The Grammarian (20 page)

T
HAT EVENING HE
joined the Adivis for dinner as he always did and made cheerful conversation with all of the relatives in the house. His French accent amused them and they were flattered he was speaking their language. The women lavished him with motherly caresses and the men kept his glass full of whiskey. He managed to avoid being alone with Anjali and avoided her gaze too.

The evening went beautifully, just as always, as so many Andhra evenings before in the Adivi home, and Alexandre joined the men in the family afterward for cigars and more rounds of whiskey.

“Your daughter is too beautiful, Shiva.” Adivi’s uncle Anand said, his hands gesturing like those of a poet.

Adivi’s friend Abdul chimed in, “Your girl will be moving away soon, Shiva!”

Adivi smiled. Once he had hoped to send his girls abroad to university. Mohini hadn’t had the aptitude or desire; Anjali with her condition could not travel.

The home was ready for a wedding, and everywhere were flower garlands and lanterns; the men were feeling sentimental. They relaxed into their chairs, listening to Thyagaraja
raagas
floating out of the gramophone; Alexandre watched Adivi and his cousins sway their heads, eyes closed in appreciation of the rhythm. His nephew Aditya leaned back in his chair and rested the glass of whiskey on his big belly. Adivi’s hand moved in the air to the music like a feather falling toward
the earth. Adivi talked about how beautiful Lalita looked on their wedding day, his smiling eyes becoming watery. “She still looks like that,” he commented into his whiskey glass. Alexandre noticed just then how handsome Adivi was.

They asked Alexandre what Madeline was like and whether he felt European and Indian women were different. Alexandre blushed and smiled, “Women are women, isn’t it?”

A
LEXANDRE WOKE WITH
a pounding headache owing to the whiskey he had had the night before. He went to the mirror and stared at his red-eyed self. He shaved and dressed, walked into the courtyard, and asked Mary for a strong cup of coffee.

He settled into a chair and began again to work on his manuscript. Alexandre was writing in his notebook, and as he heard her, he looked up to see Anjali settling into a chair next to his, another servant behind her holding a tray of two steaming cups of coffee and a plate of fruit. He shifted to stand up.

“No, Dr. Lautens, don’t get up, please . . . you are working on your book?”

He looked at her and noticed happily that her expression had lost that sheen of hopefulness that yesterday had caused him apprehension.

He smiled but was careful to keep his expression neutral. “Yes . . . I was just starting the introduction, actually. I wanted to take a break from some of the technical elements of the language to frame a context for my readers.”

“Ah . . . ” she smiled, glancing over at his notebook.

“Would you like to hear some of the introduction?”

“Oh, yes, I would love that!”

He cleared his throat and smiled, “Dear Reader, I would like to begin the introduction of this grammar of Telugu by thanking you for your kind interest in this beautiful and poetic language. I trust that your interest will be well rewarded; Telugu is a difficult language for the Western mind, but knowledge of it will broaden one’s understanding of human language greatly. It is not a well-known language in the West, overshadowed by some of its Northern neighbors like Hindi and Bengali. It was first recorded in Western records by Niccolò de’ Conti, who remarked on Telugu’s harmonious qualities, so much like his own language, calling Telugu the ‘Italian of the East.’ Students of Indian studies will know that Telugu is one of the major languages of the South Indian Dravidian family. The others are Malayalam, Karnataka and Tamil.”

He broke for a moment to sip his coffee as Mary brought out
idlies
.

Anjali leaned forward a bit. She had the look about her of someone about to announce that she has a great gift she is about to bestow on a friend. “Where are your people from, Dr. Lautens?”

He smiled, amused, and slipped in a yellowing bookmark that read “
QUI MI ADDORMENTAI
. Here I fell asleep.” Madeline had purchased that for him years before in Florence. He sighed and smiled, resigned. “My people are from Switzerland, Anjali. I did tell you that, no?”

“Of course I knew that, Dr. Lautens. I don’t mean which country . . . I mean to say, do you realize all the things that needed to happen in the world, all the movements of history and the migrations of people to . . . and all the wars . . . trains and ships had to be invented . . . to bring you to us?” Her eyes were big and bright, as if she alone had just discovered the whole world. And though Alexndre didn’t mean to, he laughed.

But Anajali, unaccustomed to masculine expression, took his laugh only as a sign of his happiness at seeing her, and continued. “For instance, if the Greeks and Egyptians had never thought to create ships, and, well, if the English never came to India, we would perhaps never have had trains, and if my ancestors, the Dravidians, hadn’t built these towns and these cities . . . ” He couldn’t be sure, but her voice was shaking and she looked down, and he thought she might cry. She continued, “I would never have known you . . . and now that we know one another, well I can’t imagine the world being any other way, though, for all the things it took in the world, all the unlikely things, Dr. Lautens, we should never have met.”

Alexandre looked at the pale part in her hair, for her head was still bent down. She had never before looked away from him but always in the eye, like a man, as if greeting all the world in preparation for a battle, in that particularly put on way, like a young infantryman, afraid of everything and so fixing his gaze to appear afraid of nothing.

He said nothing, only listening to the light breeze move the trees and the leaves of the garden; he looked up and saw the rose blossoms tremble.

“Do you know, I’m not terribly hungry,” he said softly, “I think I need to do some more reading. I’ll share the rest of the introduction with you later.” And he stood and left.

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
, the house was spotless, cleaned to a sparkling shine; and when Alexandre awoke from a long nap, the servants were all attending to last-minute duties. Water was already being heated for Mohini’s bridal bath. Anjali stood behind her sister, holding safety pins and hair clips as Lalita pinned flowers to Mohini’s head. Mohini
shrieked when Lalita stuck her scalp with a pin, the trembling orange flowers in danger of being crushed by Mohini’s hands as she reflexively grabbed her mother’s. “Mummy!” she screamed.

“Mohini stay still!” Lalita commanded through gritted teeth, holding bobby pins in her mouth. “Anjali, hold these,” she said to her older daughter, looking at her in the mirror as she unpinned a coiled loop of strung jasmine blossoms and threw them to Anjali. “Oh for goodness sake!” Lalita cried, irritably, as two servant women arranged the pleats on Mohini’s sari. “Go! Get out!” she yelled at them in Telugu, removing Mohini’s sari altogether and starting from scratch as her younger daughter, in her blouse and petticoat, stared angrily at her mother.

A
LEXANDRE FELT IT
easy to disappear in the midst of the commotion. There was to be a prayer before the groom’s family arrived, and flowers and fruit were gathered in the
puja
room, which was full of pictures and sandalwood idols of many-limbed gods; ghee lanterns ready for
aarti
, that part of a Hindu prayer that Alexandre found particularly lovely, when mortals would beseechingly fan that divine flame toward themselves, letting the heat of that fire wash over them like a smoke baptism.

The dark night fell upon the wedding evening like a cloak, and the air smelled of kerosene and flowers and food. The guests assembled in their silks and bejeweled finery around a low stage upon which Mohini and Varun sat with the bare-chested Brahmin priest. Adivi called out to Alexandre, “Come! Dr. Lautens! Come, sit!” Adivi grabbed Alexandre’s arm and brought him over to sit with his cousin Aditya on the floor, cross-legged. Alexandre sat with some difficulty. Alexandre sat back on his hips, trying to find some comfort and looked around. He saw Adivi’s sisters and Anjali sitting with Kanakadurga, the small
children of various relatives in fancy kurtas and
lenghas
. They were allowed to run about freely. Old men from the village chatted among themselves, smoking, as the ceremony was under way.

M
OHINI LOOKED NOT
unlike Lalita, in the wedding photo Alexandre had seen in Kanakadurga’s room. Mohini also had that wide-eyed, gazelle-like wonder, that glint of expectancy in the face, as if to say, “So this is what life is.” Hers was the expression of a girl throwing herself to the spinning joyous urgency of life. Lalita, her features now softened by age and motherhood, but her beauty no less intense, now wore on her face a look of sweet nostalgia; she was thinking of her wedding day as she watched Mohini undergo those rites under the golden glimmer of this perfect, auspicious night. This is how it was supposed to be, she felt. Lalita thought: “This is right, all of it is right.” She remembered how she was too young, too innocent then, on her wedding day, to even be afraid. That it somehow hadn’t occurred to her until the moment it happened that she would be pulled from the safety of her mother’s bosom and her father’s loving protection; she had worried only about which colors to wear, wondered only why everyone around her seemed so sad, so melancholy; why her mother would fold the saris in the bridal trousseau in that distracted way, as if thinking of something she’d lost many years ago. On her wedding day, when they’d pulled back the curtain, she nearly didn’t recognize Shiva from their prior meeting, his characteristic and charming arrogance absent and in its place a stern expression of boyish fear tempered with a manly desire to appear proper in the face of tradition. It was if someone had warned him that on this day he was to act like a man, to leave the mischievous expressions of boyhood behind.

For the first time since Mohini’s wedding date was set, the joy in Lalita’s heart gave way to loss.

The wedding began with the bride and groom separated by a silk curtain, and Lalita and Adivi rose to wash the groom’s feet in a brass bowl. The priest began to recite
śloka
in a low, meditative song, almost a rhythmic chant that reminded Alexandre of the Catholic priests reciting Latin prayers in the churches of his youth. Mohini was resplendent, a bride whose skin glowed in the light of the oil lamps. Older women took plates of rice and turmeric and lit candles, and the curtain separating Mohini and her groom was removed.

Anjali saw Alexandre looking at Mohini—she was the bride after all, breathtaking in her brilliant sari and jewels. But Alexandre’s gaze was steady and serious, violently intense. Gone was that merry expression of the afternoon. His eyes shone in the light of the oil lamps, piercing the darkness like two intrepid stars. Anjali felt the heat of his gaze though it was not directed at her. She felt her own muscles tense though her sister was in her own revelry and did not seem to notice the handsome man taking her in like a last meal. Anjali did not know how Mohini could not feel his gaze, how the waves emanating from his body did not force her to turn around, silence everyone, stop all the mouths and cause their bodies to freeze in mid-gesture, why the maids did not drop their pitchers of water, and the leaves stop rustling in the trees, and the lizards on the sides of the home did not stop crawling. Anjali thought the oceans should have turned to ice with that gaze. Yet Mohini beatifically looked out onto the crowd of loved ones and well-wishers and oblivious, beautiful in her innocence, Alexandre consuming her with his eyes, Anjali unable to look away from him.

Had anyone been looking at Anjali, he would have seen the blood rise in her face, into her ears, lamplight making her wet eyes shine. He would have seen that her whole body was made of fire and that she could incinerate everything.

The groom, preternaturally stoic, took a black-beaded necklace and fastened it behind Mohini’s long neck, his fingertips never making contact with her skin. Then both Mohini and her groom placed heavy garlands of marigold and jasmine and rose on each other’s neck, Mohini never lifting her eyes to the slim boy across from her. Kanakadurga had told Alexandre that in the Hindu ceremony, the bride and groom are thought to become, however briefly, avatars of the divine—she Lakshmi, he Vishnu. They became, in front of the gheesoaked
aarti
, in front of the pans of turmeric and brown sugar, in front of their families, glowing gods.

The priest invited everyone to come up and bless the couple by pouring grains of turmeric rice and flower petals over their graciously bowed heads. Mohini’s aunts walked up, loving and jovial as they spilled forth blessings from their open hands, Mohini smiling up at them affectionately.

Anjali, saffron rice in one hand, the handle of her cane in the other, stood in front of the seated couple. She bent forward, her hand tensing on the handle of her cane as her weight shifted, and Mohini looked up to see her sister hovering over her, Anjali’s rice-filled hand poised over her sister’s head, and each sister looked at the other in a pause as long as the blink of an eye, each looking at the other as one might look into a clouded or broken mirror, eyes narrowed as if to see something familiar that had been obscured—a singular beam of sisterly light passed between the two girls, each looking like half of Fortuna, and then, just
as quickly, that light between them was gone, as surely as a candle blown out. And then Mohini looked back at her sister, recoiling, like someone walking through a dark house and thinking she has seen an apparition among the shadows.