Alexandre smiled uncomfortably, speaking through lips pursed around the cigarette, his head inclined toward Anthony’s lighter. “I hope she is alright . . . ”
“Don’t worry too much about her my boy . . . she’s probably just been sent away to some spinster aunt until this ‘scandal’ blows over. Indians are gossips . . . once their neighbors and relatives have something else to talk about, you know, once some unmarried girl finds herself with child, or someone’s cousin is caught drunk making a scene at the social club, her parents will call her back.”
Alexandre looked out the window, expressionless.
THEY HAD DINNER that night. He, Anthony and Madhuri, and as Alexandre watched the two of them banter, and the affection and humor between them, he missed the women in his life. Anthony and Madhuri used the familiar “you” form between them, nuvvu, like tu in French. A linguistic undressing. Despite the disparity in age between them, they seemed like young sweethearts, and Alexandre felt a pang of jealousy.
After dinner, Madhuri and the maid cleared the table, and Anthony and Alexandre went to the sitting room to smoke.
“Dear Doctor, you look pensive this evening . . . you hardly spoke during dinner . . . is something on your mind?” Anthony smiled deeply, his cheeks red. “Surely you are not still worrying about that girl?”
“Oh, it is nothing, Anthony.”
“Oh, come now, Alex! You’ve been here, what? A week? Friendships move faster in India. We are old mates now! Tell me!”
“Well . . . ” Alexandre smiled slightly, “I was wondering, well, I have a question for you Anthony but it is rather untoward—”
“You were wondering how I’ve managed to stay so handsome all these years?” Anthony laughed from his belly.
Alexandre laughed too, and then asked, “You wife . . . Patricia, right? Does she know about Madhuri?”
Anthony laughed again. “Oh, Alex. God bless. Old Pat knows about Madhuri . . . well, of course she thinks she is only my cook. No, she doesn’t know the exact nature of our relationship, no . . . Pat is a good woman; she’s the mother of my boys, she laughs at all my jokes and she can drink me under the table. As long as she has a little extra money to put on the horses, and cake and cider for her knitting circle, she’s happy. Me, I need whiskey and a pretty girl in my bed. Believe me, Alex, Madhuri is the best thing to happen to my marriage. Pat and I have never been happier. Come on boy, you are French! You of all people should understand!” he laughed before settling into a dry cough.
Alexandre smiled, and his eyes lifted to see Madhuri walk in, and he watched her rolling hips under her pink sari. She went to Anthony and held his face in her hands and kissed his cheek, wishing him a good night. He clasped her small brown wrists.
“Good night, my darling,” Anthony replied sleepily, smiling deeply, his old eyes twinkling in the lantern light.
She turned and looked at Alexandre and said, “Good night, Dr. Lautens.”
ALEXANDRE WENT TO his room and tossed a newspaper onto the desk and drew back the sheets on his bed. As he undressed, he looked at the small Ganesha idol on his desk, and he changed into cotton pajama pants. He stood bare-chested in front of the mirror and ran his fingertips lazily over the lines where his pale chest met his sun-baked forearms and throat. He sighed.
He had just read in the paper that the Nepalese had a new king, a child who was only five years of age. A little boy king photographed for the newspaper in regal, oversized robes. Alexandre fell onto the bed and looked at the ceiling, thinking about his children and their last Christmas together and why he was in India.
At the Adivis’ home he would hear Kanakadurga doing private pujas in the prayer room across from her bedroom. She would sometimes refer to Sanskrit as Deva Bhasha, God’s tongue. Alexandre found the room exotic and frightening. It smelled of incense and the coconuts Kanakadurga would break while she chanted, her hands pressed together, rocking. He would hear her sometimes in that room, her voice low and trancelike in prayer, “Avaneesh, Avighna, Balaganapati . . . Gaurisuta . . . Heramba . . . ” In Kanakadurga’s puja room, a wild-eyed idol of Kali looked at him with her tongue out. Ganesha was muted, his elephant eyes wide and serene; silver tins of turmeric and bindi were among the coconuts and fresh flowers. There were framed paintings of beautiful Lakshmi in her lotus, Saraswati holding her lute, a blue-skinned Krishna spying on nut-brown milkmaids. a gold Nataraja Shiva balanced on a dying serpent. In the center of the room was a picture of Hanuman, Rama’s faithful monkey warrior, holding his chest open, Rama’s name written on his ribs and blood and flesh and heart. “His love for Rama and Sita was questioned,” Kanakadurga had told him once, “and in response, he tore open his chest, so all of Ayodhya could see that they were literally in his beating heart. There was also a photograph of Adivi’s late father, Anil, a man whose face echoed his son’s but was softer. “He wasn’t as handsome as my son, but he was a kinder man . . . ” Kanakadurga had said, smiling sadly, “so often beauty and cruelty seem to go together.” Fresh flowers rested against Anil’s photo, and there was red talcum powder dusted on his sepia forehead.
Now, in his room in Anthony’s house, Alexandre got up off the bed and went to his desk and held the small marble elephant god in his hand. Like his father, he had never been religious—attending church only on Easter and Christmas. He liked the community that religion provided—the sense that he belonged to a family of man, and was not too proud to bow before a god or speak to one at night when his heart was distraught. But not for him the proscriptions on life. Not for him his mother’s kneeling nightly like a child seeking a new toy or forgiveness for cheating at jacks.
Kanakadurga had given the little Ganesha to Alexandre on the morning he left. “The remover of obstacles and the patron of scholars. Sometimes, when I feel myself lost, when I feel away from myself, I sit and I say the gaeśa sahasranāma, the hundred and eight names of Ganesha. I feel the rhythm of his names in my blood. It calms my heartbeat.” He smiled as she handed it to him, her kindly eyes deeply wrinkled, bright and watery. She was not one to cry, but she held his large white hand in hers, which were small and brown. She clasped his hand tightly and pressed it to her soft cheek. “My friend,” she said.
His Ganesha was round and cherubic, and he held an axe and rope in two of his hands, and a lotus and a sweet in the others. Alexandre remembered Dr. Bonventre introducing him to Devanagari. Bonventre drew a slash after deva, “God, plus city . . . the language of the city of God.” Bonventre whispered in quiet awe and smiled—an indulgent, sweet, unscholarly smile, like a boy dreaming. “It will take you all your life to learn Sanskrit. But you should. In the Hindu mythology, Sanskrit is made of all the sounds of the beginning of the universe. It is a most beautiful calculus.”
11
WALKING WITH THOSE women, it occurred to Anjali how they were just women like the women she had always known: daughters, mothers, wives, most of them in saris. They were the respectable women of respectable men, not lawless rebels or society’s rejects. And Anjali hoped that she would not find herself an outcast yet again.
THEY WERE ALL there, hundreds of them, many of them men in white khadi, like an endless army of widows, but neither somber nor funerary. This was not a military procession of strong young soldiers wearing armbands of black. Anjali turned and saw the crowd closing in on her as if suddenly rushing, all of them, and felt terrified; never in her life had she seen such a crowd. The women pushed and wailed, carrying frightened babies against their breasts, the men shoved, their hands straining forward even if separated by several feet from the door, among them all children seemingly without parents or means; Anjali thought that the English were at least a civilizing force on so miserable that swarthy mass. She saw the baby-faced white officers, their stoic faces betrayed only by that glimmer of terror in their eyes and the thin, transparent lines of sweat trickling down their temples, suggesting discomfort as they attempted to manage the crowd in the spotless uniforms of the Indian Imperial Police. Standing o
utside that afternoon, tentative, Anjali waited as the other women filed in, eager to hear the fiery, young freedom fighter, this woman said to rival her male counterparts in passion and intellect. And then, with her awkward gait and with that long-carried burden of solitude, pushing past a thousand onlookers, Anjali walked into the courtyard of the University of Madras. There were red paper stars fixed to the gates: the college was preparing for Christmas.
She saw from inside the gated walls of the college how they were: how deplorable, how selfish, how ruthless and how barbarous, how jealous and greedy, how small they all were, how ugly the most beautiful, how poor even the wealthiest among them, how sick even the young and robust; just human, pathetically human, a million incarnations of flawed, so fragile, each of them as volatile as fire crackers, each needing only a single, catalyzing spark to explode and explode again, in a brief shimmering display of rage and fury before that silent demise of death, disappearing into the ether of that pillaged and plundered earth.
One blond officer, whose icy blue eyes were wild with fear in the face of angry old Indian women, met Anjali’s gaze. Anjali for a moment saw him, herself and those all around, not for what they had but for what they didn’t, their secret stories of loneliness and fragility, of anxiety and fear. And Anjali, as quickly as she felt the repulsion, felt depthless sorrow and pity and compassion and thought how variously vulnerable they all were, how sometimes wretched. She decided then, while covered in sweat and dust, the dizzying heat bearing down upon her, to love them then, in spite of herself, in spite of those twin candles of rage and fury that burned equally brightly in her; because they were just like her, selfish and small and foolish, but trying, and in trying became godlike, to shake the shackles of human existence.
She turned to see her heroine mounting the podium. When Sarojini ascended the steps, she turned to the British flag behind her and removed it from the wall; turning it upside down, she tacked it back up. “Ladies and gentlemen, the empire is in distress.”
Anjali, now in the confines of the hall, closed her eyes as she imagined the night she was banished. She was still smarting from her father’s scolding as she walked out into the garden in the purple evening light. A pitying servant had quietly handed her a tray with sweets and a cup of tea, and began to pack her bags. She left in the morning.
Alexandre’s face had somewhat faded from memory, but Anjali did in fleeting memories recall that hair, those eyes, that soap-scented skin and remember feelings of being illuminated from within. Love makes one present. Now, in quiet moments, she sometimes felt she had only the past.
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.”
“MY 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 Anj
ali 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.
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