Dreaming in Hindi (7 page)

 

AT THE PALACE
when I visit, the air is sweet with jasmine. Even in stolid Sector Eleven, there are sudden whiffs of perfume; of sandalwood; of something shadowy, violet. At school, two weeks on now, we fight indolence, push on to headier realms, though no matter how high the plane, the conversation is stilted. "
Yes, I like the film very much.
" We never just like anything, we like it very much; extra words. "
But to me, the ending was not a surprise.
" "Surprising" is a vocabulary stretch, plus you risk using the wrong suffix or infix, turning out "surprised person" or "person who causes surprises." Hindi has a vast series where, by adding a short
a
in the center of a verb, you make it causative. "To eat" becomes "to cause something to be eaten"—that is, "to feed."

"
Yes. I see—no, I saw...
" The teachers, who all deserve acting awards for animated enthusiasm in the face of continued babbling, smile and nod vigorously, make the
Come on!
gesture, curled fingers. "
I see—saw—the ending in forward.
" Slight frown. "
In advance?
" Precise nod! Delighted smile!

"Kathy-ji is saying she did not like the ending, that it was, can we say"—introduction of new word—"stereotyped,
ghisa-pita.
" Vidhu turns and writes the word on the board. He's been planking sentences with English on the sly, thank God. "
Stereotyped. To stereotype someone. Stereotype
"—the Hindi word—"
means
'beaten and rubbed.'"

Occasionally, they throw in an idiom without alerting us. "
To beat someone with shoes?
" I repeat, puzzled. "
To beat someone with shoes—yes!
" the small teacher, Vanita, replies, thinking I'm unsure of the script. "
It means?" "Oh! It's an expression,
" she says, but before I can ask for what, the class moves on.

Words rain down on us all day. A monsoon of words, so furious that I pull away sometimes, pull down. I hear the tat-ting at night and can't decipher it,
aane-jaanewaala,
bits of phrases from the day coursing through my head. At night, I dream in Hindi I can't understand. The language has to stay fixed, or I'll lose the nuance:
Aap,
not
ap. Ghar
not
gora.
I know it when they say it, then two days later, it's gone. My English sometimes now feels spotty, as if, in preserving the new words as long as possible, my brain keeps the old ones tamped down.

At night, in white India, the Hindi snatches keep me awake, chittering sometimes till dawn. During the day, I'm safe in the slow dream. At night, a terror comes on, steals in through the window from a distant place, from over deserts and oceans, past the squeal of a million sounds. "With each new language, you acquire a new soul," a Slovakian proverb goes, and for this rebirth, I've chosen one of the most inauspicious birthdays possible, in any calendar, Indian or Gregorian. For I arrived in India on the fourth day of the dark quarter of Bhadrapada, Hindu year 2057: September 6, 2001.

Five days later, when I went to collect Helaena at the palace for dinner, a uniformed man at the front desk held out the phone. "I think you better come up and see what's on television," she said, her voice so strained it made me check his face. The man looked away. And that, always, will be my first memory of the day when bhram savaged the world: a man turning his face to the wall.

In New York, it was ten in the morning.

 

"
I AM YOUR SISTERMOTHERFRIEND
," the pretty Brahmin teacher, Samta, said, wiping tears from my face when we met up at the school, in the hour before it shut down.

Time spun so fast then, past and future converged. Yesterday was tomorrow: impossible to say how long we'd been at the palace, holed up with Helaena. Two days? Five? Tomorrow was yesterday: parapets and citadels, crows cawing from towers, implacable ancient white stone—in the palace, it was always the seventeenth century. Murals of elephant fights ran the length of the walls. In the Diwar Gallery, the eyes of framed maharanas followed us as we moved, a trompe l'oeil perfected over 566 portraits.

Sharp studs in doors to pierce attack elephants' breasts, lintels set low to crack barreling intruders' heads—the architecture of defense was reassuring. Murderous men had clearly been thwarted here, though they'd swept down on horses, not from the sky.

At the front desk the first night, a late arrival thundered, "The Philistines have done this thing." When I couldn't sleep, I'd slipped out of Helaena's room, hoping for news. At daybreak, when I padded back, spots of orange lights in the high tower windows gave the impression of startled eyes.

On the second day, the palace employees held a peace march. Cooks and chauffeurs and receptionists in saris, a ragtag band with hand-lettered signs. Helaena and I joined them outside the maharana's quarters.
ANYONE WHO COMMITS A TERRORIST ACT CANNOT SAY HE IS RELIGIOUS
, the posterboard beside me scolded.

The door in front of us snapped open. The maharana in sweatpants and a yellow polo shirt delivered a speech from the step. He was short, with a fuzzy white beard that made me think of a hedgehog. In the middle of his speech, Helaena cut short a giggle. "I bought Sri-ji that shirt in Bombay," she said out of the side of her mouth, using the honorific everyone at the palace did. Sri-ji, "venerable lord," pronounced tightlipped and southern, came out like "squee-gee." The door clicked shut. Someone handed us white candles. Helaena hoisted hers, and I followed as she led the line through the bazaar.
AMERICA, INDIA IS WITH YOU
, the front banner declared, in English, though most people in the throngs couldn't have read it. By now, most Westerners had fled.

On the third day, there were tiffs. The Whisperer complained about having to watch the CNN loop again. "I just don't want to prepare anymore," she said when we voted to postpone school a few days more. She'd spent the downtime studying verbs. "I just think it's unhealthy to stay in this. All my friends back home are starting to get over it, okay?"

All my friends, in e-mails, had the slow tone of witness. "It's four days after, and everything below 14th Street is still closed," one wrote. Hearing about this thing from so far away sharpened worry, the way when you can't see a loved one who's ill, your distress grows more acute. But when friends asked, "Shouldn't you come home?" I said I couldn't. My truculent, sweet-talk city, tricks of will exposed: I couldn't look. "But the attack was there," I answered. Or I explained how the decades here were rearranged, were like barriers. "In Udaipur, we're muffled from events. This town is in a time warp, though it's hard to say which time. When neighbors wave and ask, 'Who was that who walked you home?' I think the fifties. When rickshaws whiz by, looking like Model Ts from the back, it's the mutated Indian twenties. But when I go to the doctor and find myself next to a tribal woman with an enormous gold nose ring, or when I talk to a Rajput, a member of the aristocratic warrior caste—the men have knife-straight backs and villainous handlebar mustaches—I can see the links to the Middle Ages so clearly, it's startling."

I was muffled, true, but not so swathed I couldn't perceive the shape the twenty-first century had taken here. Anti-Muslim sentiments were running high. Down by the Clock Tower, boxes scrawled with slogans denouncing Pakistan had been set on fire. In Bapu Bazaar, they'd burned Osama Bin Laden in effigy. George Bush afterward, too, though. Osama Bin Laden, I heard for a fact, had ordered all Americans abroad killed on sight. I heard that the year before, they'd caught a member of a terrorist Islamic organization living just outside of town, and this was a fact. The man who told me repeated the name of the group, something like "Ul-ka-da." The borders had closed, all flights to the States had been canceled. You couldn't get out now if you tried.

Worry gnawed holes in illusion. For a time after I moved back in with the Jains, I'd watch Alka as she went about her chores and wonder,
Would she harbor us if it came to that? Would she, they, remain kind?

"What if we can't leave?" I asked the other students on a weekend when we all went away to Kumbhalgarh, a mountain resort run by the maharana's nephew, Aditya. This was when we were all still speaking. We were slouched down then in Helaena's room, watching
Star Wars
as she got ready for Aditya to get off work. "What if we're stuck?" I said. "Where would we get money?"

"The institute," Helaena told her reflection in the mirror. She turned, freezing the mascara wand in an exclamation. "Or we'd go to the embassy. They'd fly us out." But the marine who answered at the embassy when I later called to register our presence didn't sound like he was gearing up for evacuation. He couldn't take down information then; could I call back? "Well, ma'am," he said when I asked what we should do till his schedule cleared. "I would not go into a dark alley. Don't wear a shirt that says Tennessee or anything. And just don't act like an ugly American."

"I always make a big deal out of things in my mind, then they always turn out all right," Harold said in a pointed singsong. On the screen behind him, Darth Vader was choking a guy using mental telepathy. Earlier, on the terrace, a waiter had been flipping through broadcasts on the television above the bar. Hindi, English, Urdu, he made the news stutter as the same image showed on every channel. Men in white robes, their faces contorted, were kicking at a burning straw man. Its grinning Western head had been painted to look obscenely simian.

Harold had sighed then. He sighed again now. "I always get all worked up, and then nothing ever happens," he said in a calm, instructive voice. He'd had it with this whole belabored business. The Whisperer winched her face in commiseration:
What did he think? So had she.

Kumbhalgarh was tony in the extreme: silver chandeliers in the great room, where women offered rose-scented goblets; a gray stone staircase threading up a hill through greenery so wild, it concealed all but squares of the cottages. On a late-afternoon jeep tour of a wildlife preserve that Aditya had arranged, we cut through swarms of butterflies the color of morning glories, rocked past lavender and pussy willow under a sky streaked with violet. "What's the word for 'sky,' d'ya know?" I asked Harold on the seat beside me.

"
Aakaash,
" he said with a bored sigh;
who doesn't?

"
Aakaash,
" I repeated.
Aakaash
—from the Sanskrit, I could tell. Already, bloodlines were showing. Elegant or jawbreaker, the word was Sanskrit. Gravelly or plangent like a sarod, Persian. The ability to distinguish had developed so fast, was so sure, I mistook it for a portent of mastery. But in fact, rats have exhibited a similar talent in the lab, are able to demonstrate, by pressing levers for pellets, that they can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese in just weeks.

Aakaash
—as he said the word, we were bumping through high grass at sundown, a time when cooling breezes would have made me lightheaded anyway, even if the driver hadn't just said that at this hour, leopards could appear; even if I hadn't been tipping my head back to examine every passing branch. Forever after, "sky" for me in Hindi is less a color than a charged sense of devouring revelations about to come. Or that word for sky is; the language has a dozen.

Soon after, back in town, the other students reached a tacit agreement: what we'd seen on TV at the palace had been sci-fi. Some FX movie like
Escape from New York,
probably on the Murdoch channel. Among ourselves, if someone, me, mentioned this thing, conversation would falter, then we'd return to the subject at hand: Hindi. Days went by without discussion in English, till sometimes when the e-mails from home came in, it was like I was learning about it all over. But that was also the effect of ripple shock.

One afternoon on the street, I heard unholy screams and saw that two men outside a house had a pig lassoed by the neck. The animal was crying frantically and choking itself as it raced circles against the rope, while other pigs squealed and fled. I knew I shouldn't watch, but I did, as one man grabbed the doomed pig's legs and flipped it on its back, and the other, flashing metal, leaned down, and the cries grew more terrified, as I raced from it, too, my fingers pressed into my ears. When I stopped at the corner and turned around, the pig was no longer struggling. In my room, I couldn't stop crying.
You're a spoiled American,
I thought.
What do you think you've been eating all these years? Lovingly culled meat "products"? Happy cows? Happy pigs?
"I've never seen anything be killed before. Never," I said out loud, which brought the next thought. "Oh, God, those people," I said, and cried harder.

 

"
AMONG THE MAITHILS
, time is like a spider's web," an Indian anthropologist named Baidyanath Saraswati writes; the Maithils are a subcaste of Brahmins. "Like a tree with branches spread out; like a river with tributaries progressing relatively in relation to the surface of the earth; or like a lamp flickering; but
not
an arrow like movement."

In the center of time's web, in the sly tugging present, I watch a fat woman standing in front of a Birla Cement sign. Her sari is the same birthday-party yellow as the Birla ad—and the Oasis mobile ad, and the Rupa Macro Man Briefs ad, and the "straight-dial" phone booth signs. Apparently, there's only one loud yellow paint available here. Bara tempos, oversize mass-transit rickshaws, also all canary. An ox cart rumbles past. On the ox's horns, a ring of fading yellow around a ring of fading blue.

Evenings on the mountain above Fateh Sagar lake, the lights leading to the Monsoon Palace glitter, a crooked line of diamonds in the dark. Even in these circumstances, India can't stay white for long. At night, when it can't fill itself in with colors, it adopts the glitter of jewels.

 

"
WE ARE SHOCKED
and saddened by this dastardly attack," the e-mail from Delhi headquarters had said, adding that it would be better if we didn't go out alone. Soon my social life consisted of field trips. On the first, we toured a Styrofoam gallery where the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, and Vishnu's-head-complete-with-snakes had been rendered in polystyrene. At a folk performance, a man who looked like the performer Prince in a dress balanced ten clay jugs on his head—on a metal cup—and walked daintily around the stage by rocking on the edges of a metal bowl. "The dance represents a lot of time in the desert with nothing to do," Helaena said.