The Grammarian

by Annapurna Potluri

  Yours,

  Alexandre

  ANJALI RAN HER fingertips along the smooth edges of the tissue paper inside and lifted up the scent of sandalwood into the air; Matthieu propped his elbows on his knees, his eyebrows high on his forehead like a youngster in anticipation. She thought for a moment of all the boxes that in her young mind she had hoped for from Dr. Lautens after he left India: boxes of the chocolates he had described, postcards, handmade French lace, love letters. She lifted up, out of familiar fuchsia crepe paper, her grandmother’s pearl necklace with the ruby pendant, the earrings with the ruby flower and the pearl flourish. And now she felt the full sorrow of missing on earth those whom she loved most in this world.

  IN PARIS, IT was cool now; the low light of spring filled the evening with a warm, pink glow. She could see its beauty now—a promise of the modern city, and like Waltair, a specter of the ancient. She closed her eyes and saw in her mind’s eye for a moment Dr. Lautens’s boots kicking up dust as he alighted the horse-drawn coach, descending for the first time upon her natal home.

  Anjali was alone again after Matthieu left her. She strolled the streets and bought boxes of chocolate and stopped into the Guerlain shop on the rue de Passy to buy a bottle of Après l’Ondée, and then walked in cool darkness back to her hotel. There, she looked out through the window of her hotel room. She rubbed the perfume into her neck and wrists and melted chocolate after chocolate in her mouth. She inhaled the smell of ozone and flowers. It came upon her that all these limits and the artifice of modern morality and the supremacy of safety were curtailing her living. She felt inside of her an angry beast.

  It began to dawn on her that greatness was not an amplification of goodness, that they could be opposites. That it would be hard to be great without taking risks, that all those around her, who purported to be good, that their lives didn’t stand up to scrutiny. That goodness and greatness were sometimes composed of opposing qualities. That the imposition of reasonableness and social mores stifled her hunger for life. That her leg prevented her perhaps from marriage and thus perhaps even from having children but that those demands were somewhat artificial ones and that in some small way she was given the gift of being freed of the burden of her biology, because she lived in a grey area, neither man nor woman, not fully human yet in that human realm. She remembered Sarojini once reading Apollinaire to her; Sarojini laughed, “He says the Marquis de Sade is ‘The freest spirit that ever existed.’” Sarojini had smiled and repeated the words, “the freest spirit,” dreamily. Anjali thought that sentiment so beautiful; she wanted to have a fuller soul to keep herself company. Duty imposed on her a smallness she wanted to shake off. Smallness wasn’t her destiny. She realized with shame that when she was infected with polio the world had jailed her into a eunuch’s existence, and she had bowed her head and submissively entered the cell. That she had worked for those who never felt any responsibility toward her.

  She turned out the lights and lay down on the bed in her hotel room. Several months before, she had had a moment when bravery and terror hit her in equal parts and she had made a single slash at her wrist before losing her nerve, and now she ran her fingertip along that pale scar. Sleep had longtime been her dearest companion. She wished to sleep deep and long, and wake up—in spring, in India. In her mind she heard the bells of anklets chiming as she and Mohini walked through marigold fields as girls. She had long wanted to see those golden flowers again, to smell the roses and the jasmine on her father’s estate. She longed to hold her grandmother’s hands to her face. She wanted to go home. For a moment she fancied walking from Paris to Visakhapatnam by night, to pay obeisance to nothing so artificial as country borders or other imaginary and invented things. “And then I would walk to the mountains and die in the snow of the Himalayas,” she thought.

  IN 1800, THE nawab of Oudh sent his engineers to Lucknow to design for his British court representative the Tower Residency edifice. The representative was a man with two masters, the nawab and the queen. Fifty-seven years later, when the brown-skinned sepoys mutinied, the white residents of Oudh rushed to the stone Tower Residency there in Lucknow.

  The sepoys mutinied because they were forced to give up their India Pattern Brown Besses, the same guns used to free the American states from the British. In 1856, they were issued Pattern 1853 Enfields, whose cartridges were greased with beef and pork fat. For the Hindu and Muslim soldiers, this was akin to giving up their gods. It was the final insult, and word began to spread among villages and towns that the company’s end was near: Sub lal hogea hai, everything has become red. For eighty-seven days, Oudh’s British residents withstood cannons. The city around them was on fire, but the lonely Union Jack at the residency flew as artillery shells chipped away at the building’s red stone.

  All around India, all other British flags were lowered, burned and trampled under horses’ hooves. Officer William Hodson, with his fifty horsemen, rode out to Humayun’s tomb and captured Bahadur Shah Zafar, and later his three sons. At the Kabuli Darwaza gate, Hodson shot Zafar’s sons. His men stripped their bloodied bodies and hacked off their heads. Hodson collected the heads and handed them to Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal emperor, whose empire had once held most of India in its embrace.

  On the fourteenth of August in 1947, minutes before midnight and ninety years after the sepoys mutinied, the British at long last lowered the Union Jack on the Tower Residency. The British officers swung axes at the flagpole and destroyed the cement foundation in which it had been planted so no other standard would ever be strung up there. In Manhattan, Ivan Kerno, the acting secretary-general of the UN, supervised the lowering of the Imperial Indian Blue Ensign and raised in its place a khadi Tirangā. Sarojini was sworn in as the governor of the United Provinces.

  Four million people would move as the country divided; two great migrations. Hindus to Delhi, and Muslims to Lahore. And in two weeks, the train cars between the cities would begin to arrive full of corpses, the floors slippery with blood, in their bodies the shards of the axes used to hack the bones and flesh; their murderers believing them to be the children of a lesser god. Everywhere death, everywhere guts and limbs and hair. Wheeled luggage carts were piled high with limp brown and red bodies; blood was mopped off the platforms.

  Anjali watched now as the French tricolor whipped in the wind, and it reminded her of her own Tirangā and she felt, after so much, through good and ill fortune alike, a sense of pride. She had helped to deliver her country from the tyranny of colony. And sad too, because a country wasn’t something that could really be captured or held in the hand; it was an idea and not a heart.

  For years now, she had had only one thought, again and again: she dreamt of a strong and merciful rope around her neck and dreamt not of returning, not of a heaven full of choirs of angels and treasures of gold, but of sweet, silent death, of melting into that earth that had bore long silent witness to her pain for so many long years, and dreamt, open eyed and awake, again and again for the comfort of a quiet demise.

  DAVID PAINTED BRUTUS in the shadows. Amid the weeping of his wife and mother and daughters, Brutus sits, his arm weakly lifted, as if to acknowledge the victory of the republic. Despite this glory, Brutus’s face is a mask of quiet sorrow. Anjali had gone at last to the Louvre; Alexandre, as a ghost of her own conjuring, accompanying her. She walked along the Champs-Élysées and alongside the arterial river of the great city. She saw the river and the crowds and saw that through all these things—the world wars, the revolts, the struggled-for tricolors of France and India and Ireland—the Seine flowed with slowness. The movements of the people outside for a moment seemed to lose continuity. They moved in finite gestures like rapidly taken photographs, each articulation distinct from the one before it and that one after, each movement only a suggestion of what was to come and not a promise, and then, after such a time of tirelessly fast spinning, the world for a moment seemed still.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I AM INDEBTED TO the The Edward and
Sally Van Lier Fund, the Asian American Writers Workshop and Quang Bao; their early support of this book gave me the gift of time. I would like to thank Erin Lem and Claire Dippel at Janklow & Nesbit, for their committed championing of this book and without whom I would not have met my wonderful agent, Alexandra Machinist, who took this book on only as a labor of love.

  I would like to thank my family, especially my Mom and Dad.

  I have the good fortune to have the most wonderful friends in the world, all of whom have been a fountain of support, and I would like to thank all of them, especially Antara Kanth, Michael Smith, Grace Lu, Katie Pulick, Sabrina Esbitt, Wendy Kuo, Laura Beck, Joy Meads, Kristyn Caminos, Daniel WK Lee and Grace Kim.

  Finally, my deepest thanks to Liz Parker, Kelly Winton and Julia Kent at Counterpoint, who have been wonderful to work with and have provided constant comfort to a very jittery first time author.