Dreaming in Hindi (26 page)

Only years later, in a conversation with A. L. Becker, did I begin to understand what had happened to me. "People who study languages think of them as codes, but they aren't really," he said. "A language is a whole map of reality." It was Wittgenstein who first compared language to a map. A language should mirror the world the way a map does, he said, but what Becker was talking about was more profound. "Most of the distinctions we make about ourselves—what time it is, where we are—we learn through the map of language," Becker said. He described how in Burma, he'd learned firsthand that languages aren't, at base, codes with essentially the same fundamental components. His "attunement to the world," he said, had to be changed in order to speak to people. "In Indonesia, you say, 'How is everything here?' and by 'here' you mean not where the speaker is, but where the hearer is. More than two sentences would give a foreigner away. If I'm talking with someone and using 'here' and 'there' in ways that are strange, I won't be understood even if I know the words of their language. I'll be treated as nutty or as a child."

"Here" and "there" fall into a linguistic category called deictics—words that rely on context for meaning. "Here" and "there" are meaningless unless used in a sentence, unlike, for example, "bottle" or "chair." The way deictics are conceived change from language to language. In English, we have just two positioning signifiers: "this" and "that," "here" and "there"—the first in each pair indicating a location near the speaker, the other near the listener. But a number of tongues—Korean, Thai, several Romance languages—employ a third signifier that refers to a place that's far from both.

"This array [of deictics] lies at the center of a language," Becker said, "That's what makes it like a map, only a map that involves time. Each language tells you what 'now' is, where 'I' am, orients you differently in space and time." He'd been speaking quickly, and now he paused. "You can see," he said, "why the shift into another language is so disorienting—you don't know where 'here' is, literally."

 

MORNING IN UDAIPUR
, in the dense rolling present, preserved now forever in my head. A scrofulous street dog, legs hobbled by rubber bands, yelps at the demons the traffic sounds raise. The cur is an outcaste. Pomeranians are Jain. The wolfhounds in the yards of the havelis are Rajput. Dogs have castes now, not breeds. In the tide without ebb, boys towel off at a street pump. The distant Aravallis are dark green with shadows. Winter's coming on; the Tibetan market displays cheap sweaters. I sleep in one the rickshaw drivers all wear, in loose olive pants brought over from the States that once had a descriptive name. (Parachute? I think.) "Too much rain is bad. Too much sun is bad. Too much speech is bad. Too much silence is bad," Vidhu says in overlay, on the same flowing morning, riffing and quoting the poet Kabir. Vidhu can circle all India before he gets down to the vocabulary lesson. Today, though, he zeros in. "
Lokendra:
'the god among the folk,'" he says crisply. "
Mahashakti:
'superpower.'" "
Threshold." "Application.
"Words, decanted, hang in the air. "
Real," "in reality," "as a matter of fact,
" then he stops, lights out for a ramble. "Sacred cows can tell if you're foreign," he says with a crooked grin. "If you go to the villages, you will startle them." It's not true, I think, somewhere in that morning, that I ever had a house or life back there. Too much memory is bad when it's jagged or sublime, but then it fades, and with it the life you're not convinced you had anyway.

 

FOR ALL ITS
disruptive ways, Adhikmas doesn't mess with mail delivery. Just the opposite, it seems, judging by how quickly I receive a package a friend's sent. "I'm teaching drawing, and I don't know how to draw," I'd e-mailed him one week; the next one, this, Swami-ji is handing me an envelope containing a book with a smiling duck on the cover. Inside are instructions for how to sketch anything using geometrical means. You can make a rhomboid, you've got a cow.

At the deaf school, Anukul raises an eyebrow in cool admiration when I show him what I've brought. He positions the beautiful tribal boy Banshi Lal at the board beside his desk. "
Now draw an oval,
" he signs. He checks the steps in the book. "
All right, a circle. No, no—on top. Now, two lines there. No, there.
" Banshi Lal frowns, uncertain where this is heading, but tries it anyway. Lines, waves, a curl, and presto. A turtle! The class shrieks. Without even knowing he was, Banshi Lal has drawn a turtle.
Samudri:
Anukul underscores this development by writing the Hindi word on the board.

Banshi Lal was the test case. Now the floor is open for turtles on paper. In the same mysterious assembly, lines become dogs. We're all enthralled. The paper supply is running low, though. Anukul calls for a break and razors a stack of sheets into eighths.

Cylinders turn into cats, into cows, into long smoking trains, but then the thrill starts to wane. After a while, we all know the trick. Anukul decides to up the ante. From now on, we'll be working with a limitation: only colored pencils can be used; no erasing possible. "I see," I say. "So they have to pay attention."

"No, for their fine skills," he says.

Circle, square, smaller circle, and ten teddy bears, in a fiesta of colors, start to take shape. Banshi Lal is stuck with light yellow. His bear's all but invisible. We're finished with the feet when a problem becomes evident: one of the directions is calling for the artist to erase the line he's just drawn. We're stalled. We all stare at our emerging bears. "I know," Anukul says, and with a razor, lightly scrapes off the mark that's supposed to disappear. "Necessity is the mother of invention," he says, and smirks in flagrant self-appreciation.

The exercises grow tiresome, too complicated or too predictable. Anyway, the paper's almost gone. Anukul hands me the razor to use on the last two sheets. My eighths are a regular shame: ragged edges like teeth, deep Vs. He smiles. "
You
don't have fine skills," he teases. This last round is a bonus round. Anyone can draw whatever they want.

With the paper gone, the art portion of the afternoon is concluded.
Kya karun?
What to do? We do what you do in India most of the time. We talk, which means a sign lesson for me.

"Ask that boy what his father does," Anukul suggests, and shows me how. The boy answers with a fast ripple of his hand. Anukul stares.

"The father is ... He is saying the father works in marble I think." He asks the boy to repeat himself. "He makes disposable cups," Anukul says hesitantly, checks with the class.
Cups?
The boys all shake their heads. Noooo. One runs up to the front. He translates the answer.

"Oh! The father makes butter," Anukul says, sounding relieved. "You know, that other boy is smarter. Because the first one, he is poor. Nobody shows him anything. The second is poor, too, but the first lives in the hostel. The other lives in a family." Then he says something that will stick in my mind for years: "The children have so many words even we don't know."

Words they don't know? The idea is slightly jarring; I think of Anukul as the authority on sign. The boys come, he teaches them. Whoever names something has power over it, and I'm curious to know where the children's power lies. "What kind of words?" I ask.

"Like they have one we think means 'plow,'" he says. "All of them, when they come here, they have their own words. The first thing we do is try and learn what they are."

The way deaf kids do in poor areas around the world, children come here for the first time at all different ages. At ten, twelve, even older; up till then, many of them have never been in a classroom. Most of the kids find themselves here through the same enrollment process that's typical in Nigeria or Nicaragua. Word reaches the school that way out of town, there's a child who's deaf. Someone then goes out and tries to persuade the parents it's in their best interest to give up the labor he's been providing and allow him to come. If the school trains him, he'll get a paying job and be able to send money home. I say "he" because in India, in many impoverished areas, education for deaf girls is a lost cause. Why bother? They're just going to get married. Here deaf girls frequently become indentured servants through arranged marriages, sometimes as young as eight or nine.

But even when the parents agree, educational possibilities are often minimal for the kids who are brought in too late. At the deaf school, one of the things that struck me was how radically staggered the ages of the newcomers were, along with their cognitive abilities. In a normal school, students would be grouped by age, but here that doesn't make sense. Here you have younger kids who are sharp and perceptive, whose parents enrolled them in the school not long after a fever took their hearing, for whom the sight of moving lips still triggers "phantasmal voices," the novelist David Wright's phrase. You have children who've been deaf from birth but who sign easily because their parents, too, are deaf and taught them to. Those kids' talent for learning is robust, unlike some of the teenagers seated beside them, who arrived only a year or two before, by which point their abilities had ossified. These were the ones Mr. Paliwal had been referring to when he'd told me despairingly, "They come here fifteen, sixteen." Those boys will remain forever without language and all the attendant cognitive expansion that language sparks.

With all children, deaf or hearing, language develops in predetermined stages. All babies babble, the deaf ones with their hands. All two-year-olds begin to speak in what are referred to as two-word strings—"Mommy eats"—though in the case of deaf kids, these might be called, more accurately, two-sign strings. By the time a child, deaf or hearing, reaches age three, these word strings are blossoming, expanding, gaining complexity, inflection, word endings.
They turn into sentences: "Mommy eats cat food," a friend's son's first joke, which he found as riotous on the thousandth telling as he did on the first. From then on, words take shape in greater and greater complexity, except when the brain is malformed or when children are severely isolated.

The case of Genie, barred from human contact by her disturbed father, demonstrates what happens to the hearing in these circumstances—how the concept of word order must be acquired by a certain age, before the window of opportunity squeaks shut. When it does in the hearing, any prayer of grasping the full complexity of language is extinguished, and the same occurs with the deaf. Chelsea, a woman who in deaf educational circles is as well-known as Genie, was diagnosed as retarded at a young age, though, in fact the trouble was blocked hearing. The mistake went unrecognized till she was thirty-one, and by then, she was caught in twilight—if the full light of understanding depends on the ability to make fully ordered linguistic sense of the world, as many experts believe. She was fitted with a hearing aid and started on intensive instruction in English, but though she's managed to acquire many words, syntax remains elusive. Her speech is forever shuffled: "The woman is bus the going."

"What can we do?" Mr. Paliwal had said. The answer, unfortunately, is not a lot, and what's more, the problem becomes systematic. How are the teachers supposed to contend with a classroom of kids with a vast range of abilities, some able to sign and learn at lightning speed, others who stare at them dully. Where are they supposed to aim the lesson? Too high, and they will lose half the class. Too low, and the rest will be stupefied. The mix is infernal, guaranteed to produce restlessness in the students, lethargy in the teachers. What they do then is this: dream small dreams, some of them, and by holding on to those visions, challenge the kids. The rest, frustrated, run classes that are holding pens. Mr. Paliwal, he does what he can. And the students, through no fault of anyone's, have no say.

At the end of the hour, I gather up the papers. I bring them home and lay them on the bed. Arching cat after arching cat, identical down to their ears, the exact same stiff repeating cows, but it's the other set of drawings my eye keeps returning to. Not the geometrical ones, but the ones where Anukul called for free expression. In many of them, the boys have drawn themselves—flying through the air in boats, dwarfed by polychrome towers. Something about these is off. I keep thinking I'm looking at space aliens. The kids' heads are too big. They look startled, odd, but I can't say why, and I give it up. I pick up a book, put it down, stare some more, and then I see.

In the portraits of themselves, many of them, the boys have no mouths.

 

HELAENA AND THE NEPHEW
were coming apart. The marriage charts had cleared, and they'd gotten engaged. Helaena began to lose interest.

"Aditya tried to strangle me in the car on the way to school," she'd announce cheerfully in the morning. "Aditya tried to drive us off a cliff," she'd report. Aditya, clearly, was beside himself. Nothing in his life had prepared him to be visited by American dating.

One evening, she and I attended a birthday party. This was immediately after the engagement had gone through—so soon after that, I hadn't, at the beginning of the night, even known it had. Divendra Singh, the celebrant, was someone Helaena had recently met, a lawyer and former classmate of Aditya's. An only child, he lived with his parents on a hilltop estate with a sign that said
FORT DIVENDRA
.

"... and we have fourteen antique cars and two temples and a pandit and fifteen servants," he'd said on the house tour he'd given us on our one previous visit. Divendra had the soft, burbling manner of a pampered son, but all the same, sparks were visible even from behind, where I was trailing along, counting.

From a rooftop, you could see the servants huddled around a cook fire outside huts, looking, from up there, like a diorama. Downstairs, we joined the family. Mr. Singh, Divendra's father, also a lawyer, radiated testosterone. He was short and scrappy, with the oddest wig I'd ever seen: black, shellacked Elvis hair. He also had, as Helaena reported on the rickshaw drive up, more money than anyone in town. Divendra's mother, an anesthesiologist, was there as well, along with her sisters, who were all three doctors and seated in the living room with polite, nodding husbands. The room was done in Udaipur modern: a table made of a varnished swan-under-glass, four overstuffed couches and numerous plump chairs arranged in a circle.