The Grammarian Read online

  Weary with grief and the exhaustion of a two-day-long journey north, the Adivis rose the next morning and Meha, who had traveled that long way up with the family, took Mohini and Anjali to bathe in the holy waters of the river. Shiva and Lalita were still sleeping. They stayed with a distant relative, a cousin of Shiva’s. Meha, taken up with the religious fervor common among the poor, dressed both of the girls and called the house butler to summon the carriage. Irritable in the manner of children, Mohini and Anjali whined to Meha, drowsy and unaccustomed to traveling without their parents for even short distances.

  Lit in the early morning gold light, the city of Benares was beautiful. A thousand temples. Spires like spears of gold in the sky. There, in the river, farm boys bathed cattle and buffalo. The faithful, cut from the same ilk as Meha, offered up prayers in waist-deep water to the silent witnesses of floating blossoms and empty fishing boats. The tired moans of two girls were no match for Meha’s religious fervor, and she carried the girls into the river, bathing them in its mythic water.

  Anjali turned to Alexandre. Her eyes were heavy, pedagogical; in another world, she may have been a scholar as well. Anjali was afraid that her airs of erudition did not have the dignity of choice, that the life of books was the only choice she had had. She couldn’t indulge in feminine frivolities for fear of making herself ridiculous. And now, in the face of Alexandre’s real scholarship, she was afraid that her dilettantism would become apparent, and again she would seem absurd. Still, she ventured forth. “Did you know that there are blind dolphins in the Ganges? The English think they discovered them some hundred years ago, but the Indians have known about them for ages; they are shy, strange-looking animals. Beautiful in their own way . . . the Hindu belief is that they proclaimed the arrival of Ganga from the skies; the emperor Ashoka so loved them, he made it a crime to kill one.” She turned away from Alexandre, her mind drifting.

  Relatives from all over came to the funeral. Stoic men, wailing women, beating their bosoms in grief. Confused children. They ate no meat for weeks, and Shiva shaved his mustache and hair. Days later, without the aid of a second carriage, they left Benares. On the train Anjali held her grandmother’s hand and curled into the warm comfort of her body, drifting in and out of sleep until she woke on her own bed back in Waltair.

  The home was quiet for days, but on the ninth night after returning, in her clean white sheets, a fever overwhelmed her body, and it did not abate for days. Thinking at first this was only an expression of grief, Lalita and Kanakadurga at first applied ministrations of turmeric and lime juice and cool cloths. By morning the fever had still not gone down, and Lalita called Dr. Ranganathan, the man who seven years earlier had delivered her.

  “He sat next to me, on the bed; Mummy and Nainamma waited, worried, behind me. Dr. Ranganathan stuck a silver thermometer under my tongue. I remember him saying ‘Good girl’ when he took a couple of vials’ worth of blood from my arm.” Anjali reflexively touched her right bicep. “I cried when he stuck a needle in my arm and filled two vials with my blood. And then he looked at Mummy and said, ‘I’ll have to do a few tests, Madam.’”

  Two days later, with his briefcase of medical tools—vials, needles, bandages and medicines—he arrived. Passing by her bedside, he touched Anjali’s face in a gentle and paternal way before disappearing into the parlor with Lalita and Shiva.

  Anjali heard Lalita wail and then Dr. Ranganathan and Shiva’s voices comforting her. The diagnosis was polio. Certainly not, by any means, an uncommon one among children, but unexpected for someone of their class, for whom cleanliness, sanitation and hygiene were so important. The Adivis boiled all water for drinking and bathing. Even the house dogs were bathed in water that had first boiled for a quarter of an hour.

  In the course of the following weeks the gardens grew quiet. The birds, no longer provided with small plates of sugar and honey, did not visit their home for any longer than fleeting moments. They abandoned their nests, gradually, and soon Anjali could scarcely remember how the garden looked when it was a sort of aviary.

  Later that year, distraught with guilt, Meha renounced Hinduism in violent sobs, was baptized in a pool of water and emerged from it renamed Mary.

  Over the following years, spells of seemingly perfect health were interrupted by the onslaught of a deep ache in Anjali’s muscles, so severe that she would resort to bed rest. Her left hip and knee would throb painfully, and at times it seemed she had less control over this leg than the other. By the time she was twelve, she could no longer walk without the aid of a cane. She told these details to Alexandre matter-of-factly, without emotion. Her left leg became deformed, and she lost feeling in it gradually, until she one day realized she had no awareness of it and could feel nothing there at all. The muscles withered. It was smaller than her right leg and misshapen.

  Now she smiled, lifting her head. “Sometimes, in my dreams, I am swimming in the sea, or in a river. I haven’t been in water since that day—my parents forbid it; and in my dream I feel weightless and even though I am sleeping I can actually feel the lightness . . . feel the nothingness of floating . . . and the waves, the motion of the sea. I think someday, when I’m older, I may be able to go to the ocean, but not now . . . ” She looked at him, for a moment, and then looked down. She thought that perhaps there was no place in this world she loved more than the seashore—the long sprawl of sand, in whites and then browns, as one gets closer to the waterline, darker and ever more so as it melts into a never-ending, fathomlessly deep ocean; within, the beginnings of life, great beasts, plants that sway in the arms of the tide, schools of fish in colors she could not and would never imagine. In her dreams she swam, and there she felt the waters rise up and hold her body up; there she had not one but two perfectly formed and shapely legs. In her dreams her body was weightless. In her dreams the water rushed up about her legs, enveloping her body, so much a release, nearly like drowning or death.

  Alexandre thought it must be terrible for her, in the mornings here, when the air smelled of sea salt.

  Anjali’s story made him think too about his own body—how it had never betrayed him; he had always been able to trust that tall and well-formed mass of bone and muscle that even now had retained its youthful strength and dexterity; it had always been a faithful vehicle of utility and pleasure, his skin the color of white marble. When he was a child, he used to sprint through the neighborhood with that winged fleetness unique of little boys, his book bag flapping against his hip, just so he could hear the blood pumping in his ears.

  LATER THAT DAY, Anjali approached one of the household servants, Peter, who had been her father’s servant since they were both boys. When Adivi was in grammar school, Peter would sneak his master’s schoolbooks and read them while his young charge slept.

  “Peter,” Anjali asked.

  “Yes, Miss Anjali.”

  Anjali handed the butler a list and some money. “Can you go into town and purchase these books for me? They will be in one of the English-language bookshops.”

  “Yes, Miss,” he answered. Peter eyed the list and looked skeptically at the titles: Candide, The Social Contract, Madame Bovary. “May I ask why you have this sudden interest in these books, Miss Anjali?”

  Anjali pushed her weight down on her cane and pivoted suddenly, squaring her eyes on Peter. “No you may not,” she hissed.

  TO ALEXANDRE’S VIEW, to be rich in India was unrivaled by what it was to be rich in Europe. How wealth here was a buffer against all the cruelties, all the vulgarities of life. Every peasant had his price. Servants watched children. They cooked, cleaned, minded the horses, fed and washed the family pets, tended the gardens, washed the clothes, brought tea, summoned cars and coaches, shopped for vegetables and meat and fish and sweets and fruit; there seemed in India no task of daily life not able to be delegated to some servant for a small price.

  It did not surprise Alexandre if even very private matters could have been handed out to some particularly wretched person of the lowe
r classes. He needed scarcely lift his brow to any one of the female servants—at all times on the grounds—before his empty coffee cup was whisked away and another was brought out: fresh, sweet and milky. It was strange how quickly he grew accustomed to the absurdity of his every need being catered to. He now grew irritated if he was made to wait more than a few minutes for fresh towels to be brought to him in the morning, or if he found his room had not been swept before breakfast.

  He worked every morning, and most evenings. In the morning, when he studied on the verandah, he was sometimes joined by the cooks, who, with sifters, shuffled rice endlessly back and forth to pull from it tiny stones and bits of sand and dirt. And so was his task: shuffling languages back and forth until something familiar emerged, and meaning was found.

  He was falling into a nice routine: in the mornings he would take coffee and breakfast with Anjali in the garden and review what he had written the night before. Anjali critiqued—mostly helpfully—his Telugu handwriting and would help him by reviewing his translations. During the day he would go out, sometimes on foot. At other times he would ask Peter to take him out in the carriage to the market or to a school, to speak to the natives and see how well he could describe their language. He would ask them the names of things and how to describe them and interrupt conversations to learn how the natives spoke—their use of slang, their diction, their syntax, the ways in which their registers would alter dependent on the situation and the company. He would write notes as warm-hearted natives corrected him during conversation—it was pedda kukka, “big” before “dog,” not kukka pedda—he liked to purposefully make simple mistakes to endear himself to the natives as a well-intentioned foreigner who needed their guidance; it made the conversation longer. Children would rally around the tall, smiling foreigner handing out chocolates and giggle as he spoke to them, correcting him: “Caadhu babu garu,” no Sir, you say it like this, not that. Sometimes the more confident and gregarious, barefoot and half-naked street children would scamper alongside Alexandre, following him right up to the gate, and wave at him, smiling and waving as Rajiv, the servant who stood at the entrance, always irritated by their presence, shut the gate behind them.

  IN THE EARLY evenings before dinner, Kanakadurga called him for tea in her quarters. Lautens had taken quite a liking to Kanakadurga; she was wise, indulgent and protective of her flock. He had come to call her Kanakadurga Amma Garu; he was told by one of the servants that it would be the most polite way to address her. He had called her by her first name and heard one of the older servants giggling behind him, and only after an awkward confrontation did the servant correct Alexandre. Kanakadurga’s maidservant brought them delicious sweets made of milk and butter and pastry, dotted generously with almonds, cashews and golden raisins. She took her tea rich and sweet, made with very little water and too much milk. The maid mixed in heaping spoonfuls of sugar and boiled the leaves with cardamom and cloves. The old woman wore widow’s white and no bindi; she no longer ate meat. And though the effects of time were obvious on her face and in her posture and hands, her mind remained sharp and perceptive, with an often-indulged, biting wit. She did not shy away from making unkind but true observations about even those she loved most dearly, and was equally quick to bestow loving affection in her words or with hugs and kisses and watery, maternal looks. She often touched his cheeks and laughed at their fullness, or put her hands on his.

  She invited him to her chambers before the evening meal one day. She stood at her doorway, calling Alexandre in and clicked her tongue at her granddaughters, who were gossiping in the gardens. She smiled and nodded disapprovingly at them. “These girls today! I have told them to collect jasmines for their hair, and look at them laughing and talking. Lazy girls!” She shook her finger at Anjali and Mohini, and Alexandre smiled, leaning against the doorsill. “Come, Dr. Lautens, take tea with me. These girls today—it is not even important to them to take proper care of their hair!”

  In Kanakadurga’s room were photographs of her granddaughters and her children—a photograph of a stern, dazed-looking Adivi with Lalita at his side sitting calmly for the photographer on the day of their wedding, and another bridal photo, this one of Kanakadurga and Anil: Anil a more slight, softer-looking man as handsome as his son, Kanakadurga as a young bride, lovely and bemused, her fingers interlaced, her hands raised to her chest, almost as if in prayer.

  “You look so lovely in these photographs,” Alexandre said, smiling.

  Kanakadurga giggled, “I’m still lovely, Dr. Lautens!”

  “This used to be my house,” said Kanakadurga. “Anil was friends with some of the English officers and they would bring their boys here for tea and cards. Anil used to stay up for hours, and I would hear those young officers drinking and laughing. It used to be a bit more jolly back then, more lively. It seemed more possible back then, at once, to be friends with individual Englishmen and against English rule.”

  Alexandre thoughtfully examined the photographs. There was Kanakadurga with her children—four girls and Adivi—photos of some Indian boys in regimental uniform, Kanakadurga holding the hands of two of her girls. “You have a very large family,” Alexandre said.

  “Yes, most Indian families tend to be large.”

  “Ah, it must be unusual to have only two children, like your son.”

  “Yes . . . ” Kanakadurga looked sad, and suddenly Alexandre felt embarrassed at the thought that she might feel he was prying.

  “There is a reason for that; it was not by design, you see. I still remember Dr. MacKissock. He was holding my daughter-in-law’s wrist, taking her pulse as his fleet of Indian nurses, who were neat women in the Western white uniforms, heads covered, no jewelry and no bindi,” she recalled, “delivered Mohini. Anjali was three years old, in the next room, and clung to my legs, listening to the sounds of her mother’s cries and moans. My son sat in a nearby chair, reading the newspaper. Later, I found that Mary-Meha gossiping in the servants’ quarters. She had been sent to Lalita to fan her during the delivery, and she told me that there had been a lot of blood, and that Lalita’s eyes had rolled into her head as Mohini was pulled from her body and out into the world. At the same moment that Lalita heard the new baby’s first cries, she also heard the nurses.” Kanakadurga’s face was so stoic, thought Alexandre, as she continued. “They had before only been speaking in English, and then all these voices rose, and in their panic they reverted to Telugu, shouting and commanding each other. Dr. MacKissock was also agitated and started yelling ‘English! Speak in bloody English!’ and then, ‘Jesus bloody Christ!’”

  Kanakadurga stood and walked over to an armoire and took out a brown envelope of photographs and took out one of a handsome white man sitting in the garden with Adivi, the men raising glasses of whiskey to the photographer.

  MacKissock was a military doctor in the second battalion of the Argyllshire Highlanders, a Scottish regiment from Glasgow, and he had never delivered a baby before. Most of his experience, having been acquired during times of peace, was of dealing with his men, who were maladapted to the heat and water of India, or who had contracted a tropical ailment. Lautens could not remember how they found themselves on the topic of Mohini’s birth.

  Kanakadurga pushed a small plate of sweets toward him as she showed him the old photographs. In his limited experience in India, admittedly not great, he had found Kanakadurga and Anjali to be curiously and uncharacteristically forthright for Indians, especially for women. Kanakadurga was strangely open about all the matters of family and self that were usually kept in confidence and guarded as a matter of decorum in both the East and West. “Shiva met Dr. MacKissock some weeks earlier at some English social event, to which he wore a Brooks Brothers suit. I remember that suit; he went to such lengths to procure it. He thought it would be advantageous to have his child delivered by one of the men he referred to as ‘the queen’s own doctors,’ and he promptly dismissed Dr. Ranganathan, the Tamilian who had been seeing along Lalita’s pregnancy until that
point. After Mohini was born—it could have been hours or minutes—Dr. MacKissock came out, his white coat was now bloodstained, and he pushed open the double doors, his nurses shaken. My God they all looked like they were emerging from a war zone; and Dr. MacKissock was apologetic and said, ‘You have a daughter, Mr. Adivi. The girl is healthy and well. I do not believe, however, that your wife will be able to bear any more children.’

  “Later the next day, from a window on the second story of our home, I saw Mary scrubbing with soap bloodstained white sheets and then beating them on a rock next to the stream that ran up the back of our property. Dear God it was so terrible!

  “Lalita and Mohini, after she had recovered for a week here, went to Lalita’s natal home and stayed there for a few months to be with her mother. Anjali stayed here with myself and Anil and Shiva. She and Shiva would visit them, and I would send them sweets—it’s meant to be good for mother and baby. After learning she was now barren, my daughter-in-law, she wept endlessly, and her mother was afraid that Mohini would take in all that sadness from her mother’s breast. Subbamma, the maid that had taken care of Lalita as a girl, and who was now an old woman, would rub Lalita’s swollen feet with coconut oil and make her cool lime juice from baby limes and sugar cane.

  “When she came back to our home, I remember how Anjali would sing familiar lullabies to Mohini, the ones I had taught her. Mohini was a gorgeous baby with lovely, large eyes and long eyelashes and fat, tightly clenched baby fists. Anjali would always push her fingers into the baby’s fist. At first, understandably, Anjali was jealous. But soon enough, the sense of being displaced in the family dissipated, and she loved Mohini in a sweet, sisterly way. Anjali loved to hold her, and to brush her baby curls.

  “Oh Dr. Lautens! I am so sorry, so sorry to go on like this! I’m an old, lonely woman, you must excuse me!”

  “No Kanakadurg Amma Garu, not at all, I treasure the time we spend together,” said Alexandre, blushing.