The Grammarian (5 page)

And then the Indian night. Quiet, blue and black and clear, the dark eyes of the Indians sparkling in the omnipresent light of candles and oil lamps outside the train’s windows. The strong smells of fried street foods, of evening blossoming flowers, the stringent rules of English society letting loose under the slow departure of the fatiguing heat whilst retaining something sultry and sensual in the dark alleys and secret doorways lending protection from a receding sun. Most of Indian life, it seemed, was lived after hours; as a Parisian, Alexandre found this very familiar.

Alexandre found himself wildly sentimental. India had made him sensitive to life in a way he hadn’t been for so long. His life back in Paris had grown so routine, and the comfort in that routine had made way for a dreary, sleepy monotony. Going day to day as if sleepwalking—sometimes happily and rarely sadly.

In 1889, Alexandre had felt that peculiar dream of flight, there, on the Ferris wheel at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was his first memory of that particular feeling of being alive so different from simply being awake. He was very young then, still wearing short pants and made to watch over his sisters as they ate chocolates while walking up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower. As he got older, he realized that that state of vitality was not only impossible day to day, but inadvisable. How could anyone go about like that all the time? So sensitive, always striving and learning and listening, always seeing beauty and horror, how terrifying it all seemed. Adulthood, it seemed to Alexandre a somber and sober expanse—that long stretch between a winged youth and the eccentricities and frailty of old age.

M
ADELINE WAS SEVENTEEN
months older than Alexandre. He had met her when she was twenty-one; he was nineteen, and an arrogant young man of the sort that in his adulthood he was weary of. There was little to be said for his younger self beyond that he possessed a keen intellect and a quiet ambition. His physical beauty was more girlish then; all else was unremarkable, and not different from other young men of his generation. He was sometimes brutish and coarse. He thought too much of himself and too little of the minds of his parents and teachers.

He was a student at the Sorbonne back then; he met her ankles first. He met those perfectly sculpted ankles, which led to perfectly sculpted calves as Madeline balanced herself on a rolling ladder in the philology department’s library. He had for some days made a habit of asking for hard-to-reach books so that he might admire her without her knowing. Though (as she later told him) she had grown suspicious of his eclectic book requests, she obligingly smiled and went to retrieve the ladder. More often than not, they were not books he needed, and they rested for hours on his desk at the library while he studied morphology and Madeline. She had then, and still had now, wonderful taste in shoes and stockings. One day, he followed the single black seam up the back of her legs and up her skirt, and he cocked his neck to sneak a look at the slip he would sometimes catch a glimpse of. She kicked him in the face.

Her pale green satin shoe landed squarely on his nose. She did not say anything, just stared at him with her large green eyes, demanding an apology, which he gave her, stumbling over his quickly sought words. He asked her her name.

“Madeline.”

And he knew her name and felt now he knew her. Madeline, like a sylph, and again and again Madeline. In the library and later, waiting
for him in cafés, always Madeline. And now, knowing her name, he felt he knew all he needed to know about her, her name like a ribbon enveloping that body—softer than a boy’s but not quite womanly. It was that same peculiar feeling of possession he felt when his children were born and he would look into their blue eyes and say their names and feel them become what they were called. Now Matthieu, now Catherine, gazing back at their father’s too-handsome face and becoming his children under that quotidian but astonishing feat: that baptism of being named.

The next day he returned to the library with gauze on his face, and a bunch of fresh yellow tulips with a note of apology, and a request that she meet him later in a nearby café on the street Monsieur le Prince. He remembered feeling a wonderful sensation of being some beautiful woman’s lover as he ran up the library’s stairs with flowers, his overcoat flapping against his back, a light rain making the air wet. Another librarian, matronly and disapproving, snorted and crossed her arms over her chest when he handed Madeline the tulips.

She laughed at him when he tried to kiss her outside the café. Then, those dismissive reactions made her more alluring; Alexandre, with his archangel face, was rarely rejected by women. Later in life he would find her smugness withering.

“You cannot kiss a girl with a bandage on your nose, and plus, I don’t want to be kissed—not by you, not now.”

He was indignant. “When?!” He was a beautiful boy, and the reluctance on the part of any woman he was making advances on only amounted in his mind to a show of propriety. Real disdain he was not prepared for.

“You’ll have to wait . . . anyhow . . . I feel I would be taking advantage of a mere boy . . . and one stupid enough to get caught looking up a woman’s skirt.”

Some months later, when her guard had dropped and the bandages on his nose had long come off, she showed him the library after hours. Years later, he could still see her pale hand agitating the formidable library lock on its heavy door. They went in to the dark, and with only small panes of moonlight and streetlight making their squares on the floor, she climbed the ladder and let him make his way up her legs guided by the seam on the back of her stockings. She giggled and clutched the ladder. He knew he wanted to marry her when she stopped giggling and at long last sighed.

A dark native steward in an English butler’s costume walked the aisles of the train. His hands, in immaculate white gloves, were striking against the black of his uniform, the bluish hue of his impossibly dark skin.

“Coffee or tea, Sir?” he asked, his timbre affected, his bored eyes heavily lashed. The tips of his full mustache had been waxed, and his thick hair had been combed in the manner of a matinee idol’s waves. He carried two silver pitchers with an ease that did not suggest their weight.

“Coffee, please,” Lautens said, offering him his emptied cup. The steward filled the cup gracefully, his other arm bent behind his back.

T
HE TRAIN HAD
stopped many times since leaving Bombay. Usually, Alexandre would wander the platform, trying Indian street food and buying fruit. He would stretch his legs, his back, his neck, before long
lastly reboarding the train as the conductor, with all the flourish of his English and American counterparts, cried, waving his handkerchief, “Alll aboarrrd!”

But this stop was his. At last Waltair was declared in red lettering on signboards. He slowly and carefully read the Telugu signage. His body felt exhausted; the final few minutes of waiting as the train slowed into the station were the longest moments of the entire journey. Finally it happened and the train stopped, pulling the passengers’ bodies forward before throwing them back against their seats. Men found their briefcases, women their parasols, children were ushered out by tired governesses. They nodded politely at those fellow passengers who would remain on for destinations farther south. And then suddenly his heart began to pound wildly in his chest. He pulled his attaché case from beneath his chair, and with legs that moved at first uneasily beneath him he disembarked.

Bulky stewards, also in English costume, unloaded his cases. When he finally descended to the platform, the task of collecting his belongings and meeting up with Adivi’s servants seemed to have been miraculously worked out for him in rapid-fire shouting in native tongue between a man in a red European jacket on the platform and the train’s head steward, a man with a white cummerbund and black bowtie.

Within seconds of descending the train, Alexandre felt that Indian heat no longer mediated by the enclosure of a train car, and he felt sweat trickling down his face and on his forearms and thighs; his clothes stuck to his skin and the ever-present dust clung to his face and in his lungs, a dry, spicy non-air that stuck in his throat. Feeling the dirt on his face and in his fingernails and nose, and sweat dripping off his chin, so many brown bodies, human and animal closed in on
him, Alexandre felt nauseous and dizzy and, for the first time since his departure, a sudden and painful desire to return home.

T
HREE INCHES
,
HELD
between the tip of a girl’s index finger and that of her thumb, almost holding in her hand the roaring Atlantic sea, and the Pacific too, which moaned and thrashed like a temperamental god, and between: burgeoning concrete cities, fields of golden wheat, canyons, soaring mountain ranges, those ancient forests: the United States. A mere three inches between her fingertips. Anjali Adivi touched the tips of the map in the newspaper, a tiny dot in the state of California, indicating the town of Oroville, where white Americans had for decades moved toward the battering western ocean and the gold promised on its shores.

All around her, her mother and the household servants were readying themselves for their guest.

Oroville was where Ishi was found. He was the last of the Yana, who lived in the Sierra Nevadas, where once they ate fish and fruit. When the gold prospectors came, the Yana retreated to the cover of sylvan concealment. Ishi’s mother and all the rest of his people had died. Starving, his hair shorn in mourning, he stumbled down the foothills and into the white towns below the forests.

It was morning in Waltair, and she was alone now. She could hear the servants in the kitchen preparing for the arrival of the academic.

Anjali held the newspaper in her hands and felt a fast swelling of some powerful emotion: tears filled her eyes and she began, there, alone in the garden, to cry for Ishi, the last of his tribe. She imagined herself without family or friends or kindness, only an object of scientific curiosity. The last speaker of his language, the histories he would take
with him, all soon to be gone with this single man; he would take with him the story of his people, and sing for the last time certain songs. He was the only one on earth to know his given name, this brown-skinned Calàf. Anjali’s lip quivered at the thought of that lonely man wandering from the forest to the foothills below, and to the scientists and museum curators who received him, and Anjali hoped Ishi would die soon.

3

“D
R
. L
AUTENS
?!”
ASKED
the man in the red jacket.

“Yes?” Alexandre leaned in toward him, shouting to be heard over the Indians scrambling about him, collecting trunks and placing them atop turbans on their heads, shouting irritated orders to each other.

“I am Subba Rao, Mr. Adivi’s personal butler. I have been sent to collect you from the train station. You will please come with me,” he said, his tone infinitely polite and deferential. Subba Rao then turned toward the men handling the luggage, his countenance changed suddenly, angry and aggravated, yelling in Telugu but peppering his speech with “Idiots!” a word that seemed much sharper with the twist of an Indian accent. The luggage handlers, men who waited in front of the first-class compartments for the descent of wealthy passengers, were not so well dressed, and wore short pants and shirtsleeves in military greens, dust and dirt on their hands and their bare feet, shawls wrapped about their heads to create a platform for the luggage they balanced there so effortlessly. They moved out of the airy stone train station, with all its chaos of passengers and beggars and vendors and station workers—thousands of people, it seemed, monkeys in the rafters, swiping bananas and bread from the food stalls, pigeons fluttering about, and to the surprise of Alexandre’s amused eyes, an actual snake charmer. He was an old man, dressed in filthy rags of white, sitting cross-legged, playing a sort of flute-like instrument of wood, in front of
him a hemp sack from which emerged a regal cobra. The snake’s neck was engorged, moving with the man’s flute, immune to the sounds of barefoot street children, and it astonished foreigners, from whom the old man solicited coins after each short song.