The Grammarian Read online

  Our (incl) tiger

  Mana pulli

  Our (excl) tiger

  Maa pulli

  Their tiger

  Vari pulli

  His tiger

  Athani pulli

  Her tiger

  Aame pulli

  AT NIGHT, THE home was like an island. From the outside in, it seemed as if it might have been the last salvation of a dying race, a sort of Hindu-Mughal Noah’s Ark; lights and guards with lamps illuminated it, a floating Atlantis in a sea of the dark roads and unlit alleys that surrounded it. Inside, it was safe. The marble floors cooled in the evening, the stucco walls remained warm, fireflies flickered in the garden.

  Weak with grief, it was through these corridors that Anjali raced in her awkward, aided gait, the skirts of her nightdress skimming the floor, toward her grandmother’s bedroom. Alexandre wasn’t meant to have seen her, of course. He woke, refreshed by a deathlike sleep; his body was still confused by the long journey, and it was the small hours of the morning. Alexandre walked through the house like a pale apparition, feeling invisible. He had meant only to fetch some drinking water from the clay pot in the kitchen. Weak grey light was only beginning to enter the home, the house full of shadows. He rose from bed, his body infantile in its first attempts to walk after so deep a rest. Disoriented and groggy, he moved about the home, enjoying its nocturnal stillness.

  And that was when he saw her, from the shadows of an adjacent hallway. With one hand covering her sorrow-contorted face, she pushed her grandmother’s bedroom door open. Though he knew it was bad form, Alexandre followed Anjali at a distance, and in the lamplight of the hallway, he saw her sink to the floor beside her grandmother’s sleeping body.

  How she wailed for her grandmother in the semi-darkness.

  “Nainamma!” She cried, shaking the old woman awake, holding her by the arm. “Nainamma!” She sobbed for her again and again, until wearily Kanakadurga woke, and seeing the child sat up.

  “My dear . . . my dear,” she said, and Anjali crawled into her grandmother’s bed and took solace in her arms as tenderly Kanakadurga stroked the girl’s hair. She seemed already to know the source of the girl’s misery. And clutching the old body of this woman who, it seemed, had with such sweetness loved her her whole life, she wept until exhausted and fell asleep.

  Kanakadurga, holding her granddaughter, looked up and saw the fast movement of a shadow retreating in the hallway.

  6

  AS IT HAPPENED, and to Alexandre’s slight annoyance, it seemed he and Anjali shared a habit of waking up early. Every morning she would say, “Mary, bring some coffee,” and Anjali’s voice was cold, her eyes not even lifting to the servant woman’s. Despite her handicap, Anjali was able to convey a profound degree of an icy sense of superiority. Though the color of her eyes was a rich, dark brown, they were set with a look of glacial calm, a masculine hardness that Alexandre found unnerving in a girl.

  And every morning Mary would reply, “Yes, Miss Anjali,” and scuttle back from her mistress, her plump, pleasant bovine face lowered in submission.

  Mornings in the Adivi household started early. By daylight he could hear the sounds of the servants gathering water and readying the day’s food preparations and feeding the dogs. Occasionally, he would find Adivi up reading the paper in his white nightshirt and dhoti, but the women of the house never left their rooms without having bathed and dressed first. He had never seen Lalita look so much as slightly disheveled. When she made her entrance, she would head straight for the kitchen and oversee making breakfast. Kanakadurga performed her morning puja after a bath each morning and Alexandre would sometimes hear her repeated Sanskrit mantras or hear her ringing a prayer bell as he made his way out to the garden.

  Alexandre took a cue from Adivi and allowed himself a degree of casualness in his morning appearance. Time was important, as he hoped to salvage an hour before breakfast for work. Walking to the garden that morning, Alexandre was surprised to see that Anjali was already there, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper, her hair freshly washed in a wet braid and wearing a sari. She did not look any worse after her sorrowful night.

  Byron was curled on the cement, in the shadow of a guava tree. He greeted everyone with the same expression of total indifference—a single eye raised, followed usually by a tongue-stretching yawn. He barked only at monkeys and in his most extreme shows of athleticism would put his forepaws on the trunks of monkey-inhabited trees and bark, relenting only when his master called his name.

  Alexandre smoothed his hand over the page in front of him:

  NOMINATIVE DECLENSIONS IN TELUGU

  Ill(u)-nunchi

  from the home

  Ill(u)-ki

  for the home/to the house

  Ill(u)-kosam

  for the benefit of the home

  Ill(u)-paina

  on top of the house

  Ill(u)-krinda

  below the house

  Ill(u)-waraku

  until the house

  Ill(u)-lo

  in the house

  Ill(u)-mundu

  in front of the house

  Ill(u)-venuka

  behind the house

  Ill(u)-ledu

  without a house

  Ill(u)-tho

  with the house

  Ill(u)-gurinchi

  concerning the house

  Ill(u)-prakkana

  next to the house

  Ill(u)-meeda

  on the house

  PERHAPS HE WOULD have Anjali check it over for accuracy.

  Alexandre stared blankly at the stones, making shapes—that one there looked like an ear and then one over there like a palm frond. His feet were tanned in weird stripes made by his Indian sandals. His face, neck and forearms were also more golden than when he had arrived.

  “Good morning Anjali,” he said, quietly announcing his presence so as not to startle her.

  “Good morning, Dr. Lautens,” she replied, reaching for her cane to stand.

  “No Anjali, please, don’t get up; I hope you don’t mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all.”

  He sat down, saying nothing of the night before. She spoke about an interest in learning French, how she thought it was a beautiful language and dreamed of one day looking down on the city of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  Alexandre nodded at the paper in her lap. “What are you reading?”

  She smiled shyly. “This . . . oh, it is called Maratha, it is a left-wing paper . . . this man named Tilak, he’s a nationalist . . . he owns the paper. He’s a bit of an extremist . . . but he has good ideas and he’s very charismatic . . . people listen to him.”

  “He’s an extremist?”

  “Well, a few years ago he came to the defense of some Indian boys who accidentally killed some women when they threw a bomb at the Calcutta Presidency magistrate.” She smiled, folding the paper, “I got the paper last week, but Daddy doesn’t want me to read these, so I had to wait for some privacy.”

  Alexandre smiled. “Well, I won’t tell.” He was impressed. “So, you don’t believe in ‘by any means necessary’?”

  “I don’t believe in killing people.”

  “Why did they want to kill the magistrate?”

  “He sentenced a boy who had hit a police officer to be caned. The boy almost died.”

  “Hmm . . . freedom always has its causalities, Anjali,” he said, flatly. “Well, when I was young, there was a scandal, in the French army, which we now call the Dreyfus Affair.”

  Anjali leaned into Alexandre. Alexandre’s entrée into scholarly life left little time for concern about politics and the things of public life, and recalling his impassioned youth made his eyes sparkle. He liked telling her stories. He continued. “A Jewish officer in the French army, his name was Dreyfus—he was convicted of treason for spying for the Germans. He was taken into the public square and the badges of rank on his jacket were torn off and his military sword was broken and he wa
s shipped off to be exiled to a penal colony in South America.”

  “My goodness . . . ” She wanted to show him she was listening.

  “Well, so, a few years after he was exiled, these papers came to light, which exonerated Dreyfus, but you see, there was at the time, and still now, this very strong anti-Jewish feeling in France, and the army covered up the new evidence.” Alexandre smiled, recalling his youth. “I remember protesting the government with other students and professors. We called ourselves the dreyfusards.” Alexandre smiled to himself, remembering the moments of fraternal solidarity with his fellow dissidents. “I haven’t thought about that time in my life for rather a long time.” He smiled warmly. “Anyway . . . it is always good to see young people interested in political life.”

  Alexandre and Anjali shared a moment in silence. Though they were both facing forward, he thought he saw her eyes, out of the corner of his, darting toward him.

  Though perhaps rude, or too soon in their acquaintance, he was curious as to her peculiar physical condition.

  “Anjali . . . may I ask why you use a cane? Of course, it is none of my business . . . ”

  She did not seem taken aback or offended at his asking; he was the most handsome man she had ever seen, and she felt glad that he had taken an interest in her. Rather, she smiled indulgently at him, in the manner of an adult to a child, and began her story.

  “Not at all, Dr. Lautens. I had polio as a child,” she answered.

  He took the girl in. Her body seemed to be cut from some very strange piece of wood, twisted. Anjali was plain, and it had never existed in the realm of possibility for any charm of face, hair or body to have compensated for that mangled leg. There was, in fact, little in her countenance suggestive of her patrician blood; proof lay, perhaps exclusively if at all, in her straight and pointed nose. Perhaps, from a great distance, some generous daydreamer, seeing the girl in profile, could fancy her a princess or an empress, a lesser maharani. But from his point of vantage, she was a plain woman-child, clearly a victim of the darker side of fortune.

  “I do not look at my leg often,” Anjali said.

  That hardness, that startling gruff quality in Anjali was one she had purposely cultivated. After she fell ill, Anjali, even then, even as a little girl, realized that she brought out in others a saccharine pity, one not rooted in sympathy but in quiet gratitude: their pity was fueled by the guilt they felt for being supremely thankful that her fate—her illness—wasn’t theirs. And so it came to Anjali, how sickening it was, to be at once crippled and sweet natured, how they would coo sadly at Lalita, “Ooh what a pity! Such a sweet girl.” They would nod their heads, sighing, or click their tongues sympathetically at Lalita, as if she were the one who were sick. As if she had been the one who had once feverishly courted death. Anjali took on, at first with great effort and then suddenly one day, with none at all, that stoic quality of stone.

  It was only to her grandmother that her true self was ever revealed: on the day she decided to hide her real nature, she sat to tea with her grandmother, but, indeed, her grandmother’s stern, loving nature met Anjali’s put-on coldness with such determined warmth that Anjali’s resolve at once melted away. Her parents, weary with concern and soft words for their sick child, took almost with delight to this new, hardened girl whose stoniness they could at long last meet with anger, anger they felt at the gods for causing such pain and such embarrassment to their proud family. Lalita and Adivi could even yell at or ignore that girl who answered them with aloof gestures, or by rolling her eyes, the way they never could at that sickly, ailing little girl. It was so much easier to court the world’s anger than its false sympathies; Anjali felt so less diminished by this new reaction from others. But to her grandmother, she was passionate, vulnerable and brilliant, and, far beyond the concerns of her disfigured body, excruciatingly fragile. That day, stirring her tea, Anjali had answered her grandmother’s question of “How are you feeling today?” with a shrug, her mouth a flat line of indifference. Kanakadurga was resolute, shaking at once with anger and love, “I have seen, Anjali, this new attitude of yours. Shrug your shoulders at the whole world. Dismiss everyone else with your hand. But my darling, do not dare ever, ever, act this way with me.”

  And then with Anjali looking up, her eyes wet, her lips trembling, her grandmother smiled, seeing once again that little girl, the little girl who, since her husband, Anil, had died, was her one true love.

  And Adivi became harder too, as if Anjali’s illness had shown him in cruel starkness the limits of his power as a father: that his protection didn’t extend so far as he thought. And that disappointment, and yes, he couldn’t lie, seeing his daughter look that way, so contrary to anything he understood as feminine, caused his daughter to see in her father’s eyes, from year to year, day to day, profound, heartbreaking disappointment.

  ANJALI RECOUNTED TO Alexandre the day that it had happened, like an elegy, an old funeral poem that she recited as if she weren’t the object of it:

  Mohini and Anjali sat patiently at her feet that morning as their maid, Meha, oiled their hair and put it up in braids; Anjali was seven then and Mohini only two. Meha dusted their faces with talcum powder and rubbed oil onto their lips. The girls waited inside the coach as the horses were brushed and their father instructed the servants which cases to put where within the cabin. Anjali remembered, as they entered their train car that trip, seeing the shabby train cars of the poor ahead of them. Scolding Anjali, Meha ushered her past the leering faces of the masses as the peasants took in the opulent sight of the Adivi family. Lalita in her rich silk saris, Mohini and Anjali in lacy dresses cut in the style of English girls.

  An extra coach was hired to carry their grandfather’s body; Adivi’s father, Anil, had died the morning before. He had been outside sitting on his favorite swinging bench, watching his beloved birds in the trees. Bird-watching had become a late-life pleasure of Anil’s. He was a sort of would-be ornithologist. He loved birds and would not only sketch them but also take notes on the habits of his favorites: their plumage and their song, what kind of feed the seemed to prefer. Age had so softened the heart of the very man that had in youth hunted the great tigers of Bengal, that when his once-hunting companion and lifelong friend John Stanford, an English aristocrat, had advised Anil to create a sort of aviary in the home, he refused, the thought of caging the animals in any way playing heavily upon his old heart. He told his granddaughters that violence and ferocity were young men’s indulgences, a defense against the restlessness of youth. He would weep when he told Anjali tales of hunting, cornering the wild and beautiful beasts, their great eyes wide with terror in the face of so many English shotguns, village boys surrounding them, crying excitedly “Sher! sher!” Their horrible, snarled mouths, wide with jagged teeth like knives. Like great soldiers shot down, when wounded the tigers would not cry out but roar: such an indignation against their majesty. Hearing the guns, the birds, unseen moments before, would lift in a cacophony of feathers flapping and startled cries, and fly off in numbers that exceeded the thousands. The tigers’ heavy bodies would sway when shot, all their muscles taut, their necks twisted as their rage-wrought growling continued until their last hot breaths would escape from their mouths, vaporous in the humid forests, ruby-colored blood pooling beneath them. Their roars would echo against the trees, until at last all the jungle would become pristinely quiet for some moments. The lower-class Englishmen without schooling at Eton and Cambridge and Oxford, the ones with the accents reminiscent of the East End—they would, in teams of five or six with Indian village boys, lift the carcasses of the great cats and throw them on counts of three onto the backs of the carriages.

  Anil would sometimes recount the nightmares of his youth to his inquisitive little granddaughter, the one with lacquered, ribboned braids who would sit with him and count the birds: in his sleep, he was visited by the image of the great and fierce goddess Kali, a beautiful woman mounted on a tiger, who at turns would turn medusan in her hi
deousness, charging her tiger upon him, his torn and tattered body in its mouth, the goddess terrible and victorious. By the time he had grandchildren, Anil never ate meat. And rather than caging any spirit, through his copious note-taking he had discovered the feeding preferences of his favorite birds. Thus, in those years, the garden in the back of the Adivi home became a riot of bird feeders filled with sugar, seeds, water and grains. In his own hands, each morning Anil would bring out saucers filled with honey from the kitchen.

  Stanford’s son had, from London, at his father’s request, sent Anil a pair of binoculars. Anjali could still remember what was inscribed on the brass rims of the eyepiece: J. TOZER, OPTICIAN, 70 FLEET STREET, TORQUAY. Anil died on that bench, the leather strap of his binoculars entwined among the dry, long fingers of his right hand. Unknowing, the birds chirped on merrily, feeding at the sugar water and honey that he had provided them, looking from beyond the death mask at the lovely Eden-like scene of blue, green and yellow birds among the trees of his garden . . . scarlet minivets, robins, ringed plovers, the mynas, of course—with whom he would speak—fantail flycatchers, ioras . . .

  In Anjali’s bedroom, she kept a sketchbook from those days, when she would sit with her grandfather and draw the birds in the trees in their garden. Under her childish handwriting naming the birds in English, Anil would write in an elegant hand the Latin names.

  SHIVA WAS ANIL’S only son. It was the eldest son’s duty to light the funeral pyre; the ashes were collected in great urns.

  On horse-drawn carriages and in train cars, Shiva, his mouth a taut line strained with duty, took Anil’s ashes to Benares. Those binoculars, from a street near a wharf that he had never been to and could scarcely imagine, were set afloat upon a lotus-laden Ganges with the ashes. A burning corpse drifted a small distance away.