Maya (35 page)

NOTICE OF ENTRY

To:—The Defendant in Person

 

Sir:—Please take notice that the within is a (certified) true copy of a judgment duly entered in the office of the clerk of the within named court on,
September 14, 1976.

Yours, etc.,
Frederick W. Klostermier
Attorney for the Plaintiff

The printed cover opened like a little door, swinging to the left; underneath was another little door that swung to the right. Inside, a paper had been stapled lengthwise, so that I needed to turn the whole thing ninety degrees in order to read it.

At a Special Term, Part 7C of the
Illinois Supreme Court at the
County Court House, Cook County
on
September 14, 1976.

Present:
Hon. Samuel Hook
Special Referee

JUDITH L. HARRINGTON
,
Plaintiff
,
DIVORCE JUDGMENT

— against—Index No. 67003

STANLEY D. HARRINGTON
, Defendant, Calendar No. 43555

(a) This action was submitted to me for consideration on
5 / 13 / 1976

(b) The defendant was served within the state, personally outside the state.

(c) Plaintiff presented a verified complaint.

(d) Defendant appeared has not appeared and is in default.

(e) The Court accepted written proof of non-military service.

Now, on the motion of
Frederick W. Klostermier Esq
., attorney for the plaintiff, it is:

ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that:

1. Plaintiff shall have judgment that the marriage of the parties is dissolved on the evidence found in the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in accordance with Domestic Relations Law, Section 235, Subd. 3;

2.
The husband shall pay the wife for support of the above named child(ren) $ per week and alimony for the wife $ per week;

3.
The Separation Agreement , executed _______________, 19 _____ which is annexed to the Findings of Fact, shall be incorporated by reference in the Judgment and shall survive;

4. The woman may resume the use of her maiden name, which is
Reusswig
.

Judith and I were married in July of 1970; I was twenty-two at the time, she was twenty-one. Our friends were startled that we chose to have a traditional Christian ceremony performed in a church. But a wedding is—or, at least, so it seemed to me—the quintessential ritual act, and I subscribed to Victor Turner's understanding of ritual as a peculiarly potent form of theater. This was one time Judith and I were in complete agreement on the value of dramatic effect. Any theatrical performance is enhanced by suitably majestic architecture, and Bond Chapel—a small, Gothic church on East 59th Street—was the perfect setting for our transformation from man and woman to husband and wife. And if the setting is important for good theater, finding the right script is essential; ideally, the vows spoken on stage should resonate with indisputable literary and historical significance. Measured by this criterion, nothing wields more authority than the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer
, unchanged from 1662 to the present and used by every one of Jane Austen's couples:

So I was on familiar territory. Like the
Book of Common Prayer
held by the minister who had stood before Judith and me at the altar, clothed in his black gowns and prompting us with these words in stentorian tones, the slender blue triptych resting in my hands was also a ritual object imprinted with ceremonially charged words. Employed, as these words had been, in the appropriate context of the municipal courthouse, this was language that brought to an end what other language had once created. No great mystery here, no mystical juju. Anyone who's read J. L. Austin's work on speech acts knows all about the power of performative utterance, the capacity of language—mere words—to create and demolish whole worlds.

I read carefully through the legal jargon one more time, absorbing every tortured locution, then closed the two small doors and laid it aside. For quite a while I just sat there at my desk, staring out the window and down the street. I could see one of my neighbors, the press-wala, standing at his bench next to a mountain of laundry, smoothing out a shirt and straightening the cuffs. Beside him the heavy iron rested on a grate, suspended over a red-orange glow of coals. A solitary rickshaw drifted by, coasting around the corner by Ganga Mat.

I had known for almost a year that the divorce was in the works. But still, to hold in my hands this tangible proof that our marriage was over, a legal certificate generated in some anonymous courtroom in Chicago and sent all the way here to Banaras: it was exceedingly strange. My life with Judith had become a distant memory. Nevertheless, this document was an object of undeniable power, invested with all the ritual authority of the court—the call to order, the judge in his robes, the banging of the gavel. By the sheer force of these words, I knew that something terribly real, something I had once dreamed of and desired with all my heart, had now been irrevocably destroyed.

I couldn't plunge into my usual routine today; I decided to get out of my room and go for a walk.

Near the little temple at the corner of Assi crossing, I paused for a moment, immersed in the tumult of human speech. A group of fifteen or twenty old women—pilgrims from the country—passed by on their way to the river. They were bunched together like gaily colored birds, singing bhajans in
a high-pitched, nasal drone. In the gutter at my feet, squatting behind baskets heaped with fresh coriander, two village girls argued loudly in the local Bhojpuri dialect. A few feet to their left a group of Muslim shopkeepers dressed in checkered lungis and white kurtas stood knee deep in a swirling tide pool of Urdu. The prime minister's name was cast up now and again on a velvety swish of fricatives, only to be sucked back into the guttural undertow. One of the men was waving his shabby briefcase to emphasize a point—something about Sanjay Gandhi.

Several rickshaws were parked in the shade. On each red vinyl seat a driver leaned back and puffed at a hand-rolled bidi, his feet extended straight out over the handlebars. Wound round each head was a swath of vibrantly colored cloth. Sweet clouds of smoke drifted in the air, mingling lazily with the drivers' rough Bihari patois. Nearby, two middle-class babus wearing dhotis and black, pointed slippers were carrying on a sedate discussion in cultivated, Sanskritized Hindi—“Standard Hindi,” as it was called by the linguists at the university in Delhi. Their pronunciation was quick and sharp, each crisp syllable grafted onto the next with surgical precision. A young French couple crossed the street with their long stringy hair, gaudily embroidered Afghan vests purchased in Kabul, and bare, grime-coated feet. A languid succession of round, heavy vowels rolled from her pursed lips while he listened, self-consciously wagging his head in agreement. All around me, men, women, and children quarreled and bartered, discussed, joked, scolded, and bantered in a multitude of languages and dialects. The rhythm of their voices was captivating—a grand, invisible realm of sound, dominion of the mighty Logos, the Maharaja of Nomenclature and his Court of Verbosity.

Behold the cavalry of sturdy substantives on horseback, troops of light-footed participles, a humble, exploited peasantry of pronouns and prepositions. Cloistered in the harem and languishing under fans of woven grass wielded by a core of eunuch articles, definite and otherwise, are the adjectives, vain and prone to excess. Some are clothed seductively in diaphanous diphthongs; others are wrapped in gowns of richly embroidered phonemes, their feet pressed into tiny sibilants. Necklaces of semivowels shimmer at their throats; their fingers are adorned with clusters of surds and chunky, garish sonants. The atmosphere is thick with labial perfume. Outside the palace the bazaar teams with offensive idioms and guttural riffraff. Here and there in the crowd one spots an old, worn-out cliché hobbling along, an offensive quip darting among the shadows, or a charming expression from the village decked out in her best sari. A gang
of ugly remarks lounging around the nearby paan stall eyes her as she passes. Not far away an overworked metaphor sits hunched behind his chai, brooding on the continuing string of accusations he cannot afford to feed and clothe. The holy city is home to an endless succession of gross insults, bold assertions, and redundant misnomers that are born and die in the streets; but it has, as well, spawned generations of subtle discourse and eloquent turns of phrase. The citizens of Banaras are born in the shadow of Bhojpuri, raised by Hindi, educated in English, and die with Sanskrit whispering in their ears.