The Grammarian

by Annapurna Potluri

  Years before, when Alexandre had just returned from India, Matthieu would often play with his toys under Alexandre’s desk, running wooden train cars over Alexandre’s feet, repeating after his father: “Naa peru Matthieu. Maa Naanna garu peru Alex. Naake chocolatlu ante chaalaa istam.”

  “And what does that mean, my love?” Alexandre would peer down at his son, smiling up at his father, a chubby hand on his knee as he repeated the Telugu phrases Alexandre had taught his children.

  “My name is Matthieu . . . ”

  Matthieu closed his eyes for a moment, thinking.

  “Yes . . . ?” Alex prodded.

  “My papa’s name is Alex.”

  “And?”

  “I love chocolate!” Matthieu giggled, running a tiny red engine car up Alexandre’s leg.

  He reached down and held Matthieu’s face in his hand. Matthieu’s face was soft, and his cheeks pink. “My boy,” he grinned. He was proud of his children but quietly jealous of how quickly they were picking up a language it had taken him months to grasp the basic structure of.

  MONIZ HAD MANY times held the human brain in his hands, and it never failed to seem miraculous to him: some three pounds of nerve cells, blood, fat, axons, fiber, dendrites that together lay claim to the sum of human experience. Even though the samples he’d handled were from cadavers, he felt sometimes like he was holding a soul. Somewhere in that structure were memories of a mother’s cooking and the scent of grass, and the ability to make sense of calculus and map the Alps. He replied, flattered that he had been sought out. “Dear Dr. Lautens, I am flattered that you ask for my assistance. I am afraid the science has not yet advanced to the point where we can pinpoint brain activity, so I regret to tell you that I cannot offer you any firm evidence to prove your theory. Angiography, at least at its present state, focuses primarily on the health in the brain of the venous and arterial systems, not on the development of the so-called grey matter itself.

  “What is more, I do not yet have any cerebral angiographies of children. In terms of hunches, however, I do believe you are on to something. I will be in touch soon after I’ve had some further time to consider your hypothesis. I will tell you this now, which I’m sure you already know. At the root of us all is a reptile’s brain. Instinctive, reactive, survival based, lacking in altruism—only meant to keep us alive. It reacts to fear and works on impulse. The point where emotional life begins in the mind is the amygdala, next to the hippocampus, nothing more than a little bundle of nerves, small, pink. What a wonder that so much comes from it: love, fear, joy, and if you are right, the matrix too from which our first utterances originate.”

  Smiling, Alexandre pressed the paper of the letter to his lips. He knew now where his studies would lead him.

  ANJALI LOOKED UP at the ceiling of her cell, as the light flickered valiantly before dying and darkness fell over the whole jail. After a moment she heard the snapping, hissing sound of matches being lit as the guards illuminated oil lamps, throwing into the hallway the striped shadows of cell bars.

  She had been imprisoned this time for several weeks, picked up in November 1919 for organizing a small local riot. She had some vague sense it was now December but wasn’t sure. Down the hall, she could hear the raspy voice of a woman wailing to the guard for water.

  The sun had set many hours earlier and she could see black night outside the window, and then she heard the plink-plink of raindrops hitting the glass.

  Anjali heard the hiss and pop of small fireworks, and then the happy sounds of cheering children and more fireworks exploding.

  Anjali got out of bed and pushed the chair in her cell under the window. From the direction of the constabulary, she heard the voices of men singing “Auld Lang Syne.” Allahabad, with all its history and all its institutions, lacked the one thing Anjali would have loved to hear the most, the sound that, if it bounced around the walls of her cell, would make her most glad: the sound of the sea. It was everywhere in Waltair, but Allahabad was farther inland. She stood on the chair and stood as tall as she could, trying hard to look outside at the city around her that had come very much to life.

  She leaned forward, pressing her small hands to the walls of her cell. She strained her neck upward, exposing her long, brown throat, and opened her mouth for rainwater, squeezing her eyes shut as she began to cry.

  14

  DURING A VERY low tide, horse-drawn carriages on the sometimes island of Neuwerk can reach the little fishing villages on the icy shores of the North Sea. It was in one such village, Cuxhaven, on the river Elbe, that the Imperator was built, and in June of 1913 it set sail for the first time to New York across the choppy Atlantic sea. She was the pride of the Hamburg-Amerika fleet, the largest ship afloat, an answer to the less luxurious Titanic of the rival White Star company.

  When, after the Great War, when she had spent much of the time rusting in the Elbe, the Imperator was seized by the Americans and used to bring surviving Yankees back home to industrial coastal cities and university towns and midwestern cornfields. She was afterward given to the Cunard ship company to compensate for the German U-boat-struck Lusitania. Arthur Ballin, a Jewish entrepreneur from Hamburg who had built the Imperator and who had once been a guest of the kaiser, seeing his life’s work destroyed under the pressures of war, overdosed on sleeping pills and died before the war ended. The Imperator, out of commission during those war years, was claimed as an Anglo-American war prize and rechristened the Berengaria.

  Sarojini, no foreigner to travel, enjoyed the trip but spent much of her time on the Berengaria inside her quarters, writing speeches and poetry and corresponding with her many friends—poets, like George William Russell and Arthur Symons, her mentor; Nehru; Gandhi and of course her family, whom she always felt suffered the most for her politics.

  ANJALI, AFTER MEALS, walked out on to the deck and felt the breeze move through her clothes, the salt air in her silks. There had been a flaw in the building of the ship: in Ballin’s desire to outdo the grandeur of the Cunard and White Star lines, the many mirrors and tiles, the marble pillars and oak furniture weighed so much that the bottom of the ship rocked frequently in otherwise modest winds, but Anjali loved the swaying, the wonderful sensation of danger, the way that the English girls on the deck’s croquet courts would moan when the waves made the game balls go astray in the course.

  Most of the male passengers spent their evenings in the smoking rooms, the ladies in the rooms with plush red European furniture, well-cushioned and surrounded by plants. The first-class cabins and recreational areas dripped of luxury. The swimming pool for the first-class passengers was modeled after an ancient one in Pompeii.

  A day’s distance from the dock she could see no land at all. The seagulls floated on the airy current above her, diving down now and again to flit over the water. Inside the ship were drawing rooms and a swimming pool—a floating palace: a marvel of marble and Oriental rugs and cherry wood furniture. Anjali gasped when she boarded, astonished that such a thing could be, that she would spend her days here on the great steamship as if by magic skirted on the seas toward another place, America, a place that had long ago rid itself of the British. The Americans had polluted their oceans with tea.

  Anjali liked to look at the silver-blue ocean, its mesmerizing waves so powerful, moving in accordance with the moon. Alexandre had once spoken to her about the stars and the heavens and how they governed the motions of the seas and seasons. On the deck she could let her weight fall down into her hips and allow the rocking of the ship to hold her up. But at night, from where she stood on deck the waves were terrifying, concealing depthless depths. She sometimes felt she could fall down below, leaving everything. She could fall down below into those unimagined depths, to the blackest black below, below the underwater volcanoes, the great sea beasts, the beseeching undertows. She could lean into death.

  ANJALI FOUND THE autumn in America lovely, the golden foreign foliage sweeping up the avenues of the grand urban landscape of New York Cit
y, where Sarojini’s American speaking tour would begin. Haridas Muzumdar, a friend of Henry Miller’s and a Gandhi enthusiast, would be Sarojini’s escort around America. Some years later, Muzumdar, who marched to Dandi and would die in Little Rock, Arkansas, would lay garlands upon the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to celebrate the Indian National Congress’s declaration of independence.

  After Sarojini’s talk at the Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, they were to have dinner at Rossoff’s restaurant in Times Square, where Anjali marveled at the gigantically tall and grey buildings and the panels of electrical advertisements that decorated them.

  They wore saris—Anjali as a matter of course and Sarojini as a matter of principle—and the white ladies in their dresses and hats and the gentlemen in their suits eyed them not unkindly but with great curiosity. Whatever repulsion they may have felt at the sight of their uncommon brown skin was mitigated by the beauty of their silks, which fluttered about in the cool New York autumn from underneath sweaters lent to them by the idealistic and generous women of the society. “I had forgotten how cool these northern climates can be,” Sarojini said to Anjali, shivering slightly.

  Anjali wanted to see the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge and the Singer Building. Alexandre had once told Anjali that the statue was a woman to whom Bartholdi had given a triumphant, American gesture but whose proud expression was French as per her parentage. Anjali remembered the phrase he used to describe her clothing: “skirts of copper” that blew freely above broken steel shackles. He told her about the politics of the gift, how perhaps it had been from the French as much a snub to Britain as it was a gift to America. But Alexandre, in his particularly grave and low-toned idealism, offered too that perhaps people everywhere feel a sense of joy at seeing the achievement of freedom of people anywhere.

  Anjali tried to pay attention as Sarojini reviewed the following day’s schedule. But how could anyone be made to survive the street lamps illuminating the golden foliage of a New York evening, she wondered. How to endure the low happy murmur, the clinking of glasses, the peals of laughter from the crowds that spilled out from the nightclubs and dancing halls? The sounding horns of the streetcars, the women in their evening gowns; Hercules, his arm lifted in a declaration of glory, heralding the modern age from the top of Grand Central Terminal. There was that foreign chill in the air, the calamitously violet nightfall, and Anjali braced the iron bars of the horse-drawn carriage that returned her and Sarojini to the hotel. Sarojini, after some minutes, became lost to Anjali in the drowsy reverie of the poet. Tomorrow’s schedule was set.

  Anjali sucked cold air into her aching lungs, bracing as those deadening waves of despair overcame her like heavy blankets. She tried again to think of tomorrow. Would there be a particularly good cup of coffee? Perhaps one of their hosts would take them to a Broadway show. Or a nice meal at one of the many charming cafés. Maybe everything could change. But along the sidewalks, there were men in their wool suits and women wearing gloves, the children skipping along; Anjali looked at them beseechingly, desperately, would just one call her name? She focused on the rolling rumps of the beautiful horses pulling the carriage. She let her mind be comforted by dreams her own death. Anjali bit her lip; a lump of fury formed in her throat as the Americans walked past the carriage on their way to the places they were expected. The Americans, Anjali thought, moved with light step, a sense of gaiety if not immediate upon their faces, always inching upon the visage from the periphery, as if something not just good but indeed very good, were just out of sight. Anjali held the metal bars tighter. She really did want to love them.

  EPILOGUE

  PARIS, APRIL 1951

  THE DREAMT-OF CITY of her imagination radiated through its postwar death mask with the promise of springtime. She had loved this city nearly all her life, though never before had she stepped foot in it, only inhabited its grand avenues and back alleyways in her dreams. And finally she was here. Alexandre’s resonant voice narrated and guided her through its museums and shops, its cafés and gardens, through this modern city and its squares and circles.

  Age had caught up with her. Age and the polio she had so long tried to live with as if it were only an inconvenience. But now, in the mornings, as she lay in bed, unable to will herself up, to find reason to move, she was most distraught that her body told her this was right; it was right to lie still. Now, when the morning sun poured into her room and she considered her life, the hopelessness she felt ran straight to her stomach and was as true a gut feeling as ever she had had. She tried to think back to the last time she was desperately sad and thought of the time when her grandmother died and remembered that though sad, the grief was a feeling affiliated with life, while the cloud-like melancholy that engulfed her now was more of a deadening weight from under which she was not sure she could emerge. Such a task was living.

  But now, oh Paris! The city was floral and luminous, and when the wind picked up and the foreign foliage swirled in orange and red circles at her feet, she had faith enough in this world to leave it without fear.

  Her hotel sat upon the Seine, and while sitting waterside with the locals, she sipped coffee sweeter and weaker than that she was used to. There was also a small plate of fruits from which she ate casually as she watched the glamorous and exotic city dwellers carry on in their daily lives. She imagined Alexandre in a crowd of his countrymen, refined in a grey overcoat, avoiding the rain in a hat, one of those finely dressed women on his arm. She could still remember how he felt, his solid, warm body exuding heat and the smell of wood and musk as she clutched him along the coast of Waltair as the fishermen hauled up sacks of fish like silver coins, the early sunlight illuminating his hair. Her birthplace was called Visakhapatnam now that the British had left.

  The women of Paris walked past her, like a parade of the lives she had never lived, casually wielding their femininity like a weapon. “How cruelly and ignorantly they handled its unknown strength,” Anjali thought.

  A STEWARD AT the hotel told her to wait in the lobby with the same French accent she remembered coloring Alexandre’s voice when he spoke of Paris to her in English in her garden in Waltair.

  She caught her breath at seeing him—still so youthful, somehow, still so lissome in carriage and graceful in his stride; she was too taken to wonder how it could be, after so much time. Because he entered as if from a girl’s dream, tall and handsome and strong, his pale hands exactly as she remembered, the translucent skin and the blue veins, clutching a small box, that same long-strided walk, and only as he neared did she realize upon closer inspection that it wasn’t Alexandre at all. The light moved across his face, his beautiful face, made an angel of him and redoubled Anjali’s sorrow.

  To her old eyes, and in her heart, which had grown weary with sorrow after so much time, the man carried with him more hope than she could muster into words.

  “Miss Adivi?” he asked. And then she felt her heart fall; though the voice too possessed beauty, it was not the one she had loved listening to for so many cool nights in the blue, Indian moonlight. He sat as tears blurred her vision and she could no longer find words.

  “Miss Adivi,” he repeated, a gentle smile spreading across his face. He set down upon the table a small wooden box. “I am Matthieu Lautens . . . ” he waited for her with an infinite patience. “I am Alexandre Lautens’s son.” He placed his hand upon Anjali’s. “Dear Miss Adivi, how long I have waited to meet you. How very long.” He took a look about the lobby. She thought how strange she must have looked in it, how insignificant her life. She straightened her sari over her shoulder, refolding the pleats under her hand, trying to gather her courage. He answered before she could ask. “My father died last year, Miss Adivi.” Matthieu reached into his pocket and retrieved a kerchief, which he handed to Anjali. He held her withered brown hand as tears filled her old eyes. She had of course known all along, but still the finality of this knowledge stabbed at her stomach and heart with a sharp, forceful viol
ence.

  “My father had kept something in the family account in Switzerland for safekeeping during the war. We retrieved it from the bank before he died. He had wanted to give it to you himself. He always wanted to go back to India. He used to tell me he’d left something there. But when he was dying, I promised him I would do it.” Matthieu smiled sadly and sighed, “He had waited all these years to give it to you.”

  She could see now that Matthieu was a young man, handsome like his father, but his face yielded a sense of joy that Alexandre’s never had. Matthieu’s face was bright and young. He lifted the small box and handed it to her. Inside was a note, written in Telugu:

  Dearest Anjali, February 1914, Paris

  If I have come to you, and we are in India, you must show me the new country. This new place, your India.

  Or perhaps you are here, in Paris? You are near the Louvre. I’ll take you to go there, to see a David painting, of Brutus waiting for the bodies of his sons. It inflamed past generations, during the revolution. Brutus was a supporter of the Roman republic . . . to ensure its stability, he ordered his own sons to death.

  Here, in France, not so very long ago, the prince died alone, orphaned and weak, in a stone tower. He was a child. His sister could only hear his cries for their mother, whose severed head had long before been lifted before cheering crowds. The boy did not know she was dead. Must children always be sacrificed during revolution? What is necessary is often ugly.