The Grammarian (8 page)

Lalita knew Europeans ate meat every day and felt it would be impolite not to provide this for Dr. Lautens, distasteful though she found it. The food would have to be cooked in a more mild fashion for Dr. Lautens, but her mother-in-law would insist on fully spiced curries and Lalita worried that for the next several months she’d have to supervise two full sets of meals; the cook, she knew, would put up a fuss and Lalita hated arguing with the servants. Just thinking about it made her anxious; houseguests, as often as the Adivis had them, always posed extra work for her, but since this guest was European, the work was redoubled—otherwise she wouldn’t need to concern herself with silverware and washcloths, table settings and flower arrangements. That sense of self-consciousness that caused her to clean the house from floor to ceiling was stronger around foreigners, and knowing that this would be an extensive stay made her sigh periodically in anxious anticipation as the servants ran about the house carrying buckets of soapy water, bundles of freshly laundered linens or baskets full of potatoes.

She sent to Bombay too for a French-English dictionary, in case one of his needs were lost in translation; her husband told her that Dr. Lautens spoke fluent English, and good Hindi, but Lalita believed that one can master other languages but the only one he’ll ever really know is his mother tongue.

Despite how tired she was, there was that singularly pleasing feeling of overseeing the folding of linens or the assembly of the silverware drawer, that wave of satisfaction from completing a wifely and self-sacrificing task, that exhaustion that came from cooking and cleaning that so reaffirmed her. She was the woman of this house. It was a series of small tasks: leaving a room spotless, anticipating her husband’s need for more rice and mango pickle before he asked for it, keeping the
pantry stocked with her mother-in-law’s favorite brand of biscuits, making the whole ordeal of wifely duty—to perform all these tasks and a thousand others all while wearing a clean sari scented with talcum powder, her hair in a neat bun, always ready to graciously receive last-minute guests, to make all of this look effortless was what filled Lalita with her quiet, womanly pride. It was a part of her very femininity that, through repeated and constant show, she had attempted to pass down to her daughters—successfully to Mohini but to which Anjali seemed immune. Her elder daughter’s cold superiority had alienated Lalita more and more as Anjali grew out of girlhood.

A
T THE TIME
of Lalita’s marriage, the 1891 harvest of mangoes began with such a boon of perfect sunshine and rich soil that her father had to hire extra farmhands to collect all of the fruit in the great wicker baskets that when full shone like pots of gold. However, at the height of the season in late June, while she and her mother were being visited daily by silk vendors with wedding saris in their trunks, a plague of fungus started on the mango trees, and as quickly as her father had hired the farmhands, they were let go. She could still remember, as she looked out from the sitting room onto the verandah, her noble father, offering up poor explanations to emaciated, sinuous young men promised a summer of work. They—brown boys with bare feet and dirt embedded in their hands—left with less than they had hoped for but slightly more than they had actually yet earned.

The mango grove, for the rest of summer, smelled of rot; flies swarmed it, and birds pecked at the blackening fruit. Nevertheless, by August the home was festooned in red and saffron curtains, and the maids dusted auspicious
kolam
patterns in white chalk on the home’s
doorsteps. She had met Shiva once before the wedding. In a kurta of cream silk with silver thread embroidery, he had arrived with his parents, a butler and the driver of their coach.

She was taken first by his handsome face. But later in the meeting too by his swift and arrogant manner, tinged by tenderness and humor. So decisive a young man—Shiva was three years older than she—and in whom the corporal so perfectly manifested his personality: robust, broad, with light touches of the feminine in long eyelashes and lips curved into the shape of a warrior’s bow. To that first meeting, she wore a sari of pink, thinking it innocent, feminine and virtuous. Her mother had dressed her hair, braided in a single rope with jasmines. Lalita lined her eyes with soot-colored
kajal
. Foreign aid of this sort was rarely resorted to—Lalita’s beauty was well-known among those of their community and wanted for little. But this occasion was pivotal to her whole life, and she without shame would admit that when she stole a glance at herself that day in the mirror she was surprised, proud and elated at her loveliness. Though there was some relative difference in the family’s wealth, and though Shiva was known to be a bachelor of infinite eligibility—handsome, rich and from a good family—her beauty gave her family the upper hand. He would want for no one else. Shiva’s father was like his son: tall and proud; his mother was deeply maternal, her body already heavy, her brow sympathetic and intelligent.

Both of their families had retained ownership of the land through the permanent settlement licenses reached between the East India Company and authorities of the Princely States a hundred years before. Part of the contract ensured that their families, and others in a group of then nascent landed gentry, would continue to grow not only food
crops but also indigo and tea. The ever-increasing tax on a presumed crop had forced many families to sell their land, but the Adivis through their close connections with the English had made a success of the treaty.

F
OR
A
NJALI
,
HAVING
guests was always painful; to each new person who saw her she knew she inspired a new pity, or shame or disgust. Each felt she was a source of ridicule or pain. Frequent though guests were in their home, she never stopped feeling the intrusion. Her father would often receive business associates, aunts, uncles, cousins and distant relatives. Of the relatives she had her favorites, but most it seemed reserved their smiles for her sister, who would flutter into the receiving room with a tray of filled teacups. The formality of manners required in the presence of strangers made home less homelike, and the putting on of formal airs, especially in the presence of Europeans, exhausted her. In the company of her father’s Indian friends, a “namaste” and a smile were usually enough; sometimes they would ask her how she was, but nothing much more. Around Europeans she was required to answer questions too. With white guests, she was expected to talk about the weather and her studies and interests, all with a rather feigned deference to their station and race, and more often than not, the fact that they were men alienated her further; few white women called upon her parents, as many of the wives of the Englishmen remained at home in cold, stony England, or at the very least passed most of the year with their children in the hill stations, where the weather and climate were said to be more suitable for European ladies.

H
ERE
,
AS NIGHT
fell, the garden’s night bloomers opened like shy children, surreptitiously, and the scent of flowers fell over the home
like a velvet curtain. The floor, the walls, even the sheets emanated the long-held heat of day, like an angry woman opening a tightly clenched fist. Kanakadurga had gone to bed; Adivi and Anjali were reading the paper, Lalita was overseeing the servants as they completed their nightly chores, Mohini was embroidering handkerchiefs. Adivi had offered him an after-dinner drink, but Alexandre made his excuses and declined, too tired. “You girls get ready for bed!” Lalita shouted at no one in particular. “Go! Anjali! Mohini! Get up, go! Anjali! What did I say?!”

Lalita took a softer tone than her husband with Anjali, and Alexandre imagined it difficult for Lalita to see a daughter with an old woman’s gait, who walked with a cane and sighed when she bent to sit or rose to stand. From a distance, she seemed a brightly dressed elderly lady, taking her afternoon tea, and sometimes Alexandre was surprised when she would turn her head and he would see the profile of a girl.

A
S THE SKY
was blanketed in midnight blue, and the stars pushed from within it, bright like bits of glass, Alexandre took out the journal he had kept on the train, filled with notes on Telugu etymology and syntax, interesting idioms and sayings. Describing languages was like pinning down a butterfly; just at the moment it was caught, it fluttered its wings, already escaping. Elegant translations, for the complex words, for the higher concepts, were few and often cumbersome. Alexandre saw a moth buzzing about the kerosene lamp and inhaled deeply of the oily, addictive smell.

He knew what drew him to this discipline of linguistics. He supposed it was, in some ways, only his interest in all things, all aspects of learning—but language was the most fundamental. His colleagues in
mathematics would disagree with him. His children, waiting for bedtime stories, would not. He found that to understand language, like philosophy or religion, but unlike physics or biology, was to understand something profoundly human and close to the heart.

He felt that there was no place more right in this world to study the profound and sacred than India. He feared that France too soon would loose her foothold in here; but before that, he would have his speech samples, his lists of Dravidian family trees, his register of sounds.

To an observer, he was sure he seemed less a scientist than a scribe: a glorified gossip, an eavesdropper. But still he thought there was art in it; there was affection and care administered to the languages he worked with. He strived to describe the full richness of their sounds, the complexity of the meanings of the words, the modes in which they were acquired, their ways for describing time and space, for setting the world into sense.

He would start with the basics, addressing the linguistic structure of the Telugu family, and began to write:

H
IS STOMACH FELT
full but not overly so, and Alexandre felt good and languorous, tired but glad, knowing he would sleep well tonight. He felt easy in his body for the first time since getting to India—finally, he was done traveling. At least, for the time being. He set his pen down and leaned back. Alexandre could feel the weight of muscles and bones. He felt again planted in his body, he felt human again reconstituted all the way to his fingertips and toes and even the tips of his ears.

He reached for the pictures in his pocket of Matthieu and Catherine in their white baptism dresses and began to fall asleep in the safety of knowing that his children were succumbing to sleep as they too gazed upon the same rotund and pearly moon. Alas. He blew out the oil lamps by which he read. He was tired now and needed sleep.

There is no sleep like that of the weary traveler—all the muscles succumb, the heart slows its pace, there is no need for a comfortable bed or fine linens—though he had both. And so he slept, deaf to all noise, blind to the nightly movements of the heavenly bodies, dreamless, half expecting to wake up next to his wife in his bed in Paris.