Dreaming in Hindi (14 page)

Our front door is now manned by a uniformed guard, a skinny guy who appears more nervous than even Swami-ji, a kid who looks as if he spends late nights figuring what he'd do if armed terrorists burst from the elevator without warning. Make a run for it, you can tell. But Swami-ji's hired him for that possibility exactly, and for once Swami-ji is not acting entirely out of hysteria. Tensions are rising around the world. People everywhere are bracing for more attacks. Until recently, there was an Al Qaeda operative living nearby. Muslims in other parts of the world have lately gone after Americans; we're among the few Americans here: the easily locatable, last remaining ones in town.

"
The sign out front does not say American on it,
" he tells us, I think, to calm himself. "
It has the school's initials only.
" But though the sign may not say that, the fact is I do. When I open my mouth, it's all shibboleths. People with high motivation to change their accents sometimes do, a sociolinguist named Dennis Preston told me; otherwise, the undertaking is dodgy. "You take Henry Kissinger and say, How does this man sound like he just got off the boat from Germany? No motivation," Preston said. "He has socioeconomic status, got beautiful women, held a key government position—why should he? But if you're a spy, it's pretty darned important, because they'll kill you. Or if you're a person who's tortured socially, you'll change."

Or if Maoist terrorists have just blown up a Coca-Cola plant to the north, precipitating a fast chutti to the south, you'll try. Maoist terrorists just have. I push myself to make the velar adjustments, to swallow sentences whole, although I know that no matter how agile I become, I won't fit in. The Tibetans outdistance me in the language, and they're still regarded as videshis, as foreigners. The Tibetans have come down from the Himalayas and set up a winter market. Their faces remind me of full fall moons, an image that comes to mind because in vocabulary Vidhu has just said, "
Chandremukhi,
'moon face,' means 'beautiful.'"

At school, I'm still dead last, too self-conscious to push myself in front of the others, but outside, I ski Hindi, have long, gleeful conversations in shops (gleeful for me, long for my interlocutors). I kick off and really fly sometimes. "Your Hindi is very very good," rickshaw walas say, by which they mean it's intelligible. I talk till I drop, colonize my walls with Post-its that peel off in the night. I wake covered in complicated verb tenses, elaborate sentence fragments:
Jab kisiki chikhne mujhe jagaya,
when someone's scream woke me, from a comic book.

Determination makes me sanguine about some of the boggier aspects of the school—the way the language CDs in the workstation all stutter and freeze, how the two women teachers are under orders to lay off the hard-core Hindi. "
Swami-ji says you should not ask Samta-ji about grammar or vocabulary,
" small, studious Vanita tells me one day. "
He says you should not ask me either,
" she adds. When I ask Vidhu about this—fully half the Hindi teachers are requested to refrain from teaching full-out Hindi?—he cuts Samta a sharp look, changes the subject. Later, I'll remember the moment exactly. For now, I press on.
To acquire a language,
I flog myself,
you have to give up your accumulated assurances—this is how you say things, this is how it's done.
Pretty soon, I give up my American pretenses that things should be any way at all.

 

SAMTA IS PERMITTED
to do light lifting. She's allowed to work on our pronunciation. "
Mat, math,
" she says during dictation, running a finger under type so small, it appears to be scurrying off the page. "
Mat, math,
" she says in a singsong, across a desk so large it takes up half the side room. I shake my head: can't get it, no. To an Indian, the sounds are as distinct as their meanings: "don't" and "monastery." To my ear, they're identical,
mat.

"
Bhatt, baat!
" she sings, same chirpy tempo with which she says, "I am com-ple-te-ly fine!" each morning.

"
Bhatt, baat?
" she says, in a tone that asks,
Clear?
All I hear is a stutter:
bat-bat.
Speech is an illusion, the psychologist Steven Pinker writes, "a river of breath bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat." The tiniest particles in the current are called phonemes, the smallest splices of sound:
aa, bu, cii.
In ordinary speech, we run through ten to fifteen phonemes per second, though souped-up, machine-pressed ads—"Tuesday! Tuesday! Atthepoconospeedway"—can pack in nearly fifty before the pitch goes from breathless to a buzz. Among the world's 6,500 or so languages, thousands of phonemes exist, all distinct to their speakers from plain noise. You notice the ting of a fork on a glass, know it's not a semantically meaningful part of the toast. Given that everything you say is constructed of these bits, it's remarkable how few it takes to make a language. Pirahã, from Brazil, relies on just ten: seven consonants, three vowels. English, in the average range, has between thirty-five and forty-five.

"
Bhaat, baat,
" Samta insists, but the aspirated Hindi
bh
is lost on me. Lost to me. There was a time, very early, when I'd have heard it at once. At birth, we have the potential to discern all the speech sounds used around the globe: the throaty Polish
dz,
like a slipped
j
to Americans, the high
-ba
and low
-ba
pitch phonemes of Mandarin. Phonologically, in infancy "we're citizens of the world," the neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl says, though even before we leave the womb, basic sound settings for our own language are in place. At birth, our brains are already tuned to the prosody, the characteristic lilt, of whatever our mother's tongue is. When tapes in French and Russian were played for four-day-old French newborns, the babies sucked harder on hearing the French, a sign that it was already familiar. For a brief period early in life, we can easily register anything anyone from anywhere says, then we can't. By six months, our ability to detect other cultures' vowels is waning, though other cultures' consonants remain clear for a while.

"
Natnat.
" Again I say it, once more like the Three Stooges. Rhythms of speech are acquired before speech sounds, laid down like tracks. When a tape of babbling eight-month-olds of different nationalities was played for a group of French infants, they could tell the proto—French speakers from the Arabic or Chinese. But by the time we're a year old, through our mother's cooing and baby talk, our ears become set to our own small parcel of phonemes. Nature locks us into our tribes early.

"
P-h-an, p-h-al, p-h-il, p-h-auj.
" But the grand finale bombs when my brain fails to grasp its similarity to Buddy Holly hiccups.
Paan-paal.
We try video clips instead. Faces of slack-jawed boys appear on the screen. "The mentally retarded," Samta says. "They have wandered away from their homes." "
Laapataa hai?
" I ask, words from the newscast.
Laapataa hai
means "missing," she says: we are piecing together language from photographs of missing children. "
Chhota tha,
" the announcer says: "He was small."

The next one is stocky. He looks dazed by his fate, continues to stare bewildered from the screen after Helaena knocks and Samta presses Pause. Helaena is here for the neem sticks Samta's brought to soothe her nose, which is red as cooked shrimp on one side. Helaena takes a chair and eases out the gold stud. "Samta-ji," she says, once she's left off hooting. "When are we going to meet with your husband?" Samta's husband, Manesh, is an architect and astrologer, though presently without work in either capacity. There's been talk we'd go over, he'd cast our charts, but now Samta looks uncomfortable.

"Swami-ji has said we should not get together outside school," she says.

"Just to talk about architecture?" I ask.

She looks pained. "Maybe after," she says, won't say after what.

"He's a weird guy with dyed orange hair," says a woman who comes through on business. She was a student here several years ago. Slept through classes, was the black sheep of her year, she says, laughing, at dinner. Now she uses the language all the time, in the export business she started. The batiks her second host family made were a hit in the States. Her first host family, Samta's, lasted four weeks. She's quiet when I ask why she moved out, eventually allows: some trouble with Manesh. "He's a weird guy," she repeats when I press for details. Then she's eager to know: do I think I'll buy a scooter while I'm here?

 

UP AT PIERS'S
, on his terrace, there was a tabletop disco ball you could hook up to music and make throb to the beat. Back home, it would have been embarrassing. Here it was arresting, as blatantly unusual as his collection of silver spoons behind glass downstairs. It wasn't Indian. One night at a dinner party, I tried it out on the Gayatri Mantra, a haunting chant I couldn't stop playing, both to see what it would do and because I wanted to hear the song some more. The music made the machine bleat light dyspeptically, then go black. It wasn't disco. Piers switched tapes. Soon "You're My Everything" was clashing with the muezzin calling from a mosque down the slope. The machine was growling light, making everyone at the table think of cologne and arms pumping dry ice. Everyone but the Indians, who that night included the jigri.

When I arrived, he approached in a nimbus of intensity. "You know me," he said. "We met at Sixteen Chefs. But your face is different."

"Her face is different?" Piers said with a laugh. He came over to examine me, mugging like he'd found something. "Her face isn't different!" he said.

"It's different," the jigri said. "Your eyes are red."

"They aren't," I told him. They weren't. Piers's mother, in a lounger that supported her braced leg, rapped sharply with a matchbox on a table.

"Mother, stop that banging," Piers said. After one of the house-boys helped her up to bed, he said, "A stroke is such a vicious thing."

On the terrace, the table was half-Indian, half-Western. The Indian contingent was better represented: cricket player, police chief, a woman who worked at an NGO. Over
chota
-pegs of whiskey, deviled eggs, and plates of Manchurian vegetables, we discussed the surveys Piers had been conducting at the tourist center. Someone had written in "Piers for mayor." "Nightmare," he said, grinning. He rose and went over to the table by the door to fiddle with the disco ball's connections. Light started to thump, flashed the evening ahead, so that when I checked my watch, it was already past nine, after the Jains' curfew. The jigri leapt to his feet when I did. He had his scooter. He'd give me a lift.

On our way out, he decided to pitch in with my Hindi. "You should say
meharbaani,
not
meharbani,
" he said: double
a.
I'd been trying for a flowery form of "thanks."

"
Haaan?
" I said, stretching the word the way I would have in English, to show polite, concentrated interest.
Yeees?

"And don't say
'haaan,"'
the jigri said irritably. "It sounds like you think you're better than other people. The maharana says '
haaan.
' You should say it
'haan.'
" Crisp and to the point. On the scooter, we tacked past sleeping cows, sped around corners and down steep hills. I turned my head sideways to keep my hair from stinging, thought about a story I'd heard once.

A Canadian musicologist was doing research at a school for indigenous kids when a number of the children in one class stopped coming. Their parents sent notes saying they were ill. But when a number of days went by and the students were still absent, the administrators held a meeting. The musicologist sat in. The administrators couldn't think what was wrong. A mass attack of the flu or colds would have resolved itself by now. And the school year had started on such a high note. A very bright, really nice American teacher had come to the school. He was teaching the class. Afterward, the musicologist wondered about this detail. He wanted to test a hunch. Stopping by the classroom, he asked the new teacher's permission to try an experiment. The musicologist positioned himself at the back; he took out a pencil and kept time as the teacher and the students remaining spoke. A smile soon crept onto his face. Exactly as he'd suspected—the American teacher spoke much more quickly than the kids. The teacher had, the musicologist concluded, been throwing the children off their rhythms, to the point they felt ill. Maybe, I considered, as the jigri and I careened around trash piles, I was making the man sick.

In tutorial several days after, Swami-ji was going on about local customs. "
... and the color red is very important.
For example"—the English poked me awake—"
when a girl gets married, she wears a red sari. Do you know why? At a wedding, the center of attention is the girl. And in a prism, red is the straightest line. The red sari will scientifically draw the guests' eyes! Red also is the color of creation. Red is the color of anger, or love. The Indians,
" he said, "
believe that when a person falls in love, red threads appear in the eyes, the eyes turn red.
" India reprising word after word. But the jigri was wrong. It was only dust, or mostly.

 

"
WE HAVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS
, equipment problems," Mr. Paliwal says in English after I hand him the proposal, addressing his remarks to the paper. Mr. Paliwal, Anukul's boss, has neatly oiled hair, brightly shined shoes, the tense arms of the second language learner suddenly aware of his shortcomings. His spring-loaded arms announce,
Anyone can hear me talking like this, even that woman there.
A tiny woman with a whiskbroom has drifted in through a curtain that's the same faded blue as the walls. She doesn't so much as glance over as he says, "The boys are rural. Some are tribals"—the original inhabitants of India; aboriginal. "They are coming sometimes fifteen, sixteen. What can we do with them?"