Read Online The Grammarian by Annapurna Potluri - Free Book Online

around foreigners, and knowing that this would be an extensive stay made her sigh periodically in anxious anticipation as the servants ran about the house carrying buckets of soapy water, bundles of freshly laundered linens or baskets full of potatoes.
    She sent to Bombay too for a French-English dictionary, in case one of his needs were lost in translation; her husband told her that Dr. Lautens spoke fluent English, and good Hindi, but Lalita believed that one can master other languages but the only one he’ll ever really know is his mother tongue.
    Despite how tired she was, there was that singularly pleasing feeling of overseeing the folding of linens or the assembly of the silverware drawer, that wave of satisfaction from completing a wifely and self-sacrificing task, that exhaustion that came from cooking and cleaning that so reaffirmed her. She was the woman of this house. It was a series of small tasks: leaving a room spotless, anticipating her husband’s need for more rice and mango pickle before he asked for it, keeping thepantry stocked with her mother-in-law’s favorite brand of biscuits, making the whole ordeal of wifely duty—to perform all these tasks and a thousand others all while wearing a clean sari scented with talcum powder, her hair in a neat bun, always ready to graciously receive last-minute guests, to make all of this look effortless was what filled Lalita with her quiet, womanly pride. It was a part of her very femininity that, through repeated and constant show, she had attempted to pass down to her daughters—successfully to Mohini but to which Anjali seemed immune. Her elder daughter’s cold superiority had alienated Lalita more and more as Anjali grew out of girlhood.
    A T THE TIME of Lalita’s marriage, the 1891 harvest of mangoes began with such a boon of perfect sunshine and rich soil that her father had to hire extra farmhands to collect all of the fruit in the great wicker baskets that when full shone like pots of gold. However, at the height of the season in late June, while she and her mother were being visited daily by silk vendors with wedding saris in their trunks, a plague of fungus started on the mango trees, and as quickly as her father had hired the farmhands, they were let go. She could still remember, as she looked out from the sitting room onto the verandah, her noble father, offering up poor explanations to emaciated, sinuous young men promised a summer of work. They—brown boys with bare feet and dirt embedded in their hands—left with less than they had hoped for but slightly more than they had actually yet earned.
    The mango grove, for the rest of summer, smelled of rot; flies swarmed it, and birds pecked at the blackening fruit. Nevertheless, by August the home was festooned in red and saffron curtains, and the maids dusted auspicious kolam patterns in white chalk on the home’sdoorsteps. She had met Shiva once before the wedding. In a kurta of cream silk with silver thread embroidery, he had arrived with his parents, a butler and the driver of their coach.
    She was taken first by his handsome face. But later in the meeting too by his swift and arrogant manner, tinged by tenderness and humor. So decisive a young man—Shiva was three years older than she—and in whom the corporal so perfectly manifested his personality: robust, broad, with light touches of the feminine in long eyelashes and lips curved into the shape of a warrior’s bow. To that first meeting, she wore a sari of pink, thinking it innocent, feminine and virtuous. Her mother had dressed her hair, braided in a single rope with jasmines. Lalita lined her eyes with soot-colored kajal . Foreign aid of this sort was rarely resorted to—Lalita’s beauty was well-known among those of their community and wanted for little. But this occasion was pivotal to her whole life, and she without shame would admit that when she stole a glance at herself that day in the mirror she was surprised, proud and elated at