The Grammarian (25 page)

After her father expelled her out of the family home, Anjali stayed with the Sastry family, friends of the Adivis, for a few days. At night, she kicked and screamed in silence and pulled her hair and imagined her body riddled with gunshots or hanging from a noose or drowned in a river, her clothes weighed down by rocks, and then and only then would her mind cease its endless spinning and she would kick only until the kicking stopped . . . and her fingers pulling at her hair would relax and she would dissolve into a merciful sleep and to then, to look upon her then one might think she were someone’s daughter, someone’s beloved and best girl.

Inside she was dying. Inside there was rotting flesh inside her living flesh, death eating her from the inside out, killing her in the world’s slowest-ever murder, those thoughts that came to her mind, that she could not be loved, that she could be neither missed nor noticed, that she figured into the life of the world no more than the dirt on the road filled her heart and she believed them. She was addictively attached
to the sorrow in her heart, thinking these things to feel the pain that reminded her she was living. She felt the death inside her bloom the moment her father exiled her, but in truth the death entered her at the moment love did. She who had not been made for love. Only through loving and losing was this despair made possible, and it clouded each minute of her day, all the colors in the world were bleached out. Each moment of her existence stood quiet, alone, hollow: an infinitely long and horrible moment against which she had to decide to brace herself, again and again and again. Each moment of her life was unattached to the one before or after, as if she had come to exist in a hell that could not be assuaged by the passage of time. The evenings were her favorite time of day, because she knew sleep was coming; the grey light of morning was always cruel to her, for she did not want to wake up. The sunlight painting the whole world in the façade of cheerful hope seemed a mockery to her to whom each moment was only suffering.

It soon became apparent that she was overstaying her welcome and that Dr. Sastry was concerned that his housing Adivi’s disgraced daughter would cause a falling-out with his old friend. Anjali moved in with Sarojini and her husband in the city of Hyderabad, taking over a small bedroom in their home, where she did her morning
puja
and slept. Anjali, with some shame, had related her story to Sarojini and Sarojini had invited Anjali to stay with her. Under normal circumstances, Anjali would have never accepted so generous an offer, but desperate as she was, she accepted. Never particularly religious, now estranged from her family, she appealed to the divine. She took her meals with the family, and during the afternoons they would strategize as to their next move, or plan Sarojini’s next public appearance, how to rally all these women for the good of their shared cause. Anjali helped Sarojini with
her children and keeping up the house. That so revolutionary a woman could also be so domestic! Sarojini taught her things—how to cook and also about rhyme and meter. Anjali told Sarojini about her family life—the grandmother she missed every moment of every day. Sarojini’s husband, Govinda, was like a brother-father to Anjali, always kind and gentle in his teaching. He was smitten with his wife. Sarojini tended to have that affect in some way, through the charms of her multifaceted and unabashed femininity, the force of her intellect; everyone was, just a bit, in his way taken with her.

“Therefore, I charge you,” Sarojini said, “restore to your women their ancient rights, for as I have said, it is we, and not you, who are the real nation builders, and without our active cooperation at all points of progress all your congresses and conferences are in vain. Educate your women and the nation will take care of itself, for it is true today as it was yesterday and will be at the end of human life that the hand that rocks the cradle is the power that rules the world.” Sarojini concluded her speech in the little college lecture hall, filled with men and women standing toe to toe, fanning themselves with leaflets. Anjali turned and saw a perspiring woman wipe her forehead with the end of her sari.

Anjali felt tears prick her eyes; she felt wildly youthful and clapped in joy, a nobody among all these strangers. It was only 1911, but Anjali felt that this woman, petite Sarojini, was already helping to unbind and unravel a system no thinking person had ever considered delicate.

The hall could contain only a fraction of the people who wanted in; a crowd spilled out into the hallway and further on into the street. But there were many who stayed, flooding the street outside the college if only to catch a glimpse of that tiny poetess. Inside the merciless afternoon sun—moving in great squares through the shapes of the
windowpanes—cast Anjali’s shadow long across the floor. She held tightly in her fist the personalized invitation sent to her by the Naidus.

Sarojini smiled at Anjali—a special, warm smile meant just for her. As the crowd around her cheered Anjali felt suddenly that at long last, she had shaken that specter of loneliness. All kinds of heroic images flooded her imagination. She thought: “This is where I belong. I shall start here, and end when India begins.”

“M
Y VERY OWN
Lakshmibai!” Govinda would sometimes call Sarojini, referencing Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, she the princess-warrior, who led her men into battle with her baby strapped to her back. It took two Englishmen to mortally wound the rani, and when they did, her soldiers removed her baby. She ascended her funeral pyre herself.

Anjali and Sarojini sat over a pile of green beans, clipping their ends. The maid, careless, had moved the cane away from Anjali and when she went to stand, Govinda held her by the arm and lifted her as the maid went scurrying for her stick. Though no touch could be more innocuous, more fraternal, Anjali started.

“He may very well be a mahatma, but I tell you Anjali he is also a maha-headache. I’m not throwing out a lifetime’s collection of
kanjeevaram
saris to wear some bloody prickly white homespun.” Sarojini opened her closet, pointing to shelves of neatly folded and pressed silk saris. She pointed, “These I got for my wedding, and this one,” she beamed proudly, holding up a beautiful green silk, “Rabindrinath Tagore gave to me.” The great poet had given it to Sarojini after she had sent him her latest manuscript. Sometimes Anjali did not always know how to react; she did not want to be seen to be a joyless person
or an ungrateful one—and though seeing the feminine and domestic pride in Sarojini did spark in Anjali sadness and jealousy, she wanted to partake in her mentor’s happiness. It was a strange balance of bearing she always had to strike in the presence of other women.

Even Gandhi, with his insistence on homespun khadi cloth for Indians, could not make Sarojini give up her great collection of saris. That ban on imported fabric among Indians had resulted in a great conflagration of cottons and silks in the towns and villages, whose residents had long paid dearly for the Lincolnshire craftsmanship and the British tax that accompanied it. “It is as if every woman in town is a widow,” Sarojini marveled. The khadi cloth was often more expensive to weave than the ready-made Lincolnshire cottons, and some of the erstwhile most fashionable Hyderabadi women had decided on principle to choose among two or three plain white saris. Six yards of coarse, unadorned fabric. The sacrifice of beauty and glamour had been harder to stomach than some of them had imagined.

Anjali thought of her mother’s own collection of saris—the expensive silks with the hand-embroidered
zari
, the blue one from her wedding trousseau, the green tussah-silk with the pink-and-silver border that she had worn as the mother-of-the-bride at Mohini’s wedding.

Anjali wondered about the somber vows of marriage, about the feeling of being protected by the cloak of matrimony, about motherhood—the feeling that women spoke of: of love for their children like a love they had never believed could exist, about caring for a man and feeling safe with him. Between Sarojini and her husband there was such warmth and sense of humor as Anjali had never seen before, something like genuine goodwill.

12

T
HERE WERE SOME
Indian sweets that, had he been able to ship them quickly enough that they would not go bad, he would have liked his children to try.

A few weeks before Christmas, Alexandre sent a box of silks for Madeline, a doll dressed in a sari for Catherine and toy wooden building blocks for Matthieu to Pondichéry. A French postal ship would be leaving from there within the week, and he wanted to send gifts home; he doubted the gifts would make it to Paris before Christmas but hoped that at least the children would receive them before the New Year.

He celebrated Christmas with Anthony and Madhuri. It wasn’t like Christmases at home; Madhuri seemed unmoved but amused by the occasion, watching Alexandre and Anthony drink with paper crowns on their heads, Anthony trying to persuade Alexandre to sing with him. The three of them took a walk together after dinner, to St. Peter’s Church near Hollander’s Green, where the British soldiers and sailors attended services. Everyone everywhere looked at them, that odd trio—the old Englishman with his cigar, the pretty young Indian woman in her red sari and bindi and the handsome young Frenchman. Madhuri walked with her hand in Anthony’s bent elbow.

“It must bother you,” Alexandre murmured to Anthony, discreetly.

Anthony smiled, blowing wisps of fragrant smoke into the warm night air, obscuring the candle lights of the church and the stars. He
kissed the back of Madhuri’s hand, bending in a dramatic gesture like a showman and looked straight into her eyes, “They know nothing of life at all.” Alexandre was not sure how much English Madhuri understood, but her face was an expression of pure compassion, of love and charity and sweet absolution. She looked radiant in the evening light, her cheap sari bright in the wind, covering her head, like a tattered Jolly Roger on the mast of an old pirate ship. Anthony then set his eyes upon Alexandre and fixed him with a stern gaze; tapping off the ash of his cigar, he reached out, squeezing Alexandre’s hand, “My boy. Dear boy, who the bloody hell cares what any of them think?” And then, with long strides he led Madhuri and Alexandre forward into the church.

The church was over-full, and the open doorways were packed with worshipers standing barefoot in the sand. Some of them put their hands up toward the deity and touched their eyes as if in a temple. Others cried in delirious devotion, “Mary Matha!” Mother Mary! Over their heads, Anthony, Alexandre and Madhuri could hear them singing over the sounds of the ocean and could see the candles illuminating their dying, golden savior on the cross. He wore a garland of marigolds and roses on his thin neck, which reached the place where his feet had been nailed to the cross.

After some time, Anthony suggested they turn and walk back home in the balmy Indian night. On the way out, Madhuri cupped the heat of prayer candles in her hands and swept it up to her face, quietly performing
aarti
in the corner of the church. They walked in quiet contemplation, enjoying the cool air. Anthony stopped to buy a string of jasmines for Madhuri’s hair and two newspaper cones filled with peanuts boiled in saltwater, one of which he handed Alexandre.

“I have a special treat!” Anthony announced on returning home. From his bedroom he produced a small tin box. “Christmas pudding! I had it shipped here from one of the military canteens in Madras. Cost a bloody fortune!” He laughed and merrily he instructed Madhuri to retrieve some dessert cups, and he dished out the viscous brown sweet, his nostrils filling with candied, dried fruits and brandy.

They ate in quiet reverie, and after a while Madhuri, who had left her dessert unfinished, went to bed and the men stayed up celebrating.

“Come Anthony, sing ‘Silent Night’ with me!” Anthony said, slurring his words, pouring himself another glass of whiskey and then topping off Alexandre’s glass too.