Authors: Annapurna Potluri
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.
A
NJALI 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 hideousness, 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. T
OZER
, O
PTICIAN
, 70 F
LEET
S
TREET
, T
ORQUAY
. 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.
S
HIVA WAS
A
NIL
’
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.
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.
L
ATER 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.
T
O
A
LEXANDRE
’
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.