Authors: Annapurna Potluri
Anjali wanted to see the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge and the Singer Building. Alexandre had once told Anjali that the statue was a woman to whom Bartholdi had given a triumphant, American gesture but whose proud expression was French as per her parentage. Anjali remembered the phrase he used to describe her clothing: “skirts of copper” that blew freely above broken steel shackles. He told her about the politics of the gift, how perhaps it had been from the French as much a snub to Britain as it was a gift to America. But Alexandre, in his particularly grave and low-toned idealism, offered too that perhaps people everywhere feel a sense of joy at seeing the achievement of freedom of people anywhere.
Anjali tried to pay attention as Sarojini reviewed the following day’s schedule. But how could anyone be made to survive the street lamps illuminating the golden foliage of a New York evening, she wondered. How to endure the low happy murmur, the clinking of glasses, the peals of laughter from the crowds that spilled out from the nightclubs and dancing halls? The sounding horns of the streetcars, the women in their evening gowns; Hercules, his arm lifted in a declaration of glory, heralding the modern age from the top of Grand Central Terminal. There was that foreign chill in the air, the calamitously violet nightfall, and Anjali braced the iron bars of the horse-drawn carriage that returned her and Sarojini to the hotel. Sarojini, after some minutes, became lost to Anjali in the drowsy reverie of the poet. Tomorrow’s schedule was set.
Anjali sucked cold air into her aching lungs, bracing as those deadening waves of despair overcame her like heavy blankets. She tried again to think of tomorrow. Would there be a particularly good cup of coffee? Perhaps one of their hosts would take them to a Broadway
show. Or a nice meal at one of the many charming cafés. Maybe everything could change. But along the sidewalks, there were men in their wool suits and women wearing gloves, the children skipping along; Anjali looked at them beseechingly, desperately, would just one call her name? She focused on the rolling rumps of the beautiful horses pulling the carriage. She let her mind be comforted by dreams her own death. Anjali bit her lip; a lump of fury formed in her throat as the Americans walked past the carriage on their way to the places they were expected. The Americans, Anjali thought, moved with light step, a sense of gaiety if not immediate upon their faces, always inching upon the visage from the periphery, as if something not just good but indeed very good, were just out of sight. Anjali held the metal bars tighter. She really did want to love them.
T
HE DREAMT
-
OF CITY
of her imagination radiated through its postwar death mask with the promise of springtime. She had loved this city nearly all her life, though never before had she stepped foot in it, only inhabited its grand avenues and back alleyways in her dreams. And finally she was here. Alexandre’s resonant voice narrated and guided her through its museums and shops, its cafés and gardens, through this modern city and its squares and circles.
Age had caught up with her. Age and the polio she had so long tried to live with as if it were only an inconvenience. But now, in the mornings, as she lay in bed, unable to will herself up, to find reason to move, she was most distraught that her body told her this was right; it was right to lie still. Now, when the morning sun poured into her room and she considered her life, the hopelessness she felt ran straight to her stomach and was as true a gut feeling as ever she had had. She tried to think back to the last time she was desperately sad and thought of the time when her grandmother died and remembered that though sad, the grief was a feeling affiliated with life, while the cloud-like melancholy that engulfed her now was more of a deadening weight from under which she was not sure she could emerge. Such a task was living.
But now, oh Paris! The city was floral and luminous, and when the wind picked up and the foreign foliage swirled in orange and red circles at her feet, she had faith enough in this world to leave it without fear.
Her hotel sat upon the Seine, and while sitting waterside with the locals, she sipped coffee sweeter and weaker than that she was used to. There was also a small plate of fruits from which she ate casually as she watched the glamorous and exotic city dwellers carry on in their daily lives. She imagined Alexandre in a crowd of his countrymen, refined in a grey overcoat, avoiding the rain in a hat, one of those finely dressed women on his arm. She could still remember how he felt, his solid, warm body exuding heat and the smell of wood and musk as she clutched him along the coast of Waltair as the fishermen hauled up sacks of fish like silver coins, the early sunlight illuminating his hair. Her birthplace was called Visakhapatnam now that the British had left.
The women of Paris walked past her, like a parade of the lives she had never lived, casually wielding their femininity like a weapon. “How cruelly and ignorantly they handled its unknown strength,” Anjali thought.
A
STEWARD AT
the hotel told her to wait in the lobby with the same French accent she remembered coloring Alexandre’s voice when he spoke of Paris to her in English in her garden in Waltair.
She caught her breath at seeing him—still so youthful, somehow, still so lissome in carriage and graceful in his stride; she was too taken to wonder how it could be, after so much time. Because he entered as if from a girl’s dream, tall and handsome and strong, his pale hands exactly as she remembered, the translucent skin and the blue veins, clutching a small box, that same long-strided walk, and only as he neared did she realize upon closer inspection that it wasn’t Alexandre at all. The light moved across his face, his beautiful face, made an angel of him and redoubled Anjali’s sorrow.
To her old eyes, and in her heart, which had grown weary with sorrow after so much time, the man carried with him more hope than she could muster into words.
“Miss Adivi?” he asked. And then she felt her heart fall; though the voice too possessed beauty, it was not the one she had loved listening to for so many cool nights in the blue, Indian moonlight. He sat as tears blurred her vision and she could no longer find words.
“Miss Adivi,” he repeated, a gentle smile spreading across his face. He set down upon the table a small wooden box. “I am Matthieu Lautens . . . ” he waited for her with an infinite patience. “I am Alexandre Lautens’s son.” He placed his hand upon Anjali’s. “Dear Miss Adivi, how long I have waited to meet you. How very long.” He took a look about the lobby. She thought how strange she must have looked in it, how insignificant her life. She straightened her sari over her shoulder, refolding the pleats under her hand, trying to gather her courage. He answered before she could ask. “My father died last year, Miss Adivi.” Matthieu reached into his pocket and retrieved a kerchief, which he handed to Anjali. He held her withered brown hand as tears filled her old eyes. She had of course known all along, but still the finality of this knowledge stabbed at her stomach and heart with a sharp, forceful violence.
“My father had kept something in the family account in Switzerland for safekeeping during the war. We retrieved it from the bank before he died. He had wanted to give it to you himself. He always wanted to go back to India. He used to tell me he’d left something there. But when he was dying, I promised him I would do it.” Matthieu smiled sadly and sighed, “He had waited all these years to give it to you.”
She could see now that Matthieu was a young man, handsome like his father, but his face yielded a sense of joy that Alexandre’s never
had. Matthieu’s face was bright and young. He lifted the small box and handed it to her. Inside was a note, written in Telugu:
Dearest Anjali, February 1914, Paris
If I have come to you, and we are in India, you must show me the new country. This new place, your India
.
Or perhaps you are here, in Paris? You are near the Louvre. I’ll take you to go there, to see a David painting, of Brutus waiting for the bodies of his sons. It inflamed past generations, during the revolution. Brutus was a supporter of the Roman republic . . . to ensure its stability, he ordered his own sons to death
.
Here, in France, not so very long ago, the prince died alone, orphaned and weak, in a stone tower. He was a child. His sister could only hear his cries for their mother, whose severed head had long before been lifted before cheering crowds. The boy did not know she was dead. Must children always be sacrificed during revolution? What is necessary is often ugly
.
Yours,
Alexandre
A
NJALI RAN HER
fingertips along the smooth edges of the tissue paper inside and lifted up the scent of sandalwood into the air; Matthieu propped his elbows on his knees, his eyebrows high on his forehead like a youngster in anticipation. She thought for a moment of all the boxes that in her young mind she had hoped for from Dr. Lautens after he left India: boxes of the chocolates he had described, postcards,
handmade French lace, love letters. She lifted up, out of familiar fuchsia crepe paper, her grandmother’s pearl necklace with the ruby pendant, the earrings with the ruby flower and the pearl flourish. And now she felt the full sorrow of missing on earth those whom she loved most in this world.
I
N
P
ARIS
,
IT
was cool now; the low light of spring filled the evening with a warm, pink glow. She could see its beauty now—a promise of the modern city, and like Waltair, a specter of the ancient. She closed her eyes and saw in her mind’s eye for a moment Dr. Lautens’s boots kicking up dust as he alighted the horse-drawn coach, descending for the first time upon her natal home.
Anjali was alone again after Matthieu left her. She strolled the streets and bought boxes of chocolate and stopped into the Guerlain shop on the rue de Passy to buy a bottle of
Après l’Ondée
, and then walked in cool darkness back to her hotel. There, she looked out through the window of her hotel room. She rubbed the perfume into her neck and wrists and melted chocolate after chocolate in her mouth. She inhaled the smell of ozone and flowers. It came upon her that all these limits and the artifice of modern morality and the supremacy of safety were curtailing her living. She felt inside of her an angry beast.
It began to dawn on her that greatness was not an amplification of goodness, that they could be opposites. That it would be hard to be great without taking risks, that all those around her, who purported to be good, that their lives didn’t stand up to scrutiny. That goodness and greatness were sometimes composed of opposing qualities. That the imposition of reasonableness and social mores stifled her hunger for life. That her leg prevented her perhaps from marriage and
thus perhaps even from having children but that those demands were somewhat artificial ones and that in some small way she was given the gift of being freed of the burden of her biology, because she lived in a grey area, neither man nor woman, not fully human yet in that human realm. She remembered Sarojini once reading Apollinaire to her; Sarojini laughed, “He says the Marquis de Sade is ‘The freest spirit that ever existed.’” Sarojini had smiled and repeated the words, “the freest spirit,” dreamily. Anjali thought that sentiment so beautiful; she wanted to have a fuller soul to keep herself company. Duty imposed on her a smallness she wanted to shake off. Smallness wasn’t her destiny. She realized with shame that when she was infected with polio the world had jailed her into a eunuch’s existence, and she had bowed her head and submissively entered the cell. That she had worked for those who never felt any responsibility toward her.
She turned out the lights and lay down on the bed in her hotel room. Several months before, she had had a moment when bravery and terror hit her in equal parts and she had made a single slash at her wrist before losing her nerve, and now she ran her fingertip along that pale scar. Sleep had longtime been her dearest companion. She wished to sleep deep and long, and wake up—in spring, in India. In her mind she heard the bells of anklets chiming as she and Mohini walked through marigold fields as girls. She had long wanted to see those golden flowers again, to smell the roses and the jasmine on her father’s estate. She longed to hold her grandmother’s hands to her face. She wanted to go home. For a moment she fancied walking from Paris to Visakhapatnam by night, to pay obeisance to nothing so artificial as country borders or other imaginary and invented things. “And then I would walk to the mountains and die in the snow of the Himalayas,” she thought.
I
N
1800,
THE
nawab of Oudh sent his engineers to Lucknow to design for his British court representative the Tower Residency edifice. The representative was a man with two masters, the nawab and the queen. Fifty-seven years later, when the brown-skinned sepoys mutinied, the white residents of Oudh rushed to the stone Tower Residency there in Lucknow.
The sepoys mutinied because they were forced to give up their India Pattern Brown Besses, the same guns used to free the American states from the British. In 1856, they were issued Pattern 1853 Enfields, whose cartridges were greased with beef and pork fat. For the Hindu and Muslim soldiers, this was akin to giving up their gods. It was the final insult, and word began to spread among villages and towns that the company’s end was near:
Sub lal hogea hai
, everything has become red. For eighty-seven days, Oudh’s British residents withstood cannons. The city around them was on fire, but the lonely Union Jack at the residency flew as artillery shells chipped away at the building’s red stone.