The Grammarian (31 page)

In the corridor, on a wall, a poster caught his eye: it was a beautiful photo, he thought. Like lightning among cumulous clouds. Below the photo was information for a lecture later that week regarding “cerebral angiography,” and only then did Alexandre realize he was looking at a photo of blood in the human brain. He traced his fingertip across the bright lines, which could so easily have been bodies of water across a continent. He attended the lecture and the following week, he sent a letter to Dr. Moniz, who had invented the process of cerebral angiography.

It was because of something he had known all along, anecdotally, that aging made it harder to learn a new language. He, a linguist, who had grown up speaking French, German, Italian and English, had had a hard time with Hindi and Sanskrit. He was in his thirties by the time he began learning Telugu and that had proved endlessly frustrating.

“Dear Dr. Moniz,” he began, and Alexandre provided the requisite introduction and then complimented Dr. Moniz on his research. He told Dr. Moniz about his trip to India, about his book.

“We both study the human brain, Dr. Moniz, you from within, and I from without. I am currently looking into the question of
second-language acquisition. Why do children learn languages so quickly, while intelligent adults struggle to do so? I have a nascent theory—stupid, perhaps—that language acquisition happens quickly in children not in spite of their cerebral immaturity but because of it. I assume that children—having not yet developed higher reasoning skills—use their reptile brain much more than the average adult. I believe that as higher reasoning facilities develop in the child, and learning is now dominated not by the amygdala but by the neocortex, language learning slows. Language has patterns, but it doesn’t necessarily follow reason. A brain primed to seek logical answers to questions may not be the one best suited to learning language, which is so very often illogical. In fact, it may actually slow the ability to learn language, which may explain why children can learn not just first but second, third and fourth languages with such ease, and why for adults (such as myself) this same task is often so laborious and time-consuming. Perhaps, like fear, or love, language is an instinct and not a skill. As the neocortex develops in humans, the rate of language acquisition slows. Is this merely a coincidence? Or is one directly related to the other?”

Years before, when Alexandre had just returned from India, Matthieu would often play with his toys under Alexandre’s desk, running wooden train cars over Alexandre’s feet, repeating after his father: “
Naa peru Matthieu. Maa Naanna garu peru Alex. Naake chocolatlu ante chaalaa istam
.”

“And what does that mean, my love?” Alexandre would peer down at his son, smiling up at his father, a chubby hand on his knee as he repeated the Telugu phrases Alexandre had taught his children.

“My name is Matthieu . . . ”

Matthieu closed his eyes for a moment, thinking.

“Yes . . . ?” Alex prodded.

“My papa’s name is Alex.”

“And?”

“I love chocolate!” Matthieu giggled, running a tiny red engine car up Alexandre’s leg.

He reached down and held Matthieu’s face in his hand. Matthieu’s face was soft, and his cheeks pink. “My boy,” he grinned. He was proud of his children but quietly jealous of how quickly they were picking up a language it had taken him months to grasp the basic structure of.

M
ONIZ HAD MANY
times held the human brain in his hands, and it never failed to seem miraculous to him: some three pounds of nerve cells, blood, fat, axons, fiber, dendrites that together lay claim to the sum of human experience. Even though the samples he’d handled were from cadavers, he felt sometimes like he was holding a soul. Somewhere in that structure were memories of a mother’s cooking and the scent of grass, and the ability to make sense of calculus and map the Alps. He replied, flattered that he had been sought out. “Dear Dr. Lautens, I am flattered that you ask for my assistance. I am afraid the science has not yet advanced to the point where we can pinpoint brain activity, so I regret to tell you that I cannot offer you any firm evidence to prove your theory. Angiography, at least at its present state, focuses primarily on the health in the brain of the venous and arterial systems, not on the development of the so-called grey matter itself.

“What is more, I do not yet have any cerebral angiographies of children. In terms of hunches, however, I do believe you are on to something. I will be in touch soon after I’ve had some further time to
consider your hypothesis. I will tell you this now, which I’m sure you already know. At the root of us all is a reptile’s brain. Instinctive, reactive, survival based, lacking in altruism—only meant to keep us alive. It reacts to fear and works on impulse. The point where emotional life begins in the mind is the amygdala, next to the hippocampus, nothing more than a little bundle of nerves, small, pink. What a wonder that so much comes from it: love, fear, joy, and if you are right, the matrix too from which our first utterances originate.”

Smiling, Alexandre pressed the paper of the letter to his lips. He knew now where his studies would lead him.

A
NJALI LOOKED UP
at the ceiling of her cell, as the light flickered valiantly before dying and darkness fell over the whole jail. After a moment she heard the snapping, hissing sound of matches being lit as the guards illuminated oil lamps, throwing into the hallway the striped shadows of cell bars.

She had been imprisoned this time for several weeks, picked up in November 1919 for organizing a small local riot. She had some vague sense it was now December but wasn’t sure. Down the hall, she could hear the raspy voice of a woman wailing to the guard for water.

The sun had set many hours earlier and she could see black night outside the window, and then she heard the
plink-plink
of raindrops hitting the glass.

Anjali heard the hiss and pop of small fireworks, and then the happy sounds of cheering children and more fireworks exploding.

Anjali got out of bed and pushed the chair in her cell under the window. From the direction of the constabulary, she heard the voices of men singing “Auld Lang Syne.” Allahabad, with all its history and
all its institutions, lacked the one thing Anjali would have loved to hear the most, the sound that, if it bounced around the walls of her cell, would make her most glad: the sound of the sea. It was everywhere in Waltair, but Allahabad was farther inland. She stood on the chair and stood as tall as she could, trying hard to look outside at the city around her that had come very much to life.

She leaned forward, pressing her small hands to the walls of her cell. She strained her neck upward, exposing her long, brown throat, and opened her mouth for rainwater, squeezing her eyes shut as she began to cry.

14

D
URING A VERY
low tide, horse-drawn carriages on the sometimes island of Neuwerk can reach the little fishing villages on the icy shores of the North Sea. It was in one such village, Cuxhaven, on the river Elbe, that the
Imperator
was built, and in June of 1913 it set sail for the first time to New York across the choppy Atlantic sea. She was the pride of the Hamburg-Amerika fleet, the largest ship afloat, an answer to the less luxurious
Titanic
of the rival White Star company.

When, after the Great War, when she had spent much of the time rusting in the Elbe, the
Imperator
was seized by the Americans and used to bring surviving Yankees back home to industrial coastal cities and university towns and midwestern cornfields. She was afterward given to the Cunard ship company to compensate for the German U-boat-struck
Lusitania
. Arthur Ballin, a Jewish entrepreneur from Hamburg who had built the
Imperator
and who had once been a guest of the kaiser, seeing his life’s work destroyed under the pressures of war, overdosed on sleeping pills and died before the war ended. The
Imperator
, out of commission during those war years, was claimed as an Anglo-American war prize and rechristened the
Berengaria
.

Sarojini, no foreigner to travel, enjoyed the trip but spent much of her time on the
Berengaria
inside her quarters, writing speeches and poetry and corresponding with her many friends—poets, like George William Russell and Arthur Symons, her mentor; Nehru; Gandhi and of course her family, whom she always felt suffered the most for her politics.

A
NJALI
,
AFTER MEALS
, walked out on to the deck and felt the breeze move through her clothes, the salt air in her silks. There had been a flaw in the building of the ship: in Ballin’s desire to outdo the grandeur of the Cunard and White Star lines, the many mirrors and tiles, the marble pillars and oak furniture weighed so much that the bottom of the ship rocked frequently in otherwise modest winds, but Anjali loved the swaying, the wonderful sensation of danger, the way that the English girls on the deck’s croquet courts would moan when the waves made the game balls go astray in the course.

Most of the male passengers spent their evenings in the smoking rooms, the ladies in the rooms with plush red European furniture, well-cushioned and surrounded by plants. The first-class cabins and recreational areas dripped of luxury. The swimming pool for the first-class passengers was modeled after an ancient one in Pompeii.

A day’s distance from the dock she could see no land at all. The seagulls floated on the airy current above her, diving down now and again to flit over the water. Inside the ship were drawing rooms and a swimming pool—a floating palace: a marvel of marble and Oriental rugs and cherry wood furniture. Anjali gasped when she boarded, astonished that such a thing could be, that she would spend her days here on the great steamship as if by magic skirted on the seas toward another place, America, a place that had long ago rid itself of the British. The Americans had polluted their oceans with tea.

Anjali liked to look at the silver-blue ocean, its mesmerizing waves so powerful, moving in accordance with the moon. Alexandre had once spoken to her about the stars and the heavens and how they governed the motions of the seas and seasons. On the deck she could let her weight fall down into her hips and allow the rocking of the ship to hold her up. But
at night, from where she stood on deck the waves were terrifying, concealing depthless depths. She sometimes felt she could fall down below, leaving everything. She could fall down below into those unimagined depths, to the blackest black below, below the underwater volcanoes, the great sea beasts, the beseeching undertows. She could lean into death.

A
NJALI FOUND THE
autumn in America lovely, the golden foreign foliage sweeping up the avenues of the grand urban landscape of New York City, where Sarojini’s American speaking tour would begin. Haridas Muzumdar, a friend of Henry Miller’s and a Gandhi enthusiast, would be Sarojini’s escort around America. Some years later, Muzumdar, who marched to Dandi and would die in Little Rock, Arkansas, would lay garlands upon the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to celebrate the Indian National Congress’s declaration of independence.

After Sarojini’s talk at the Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, they were to have dinner at Rossoff’s restaurant in Times Square, where Anjali marveled at the gigantically tall and grey buildings and the panels of electrical advertisements that decorated them.

They wore saris—Anjali as a matter of course and Sarojini as a matter of principle—and the white ladies in their dresses and hats and the gentlemen in their suits eyed them not unkindly but with great curiosity. Whatever repulsion they may have felt at the sight of their uncommon brown skin was mitigated by the beauty of their silks, which fluttered about in the cool New York autumn from underneath sweaters lent to them by the idealistic and generous women of the society. “I had forgotten how cool these northern climates can be,” Sarojini said to Anjali, shivering slightly.