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CHAPTER 1
En Route to the Presidency of Fort St. George, South India, October 1911
It all suited his sensibilities so, the silver tea sets that made a merry tinkling with the to and fro of the train, the quiet efficiency of the stewards, the reading car with its collection of newspapers. He had been, upon arrival in Bombay, determined to keep faithful to European dress; he thought it a burden worth bearing — as a European and especially as a Parisian — to be, at all times, a picture of style and elegance, whatever the inconveniences posed by travel or heat. After some days in the cars of this country's great black steam trains, however, and finding his finest suits falling victim to perspiration marks and oil stains from the station foods, he succumbed. The train stopped in Pune for several hours, and he left the station and purchased an ill-fitting but comfortable, lightweight kurta: a long, summer-weight white jacket, with a pair of slacks cut from the same fabric.
Seeing him in Indian dress, one of his fellow passengers, a British engineer, raised his eyebrows and said, "Ah, Dr. Lautens, you've gone native, I see," and Lautens peered over his worn copy of de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale and grinned.
"What are you reading, Dr. Lautens?" the engineer asked.
"The Bible," Lautens replied, smiling.
In his bag were other books too. English and Hindi dictionaries, a book of Sanskrit roots, the Griffith translation of the Ramayana and the Fauche one, for purposes of comparison, and Loti's L'Inde (Sans les Anglais) — his wife bought the latter and gave it to him, saying that he would at least have one other Frenchman traveling with him. It seemed so improbable to him this feeling — that here, this place not remotely stark or stoic, here, with a hundred people seemingly always around him, this place, a soaring urban space all bucolic at its blurred boundaries and where untethered animals mingled through the aisles of the city, the half-naked sadhus with the long grey beards and the Hindu rosaries, and that nearly ever-present splash of sunshine, exposing everything, and the constant sounds of the train: the roar of the engine, the boys walking through with coffee and tea, the old women fruit vendors, the endlessly inquisitive natives, here where the humidity, heat and dust all clouded the periphery of Alexandre's vision with the sheer crowdedness of the place — but there it was: he felt lonely. It was so foreign a sentiment to him that when he long lastly defined it, he found it surprising. And yet being neither a native nor an Englishman (his countrymen were few — and concentrated in French possessions like Pondichéry), he preferred to maintain a distance from everyone and remained wary, as he long had, of quickly forged friendships.
It was his fourth day on the train journey to the South — that great expanse of salty-aired land that still posed a mystery to most Europeans with its tribes and closed societies, its culture like a picture stopped in time. He breathed it in — India always smelled like it was burning, that hot dust and kerosene and petrol smell, as if under the earth was a smoldering fire, just there, beneath the surface. From Victoria Station in Bombay, and then away from the Arabian Sea, to Pune, Secundrabad. In Hyderabad he would transfer to Madras on the Southern Mahratta Line, and from his next stop in Warangal he would ride along the Bay of Bengal to Waltair.
The British Engineer always left his food half-finished. "The food and the bloody heat conspire to kill a man here. It is impossible; if you want my advice, stay away from the food and out of the sun, though of course I suppose one really can't avoid either completely. I try to eat only to the point of not being hungry; the rest I leave." He rested his fingertips on the rim of his hat; he always wore his hat and a three-piece suit, no matter the heat.
Though Alexandre had never considered himself a glutton, or even a gourmet, he had found that the thing he missed with particular intensity was the food of his country. Longing for the foods of home — completely unattainable in this part of the world — made him feel at times as if his mind was going. And hours went by before he could force away this useless reverie and bring himself back to the reality of the train: the brown faces that watched him in his window seat, his attaché case with his journals, books, and the first several pages of a manuscript in progress. Inevitably, the train's food steward would come around with the dinner thali — a main dish, usually of vegetables, surrounded with rice and small dishes of lentils, greens and pickles. This food offered its own particular satisfaction, and though it had begun to bore him now, he knew someday he would miss it too. At first he found it overly spicy, but he had grown accustomed to it, somewhat, and washed the heat down with heavy, white dollops of yogurt and fresh mango slices or jackfruit. The fruit here was unearthly in its sweetness and its richness, and it offered him a unique delight that was unmatched in Europe.
Tired as he was, and as thoughtful and pensive an adult as he had recently become, there was, just beneath the surface of his conscious thinking, in Alexandre, a kinetic, adolescent shudder, the boyish thrill of adventure to unknown lands. Since Bombay, he could not control his restless right foot and an ever so slight upward turn of the corners of his lips; all in all, he rather loved the view of that continual show of village after village outside his window, which Alexandre, new as he was to the subcontinent, found endlessly fascinating but which his train companions blocked from their sight by drawing the window shades down and concerning themselves instead with the imported newspapers from the places they called home: a white stone home off St. James Park, or those English villages with gardens of tea roses, those places that smelled in the summer of the salty North Atlantic.
Just now, as they passed through the fertile villages around Bijapure, a steward came around, in his steady hands a silver service carrying cream, sugar, tea and biscuits.
"No, I said one biscuit not two," the British engineer shouted. He waved his hand dismissively over the tea and biscuits set down before him and looked at Alexandre, sighing as if exhausted and shaking his head disapprovingly.
The steward looked bored, not shaken in the least by the engineer's sharp upbraiding. "I'm sorry, Sir," he said, removing one of the biscuits amidst the engineer's fussy, fluttering fingers.
"These people need instruction to perform even the most menial task, it seems sometimes!" the engineer said, looking at Alexandre, his long tapered fingers delicately holding the teacup.
Alexandre was supremely put off by such a sort of feminine fastidiousness regarding food, and for his part found no fault in the steward's service. Alexandre averted his eyes from the engineer's, taking deep pleasure in denying the Saville-Rowe dandy his companionship. Alexandre threw a meaningful, sympathetic glance at the tea steward.
Alexandre was not an Englishman; he shared with these people only his skin color. And there being no other Frenchman on the train, Alexandre at that moment declared himself a man without a nation, simply himself, Alexandre Lautens, and felt suddenly a wild and intoxicating freedom. He was a scholar, not a soldier, and he felt bound only to the kingdom of scholarship, of ideas, not those lines on maps that only men obeyed. All of those men, some small and some great: presidents, popes, despots, dictators. Even so stupid an animal as a pigeon had more freedom, not bound by the laws imposed by border guards where France met Spain. But a man must find his papers, those credentials given by other men, as if identity were not a birthright but a government issuance, merely a collection of yellowing papers.
Sitting in that train in a country utterly foreign to him, at that moment, Alexandre had successfully shaken off the shackles of society no more imagined than a prisoner's steel handcuffs. His body did not betray that newfound lightness, nor the soaring freedom he felt, but his eyes under his thick, dark eyebrows glittered with the color and sparkle of cut sapphires. Smiling at the engineer, Alexandre snapped a biscuit in half and pushed a piece in his mouth, eating happily, ravenously, the way his children ate oranges on Christmas morning.
This foreign land went by, and drowsiness set on Alexandre as the world outside turned dark. It was odd, he thought, how quickly one could retire from the life he knew and held dear. Even the essentials of existence had quickly fallen away like the peel of a fruit, and soon he was left only with the meat, left only with himself. Two months ago, before he embarked on this voyage, he could not have imagined a life without Madeline, without her pale, long form and messy brown hair across his pillow. He remembered how her hips felt in his hands. Rose water and baby powder on her skin, and on the bedsheets, on Matthieu and Catherine when they would nestle in bed together, all of them fighting for her loving. He did miss her. But not as much as he claimed in the letters he had sent her from the port in Bombay and from the village post offices along the train route. Perhaps it was because life here seemed a thing apart, as if it were not a continuum of that Parisian existence. He missed the children in the same way, and yet moments would go by when he could scarcely remember that he was a father. And then shuddering, he would recall, from some deep well of that former life, how dearly he once held those moments: carrying Matthieu on his shoulders, buying Catherine ribbons or a piece of chocolate, kissing them good night, setting adrift paper sailboats in ponds, flying red kites in an endless blue, summer sky.
He thought perhaps Madeline did not miss him as she claimed, perhaps she too had moved away from their life together, and taken a lover, and perhaps this same man kissed his children good night, bounced them on his knee. After all, he had been away for some time: after he collected the necessary travel papers, he had first to take the train to Calais from Paris, and then a cargo-laden ferry from Calais to Dover. From Dover he traveled to London, where he stayed for four days before boarding a ship, which took three weeks to arrive in Bombay and then, at long last, he found himself on this train, headed south and then east. How impossibly large life seemed when he considered all the possibilities, how small when a choice was made.
Cataloging a language is a never-ending task — words are added, or fall into ill repute or disuse. Innocuous terms become vulgar. The profane is edified. Grammar varies, has within it different registers — literary, formal, the easy speak of peasants. It is difficult anywhere. But the linguistic climate of India made this exercise infinitely more difficult, and — when Alexandre doubted the reason for his travel, when he felt frustrated with his work — quite nearly impossible. There were as many languages as there were gods in India, and that was very, very many. When a linguist was fortunate, a direct translation for a complicated word existed, and linguists were rarely fortunate. Most complicated were verbs — the translation for a single verb tense in one language could take three or four words to only approximate the meaning in another. Speakers would impose the correct structures of their native languages on learned ones.
He thought back to college, when he embarked — much to the amusement of his friends and family — on learning Sanskrit.
"Sanskrit means 'refined,'" his college classics lecturer, Dr. Bonventre, had said. Bonventre's office windows were draped with curtains made of saris and he had a large stone statue of a dancing Ganesha on his bookshelf.
"P? ini, five hundred years before Christ, had identified 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Three thousand, nine hundred fifty nine!" Bonventre lifted himself up on his toes, looking skyward in amazement. "... he codified a hodgepodge of vernaculars, rarefied the language until it was, when spoken properly, an elegant, mathematical poem." In India, Alexandre could sometimes hear the language coming from inside temples that lined the train route, spoken as it was over the ringing prayer bells. P? ini must not have had much time left for anything other than the study of the language, Alexandre thought.
Dr. Bonventre wrote Sanskrit on the chalkboard and then drew a slash after the n. "The name comes from sa, 'self-fulfilled,' plus skar, 'educated' or 'cultured.' The name Sanskrit is the result of the sound change laws, called sandhi, with which you will be well acquainted by the end of this term."
And so Alexandre logged these words, these sentences, their strange structures, so unlike those found in the languages of the West and charming in their own way, and often musical, with a melody that fell into the cadence of those native varieties of French and English too, making familiar languages somehow strange and exotic.
Only a few months before, the Germans had sent their warship the Panther to Morocco; the world was smaller, tenser; wars were waged over bits of land, scrambling for tokens of empire, seeing now in the light of modernity how little there was to own on earth. Some few months later, an American politician named Bingham, while wandering South America's hills, had stumbled upon the ancient city of Machu Picchu. The photographs had been published in the European press: a city so high up it could be mistaken for heaven itself, buildings of stone, the mythical city of Vilcabamba, of which Bingham had heard rumors. The Agence Havas spoke to Bingham and he said, "In the variety of its charms and the power of its spell, I know of no place in the world which can compare with it." No place. Lautens remembered. The glory of the Louvre was dimmed now, after La Joconde had gone missing; from the safety of a corner neighboring a Correggio, it had been stolen. Warships named after wildcats, dormant cities in the sky, the abduction of a mysterious woman. The world grew smaller and larger at the same time.
Inside the train car, hushed conversations carried on in the glow of reading lights; Alexandre could hear, from a neighboring car, the wail of an infant.
It was autumn in Paris now, and Madeline took an umbrella with her, an overcoat to protect her from the grey skies, the ever-looming threat of rain, the early fall of night. She wore boots to arm herself against the slush of fallen foliage; she walked the children to school. She would wear a hat, hiding a tightly pinned bun. The cold air made her cheeks pink. Men looked at her — there was no one to escort her, to mark her as his own, to protect her from their leering. She was beautiful half because of true prettiness and half because she believed so deeply in her beauty.
She made dinner in the evening. There was, in their home, in the evenings, the warm, quiet hum of happiness. Madeline drank wine while she cooked. She would turn her head back and kiss Alexandre while stirring stew. The children played, they grabbed her legs, required kisses when they fell, someone to cut their meat. Alexandre had been jealous when Matthieu was born, though he never said as much. Madeline put them to bed with stories and songs and lavish kisses. She undressed and slipped into the sheets next to him and Alexandre would breath in a garden of roses, clean linens drying in the sun, put his hand on her hip, touch the silk of her nightgown, close his eyes in the darkness, watch Paris sleep under the light weight of a blue and black night, daylight slipping away, the city growing quiet. Then Madeline would turn into his chest; he knew his children were asleep in their beds. His family was safe. The house was quiet. Tomorrow was promised. Alexandre could not, so long ago, imagine life any other way or have wished it differently.
Now, Alexandre was lulled to sleep by the heat and the train's incessant rocking, its rhythmic sounds and motion.
Late afternoon, ON the fifth day of his train journey, the train was held in a village station outside of Dharwar. The remnants of a railway collision two days before had yet to be moved off the tracks. From the station platform, as Alexandre stretched his legs, he could see in the distance mangled black railcars on their sides. Loud, coffee-colored workmen pulled the steel remains of the train off the tracks and into a nearby field.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Grammarian"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Annapurna Potluri.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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