The Grammarian (10 page)

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

A
S 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:

P
ERHAPS 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 was 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.”