Dreaming in Hindi (5 page)

Probably things like, "Udaipur is the city of lakes, but lack of rains means lack of water," one sentence that cleared the wall. There was a drought on, year four. I got that, even visually, even with my limited knowledge of the town, just two buildings at first: the school with its side lot of dust and weeds, and the Quality Inn, where a speckling of dead bugs starred the half-empty pool.

In a diarrhea lecture, I was identified as a troublemaker. "Bored? I am boring you?" the guest speaker, a doctor, suddenly rasped. It was hot and late in the day, and my gaze had gone unfocused. I hadn't meant to let my attention wander from the subject of stools, but it had. Dr. Sharma stared. The other students waited. "
Nahin, nahin,
" I said: "No, no." "With a subject like this?" No one sniggered. We were in India now, where irreverence was unfathomable. With 333,000 gods to revere, irreverence was outnumbered.

The lecture was in English, the only one that was. After days of disappearing sound, I was grateful for discourse on the consistency of stools. They should not float. If you don't feel like defecating by yourself in the natural way, then it's known as constipation. The Indian teachers looked rapt.

Sixty-two percent of the country's desert is in Rajasthan, the lectures continued. Eighty-four percent of the marble is mined here. Percentages were easy, they wrote those on the board, but never dates, not even during the architecture talk. In India, I recalled, time is circular, a perception that's been shaped by the concept of reincarnation. People go through rebirth after rebirth and always end up back in the same place: here. "Yesterday" and "tomorrow" are the same word:
kal.
"The day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow" are both
parson.
The concept of "weekend" here is an imported one. All days in the spin are the same:
aaj,
"today." In the West, in English, by way of contrast, time is linear—the speakers move ahead, they put things behind them—while in China, in Mandarin, it's vertical. Even when Anglophone Chinese switch over into their adopted tongue, one study found, they continue to imagine the minutes rising up to the sky. But in India, in Hindi, it's always right now. In the right here and now, flattened by jet lag, I tried to get used to swirling time.

The women teachers were appointed to take us shopping for supplies. There were two on staff, opposites in all but caste, Brahmin. Samta was tall and in her twenties. She had the extreme good looks common to Rajasthan: the high defined cheekbones, the long, heavy-lidded eyes seen in miniature paintings, the full mouth that made her appear voluptuous, though she was in fact slender. The effect was striking, but offset some by the daunting amounts of sunshine in her personality. "I am com-ple-te-ly fine!" she'd chirrup each morning, an objectionable sentence when you had jet leg.

Vanita, tiny, a year or two older, had the worried air of a titmouse. Her thin, intelligent face was pinched, the result, perhaps, of studying night and day for a master's. Whereas Samta's saris were rippling, languorous, Vanita's were starched to within an inch of their lives, even the
dupatta
scarves. Her scarves never lay down on the job, but remained frozen in a fluff, giving the impression that a hooded snake had reared up behind and was about to swallow her.

Four teachers, four students: it was a neat one-to-one ratio for a while—till fate, or karma, or the rebound effects of poor judgment began picking off numbers on either side.

For the shopping expedition, we hopped tootling little buses. At every stop, more passengers squeezed on, till boys were clinging to the sides. In the bazaar, the sun was so hot, it sapped all energy with its brilliance. I bought a shortwave radio to catch the news, a plastic alarm clock that played a Hindu chant and had Vishnu the protector on its face. With each purchase, in that sun, my new language eroded more. When I stopped for a pale green blow dryer and Samta made a teasing remark, I was too drained to say, "
I don't understand.
" I pretended to laugh along, but she read my reaction as forced. "
I was joking,
" I heard her apologize through Hindi. "
I make jokes a lot.
" What, I wondered, had she possibly said? "Now you will be able to style your hair"?

Photographs were taken, for identity cards. "Why did he pick these?" one of the students complained in a whisper when she saw the photographer's choices. In the black-and-white squares, we all looked shocked; we were the picture of culture shock.

"Maybe he sent the others to the paper for the marriage ads," the girl with the southern accent cracked.

"Yeah, you'll get a lot of offers with those," the one male student, a guy whom I will refer to as Harold, said with a chuckle that ended in a
hyuck.

A placement quiz consumed half a morning. "That exam really showed me the direction this course is going to take," Harold said afterward. He was portly, with robust red spots on his cheeks, and wore black Metallica T-shirts and tight khaki shorts. His combination of pursuits was also unlikely: deciphering Sanskrit texts, quoting Rush Limbaugh. In the States, he'd been in telesales till he saw he could parlay an unfinished South Asian studies major into a yearlong stipend in India.

Harold had come to my attention in Delhi with the "one hair" comment, and again when he'd been led weeping from a first-aid talk, sobbing that he missed his wife. He'd gotten himself out of Sexual Harassment, too, a symposium that took up half the afternoon. To the Indians at the institute, sexual harassment was a terrifying concept. Even its name, with its clacking, hissing sounds, was ominous. The idea behind it, actionable sexual attentions, was purely Western, and so no one understood precisely what it meant. But academic advisers who materialized throughout the year had made it clear that in America, whence most students came, this was the most serious of all offenses. Lawsuits from across the seas could come flaming down on any staff member who abetted the behavior. Careers could be singed to charred stumps. In Delhi, an afternoon of role-playing was planned, to armor the students.
Your teacher is requiring you to stay after class to discuss the test you failed. What will you do?
Harold, getting a load of the agenda, had had to make a phone call.

Now in Udaipur, he was back up and running. "Direction?" I said. The test had been simple translation, no big deal: "Five chickens are on the table," that kind of thing.

"You didn't notice how many words were Sanskritized?" he said. I was, in fact, familiar with the concept of Sanskritized Hindi. This is when words, often ones of Persian or Arabic—that is, Muslim—origin are excised and replaced with others that have Sanskrit etymology. Since street Hindi contains a fair amount of Sanskrit words to begin with, Sanskritization isn't an overhaul so much as an intensification. A purification, by some lights, the extreme right wing's. When the language has been Sanskritized, it's called
shudh
Hindi.
Shudh
translates as "pure," but it can mean "uncontaminated," and in a xenophobic sense.

Sanskritizing often signals refinement. Even to those who can't understand it, Sanskrit sounds elevated, majestic, its long looping words like scented poetry. It conjures incense and devotion, as it's the language of the Vedas, adds a sonorous beauty when it's folded into Hindi. Cultured gentlemen speak this way. But there's another kind of Sanskritized Hindi as well, this one ugly. Hindu nationalists also like their Hindi Sanskritized, and in their case, the desire is to establish Hindu dominance, to purge the language of foreign elements. Like fundamentalists everywhere, the right-wing nationalists exalt a mythologized version of the past: an India that was
shudh,
without Muslims. They subscribe to
Hindutva
—loosely, "Hinduism above all"—and want Muslims to either get out or accept their inferior position in society. Whenever the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power, as it was now throughout the country and in concentrated numbers in Rajasthan, you hear a lot more Sanskritized Hindi. Persian words then become all-too-tender reminders of past Muslim incursions. Linguistically, the invaders have to be routed. In India, language has always been a battlefield.

I knew all this at the time of the placement test. I just didn't know what direction the chickens meant we'd be taking.

Orientation stretched on, till late the second afternoon, I began to hallucinate speech. Summoned to a back room, I found the four teachers posed stiffly in a half circle for a conversation quiz.
Won't you please have a seat?
Swami-ji said with his hand, gallantly sweeping the air. The more panicked I became, the more I convinced myself I was understanding words and not, as was the case, reading gestures.
We are delighted you could join us,
Vidhu said, judging by his broad smile. "
Thank you,
" I ventured. "
I'm glad to be here.
" No one frowned, and I was emboldened by having discovered the technique of psychic language acquisition. Samta leaned forward and asked a question. "
Are you enjoying the town?
"seemed likely, to which I gave the likely response: "
Yes, yes, it's very nice.
" The teachers' smiles stayed fixed even as the talk degenerated and I seized on any word.
She surely did not mean to say her father lives in a brothel,
one said with his darting glance.
I am certain your assumption is correct,
a colleague replied, also ocularly.

Orientation proceeded, through several turns of the karmic wheel, till it threatened to become a fifth
yuga,
a fifth mythological epoch. Till it became its own world in which even I understood that if you were female, you were asked to keep a distance from host family males; that at departure, clearance from the Indian income tax authorities would be necessary. That traffic sense here was poor.

It continued, through tangles of contingencies, two discussions of Indian language groups, a visit to Foreigners Registration, till the student with the whispery voice said that she would not fill out bank papers one more time and the year lurched forward. We began.

Orientation finally wrapped up. Immediately after, we were moved in with host families, the three of us who didn't have one. Helaena, the student with the southern accent, already did, or she did in a way: the maharana.

Helaena had made an impression on me in those first days with her easy knowledge of India. One morning, on tea break, I expressed puzzlement as to why, when I'd gone to investigate the Shaping Sense gym across from the school, the slope-browed proprietor had scowled when I'd asked about the yoga he advertised. Mr. Ahmad, I related, had been too busy overseeing the hammering of huge holes in the wall to answer questions about the StairMaster, of which there was none anyway. "Because he's a gangster," Helaena explained from the couch where she was stretched out. In Hindi and English, she had a drawl. She also had wide green eyes, a fine, straight nose, and a mouth that at rest naturally pouted, all of which combined to drive the Indians to distraction. To them, she looked exactly like the Lord God Krishna, who, though male, is considered the embodiment of female beauty.

In the States, Helaena was pretty, in a milk-drinking way. In India, she was an avatar—the cause of stampedes in the streets and, before she dyed her blond hair brown, frequent deliveries of gifts from unwanted suitors. Kings fell at her feet. The local one, the maharana, had taken one look when she'd arrived several weeks in advance of classes and moved her into the palace. Personal assistance might be needed at receptions, he'd hinted. She'd wasted no time dressing for the possible job. Already American Express was compounding interest on the fifty entry-level saris she'd purchased at the snooty Mansai Plaza boutique. They were tacking on late fees for the biweekly arm waxes she'd been getting in order to look
pakka,
proper, an aesthetic that for women also called for a headscarf, neatly gathered hair, a gaze kept modestly on the floor. "I like being pakka," she'd said earlier. "Back home they assume I'm a flirt just because I'm a little outgoing. Here they assume I'm good." Other than grooming and stopping by the school, she spent her days watching
Friends
on palace cable, being driven around in curtained palace cars, and analyzing the mystical effect the subcontinent had on her looks and vice versa. "Ramu, my teacher last year, said, 'No, you
are
a god'," she'd said. This was her third Hindi language program.

"They should call that place Shaping You Senseless," she said now, gingerly tapping her newly pierced nose. "Gyms in India are hangouts for gangsters. Muslim gangsters go to one, Hindus go to another.

"Hey!" she said, introducing a change in topic. "When we get our place, we could rent you a StairMaster from Ahmedabad." She'd been campaigning for everyone to get a collective, off-the-record apartment, "so you could have privacy from those Jains," she offered, referring to my clamorous new host family. And so she could be shielded from prying eyes, for she was in the middle of an astonishing subcontinental Daisy Miller maneuver. Two weeks after the maharana moved her in, she'd begun enacting plans, matrimonially speaking, to nail his nephew.

"I'm fine at the Jains'," I said. I was. The only trouble I'd had so far was calculating how many of them there were—they always appeared in either fives or tens—and trying to keep up when they talked at once. Over dinner, they'd ask questions simultaneously or in round robin.

JAIN
1:
How much did you pay for the radio?

ME
:
Five hundred rupees? No, I think it was six.

JAIN
1 (to the kitchen at large):
She is telling us she paid five hundred rupees for the radio.

JAIN
2
TO JAIN
1:
Five hundred?

JAIN
1: Haan.
She is telling us five hundred.