Dreaming in Hindi (40 page)

Viraha is evident on the streets in the form of purdah; on a drive with a male storeowner, who has me sit in the back seat and talk to the back of his head "so people do not get a wrong idea"; on an afternoon when I first visit Ruby. My rickshaw circles endlessly through her neighborhood till I call and she comes down. Outside her building, children are flying kites above the carcass of a car. She unlocks a gate and leads me up a grimy stairwell to her apartment. Two thousand rupees a month for two hospital-green rooms—it's more money than they have, she says, "but my things grow."

Most Indian apartments are spare, but Ruby's is a veritable emporium. Books are everywhere: toppling from an old sewing machine trestle; piled on the floor; squeezed into long, felt shoe holders on the walls. Above a black shag sofa, a shelf is crammed with so many trophies and awards, a seated guest is in danger of getting cracked on the head. A feng shui consultant, Ruby says, has just been by and directed her to take the shelf down. Feng shui guys do a land-office business here, while yoga teachers languish, reduced to teaching the salute to the sun to whatever tourist girls they can hoodwink into donning Lycra and sitting in their bedroom while they give short shrift to downward dog. Transcendence always kicks in faster if the catalyst isn't from your hometown.

"You like hills now? Hills? Hills? Hills?" Ruby asks once we've removed our shoes. She's speaking in English, staking out which language we'll use. Ruby hates it when I make her speak Hindi with me. "Your Hindi is making me very, very uneasy," she complains. Though one of us could say the same about the other one's English.

"Hills?"

"Hills, hills," she maintains. "You are liking hills."

"I don't
not
like hills. Ruby:
What?
"

"Yes, hills." She points to the beat-up Manolo Blahniks I've left by the door, remnants of my magazine days.

"
Ye
'heels'
bolte hai,
" I inform her in a superior tone: "The way you say that is 'heels.'" Her failure to make herself understood in English has allowed me to seize the moment and reroute us into Hindi. We get about the same results there, however, so in the bedroom, lounging on the bed she shares with Rajendra and their two daughters, we switch off, back and forth and when we get stuck—
Prabav?
"Influence"? "Force"?—we call out to the girls watching TV in the other room: "
Prabav ka matlab?
" ("What does
prabav
mean?") "Effect!" they shout back, over a swelling soap.

On the bed, she hands me a library book, pages to an earmarked passage, translates over my shoulder. "A good man always stands alone—" she begins.

"Ruby," I interrupt. "How did you not become like the other women here?" She isn't; not remotely. For one thing, she's the only one I've met with a real career. The fact that Rajendra has a negligible-wage job in his father's card shop has turned out to be a blessing and a curse. A curse because most weeks, his father refuses to pay him, and then Ruby's and Rajendra's fights grow rancorous. Why can't he get a real job? Whenever she introduces the question, he threatens to throw himself into Fateh Sagar lake—so evaporated now from the drought that he'd only hit his head on the religious statuary people have tossed in, but all the same, a concern. Things for a while got so bad, they had to take it to a palmist. "Palmist said husband should support his wife and children or they won't survive," Ruby said in her throaty contralto when I checked in later. It wasn't hard to figure out who was paying the bill. "Palmist said, 'If you suicide yourself, you will suicide yourself your next seven lives.'" Fallout over multiple lifetimes—that is not something our Western marriage counselors have to work with.

She was lonely, she answers, after her arranged marriage, but discovered that when she traveled to poets' conferences, she found other people to talk to. She did, more and more, and one thing led to another—newspapers began publishing her work, she landed a correspondent's gig with a major daily in Bombay—and now, she says, "I have fame and a name." In that respect, Rajendra's job has been a blessing.

Her oldest daughter brings chai. Ruby pulls out a photo album, and we flip through, past poets declaiming at podiums, Ruby addressing crowds, smiling broadly, again and again, magnificent at two hundred pounds. ("When she got on my scale, it read ninety-six kilos. She said, 'I'm not stopping till I hit a hundred,'" Renee had said with pride.) We turn pages, and she offers illuminating commentary. I learn about the older woman in town who allows young couples to conduct trysts at her house on the condition she be allowed to watch, about the prominent local figure who has village children brought in for sex play. That's another way Ruby's not like other women here: better gossip. Like journalists everywhere, she has all the news not fit to print.

On the bed, miraculously, the tea doesn't spill, and miraculously, she gets a joke I make in Hindi. She slides a Hindu New Year's greeting she's composed from a pile of blue notebooks that rise high above the bed, after that a ghazal she had published in the paper. It's written to her friend, Shahid, a Muslim poet. "Ruby's a nice Hindu woman. Shahid is just a friend," Renee explained when I asked who he was, but he's the kind of friend who demands vast amounts of psychic attention and obeisance. Ruby stands her ground, which leads to fights and inordinate analysis of the situation with friends. After Ruby and Shahid's last dustup, I'd learned how to say "son of a bitch" in Hindi:
brother-in-law.

"He is telling me to come to Nathdwara," she says, waggling her brows. She asks if I'd like to hear another ghazal, reaches for the papery blue tower that stretches toward the ceiling. The journals are so close to our heads, if someone flew a hand up without thinking, Ruby's innermost hopes and desires would come raining down on us. "What if your husband looks at those?" I say. They're right there, like bedside reading.

He won't, she says. And if he did, he wouldn't understand them. I remember bucktoothed Rajendra congenially asking me at dinner, "And you are a bachelor?" I think for a minute, she'll be fine.

But what if he did? I say, suddenly afraid. The ghazal to Shahid had been a growl.

She swings her head around, says something I don't catch. Only one word,
purdah:
"curtain."

"
What?
" I say. In Hindi, signal to stay on that side. She obliges till I have to cry uncle.

"What?" I say. In English: okay to cross back.

She leans in, stares, bites her lip, smiles. "But in the curtain," she says—if everyone keeps it under wraps—"all things are permitted."

 

THE END OF THE YEAR
closes in, drawing with it heat from the future that's so violent, any grapes purchased on the street explode in your mouth as if they've been microwaved. So fierce, if a woman leaves a lipstick in her purse, it's melted by the end of the day. So blasting, no one in their right mind gets together with a friend just to talk, though Nand and I do. We're bidding again for eternity.

The talk this afternoon starts off like a shot. "This terrorism is only a word here," he says when I mention how frightened everyone in my country still sounds. "People here say, 'All right, it will pass over.' They rationalize things, because after all, how long can you go on fighting if nature doesn't smile and you have famines again and again? If you have deaths and diseases over and over? You eventually decide, 'Oh, all right. These are the wishes of the gods. All right, but we will have good days also.' In Sanskrit, they say
chakravat
—'it's like a wheel.'" He presses a finger to his chin as if to slow himself. "Younger nations are afraid of evil situations, especially if they have seen only prosperous times. America is very much afraid of facing evil days," he says, but soon this smooth-flying talk smashes up.

"Kit-ti, you are a guest here," Nand snaps when I say something about how the economy in India has never been better. "You are not seeing. If you are a guest, you come to my house, and I give you tea. I don't tell you what my thoughts really are." The expression in the portrait is on his face. "You are not in the game," he says. "If you are in the game, then I don't give you tea." He pauses to brood. "I kick you. I try to take your advantages. I am not very nice. There is so little money. I will try to take your money. India is corrupt. Indians will cheat you. The country has so many problems; it's not in good shape. Kit-ti," he says, "you are a guest; you are not seeing."

"But I am," I say, and Nand rebuts every proof I offer, till it's established beyond dispute: I've seen nothing all year; I know nothing about India; I'm like the
Angrezi,
the English, before me, skimmers of the language. I may know the words, as some of them did, but I will never write poetry. "
Angrezi
" does it. I stand up to go.

"It's late," I say, already mentally out the door, already on the main street, where turbaned vendors will be hawking tubers by the rickshaw stand, where bikes will be propped at crazy angles in the dirt, where the Muslim storeowner will be hovering above the Shogun tissues display. Where, if I skid back often enough in my mind, they will always be.

"Kit-ti," he says, two falling, high-pitched syllables that stop me, though for a second I still mistake his tone for irritable.

"Kit-ti, you know, you could have tried harder to learn Hindi," he says quietly. "I could have talked to you so much better then. You can only really speak intimately in your native tongue. In Hindi," he says, "I could have told you how I loved you."

Out past the vendors, past the crazy-angled bikes, the rickshaw men will argue about which rickshaw I'll take. They'll select a beat-up one with velour seats, and I'll get in. The driver will rev us forward; the wind will sting my eyes.
But Nand is full force enough in English,
I'll think each time.
I wouldn't want to see what he could do in Hindi.

It's late spring now, and some days when I arrive, Antriksh Flats, the fifth floor, looks nearly abandoned: an outerspace station where most of the inhabitants have been mysteriously vaporized. On the frequent occasions when the Whisperer doesn't come in, the head count is three, down from eight at the start. I sit in the main room, and Swami-ji and Vidhu switch off. Without the hubbub from before, the rooms sound hollow.

Down to three, there's an awkwardness among us, as if we've all just met. I'm glad for the extra attention, happier still when the school day ends. The hours on the fifth floor are interruptions in days that stretch out luxuriously, are golden hued, lofting, and laced with tranquility, that fill me with peace. More than alien concepts sink in with the language. The town's sweetness has, too. It steadies me.

In New York, where the constant hum of aspiration produces ADD, it's impossible, ever, to really calm down. But here, where the screech of the street is even louder, it's easy to sink into a meditative state. Half the homes here don't have phones; people weren't raised on TV. At this pace of life, from some other shuffled era, my synapses slow. Any sight can become a mandala. Afternoons, I watch clouds streak the sky rose above a low slope of the Aravallis and feel one of those aches of happiness so light, they seem remembered even at the time.

Mornings before school, I lie on the mattress beneath one of the small, square haveli windows and watch the Indian family across the street get ready for the day. After months of life without it, the concept of privacy is growing alien. On a pretty rooftop arranged with planters, the mother sets a newspaper aside to clip her daughter's nails. She leads her son, pants still down around his ankles, out from a small rooftop bathroom, and he squats down in front of her. I turn to check the time, and the children are now rushing out the front door and into the street, where two rickshaws are waiting to take them to school. The mother waves goodbye from the ledge. A German shepherd sees them off from the front door, but then, in a blink, he's up on the roof. Duties discharged, he settles down as the city cranks awake under a pale yellow sky.

On a weekend out of town alone, I find myself in a town by a lake that's vibrant with life. Shocking-blue kingfishers ripple the surface with their beaks as they skim the water. Proudy Siberian cranes command the shoreline. Two thousand tons of fish every day are pulled from these depths, the brochure in my hotel room reports. An impressive feat, given that the leaky rowboats plying the lake need one guy onboard just to bail. The nearly deserted hotel looks out over this sanctuary from a small spit of land. It has a pool with a supply of loaner swimsuits that appear to be imports from the Soviet Union circa 1982, a general manager with a lascivious grin. Every four hours the first night, the phone by my bed rings: a not-so-mysterious heavy breather. When I march down the next morning to complain, the manager claims he was similarly plagued.
"Was it one call, madam? Two? Yes, in my room, too. Why didn't you telephone me?" he says. Because yesterday, I'm tempted to say, when I was reclining poolside in a red-star bathing suit over orange knee-length loaner shorts and a complimentary in-room shower cap, you crept around behind bushes and ogled me. But the ache of happiness is too strong. Instead, I give him a look and go out to find the orange shorts and lie by the pool. I close my eyes and smile. I eat the sun.

 

RUBY BECOMES THE
first person ever to figure out what good all this Hindi can do me. Others have politely indulged me the obsession, but Ruby has keyed in on where the hidden cash and prizes lie, and not just for me, but for her and Priyanka, the young journalist she's brought along to the Rose Garden restaurant tonight. Ruby has a plan. She's come up with a scheme that's foolproof, she's decided, but all the same, she waits to spring it on me. No doubt because the plan involves substantial public humiliation on my part.

"Have you heard from Chirag?" Priyanka asks once the two of them are seated, with such obvious nonchalance, my chest tightens. Priyanka, lanky, with incandescent skin, is twenty-four, the age when the eligibility clock for a woman here starts to tick. To my increasing horror, I said I'd help her get hitched. Power had gone to my head on our first meeting, when she'd said, "No, do you know anyone?" after I'd asked if she was married.
You could arrange a marriage for someone just like that,
I realized then. I offered up Chirag, the computer student who, back in the States, used to come to my apartment to practice Hindi. Chirag was a Brahmin like her, I began, then tried to think what else. Uh, handsome (well, he wasn't ugly; I would have remembered). Smart. Eager to land a wife before embarking on the lucrative business of Java programming. The realization that the wife part was supposition faded as Priyanka and I imagined me helping her settle in the States. And so when Chirag, via e-mail, blithely dismissed his fate, I was a little stunned. He hadn't seemed reckless like that. "You've found a woman for me to marry?" he wrote back. "Interesting, but I'm nowhere near ready to get married." He didn't ask, How are your studies going? That much was clear: around the bend.