Dreaming in Hindi (43 page)

 

"
WE ARE HAVING A CHUTTI,
" Swami-ji says. He and Vidhu need to take a long weekend to go up to Jaipur, scout around for new quarters. The school is clearing out, moving on. This time, the cause isn't cow patty projectiles, but local whispering. Udaipur's the kind of Indian small town where if you so much as talk to the wrong person, your family's reputation is besmirched for the next three generations. Accumulate an institutional record of two death threats and two lawsuits in short order, and you're better off moving.

On the last real chutti we'd had, back at the end of February, I'd wanted to branch out, to take in as much of India as I could. In Benares, the ancient holy city to which I traveled, I saw wondrous things: a dog that was a light frosted blue except for where it had scratched itself pink, a langur scampering among the funeral pyres on the ghats. When I looked back and it was no longer there, I imagined I'd seen a vision of death: a long-tailed, chittering monkey? Made perfect sense.

On this time away, I had no desire to be dazzled. All I wanted now was to burrow farther into Rajasthan, as far in as I still had time for. I made arrangements to stay at a four-hundred-year-old horse estate an hour from town. "
This area is
graam?" I asked the driver on the rutted road out. I was surprised to find the word for "rural" coming out of my mouth, even more when he answered, as if I'd made sense. "
Yes, very
graam. "As we rumbled by thatched huts still visible in the dusk, I wondered,
What else is in there now?
Worlds within worlds within worlds in my head, none of them convertible.

My room at the estate was over the stables. Mornings I'd wake to the soft nickering of the Marwari stallions, sleek horses with curved ears that touched like lyres. At breakfast, the manager would fan me while I ate. He marveled at how things had changed around here. Ten years ago, the villagers would leave at four in the morning to walk to Udaipur and sell their tomatoes. Now they took the bus. Afterward, I'd return to my room and drift off again in the window seat. Once when I woke, a small, brown owl and a peacock were on a branch outside peering in. A peacock this close-up was shocking: six long feet of vain deep blues and rippling iridescent greens. He soon lost interest in me and fanned his tail for grooming, which had the effect of making the owl look timid and delicate by comparison. The birds were like the two parts of my life as I'd come to define them here, the one in India, the one before: both beautiful, but impossible to think of as related.

I spent afternoons translating Nand's poems into English. Toward dusk, a man in a turban would bring tea. I'd stretch out in the window seat and, for the first time since I'd come, allow myself to fully know how much I missed the States. Before, I couldn't have, it would have sunk me in misery:
still so far to go.
Now I saw that I could leave and come back anytime. I'd proved I could do something like this. I could do it another time, could bust my life open, if I ever had to, if my life ever grew that narrow again.

 

AT THE DEAF SCHOOL
, on my return, the boys are drawing horses. Anukul is absorbed in a book about Hemingway that's written in Hindi. "Ernest Hemingway had many Indian friends," he says.

"He did?"

"Yes, he was friends with the king of Bihar. Once he shot a cigarette out of his mouth." The Dustbin is hunched down in concentration.

"He did?"

"Yes, and he suicided."

"
Atmahatya,
" I said. I'd just learned the word.
Atma:
"soul."
Hatya:
"murder."

"And do you know why he killed himself?"

"Well, because he had a drinking problem—"

"No. Because he had too much royalties." Anukul translates: "'And the publisher gave him too much money for
A Moveable Feast.
Then he couldn't write.' This book, the children gave it to me. It says, 'Don't worry. Be happy.'"

Oh, that would have helped Hemingway,
I think. We segue into Hindi. "
My mind is not good because I am alone,
" he says. Rita, as per Indian custom, went to her parents' to have the baby. Anukul now has a son, but a theoretical one. It'll be weeks before she returns.

"
Why don't Renee and I take you to a restaurant?
" I say. He looks uneasy, wants to know why am I suggesting something like that. Restaurants are suspect here. Because how do you know they're not doing something taboo out of sight, like putting food that was on someone else's plate on yours? I appreciate this position, but it creates a dilemma. In my New York soul, I'm unsure how I'm supposed to make friends with people who won't go to restaurants.

"
Okay,
" Anukul finally agrees. "
But I will not use a knife and fork.
"

We continue to catch up while all around, pink, green, cerulean horses form. I am looking
sundar,
"lovely," he says with brotherly regard. It's his opinion I've lost weight at the haveli. And what about him? How does he look? Oh
sundar, sundar,
I reply, and he agrees. "I think I am photogenic," he says. At the end of the hour, a woman, a teacher, appears in the doorway, makes an announcement. "Now we will play," he says.

Out in the courtyard, sunlight is filtering down through the canopy, giving everything the consistency of memory. A volleyball net's been set up for a game. The teachers and I take white plastic chairs. In front of us, on the ground, an excited group of boys is expressing the sincere hope that Australia will get trounced in that night's cricket. Once a kid's written "Australia" on his palm, I have no trouble following the sentences that fly through the air. The boys' hands are balletic, sure; they swing out in graceful arcs. Out here, their hands are so different from the way they are in the classroom, where the signing is determined, exact and choppy; staccato. I'm remarking on that as Anukul looks up from another book he's gotten absorbed in, an illustrated guide to American Sign a friend of mine's just sent over. The two things converge in my head—Anukul, the cricket fans' hands—as he sighs and says with detectable sorrow, "My children do not know grammar, and I cannot teach them." I glance at the kids. No grammar? But grammar is the tracks of a language, and the boys in front of me are speeding on greased rails. No grammar? But the boys, in complicated bullet train sentences, are prophesying Australia's demise.

Players take their places on opposite sides of the net. The cricket fans settle down. I continue thinking about their hands, about something else Anukul said not long ago: "The children have so many words even we don't know. A suspicion has begun to prod me, that the kids have their own language—that they've made one up, are making one up. All year, perhaps, I've been watching a language form and not known it. The idea of a hidden world laid out in plain sight fascinates me, and I'd give anything to know if it's true. But the moment passes. The canopy filters the light but not the heat. In this densely hot afternoon, verification—of anything—seems impossible.

The moment recedes, Australia is trampled, and for weeks, months, long after I return, the question continues to nag at me: But is that what I really saw? Were they?

 

"
OH, POOR DEAF
children always do that," a man I'm having a business lunch with is saying. This is now maybe two months after the volleyball game, not long after I'm back in the States. I'm still mute and reduced: my old personality is no longer there to inhabit, and I can't find a new one. I'm gawky and lost when I meet friends, don't get jokes; it's embarrassing. Everything intimidates me, even my old apartment, which looks as if it's been decorated by someone else, someone smarter and more appealing.

"They always create language," the man says, he's read something about it, and I'm amazed to find that any of the mysteries of India are approachable from here. I set out to learn all I can.

The first time anyone documented the fact that deaf children who've grown up isolated will, if they're brought together with other kids like them, begin to invent a language was in Nicaragua, several years after the Sandinista revolution, in 1993. An American linguist named Judy Kegl had gone down to spend time at a deaf school that Hope Somoza, the dictator's wife, had opened sixteen years before, in 1977.

Up until then, education for people who were hearing impaired had been limited in Nicaragua, available only to the few who'd been lucky enough to make their way to the small number of schools for the deaf in existence. When the first kids arrived at this new school, they'd been living, as far as communication went, fairly solitary lives. They'd had, for the most part, no education and minimal contact with other deaf people. They communicated the way children who've been raised like this do: using "home signs." Called
mimicas
in Spanish, these are crude pantomimes that convey basic desires—
eat, ice cream, drink
— the equivalent of pidgin. The signs will get the job done, but they won't develop into a language—not without engagement with another home signer—which means kids forced to get by on these signs alone will, by about age ten, be stranded permanently without full language. Critical periods of language acquisition exist for both the hearing and the deaf. The consequences of this can be grim: a broader life curtailed, intelligence stunted—for the development of cognitive abilities depends on language developing as well.

You can find deaf people who got trapped in that stage in a lot of poor countries. In Managua, they're almost always over age forty-five. "In Managua today, you get the ones, forty-five, fifty years old and above, who can't sign at all," Ann Senghas, head of the Language Acquisition and Development Research Laboratory at Barnard College, was telling me when we met several years after I'd had that lunch. Senghas first went to Nicaragua as Judy Kegl's assistant in 1989, when Kegl visited a vocational training institute for the deaf. Senghas has been back a number of times since. "People that age were all separated when they were young. They still use home signs," she said. She was trying to illustrate for me how, twenty-five years or so after the school opened, you can observe how the collective process of language evolution was pushed ahead with each class. The stages the school's language went through are as profoundly marked as geologic layers.

"Then you find the people who are thirty-five to forty-five today. They were the first pack of children who entered the school in seventy-seven, and they're a huge jump from nonsigners. They have a lot of vocabulary. They have a lot of structure that holds their sentences together.

"Then you go to the twenty-five-year-olds, and suddenly the language they're using becomes an easier one to learn. It's organized. It has nouns and verbs, and it has morphology, and it starts to look like a sign language."

Go to the little kids, she said, and you'll find a language that's really smart and fast. "They have more signs per second, more prepositions per second: they're packing in more information."

Kegl, on her first visit to the school, had begun to make similar comparisons, though without fully understanding what she was seeing. At first it seemed as if everyone at the school was using only the most fragmented, rudimentary signs, but before long she realized that she'd gotten that impression because she'd been talking only to the older kids. Among the youngest, the signing was a whole other creation—far more nuanced, far more dimensions, complete with tense markers and proper word order. She began to question what had caused these differences and soon arrived at an answer: the pidgin of the initial group of students had evolved into a creole among the ones after that, and from there, group by group, it had grown into a full, vibrant language. That was obvious by simply watching the various classes.

All this had happened in only sixteen years, without intervention from the teachers, who'd initially attempted to hold classes in signed Spanish. When word got out of this spontaneous invention of a language, the linguistic community was riveted.

"The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history," the linguist Steven Pinker told a reporter from the
New York Times.
"We've been able to see how it is that children—not adults—generate language, and we have been able to record it happening in great scientific detail. And it's the first and only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of thin air." Senghas, quoted in the same article, likened being there to being present at the big bang.

Inevitably, perhaps, sniping started up in the deaf community.
When Kegl brought some of the Nicaraguan students to tour a prominent American school for the deaf, remarks were made about her "dog-and-pony show." Some people alleged that this wasn't any discovery, that what she'd done was teach them ASL. "Do you know how long it takes to teach someone American sign?" Senghas scoffed when we spoke. She had short, dirty-blond hair and a manner of speaking that was both hip and down-to-earth. What was her name sign in Nicaragua? I asked. "Oh, it's embarrassing." She laughed. "I used to have one of those rat-tail cuts. That's my name sign: 'Rat Tail.'"

Senghas has returned to Managua often to document the language as it has evolved. In the beginning, she says, this was like "trying to hit a moving target. Changes just zoomed through." She recalled how one year, everyone still signed using only intransitive verbs: "
Man give ... cup ... woman receive.
" By the next time she visited, the sentences had acquired syntax and transitive verbs; the signers had discovered the advantages of transitive objects: "
Man give cup to woman.
" Observations could now be more complex.

Some of these changes happened so quickly, it was like watching a language evolve in hypertrophic fast-forward. Once, after a lecture during which Senghas described one change she'd witnessed, a historical linguist told her that "it represented five hundred years of normal change in five years," she said.

Senghas has an ability, perhaps honed from spending so much time around children, to make complex concepts readily accessible. "It's so clear these changes came from the younger children," she said. "Normally, kids are exposed to all kinds of sounds that aren't language—dogs barking, typically—and they won't try to sort those out. But they will try to sort out language." This is, she observed, a natural impulse. "So the new kids come into this world of signers in the school, and they see those kids doing something and they learn it quickly. But it isn't quite sorted out, so each new group continues to organize it. And each year, another fifteen kids enter the school, so each year you get another iteration of learning." She used the analogy of cleaning your room. "You start to put things in boxes, and those boxes start to take on categories. The children build categories."