and Catherine when they would nestle in bed together, all of them fighting for her loving. He did miss her. But not as much as he claimed in the letters he had sent her from the port in Bombay and from the village post offices along the train route. Perhaps it was because life here seemed a thing apart, as if it were not a continuum of that Parisian existence. He missed the children in the same way, and yet moments would go by when he could scarcely remember that he was a father. And then shuddering, he would recall, from some deep well of that former life, how dearly he once held those moments: carrying Matthieu on his shoulders, buying Catherine ribbons or a piece of chocolate, kissing them good night, setting adrift paper sailboats in ponds, flying red kites in an endless blue, summer sky.

  He thought perhaps Madeline did not miss him as she claimed, perhaps she too had moved away from their life together, and taken a lover, and perhaps this same man kissed his children good night, bounced them on his knee. After all, he had been away for some time: after he collected the necessary travel papers, he had first to take the train to Calais from Paris, and then a cargo-laden ferry from Calais to Dover. From Dover he traveled to London, where he stayed for four days before boarding a ship, which took three weeks to arrive in Bombay and then, at long last, he found himself on this train, headed south and then east. How impossibly large life seemed when he considered all the possibilities, how small when a choice was made.

  CATALOGING A LANGUAGE is a never-ending task—words are added, or fall into ill repute or disuse. Innocuous terms become vulgar. The profane is edified. Grammar varies, has within it different registers—literary, formal, the easy speak of peasants. It is difficult anywhere. But the linguistic climate of India made this exercise infinitely more difficult, and—when Alexandre doubted the reason for his travel, when he felt frustrated with his work—quite nearly impossible. There were as many languages as there were gods in India, and that was very, very many. When a linguist was fortunate, a direct translation for a complicated word existed, and linguists were rarely fortunate. Most complicated were verbs—the translation for a single verb tense in one language could take three or four words to only approximate the meaning in another. Speakers would impose the correct structures of their native languages on learned ones.

  He thought back to college, when he embarked—much to the amusement of his friends and family—on learning Sanskrit.

  “Sanskr
it means ‘refined,’” his college classics lecturer, Dr. Bonventre, had said. Bonventre’s office windows were draped with curtains made of saris and he had a large stone statue of a dancing Ganesha on his bookshelf.

  “Pāini, five hundred years before Christ, had identified 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Three thousand, nine hundred fifty nine!” Bonventre lifted himself up on his toes, looking skyward in amazement. “ . . . he codified a hodgepodge of vernaculars, rarefied the language until it was, when spoken properly, an elegant, mathematical poem.” In India, Alexandre could sometimes hear the language coming from inside temples that lined the train route, spoken as it was over the ringing prayer bells. Pāini must not have had much time left for anything other than the study of the language, Alexandre thought.

  Dr. Bonventre wrote Sanskrit on the chalkboard and then drew a slash after the n. “The name comes from sa, ‘self-fulfilled,’ plus skar, ‘educated’ or ‘cultured.’ The name Sanskrit is the result of the sound change laws, called sandhi, with which you will be well acquainted by the end of this term.”

  And so Alexandre logged these words, these sentences, their strange structures, so unlike those found in the languages of the West and charming in their own way, and often musical, with a melody that fell into the cadence of those native varieties of French and English too, making familiar languages somehow strange and exotic.

  ONLY A FEW months before, the Germans had sent their warship the Panther to Morocco; the world was smaller, tenser; wars were waged over bits of land, scrambling for tokens of empire, seeing now in the light of modernity how little there was to own on earth. Some few months later, an American politician named Bingham, while wandering South America’s hills, had stumbled upon the ancient city of Machu Picchu. The photographs had been published in the European press: a city so high up it could be mistaken for heaven itself, buildings of stone, the mythical city of Vilcabamba, of which Bingham had heard rumors. The Agence Havas spoke to Bingham and he said, “In the variety of its charms and the power of its spell, I know of no place in the world which can compare with it.” No place. Lautens remembered. The glory of the Louvre was dimmed now, after La Joconde had gone missing; from the safety of a corner neighboring a Correggio, it had been stolen. Warships named after wildcats, dormant cities in the sky, the abduction of a mysterious woman. The world grew smaller and larger at the same time.