Authors: Annapurna Potluri
It did not surprise Alexandre if even very private matters could have been handed out to some particularly wretched person of the lower 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.
I
N 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.
The sun early in the afternoon was white over the estate, blanching everything. In the garden the flowers were still half-closed, lazily
opening under the impending brightness of day. The family’s Shetland sheepdog was brought to them, Adivi once told Alexandre proudly, from a regal line of loyal work dogs in Scotland by Dr. MacKissock some years before. Byron raised his eyes warily in the morning, before suddenly springing into full life. Adivi named him Byron after the English poet; when Dr. MacKissock found this out, he jokingly chastised Adivi for naming the dog not after a great Scottish warrior but instead after an “English dandy.” The indulgence of conversation and sweets in Kanakadurga’s quiet, airy room was now interrupted when he and Kanakadurga heard the servants and cooks in the kitchen clanking brass pots together as they prepared the afternoon meal.
“It sounds like they are busy preparing a feast!” Alexandre laughed.
Alexandre and Kanakadurga settled into deep cushions decorating her chambers and Kanakadurga summoned the maid to bring them more tea. She looked thoughtful and calculating that afternoon. “Dr. Lautens,” she began, “you do not speak often of your family. I am very curious about them. More than one week already you have been here and we know nothing of you.” Unlike the many other times that they’d taken tea together, and delighted in lazy and gossip-filled talk, today she seemed to have a distinct purpose.
He did not often speak of his family as he had been in this country so long as to feel like a single man here and scarcely thought of himself as a husband or father any longer. Things here were different.
“Ah. . . . Well, Kanakadurga Amma Garu,” he started, his disarming smile fading “there is not much to tell, I suppose. I have a wife, Madeline. We met in a library when I was in university. I have two children—Matthieu and Catherine. Matthieu is, well, let me see . . . Matthieu will now be three years old. That would make Catherine five.”
“Do you have photographs, Dr. Lautens?” Kanakadurga asked.
“Yes, I do . . . indeed, I have them with me,” he said, reaching inside his jacket. As this discord of feeling like bachelor grew, he thought it wise to have these photographs of them with him at all times to serve as a reminder of the life waiting for him back in Paris. He withdrew the few snapshots he had of Madeline and the children.
“Your wife is lovely,” Kanakadurga said, looking carefully at the photos, “very different from our women . . . she is very tall . . . very . . . lean,” she said, smiling mysteriously. “Ah! It never fails to amuse me how short European women keep their hair,” she laughed. “Your children! What beauties! Your son looks very much like you, Dr. Lautens.” She looked up playfully, “He is sure to be a very handsome man. And your daughter . . . she is going to one day be quite a beauty. Lovely children,” she said, and smiling sweetly handed the pictures back to him. He folded them back into the recesses of his jacket.
“But surely there is more to your family, Dr. Lautens? In India the family does not stop at the wife and children—your parents, sisters, brothers, grandparents?”
“Well,” he began, and felt immediately exhausted by the prospect of recounting so much history, of telling the facts of his life that had never interested him. “Yes, my mother and father are still living. They live in Switzerland—that is where I was born, so properly I am not French, I suppose, but Swiss. We moved to Paris when I was a young boy, when Maman was pregnant with my brother and Papa was tired of her complaining about Geneva.”