Dreaming in Hindi (28 page)

"We have women here who are brighter than you," he snaps, meaning lighter in skin tone. I've never flunked the paper bag test before.

I like that in a woman, he says, essentially, when I tell him that one of my fellows at the school has a bit of a stalkerish propensity with men.

That other word, the one that crawled up and brushed itself off, is "handful."

 

IT'S ON AN
afternoon soon after, when I'm walking with Renee into the hotel where I've moved, everything at the Jains' having jammed, cracked, and smoked, that the man at the front desk stops me. "Madam," he says, "we have received two pieces of disturbing news. The dhobi has put dirt in your laundry. And terrorists have stormed the parliament." Five men, thought to be Muslims, managed to breach the gate and shoot nine employees before they themselves were killed. The date is December 13—12/13 as it'll come to be known, to make the links with the savagery of 9/11 clear.

A few days later at Nand's, a friend of his knocks, a professor of political science. The man is stout, middle-aged, and, as the conversation moves into what's just happened, agitated. "After the attack, America didn't do anything," he says, not meeting my eye. "Your president hasn't even called." An image of the ragtag peace march back in September forms, the hand-scrawled signs:
AMERICA, INDIA IS WITH YOU
.

"He hasn't?" I say. Weakly; I don't doubt it.

"America doesn't support their words of nine-eleven—that they are waging war on terrorism," the man says and begins to pace, as a gyroscope, I can see, starts to turn.

 

A ZOOM LIKE A
growl by my ear, then a starfish of pain in my breast. The first time I was punched on the street, the men were on motorcycles. The second time, there was an instant just after when my shoulder felt oddly flat, condensed, as if its weight was heavier than its shape would imply. Like flourless cake, though nothing as sweet as that had happened. When I looked up, two couples were hurrying past, the men's heads pulled down by taut strings, the women's faces turned back to examine mine—laughing, though it looked like they were grimacing.

"Oh, no, I don't think those things mean anything," Renee said when I asked if they didn't seem like signs of some kind of tension massing. Two assaults in one week? Come on. "No—oh, no," she insisted. "I'll ask around, but I am certain that was just teenage high jinks." Renee would brook no suggestion of impropriety in India. Nothing that hinted at any kind of impugnment, no statements even vaguely critical, whether they came from me or her Indian buddy Pauline, the seventy-eight-year-old Brahmin-Christian nurse. Renee had burned her bridges when she came here. She can't ever go back now.

But nationalist fervor was rising, Pauline had said at a dinner the three of us had had just two weeks before. Come on! Renee was forgetting. "In Orissa, they killed a Christian doctor," Pauline said over
idlis.
A doctor from Australia and his two young sons had been sleeping in their car when a gang from the Bajrang Dal materialized, their faces like shards in the thin strips of light. The Bajrang Dal, sometimes referred to as the Army of Apes, is allied with the BJP and is the lunatic fringe of the
Hindutva
movement: Hinduism above all. Bajrang Dal is given to razing Muslim temples and Christian churches and to burning (Western) Valentine's Day cards and is one of several organizations that subscribe to the philosophy of the powerful RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), an extremist nationalist organization. The RSS despises Muslims and, to a lesser degree, Christians—lesser partly because there are fewer of them to hate. Christians comprise just two percent of the Indian population. In the RSS literature, Muslims and Christians are referred to as "foreigners," even though they've been living in India for centuries and are frequently descended from Hindus who converted. They are, by the RSS's definition, internal threats. The party's ideology is thuggish, to cast it in a good light; hate filled and sometimes lethal, to put it directly. It was an RSS man who killed Gandhi. One of its founders had gone on record in 1939 as admiring the way Hitler dealt with his country's internal menaces. India could learn a lot from how Germany handled the Jews, the founder, M. S. Golwalkar, wrote: "The foreign faces in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture ... or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens' rights."

The Bajrang Dal doesn't like outsiders, however they are construed, and what they really didn't like that night in Orissa were outsiders who appeared to be sneaking around trying to convert tribals to Christianity. Investigations later established that the man in the station wagon hadn't, in fact, been engaged in proselytizing. What he'd been doing was ministering to lepers, but on the night in question, that finer distinction wasn't up for discussion. In the darkness, the Bajrang Dal men stole up to the car. Several had thought to bring cans of gasoline. Others of them, matches. Soon light formed jaggedly on their faces. When the doctor tried to wrench open the door, the men at first kicked it shut through the flames. Later, they didn't have to.

"The wife said, 'Forgive them.' She is a Christian," Pauline said at dinner. Renee nodded. That was correct. Yes, that's what she did.

"The man had been helping lepers only," Pauline said. Renee agreed. True.

"And afterward, they had terrible floods in Gujarat," Pauline concluded, making a spectacular leap of karmic reasoning out of her Christian faith. Renee's head caught in mid-assent. Floods? "That's not right. That did not cause flooding," she said, frowning. Renee liked her Brooklyn rationalism challenged, but only up to a point.

The third time would occur in January, a month and a half after the dinner with Pauline. Stones and dirt then made waffles of my palms. This was at a Republic Day performance I'd gone to with Anukul and the kids. I'd ended up in the military viewing stand, surrounded by distinguished-looking men in beige leisure suits, erect generals in sunglasses. On the field, marching lines rippled in navy and white. A brass band in spats left over from the Brits extended their arms as wide as Strum Peter. "India, I-N-D-I-A," a team of school kids holding tinselly horseshoes shouted. The air was so suffused with national glory, I was nervous when I left the stadium early, by myself. Slightly, but not enough to be on guard, and so when the men slammed me from behind, sent me flying, I gasped, partly from surprise.

"If someone comes up from behind and pushes you, the first thing out of your mouth is your native language," Swami-ji had said in class not two days before. Now was revealed, if I'd had doubts: I was a native English speaker. I chased the men, shouting in English and modern-day Hindi "
Poliz!
" till they slipped down a side street. A crowd formed and I hurriedly put on sunglasses, in case I began to cry.
When a middle-aged man stepped forward, to chide me—"Next time, you should be more careful with boys"—I did, didn't care who saw.

 

AFTER THE FIRST ASSAULT
, once I've stopped shaking, I'm sharply aware there's no one at home to say "Tension-free!" There's hardly anyone else on the premises where I live now, in fact, only the thin sad Ayurvedic man who rushes across the lawn whenever I show myself. He sounds more desperate than hopeful when he asks, "Massage?" Except when the wedding field out back is in full swing, there's rarely any evidence of life at the hotel where I've moved. In the musty lounge, rows of mismatched chairs are lined up, as if some merriment has just cleared out. A baby tiger under glass stands beside a TV that shows the cartoon Addams family speaking Hindi. Once when I stayed home sick, I amused myself watching Uncle Fester whisper verb forms we'd just learned in class. I spend hours in the lounge, staring out at the grounds, which are Victorian and leisurely—lawn chairs set in pools of sunlight, latticed balconies hung with flowering plants. I mean to get up and go inspect the slate gray pool, don't. You can do anything later here.

Sometimes I think about calling the Jains, decide to later, don't. The fact is, I can't: I ran myself out of there.

"The father has told them 'She wants a baby,'" Vanita had said the morning I went in to try to figure out whether I was imagining it or not: Were the Jains put out with me? Since the drive to Meena's mother's, I thought I'd detected screwy vibrations around the house. Then again, the baseline for screwiness there was fairly high, and given the paltry illuminations of the language I was operating on, I was reading most situations by candlelight.

In Vanita's office, I laid out my evidence, which grew flimsier as I detailed it. The other evening, when I'd come home late, Meena had cross-examined me brusquely in the kitchen. "
Where, Kathy, where? Where have you been?
" she'd demanded.
And
her face had looked funny. All right, well, not proof of much, but okay, this too: Alka had lately been short with me. Never any time for banter, and one night when we'd all been to dinner, she'd stopped me at the table as I was pulling out a chair. "
No, you sit over there,
" she said and pointed to the other end of the table, "
away from the men.
" I said this last with emphasis, then realized: maybe the placement was coincidental to my fears.

"You know, I'm probably just imagining this," I was saying, but Vanita was looking horrified. The Jain family already had the beer-cruising incident on their record. In her book, they'd been on probation, and now they'd apparently added duplicity to suspected deviance.

"I am telling you, he is telling them you want a baby," she said in rising tones that suggested Jain Dad 2 could, at any minute, launch into a full-blown sexual harassment episode. If the guy pulled a stunt like that, her very job could be imperiled. I was about to observe that, really, reasonably, all that had gone on was I'd been placed in a seat elsewhere, but she was already on to evacuation procedures.

"Now that this thing has happened, you have to move," she said as the full realization of how dimwitted I'd been sank in. I'd stay, I said. But Vanita was adamant.

"Now the wives think bad things about you," she insisted. "That's how Indian women's minds work. Kathy-ji, I am Indian. I know."

"I don't think—" I began, when she said the one thing that could have changed my mind.

"Kathy-ji. You do not understand. They only have you there for the money."

All the fight went out of me. "All right," I said. I was stung.

Now I hadn't been so deluded I thought that the Jains were hosting me for the fun we'd had conjugating verbs. I knew they had three daughters and I knew the price of a dowry in India: 5 lakhs, 500,000 rupees, for a doctor, an impossible 10 if you wanted to buy your daughter an engineer. The Jains' whole house had cost 50 lakhs. I knew that, but I'd come to love them and had persuaded myself that in whatever culturally retransfigured way possible, they felt the same. When Vanita said this, I was cut to think what an obvious fool I'd been.

"All right," I said. "Let's go."

I kept my back Rajput-straight while we looked for a rickshaw. When we pulled up to the house hours before the end of school, Meena and Alka were inside and didn't hear us, but by the time I was in my room stuffing clothes into duffel bags, they were at the door. I kept my head down, refused to look at them. Vanita fielded questions. "I don't know why she's leaving," she lied. I bunched the Jaipur curtains into a backpack, still not looking up, though in my mind's eye, I could see the wives precisely. They would be standing side by side, exactly aligned, both with their arms folded, one hip each jutting right. I imagined their dumbfounded expressions, how they'd be casting nervous glances at each other.
What has happened? What thing is this?
I switched my thoughts back to the money:
Hope they're happy. They got four months.
I was trying to find room for a small, glittery basket the girls had brought me from a fair when Vanita said to hurry. "Kathy-ji," she said, "the man is waiting." I set the basket on a shelf, turned to lift my bags, and came face-to-face with the wives. They were exactly as I'd had them in my head, except for one gleaming detail: the line of tears shining on Alka's face.

What an idiot I was,
but now there was no going back. Time here could spin, jam, or slow, but even in India, it couldn't reverse itself.

I mumbled a feeble thanks for everything. The wives continued to stare. Vanita and I lugged my things to the drive. The women, with the dumbfounded expression I'd envisioned, trailed after us. They stood halfway down the drive watching as we settled ourselves in and the driver pressed my bags around us, and then he lifted his arm and brought it down on the throttle, and they were already out of sight. As we sped down the road, I knew two things for sure: That even once we'd turned the corner, the wives would still be standing there.

And that from now on, for a long time, I would be lost in India.

Christmas is coming. We know because Helaena's mother wants to mail a holiday gift basket to her at the school. Raju the cook, however, says no, not if this thing contains meat. It's not just people here who are vegetarian. Entire buildings are, including Antriksh Flats. They get it in writing when you move in: no meat on the premises.

The package arrives just before lunch, on a day Raju's serving his specialty, gluey
saag paneer:
spinach green as an algae problem, tiny gray cubes of cottage cheese.

"
But, Raju, there's no paneer in mine,
" Helaena says to distract him from the box by her feet. Raju peers into her bowl. "
Paneer is not your kismet,
" he says: cheese is not her fate. He returns to the kitchen. Helaena reaches down, and as an oregano-scented cloud envelops us, we proceed to imperil the lease.