The Grammarian (3 page)

Seeing him in Indian dress, one of his fellow passengers, a British engineer, raised his eyebrows and said, “Ah, Dr. Lautens, you’ve gone native, I see,” and Lautens peered over his worn copy of de Saussure’s
Cours de Linguistique Générale
and grinned.

“What are you reading, Dr. Lautens?” the engineer asked.

“The Bible,” Lautens replied, smiling.

In his bag were other books too. English and Hindi dictionaries, a book of Sanskrit roots, the Griffith translation of the
Ramayana
and the Fauche one, for purposes of comparison, and Loti’s
L’Inde (Sans les Anglais)
—his wife bought the latter and gave it to him, saying that he would at least have one other Frenchman traveling with him. It seemed so improbable to him this feeling—that here, this place not remotely stark or stoic, here, with a hundred people seemingly always around him, this place, a soaring urban space all bucolic at its blurred boundaries and where untethered animals mingled through the aisles of the city, the half-naked sadhus with the long grey beards and the Hindu rosaries, and that nearly ever-present splash of sunshine, exposing everything, and the constant sounds of the train: the roar of the engine, the boys walking through with coffee and tea, the old women fruit vendors, the endlessly inquisitive natives, here where the humidity, heat and dust all clouded the periphery of Alexandre’s vision with the sheer crowdedness of the place—but there it was: he felt lonely. It was so foreign a sentiment to him that when he long lastly defined it, he found it surprising. And yet being neither a native nor an Englishman (his countrymen were few—and concentrated in French possessions like Pondichéry), he preferred to maintain a distance from everyone and remained wary, as he long had, of quickly forged friendships.

It was his fourth day on the train journey to the South—that great expanse of salty-aired land that still posed a mystery to most Europeans with its tribes and closed societies, its culture like a picture stopped in time. He breathed it in—India always smelled like it was burning, that hot dust and kerosene and petrol smell, as if under the earth was a smoldering fire, just there, beneath the surface. From Victoria Station in Bombay, and then away from the Arabian Sea, to Pune, Secundrabad. In Hyderabad he would transfer to Madras on the
Southern Mahratta Line, and from his next stop in Warangal he would ride along the Bay of Bengal to Waltair.

T
HE
B
RITISH ENGINEER
always left his food half-finished. “The food and the bloody heat conspire to kill a man here. It is impossible; if you want my advice, stay away from the food and out of the sun, though of course I suppose one really can’t avoid either completely. I try to eat only to the point of not being hungry; the rest I leave.” He rested his fingertips on the rim of his hat; he always wore his hat and a three-piece suit, no matter the heat.

Though Alexandre had never considered himself a glutton, or even a gourmet, he had found that the thing he missed with particular intensity was the food of his country. Longing for the foods of home—completely unattainable in this part of the world—made him feel at times as if his mind was going. And hours went by before he could force away this useless reverie and bring himself back to the reality of the train: the brown faces that watched him in his window seat, his attaché case with his journals, books, and the first several pages of a manuscript in progress. Inevitably, the train’s food steward would come around with the dinner
thali
—a main dish, usually of vegetables, surrounded with rice and small dishes of lentils, greens and pickles. This food offered its own particular satisfaction, and though it had begun to bore him now, he knew someday he would miss it too. At first he found it overly spicy, but he had grown accustomed to it, somewhat, and washed the heat down with heavy, white dollops of yogurt and fresh mango slices or jackfruit. The fruit here was unearthly in its sweetness and its richness, and it offered him a unique delight that was unmatched in Europe.

Tired as he was, and as thoughtful and pensive an adult as he had recently become, there was, just beneath the surface of his conscious thinking, in Alexandre, a kinetic, adolescent shudder, the boyish thrill of adventure to unknown lands. Since Bombay, he could not control his restless right foot and an ever so slight upward turn of the corners of his lips; all in all, he rather loved the view of that continual show of village after village outside his window, which Alexandre, new as he was to the subcontinent, found endlessly fascinating but which his train companions blocked from their sight by drawing the window shades down and concerning themselves instead with the imported newspapers from the places they called home: a white stone home off St. James Park, or those English villages with gardens of tea roses, those places that smelled in the summer of the salty North Atlantic.

Just now, as they passed through the fertile villages around Bijapure, a steward came around, in his steady hands a silver service carrying cream, sugar, tea and biscuits.

“No, I said one biscuit not two,” the British engineer shouted. He waved his hand dismissively over the tea and biscuits set down before him and looked at Alexandre, sighing as if exhausted and shaking his head disapprovingly.

The steward looked bored, not shaken in the least by the engineer’s sharp upbraiding. “I’m sorry, Sir,” he said, removing one of the biscuits amidst the engineer’s fussy, fluttering fingers.

“These people need instruction to perform even the most menial task, it seems sometimes!” the engineer said, looking at Alexandre, his long tapered fingers delicately holding the teacup.

Alexandre was supremely put off by such a sort of feminine fastidiousness regarding food, and for his part found no fault in the steward’s
service. Alexandre averted his eyes from the engineer’s, taking deep pleasure in denying the Saville-Rowe dandy his companionship. Alexandre threw a meaningful, sympathetic glance at the tea steward.

Alexandre was not an Englishman; he shared with these people only his skin color. And there being no other Frenchman on the train, Alexandre at that moment declared himself a man without a nation, simply himself, Alexandre Lautens, and felt suddenly a wild and intoxicating freedom. He was a scholar, not a soldier, and he felt bound only to the kingdom of scholarship, of ideas, not those lines on maps that only men obeyed. All of those men, some small and some great: presidents, popes, despots, dictators. Even so stupid an animal as a pigeon had more freedom, not bound by the laws imposed by border guards where France met Spain. But a man must find his papers, those credentials given by other men, as if identity were not a birthright but a government issuance, merely a collection of yellowing papers.

Sitting in that train in a country utterly foreign to him, at that moment, Alexandre had successfully shaken off the shackles of society no more imagined than a prisoner’s steel handcuffs. His body did not betray that newfound lightness, nor the soaring freedom he felt, but his eyes under his thick, dark eyebrows glittered with the color and sparkle of cut sapphires. Smiling at the engineer, Alexandre snapped a biscuit in half and pushed a piece in his mouth, eating happily, ravenously, the way his children ate oranges on Christmas morning.

T
HIS FOREIGN LAND
went by, and drowsiness set on Alexandre as the world outside turned dark. It was odd, he thought, how quickly one could retire from the life he knew and held dear. Even the essentials of existence had quickly fallen away like the peel of a fruit, and soon he
was left only with the meat, left only with himself. Two months ago, before he embarked on this voyage, he could not have imagined a life without Madeline, without her pale, long form and messy brown hair across his pillow. He remembered how her hips felt in his hands. Rose water and baby powder on her skin, and on the bedsheets, on Matthieu and Catherine when they would nestle in bed together, all of them fighting for her loving. He did miss her. But not as much as he claimed in the letters he had sent her from the port in Bombay and from the village post offices along the train route. Perhaps it was because life here seemed a thing apart, as if it were not a continuum of that Parisian existence. He missed the children in the same way, and yet moments would go by when he could scarcely remember that he was a father. And then shuddering, he would recall, from some deep well of that former life, how dearly he once held those moments: carrying Matthieu on his shoulders, buying Catherine ribbons or a piece of chocolate, kissing them good night, setting adrift paper sailboats in ponds, flying red kites in an endless blue, summer sky.

He thought perhaps Madeline did not miss him as she claimed, perhaps she too had moved away from their life together, and taken a lover, and perhaps this same man kissed his children good night, bounced them on his knee. After all, he had been away for some time: after he collected the necessary travel papers, he had first to take the train to Calais from Paris, and then a cargo-laden ferry from Calais to Dover. From Dover he traveled to London, where he stayed for four days before boarding a ship, which took three weeks to arrive in Bombay and then, at long last, he found himself on this train, headed south and then east. How impossibly large life seemed when he considered all the possibilities, how small when a choice was made.

C
ATALOGING A LANGUAGE
is a never-ending task—words are added, or fall into ill repute or disuse. Innocuous terms become vulgar. The profane is edified. Grammar varies, has within it different registers—literary, formal, the easy speak of peasants. It is difficult anywhere. But the linguistic climate of India made this exercise infinitely more difficult, and—when Alexandre doubted the reason for his travel, when he felt frustrated with his work—quite nearly impossible. There were as many languages as there were gods in India, and that was very, very many. When a linguist was fortunate, a direct translation for a complicated word existed, and linguists were rarely fortunate. Most complicated were verbs—the translation for a single verb tense in one language could take three or four words to only approximate the meaning in another. Speakers would impose the correct structures of their native languages on learned ones.

He thought back to college, when he embarked—much to the amusement of his friends and family—on learning Sanskrit.

“Sanskrit
means ‘refined,’” his college classics lecturer, Dr. Bonventre, had said. Bonventre’s office windows were draped with curtains made of saris and he had a large stone statue of a dancing Ganesha on his bookshelf.

“Pā
ini, five hundred years before Christ, had identified 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology.
Three thousand, nine hundred fifty nine!”
Bonventre lifted himself up on his toes, looking skyward in amazement. “ . . . he codified a hodgepodge of vernaculars, rarefied the language until it was, when spoken properly, an elegant, mathematical poem.” In India, Alexandre could sometimes hear the language coming from inside temples that lined the train route, spoken as it was over the ringing prayer bells. Pā
ini must not have had
much time left for anything other than the study of the language, Alexandre thought.

Dr. Bonventre wrote
Sanskrit
on the chalkboard and then drew a slash after the
n
. “The name comes from
sa
, ‘self-fulfilled,’ plus
skar
, ‘educated’ or ‘cultured.’ The name
Sanskrit
is the result of the sound change laws, called
sandhi
, with which you will be well acquainted by the end of this term.”

And so Alexandre logged these words, these sentences, their strange structures, so unlike those found in the languages of the West and charming in their own way, and often musical, with a melody that fell into the cadence of those native varieties of French and English too, making familiar languages somehow strange and exotic.