Dreaming in Hindi (16 page)

 

ALONG WITH THE
language, common knowledge appears unexpectedly in my thoughts. I am now mysteriously possessed of random gossip, national and local, that I know with the same utter certainty that everyone else does. I know which Bollywood star is one hundred percent, absolutely having an affair with which costar, though I can't recollect ever having had the conversation. On the local front, I know that every year, the maharana installs a new Western girl as his assistant in the palace; that every year, after about three months, he suggests they think about expanding her responsibilities. Helaena, though, close to two months along, has missed this piece of floating wisdom.

"Oh, I don't think so," she counters when I pass it along at dinner. She contemplates the chicken sizzler we're sharing. In the Rose Garden restaurant, down the slope from the palace, I'm hiding out from the vegetarian Jains.

"Uh-uh. I don't think so. He's pretty old for ... that," she says, sentence going into a Parkinsonian freeze as she's overcome by a southern accent.
How could he?
But the Indian rulers are famous for their ability to surmount amatory obstacles. Unsightly frailties of the flesh such as sweat? Of no consequence. "Concubines were wheeled to their beds," Ann Morrow writes in
The Maharajas of India,
"so that their silken skin would not be sullied with perspiration." Personal challenges of physique? A trifling. When concern grew that the 270-pound maharaja of Kapurthala might be too corpulent to perform wedding-night duties, a contraption was built, like the one used to aid elephants, so that he could practice in advance with a courtesan. Given the collective track record, I'd think advanced age, in this case fifty-eight, is unlikely to be a hurdle.

 

"
KA-TY," MEENA CALLS
from the other side of my door. It's 9
P.M.
, and I've just removed my shirt, am dropping from exhaustion. But the walls are iced by loneliness tonight, and so I'm glad for the interruption, even if, precedence suggests, it means I'm about to get scolded.

Early on, Meena confined her commentary on my unsocialized behavior to smirking at Alka as it occurred.
Who was it said that's how they'd act?
her eyebrows would note as I placed my sandals on the children's backpack shelf, again. But formality has eased to a familial accord. Now she's apparently shuffled through the 153 kinship terms they tried to make us learn at school and which I'll be damned if I will, and not finding one that describes me—not "
husband's younger sister cousin
"or "
sister's husband's aunt's sister
"— come up with a 154th of her own:
distant relative with the faculties of a street cow who needs constant watching.

"
What's that?
" she'll ask, strolling into my room.
That
is always something wrong. The damp evidence of an ink stain freshly scrubbed from the sheet. New pistachio throw pillows I'm wildly happy with but have gotten wildly taken on, in Meena's scoffing view. I'll shoot back an answer in chilly body language: crossed arms, pressed lips.
Three hundred fifty rupees for pillows doesn't prove the guy thinks I'm a chump,
my posture will inform her, or try to. My body is as inarticulate as the rest of me. "
You came in what time last night?
" she'll ask, switching inquiries, poking at the bottle of hydroxy acid that defies explanation. "
Beauty for skin from above is going. Death skin,
" I'd tried; now she eyes it warily.

At the center of full-time scrutiny and invisible, both, I'm wilting under Meena's blind gaze. For it intensifies a notion that's becoming conviction: this plunge into language, this devouring of new words, is not having the effect of doubling my world, but is making me disappear.

Recently, while combing my hair, I'd glanced in the mirror and froze: a face I didn't know was staring back. Apprehension had not been preparation. This face was unfortunate. Skin that, even tanned, was sallow; contours so flat they looked dispirited; a nose that refused to rise, magnificently or otherwise; an overall flaccid form. The eyes, the brackish green of an old well, squinted back, then looked away.

I willed my old features to reappear. They did, then before I could relax into relief, they flickered out again, and that was the last time all year I'd see my face.

A preposterous debate followed in my head.
Hadn't I been attractive? Or not? Or more than this? I was.
But this face was as clear as anything else that was visible to me then: the white pig snuffling out the window, the man pumping water across the street at the well. By the next day, I'd acceded to the plain and all-too-visible truth: this is how I looked, was how I looked when I came and forever before that. Who changes that drastically? To try to believe otherwise was to engage in the luxury of pumped-up memory, to make more of yourself than you were. So far from home, you could tell yourself anything.

In this world without end, I didn't consider other possibilities, one being that going into another language may, indeed, reshape you physically. "Your face gets very much changed," A. L. Becker says. "Most language sound systems have one central vowel. It's the
schwa
sound in English. In French, it's
Uu.
It's that central place that shapes your face at rest. When you're speaking, it's the recurrent place. If it's far back, it changes your cheeks, changes the way your mouth looks." I didn't consider that perhaps I'd adjusted to the fierce desert features around me, had lost some ability to register my own, was seeing myself through native eyes. Or that, more dangerously, having yanked myself out of context with no thought to how context shapes self, I was paying a penalty, one that could be extracted again.

Context is inextricable from self—the smaller self that the Hindus say exists within us and which they call atman. In the Hindu belief, we're all connected to an infinite self as well, this one known as Brahman. Brahman is ultimate reality. Atman is "the reference point from which all experience takes its meaning," theology professor Paul Younger writes, and in coming upon that observation later, I'd think,
Yes, of course.
The self is mutable, open to experience. That's what had enabled me to go to India in the first place, I'd reflected, what had allowed me to lose sight of myself there. But in the misery of trying to avoid the brackish eyes, I couldn't comprehend that then. Instead, I mourned my missing face with the same sharp regret I felt for the missing words.

"Ka-ty," Meena calls again. Slipping my shirt on, I open the door. "
Lock, Ka-ty, lock,
" she says dreamily from the step.

"
Lock, Ka-ty,
" she repeats. She's been to her parents' for the festival of Navratri, we establish. Her loose cannon of a husband stayed behind, I learn. In her dress-up green salwar kameez with two stains on the chest, she looks Chinese and pretty, even in the room's hard neon light. Her face has been changed as well.
She feels more loved by her father,
I think, as in the thrum of light, we have the same conversation as always. "
Aap kaise hain?Aap kaise hain?
""How are you? How are you?" We are, as usual,
theek hai:
"fine." But now, after "
fine,
"we press on. Her mother was there; her sister was there; her father, grandfather, all of them. They talked, and they ate. And if I move out, as I'm starting to think I might, this will be the one time I haven't seen Meena submerged, slowed, like she's turning underwater.

 

"
OSAMA BIN LADEN
on tape has said, 'When we buy American goods, we participate in Palestinians' massacre. American companies earn wealth from Arab countries and their government given'—fuck. Taxing place?"

"Taxes," Vidhu tells Harold.

"
American companies earn wealth from their government given taxes. With this taxes three thousand million dollars per year Israel is taking. With this wealth Israel is massacring Palestinians. By means of America, bin Laden draws our attention to fanaticism.
Oh, God."
Harold sighs, frowns at the newspaper clipping—homework for current events hour, when, in pairs, we examine issues of the day. Last week we did "The New Saris." "Man," he groans, "I want a cigarette."

Vidhu sniggers. Him, too. I stare at the black-and-white photos of the institute's academic advisers behind his head, don't say anything for a number of reasons, the least being that when it's Harold and I together, the male teachers conduct all exchanges with him.

"
On the other hand,
" he continues, "
fanaticism is that which—who?
"

Vidhu shakes his head. Wrong pronoun, Harold-ji.

"
... which each Muslim to nonbeliever upon declaring on him wants attack in.
"

Harold-ji has found a pencil, is drumming in time to his homework. "
Islam's invasion on India complete different reason is
—is for a completely different reason.
According to Islam, idol worship is prohibited and so is discrimination on the basis of caste. As a matter of fact, Hindu idol worshiper isn't.
" He flips the pencil with a flourish: ta-da!

"
Protestant problem is complicated. With the personal experience that believes in consuming, God's entity becomes of lesser importance. Therefore, American Protestant disbelievers have been made...
" He recaptures the pencil, elaborately rotates his head, the way bodybuilders do: cricked neck. On the foreheads of the academic advisers, I notice, someone has dabbed respectful tilaks, the sandalwood paste marks that on women, are called bindis.

"
Both sides weakness afflicted by,
" he proceeds in a monotone. "
One side American exploitation is whose democracy's cloak came dressed in, Prottstant individualism is, other side, fanaticism is,
" he says, drumming faster to get to the end. "
Thus situation in struggle to solution to come. War is inevitable.
"

I don't say anything because Vidhu wouldn't understand why I'd take exception. But we are teaching Hindi only. I don't say anything because the voice I had is leaving me; because the new one is shaky; because I remain in the tense-armed slump, in that language stage where comprehension outstrips the ability to speak, to say much more than "
wrong talk is.
"

I became acquainted with this stage during a study-abroad semester in France (became reacquainted, to be precise; everyone goes through it with a first tongue). But when you're nineteen, the prolonged agonies of what linguists call "foreigner talk"—your own and the dumbed-down responses it pulls—aren't that dissimilar to the prolonged agonies of teenage life.
Je pense ... rien.
In both cases, you're resigned to sounding stupid while comprehending more than anyone knows.

Speaking garbled Hindi now is, in a way, easier. With Hindi, I have the surprise element. "The first time I saw a Westerner speaking Hindi, it was like seeing a chicken barking," Vidhu recently remarked. "Until then, I thought they were just coming here walking on their toes, looking at us like animals. But when a foreigner came to my house and started speaking Hindi, I was like,
va!
My whole world changed." In France, the simple fact that I was saying it in their language elicited eye rolling and contempt. In India, I can mangle words till they squeak, but the fact that I'm saying anything at all provokes astonishment. "Oh, very good! Very good!" someone will invariably say after a sentence such as "
Your shoes are nice.
" I set up the cheap ego trick, fall for it constantly, don't care that it's merely proof that there aren't a lot of other leghorns talking.

But the thrills to be had now by asking for more bread only go so far. There's still the daily schism to contend with, of having the mind of a woman who's worked to have one and a voice that's the Indian equivalent of a U.S. sitcom character named Babu. At nineteen, I'd been monosyllabic anyway. At forty-five, I have something to say on reading in class, "
Our political leadership is the culprit of compromise with Islam, but there is also an invisible enemy: our liberal public opinion
"— nationalist right-wing
Hindutva
talk—but when I try to, once again I can't.

The split can be nearly unbearable, but it's only an extreme instance of what's commonplace with language. "Even in English, comprehension can exceed your production abilities," Sydney Lamb pointed out when we got on this subject. "We can understand the writing of William Shakespeare but cannot begin to reproduce it. We admire the saxophone riffs of John Coltrane, can't wail like him."

With a second language, speech lags until you're fluent, one reason this stage is so exasperating. Because it's not truly a stage, it's a marathon, an irrational undertaking: the minute you're in it, you're unbalanced and can expect to stay that way for some time.

Recently, a cognitive neurolinguist at the University of Washington made an extraordinary discovery about the extent to which our brains understand more than we can say. Lee Osterhout scanned neophyte French students, kids in a 101 class, using an ERP (event-related potential) machine, a device that measures electrical activity in the brain. At two weeks in, after test participants had received only eight hours of instruction, Osterhout attached electrodes to their scalps and showed them lists of words. Some were French, some were made-up. When the students were asked to say which were which, they did as expected: scored, on average, 50 percent. They guessed, in other words. Nothing surprising there, but here's the part that, if a scientist hadn't been relating it to me, would have been a little eerie: the scans showed that their brains were getting the answers right. The students couldn't consciously tell which were the French words and which were gobbledygook, but their brains could, and the findings get weirder still, at least to the layperson and, judging by Osterhout's hushed tone when he conveyed them, perhaps even to him. At nine months along, when he quizzed the students on vocabulary and syntax, "their brains were doing it like native speakers," even though the students were still blowing the answers, and often. "They were wrong," he said. "A. Lot."