The Grammarian

by Annapurna Potluri

  “Anthony . . . I have no words to thank you enough. I could never have completed my studies here without your help . . . I couldn’t have. Thank you so much,” he put his hand over his tie where his heart beat.

  “Don’t mention it, my boy,” the older man’s eyes shone with watery sadness. Anthony clasped Alexandre’s hand in his, pausing for a moment. “Childhood lasts forever Alexandre, and then, suddenly, you are an adult, and every year speeds by faster than the last, and soon it is all gone, and those you love turn grey and old . . . ” his voice broke.

  Alexandre’s lips tightened, restraining some vague, melancholy feeling. He looked out onto the platform and for long moments was no longer sure there was a place for him. He thought of the gods he’d been so unsteadily faithful to. His place was not India, he knew, but he knew too that it was no longer France, because now nothing was the same. He looked at the kaleidoscopic, dizzying view of thousands of women along the stretch of the platform in colorful saris, billowing like the sails of ships. For a moment he regretted his decision to leave, thinking that Anthony’s home, a home in India where Scotch whiskey was poured and English was spoken, was perhaps the only place he belonged anymore. But it was a home that wasn’t his. He regretted too all he had not done, that he hadn’t taken the train to Calcutta or Delhi, or spent a fortnight in a houseboat in Kashmir or gone to Benares to see holy men walk across fire or eaten fish curry on the Portuguese beaches of Goa. He wished he had befriended a maharajah and lived richly above the rules of society and in between the boundaries of nations.

  He envied that Anthony would take a simple ride home and share a tasty meal with the woman he loved while he, Alexandre, would be making a journey that was nearly unbearable. The conductor called all passengers to board and Alexandre looked at Anthony, who cleared his throat and nodded in acknowledgment.

  Alexandre boarded the train, and when he sat he found Anthony waiting through the grates of the open window. The train’s engines had already started, and it was difficult to hear. He feared that when he turned back to look at his friend, he would see the old Englishman’s eyes and everything would stop, that his sorrow would stop the people milling about the station and that the clocks on the walls should not strike another minute, that the sun should stop pouring down its happy rays over the station. Where were the soldiers in their black armbands? And the girls with baskets of chrysanthemums? Alexandre felt tears in his eyes, the words of his countryman Pierre Loti imprinted on his mind: “My God! If the Indian sages that I seek could but convince me that I might find pardon and pity too.” “My God, my God, my God,” Alexandre thought.

  “I miss them already!” Alexandre shouted to Anthony, his knuckles white as he clenched the cold grates in his hands. His eyes were red and his jaw taut. His breath was coming in wet little gasps.

  “WHAT?!” Anthony yelled back, and he walked with the train as slowly it began to pull away.

  Alexandre looked at Anthony through the iron grates of his compartment window and futilely, over the engines’ roar, shouted something lost to the noise of the train and the station and the crowds. Anthony cupped his ear and raised his eyebrows in question.

  Anthony now ran alongside the train as it slowly lurched forward; and then, after a few moments, as the train gathered speed, Anthony could not keep up, and Alexandre craned his neck back, looking back in the distance at the old white man standing alone on the platform, red-cheeked with exertion, his right hand raised in final farewell.

  And when Alexandre could no longer see his friend, he sat and faced forward, looking at the strangers in the train, and held his head in his hands and cried.

  ALEXANDRE DID NOT partake of the served dinner that evening but rather ate the snacks Madhuri had packed for him. They were fried, tasty and very heavy, and Alexandre, his stomach full, soon felt drowsy. He fell asleep in his seat, upright, and didn’t wake up until late the next morning. The other passengers had eaten breakfast already, and he called the dining steward to bring some coffee and fruit.

  He took down his books and journals from the overhead storage and thought about how his job and Anthony’s weren’t terribly different; to his mind, the defining theme of the age was cataloguing: animals, fish, birds, religions, peoples, diseases, plants and languages.

  The grammar was nearing completion. Every word in Telugu ends in a vowel, and for a very short time the task of acquiring the language well enough to describe it seemed to be a practice of learning music. It was an agglutinating language; a sentence could stream off like bars of an opera. A language like a song, and so very far from his own mother tongue. So many sentences in Telugu were the inverse of French sentence syntax. To his thinking, and for all his exposure to the many tongues of men, there was still no finer language than French—no language that quite so accurately conveyed the agony, the beauty, and the wonder of the human condition.

  He wondered if he might be able to complete the manuscript on board the ship, and the prospect of publishing his grammar so far ahead of what he had forecasted dulled the sadness in him. In a year, Alexandre’s grammar would be received with much fanfare among linguists and Indologists. It would be the first comprehensive grammar of a Dravidian language; its aim was not to teach the language so much as explain it to a European audience, for whom Telugu’s structure was exotic. The vocabulary was so largely borrowed from Sanskrit that Alexandre was also invited by his editor to write a chapter, entitled “Language Contact in South India,” for a textbook of historical linguistics. It would begin: “In the Dravidian language of Telugu of South India, one of the most populously spoken languages in India, we find one of the most impressive cases of language contact on record. Sanskrit, sometimes thought of as merely the liturgical language of the Hindus, is alive and well in the unrelated but equally beautiful language of Telugu.”

  Academic renown was in Alexandre’s future, but now, on the train heading east, Alexandre found reassurance only in the rhythm of the train’s movement, which soothed him as he rewrote sections of his manuscript.

  On board the train Alexandre tried to shake the malaise off, that nostalgia he was horrified to be feeling, too soon and for the wrong place. He tried to convince himself that this was merely the disorienting effect of travel and fatigue. He should have considered his life less than completely lived to have never visited this mythic and strange land, located less in markers of longitude and latitude than in the psyche. We had all visited this place, he thought, in our dreams and in our longing to see humanity explode in all its permutations, all its absurdness, all its circus-like freakishness, all its glory and all its beauty. But India was not his home.

  There were places like this on Earth—America, Florence, the islands of the Pacific, Egypt . . . they suggested with their beauty, with the embodiment of a great idea, something of a universal human dream.

  He thought Paris was like this—with its romance, its glamour, but he knew it too for its reality, its starburst intersections, its back alleys and grand avenues, its taverns, its bars, its hidden rooms and dance halls. How many times had those roads known his familiar footfall—as a child skipping along their long stretches, with schoolyard friends, or unevenly lifted by one hand by his mother, as she bought bread and cheese and meat from the local bakers and butchers; then as a young man, with a sporting step, holding Madeline by the waist, stopping to press his lips against hers; as a father he would often walk holding Catherine’s hand, or with Matthieu hoisted on his shoulders, counting trees or pigeons. Paris kept his secrets and remembered his youth, like a loyal friend.

  In Waltair, the streets had revealed his isolation, his unfamiliarity, and his misgivings like an indifferent stranger, all the passersby avoiding eye contact, and he scolded himself for letting himself go so astray that he missed the place. He hadn’t meant to.

  ALEXANDRE WOKE TO a dream realized—he had fallen asleep dreaming of Bombay and woken up in the city’s Victoria Station. Bombay was waking up, loud as always in the morning as chaos a
nd arriving trains descended on the station. Anthony had offered to make the lodging arrangements in Bombay from Waltair by post while Alexandre made the train journey, and he was grateful that the arrangements had been squared away. He checked into the station’s desk and, as expected, found an envelope from Anthony detailing his hotel arrangements.

  He hired coolies and a carriage to take him to the British-owned hotel. Alexandre looked out the windows drowsily, seeing the city go by him in a blur of browns and reds and blues. He began to feel dizzy and sick and put his head in his lap, queasy. The driver jerked and weaved through the traffic. Street children and animals and vendors crowded the streets. Alexandre held his head in his hands and sat up only when he heard the driver say, “Sir, we are at your hotel.”

  Alexandre checked into the hotel, greeted by an elderly British woman. He was exhausted, his hair and clothes rumpled; he felt he’d been wearing those clothes forever. He ran his fingertips across his jaw. His beard was thick and rough.

  “Dr. Lautens, welcome to Bombay,” she said cheerily. Bellboys took his luggage, and Alexandre asked for tea to be sent up to settle his stomach. “Yes, of course Doctor,” she said.

  Alexandre went his room. He ran his fingertips over his unshaven beard and ran his hands through his hair, working knots loose. He washed his face, shaved and changed into pajamas; an Indian boy arrived with the tea, and Alexandre thanked him and drank it down quickly. He then lay down and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, oblivious to the sounds of the restless, fitful city outside his room.

  When he awoke, Alexandre moved his sleep-heavy body across the room and opened the shutters on the window. He sighed as he leaned outside, his bare white chest tilted forward into the Bombay night.

  Alexandre walked over to the middle of the room and opened a suitcase, found a clean pair of slacks and white linen shirt and dressed quickly. He had decided to see the city, and he smiled, knowing that for the night he was anonymous.

  BOMBAY GLITTERED. DARK Indian eyes shone in the nighttime streetlights. Alexandre bought food off the street and walked the foreign city alone. He moved through groups of Indian schoolboys and drunken British sailors and vendors. The dirty, barefoot street children from the slums were selling small toys and newspaper cones filled with boiled peanuts. The night air was heavy, and he could smell flowers and kerosene and the ocean. He felt as if he hadn’t woken up, that he had drifted from a deep sleep to a dark night peppered with languages he couldn’t understand, and despite his long rest, his mind felt unclear, as if the hot, humid air of the city had clouded him.

  He walked down a small, narrow street and saw an old woman standing on a stoop, her fist on her hip. She looked like an Anglo-Indian, one of those daughters of a British official whose mother was Indian. She had pale skin and dark hair. She smiled at him deeply. “What are you doing darling?” she called out. “A handsome boy like you shouldn’t be alone in Bombay . . . ”

  Alexandre stopped and looked at her, smiling back. He considered her and saw that she looked friendly and harmless. Almost motherly. “What are you running there,” he asked, looking at the building behind her, the windows covered in red cloth, a soft glow coming from behind them. “You have girls inside?”

  “No, darling . . . well, yes, but—just come inside. You look lost. Come.” She opened the door to the building and Alexandre followed her. A heavy cloud of sweet smoke hit him, a honeyed mix of tobacco and marijuana. He inhaled deeply. The old woman took his hand. “Come,” she said gently. There was a coatrack near the entrance, and Alexandre saw a British army jacket hanging from it limply. She looked at his feet, “Your shoes, darling.”

  Alexandre removed his shoes and followed her as she pushed open saris that served as makeshift curtains. When she pulled them open, the smoke became heavier and sweeter and Alexandre felt weak and submissive. He ran his hand over a sari-curtain, enjoying the softness of the silk. He saw through one a young British soldier sleeping on a bed, a pipe lying next to him. A bare-chested Chinese man sat at the end of the bed, smoking, his eyes red, looking at Alexandre without expression. A pretty young Anglo-Indian woman walked by wearing a sari without a blouse, the end of the sari thrown loosely over her shoulder.

  The older woman stopped her, “Miriam, help make this young man comfortable.”

  The younger woman smiled and took Alexandre’s arm. They walked to a bed in the back of the room upon which lay the inert body of an old Englishman, his legs curled up to his chest. Miriam smoothed the sheets on the end of the bed and motioned for Alexandre to sit.

  She gently touched his face and lifted a long pipe off the floor and lit a small brass lamp. Miriam sat at Alexandre’s feet, her dark eyes flashing in the low flame of the lamp. Her hair and eyes were dark but her skin nearly as white as his. She put black opium in a small bowl at the end of the pipe and let it warm over the flame. A few moments later, Miriam placed her mouth on the pipe and inhaled deeply. Alexandre watched her collarbones emerge as she breathed in. She looked up at him, her eyes limpid and black. She lifted the pipe to his mouth and Alexandre followed her example, inhaling. They passed the pipe between them again, and Alexandre leaned back on the bed. He closed his eyes and let warmth take him over.

  He looked at Miriam and saw that her eyes looked bigger and darker, her mouth pinker and fuller than before. She sat down next to him on the bed, and Alexandre felt her lips on his ear, her small hand on his chest. He looked at her and muttered, “You are very pretty.” He felt tears roll down his face. He looked at her: she was like a phantasm, her alabaster limbs like vapors. He took her hand from his chest and gently placed it in her lap and woke up late the next day, curled up on the bed opposite the old Englishman he had seen there the night before. The sun pushed through the curtains and Alexandre felt blinded as he woke.

  THE NATIONALIST JAMSETJI Tata had designed his hotel to face inland, her back to England, and had ordered spun iron pillars for the hotel’s interior from Paris when he went to see the premiere of the Eiffel Tower some years before at the Exposition Universelle; the fair had been held to celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Tata had seen Africans for the first time in the village nègre, the American sharpshooter Annie Oakley and a small number of Thomas Edison’s inventions.

  Alexandre, on a British passenger ship in December of 1911, days before the New Year, months after the Gateway had been completed for the Delhi Durbar, looked upon the city of Bombay as the other passengers made their way on board. His belongings had been stowed in his stateroom on the ship, and he stood on deck looking at the city. He took in the deep blue water of the bay and the Tata’s Taj Mahal Hotel.

  FIFTY-NINE YEARS BEFORE, in 1852, an old copy of Blackwood’s Magazine, which an English army physician, Dr. Brydon, had crammed under his helmet, took the brunt of the blow. An Afghani soldier had thrust his sword into the surgeon’s head, chopping magazine pages rather than brains. Brydon escaped the Afghani and fled, finding en route a wounded Indian soldier who lay dying. The Indian offered the young doctor his horse and pointed him in the direction of the British stronghold of Jellalabad. Of the 16,500 army men who had gone into Kabul, Brydon was the only one to survive. He followed the bugle call sounded by the Somerset Light Infantry from Jellalabad. They sounded the bugle every hour to guide those long presumed dead to safety. And on the end of the third day, Dr. Brydon arrived at Jellalabad, mounted on a horse, both he and the horse half-dead and all alone. When this news reached Queen Victoria, she rewarded the Somerset soldiers for fighting for their queen and country by having their regimental colors augmented: JELLALABAD was inscribed over a brick-laid crown.

  Alexandre, in 1911, hearing the ship’s horns blow, watched as he pulled away from India, and he could not have known then that the Somerset Light Infantry would march slowly in 1948, and as they did, Anjali would hold Sarojini Naidu’s arm in Bombay. Alexandre did not know then that the light infantry would be the last British regiment to leave India. Anjali woul
d cry on that last day of February 1948 as the first battalion of light infantry would move alongside their Indian escorts: the Bombay Grenadiers, the Second Sikhs, the Indian Navy, the 3/5th Gurkhas, the Mahratta Light Infantry, men with whom they would fight and die in Gibraltar, Normandy, the North West Frontier, the Japanese islands and Mesopotamia. The Indian and British soldiers would offer each other their last royal salute, and the crowd would quiet itself, somber as the band played “God Save the Queen.” In the crowd, sentiment would make way for joy as the standard bearers, carrying the Union Jack and the regimental colors, led the soldiers as they passed under the Gateway of India. The Empress of Australia would wait in Bombay’s harbor, great puffs of black smoke rising out of her funnels. The soldiers would board the steamship to “Auld Lang Syne.” Anjali would bend at the waist, leaning hard on Sarojini. In the distance, with the other officiates, she would weep and would not know why.

  At the center of the ceremony would be the man that Anjali revered most: Nehru would hold the arm of Major-General Whistler as his troops boarded the Empress of Australia. His expression would be stern, but even at that distance Anjali would make out in her hero’s face a melancholy about his eyes. An attendant would hand Nehru a red box. Nehru had wanted this feeling since he was a rich boy without direction or will in Cambridge. His would tremble as he handed the box to Brigadier John Platt, who would wear a scar on his face since shards of a German Nebelwerfer had hit him when crossing the Garigliano River. Platt had shot tigers in Madras, and in the brown faces of the Indian regiments, could make out men who had served under him during the war. “We are most reluctant to leave behind so many good friends and your great country which our regiment has known and served for so long. At the same time, we are happy for you in your newfound freedom, and I take this unique opportunity of wishing you all good luck and Jai Hind.” The crowd would cheer him on as he opened the box and reached in and lifted out a silver scale-model of the Gateway to India.