Dreaming in Hindi (9 page)

But then what if something occurred when you were between worlds, when you were in a fragile language that was still evolving? If you can't re-create that particular half language you understood it in—and how would you reproduce the exact tangle of errors and misperceptions and understandings?—do you not get relief? Maybe those weeks can't ever be faded.

Though maybe that first concentration of wonder can't be either. So far, that's still full color.

 

LATE ONE AFTERNOON
, toward the end of September, we brought the shortwave radio out into the drive, the wives, girls, and I. We arranged ourselves in a line along the curb, under a pink-flecked sky, and I placed the radio in front of us. Tensing for English, I fiddled with the dial, but all I got was a spin of sound, metallic screeches dropping to moans, the restrained tones of argument or confinement. In the faded voices from other worlds, I could hear I was very far away.

I'd caught a scratchy band of BBC, was frowning to listen, when Alka said something I couldn't understand. I glanced at her oldest daughter. Alka nodded permission. "She says you shouldn't get married," the daughter said as Alka watched me with a faint, amused smile. I had the strangest sense she knew I'd lied about being forever single.

"
You have a good life,
" she said.

"
Haan!
" I said. "
I'm not lonely. I have a lot of friends. And husbands ...
" I paused, not sure if New York wisecracks converted here.
Oh, hell,
I thought, and went ahead. "
And husbands are a lot of trouble.
"

Her face broke into a grin as the meaning went through. "
Haaan!
" she exclaimed, and held up her palm.

Meena stared at me dully while we waited for her to catch up. "
Haan! Haan!
" she cried suddenly, as she got the gist. The night before, Jain Dad 2 hadn't rolled home till 1
A.M.
Then we sat on the curb saying "
haan, haan, haan
" as the sun began to drop down.

The sky had turned the bright honking pink of a cut-rate sari when the front gate opened and the Whisperer walked in. She gave me the smile of a fellow sufferer, nodded curtly at the wives. The Whisperer regarded the entire consolidated Jain family as shifty characters who needed watching, for reasons I couldn't understand but she often tried to explain. "They wear evil faces when they think we're not looking," she said one night when we were hanging out in her room. Her voice was knowing, controlled.

"They do?" I said. Mine was light, ready for the joke when it came. She stared grimly at her desk. "Do you know the grandmother calls you the
niche wali?
" she asked. The downstairs dweller—I was. "Do you know that can mean Satan?"

In the drive, we waited till the Whisperer went inside, then resumed talking. How was Helaena? Alka wanted to know. Helaena had been a topic of conversation since she'd stopped by one night to pick me up. "
Tell her your family says she's very beautiful,
" the wives had said after, fawningly.

It was looking like the nephew might marry her, I said. "
Sex ke bare me, Ameriki auraten stress-free hain,
" Alka observed: "When it comes to sex, American women are stress-free." With
Baywatch
on eternal replay here, with Hollywood imports, centuries from now American women would still be known as vacuous high earners who'd go down on you on a dime. Alka's sparse English was salted with bits of American advertisements. "Tension-free!" she'd say, an ad plug that had been left to float forever, divorced of its product but still sell, sell, selling.

A slate-colored ink was spreading across the sky when Alka looked at me and said, apropos of nothing, "You are a good woman." In English, the one time she ever allowed me the indulgence—to be sure I understood. The reprieve was brief. When I returned from the cybercafe that night, she was leaning on the railing, captain of the house. "
Shubh rati,
" she called down. "
Shubh bratik,
" I replied. "
Shubh rati,
" she said, and we went inside.

 

SWAMI-JI ANNOUNCED THAT
the school would close again, on October 2, Gandhi's birthday. "
We are having a chutti,
" he said: a holiday. With India's many religions and Swami-ji's spontaneous inclinations, we had chuttis a lot. This time when the school closed, we were allowed to roam free. Locally, this thing was receding into the past, though the occasional bus driver rumor still whipped through the town.

"I heard American troops bombed Pakistan and Afghanistan," Harold whispered one Tuesday afternoon in film class. We were watching a hyperbolic Bollywood movie, and life was far eclipsing the plot. Or what I could make of it. Swami-ji banned subtitles. Most weeks, though, he'd post himself behind us and, getting choked up, break his own veto. "I know now he is my father," you could hear him mumble above the music from back near the kitchen. "
Va!
" he'd sometimes exclaim, beside himself.

Between assists, I'd frown at the screen. Had the unfaithful husband really said, "Boys will be boys"? He looked too sensitive to have pulled that.

Hindi films were unendurable—horrible honking songs, bleary cinematic clichés—till something clicked and I became a convert. Punch for punch, I saw, you couldn't beat them for high drama. In one we'd watched, there was an illicit pregnancy, a hinted-at abortion, a suicide, a wedding, and repeated shooting of a groom on horseback, all before the opening credits. "
The film demonstrates what Shakespeare could have done had he had access to automatic rifles,
" I wrote, or some facsimile thereof, in the movie journal we had to keep.

After a while, I'd watch, rapt, and try to employ a technique a translator, a polyglot of extraordinary natural talent, had told me about back in the States. At thirty-eight, the man was up to speed in twenty-eight languages and occasionally, for work, had to rev up in others. Then, he said, he knew a trick. "You do?" I breathed, leaning in for the secret. "Yes," he said. "You want to find a soap opera from the country, find someone on it who looks like you, then watch it every day and imitate her. Like this," he said, and reeled off a line in Hindi to show how the technique would work for me. I was floored—not by the tip, but by his accent and syntax: perfect, though Hindi wasn't in his top twenty-eight.

After meeting him, I grew curious to see if there was a profile of the virtuoso language learner, discovered that the entire linguistic community is, too. Everyone knows there are people with stellar abilities, the ones who absorb Italian or Spanish as if they're breathing it in. But no one can figure out what accounts for this. In the 1970s, an Israeli researcher proposed what might be called the "low self-esteem theory of language learning excellence." People with permeable ego boundaries have an advantage, he claimed, possibly because it makes them more like children. To test the theory, he plied a group of subjects with alcohol and Valium. Their pronunciation did improve, but this wasn't quite the blockbuster evidence needed to put him on the map.

Through the years, all sorts of contributory traits have been proposed and discarded. In the 1980s, two Canadian researchers tried to argue that people with poor visuospatial skills are better at languages. They aren't. A gift for music isn't linked to language ability, not in any way that's ever been proved. Intelligence doesn't have much bearing. Language savants exist, the best known being "Christopher," who, despite an IQ of between 42 and 76, has partial mastery, at least, of Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Modern Greek, Hindi, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sign (British), Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh, in addition to his native English.

You can be smart and hopeless in French, both. "It doesn't have anything to do with intelligence in other areas," A. L. Becker says. "It has to do with changing your mind. Frequently, very bright people don't like having their mind changed. If language learning means building a new subjectivity, changing your inner polarities, it makes sense that smart folks might find this task threatening. Often lessergrade scholars are wonderful at languages because they're able to get that new mind quickly."

The (very brief) list of what it does have to do with: Motivation. Good phonological working memory—the capacity to reproduce and retain sounds. Knowledge of other foreign languages. (The more you have, the easier it is to add on.) A propensity for being a ham, or, as second language dean Elaine Tarone puts it, "a willingness to play, to pretend to be someone else."

The best films pull you out of yourself, make you, briefly, someone else. Hindi movies, I'd have argued, were right up there. Tuesdays, I learned to form the sounds with the actors, hoping to take the words into my mouth.

 

SOON AFTER, THE BUS
driver rumors died down altogether. When for a while it'd looked as though the world was going to understand what they'd put up with from wilding Muslims all these years, people here had remained sharply focused on this thing. Pakistan, surely, was going to get it, but when that didn't happen, people returned to complaining about the Mughals. "Those damn Mughals," you'd hear, "they knocked the faces off our statues." Four hundred years before, sure, but the evidence was still visible on temples. In this place where most people had never been to Delhi, Aurangzeb's sweep was more real than something that had occurred in a far floating world. New York is in New Jersey or in France, I'd heard someone say, sounding like an American kid being quizzed in geography.

Though a small group in town was, in fact, from that floating world. "Is it safe here?" I asked at a gathering of expats in the otherwise deserted Sixteen Chefs restaurant.

"For the most part, yes," said Piers, the publisher of an events magazine in English. Piers was a Brit, in his forties, with dwindling straw-colored hair and ruddy boyish features. In five years here, other than acquiring a fondness for multiple gold rings, he hadn't gone remotely native. He and his ailing mother lived in a mountaintop villa with a collection of Mr. Bean videos, a number of fringed lamps shipped over from the Midlands, and three Nepalese houseboys who'd learned to cook lasagna. What Hindi he had dated to the Raj:
chota
-peg, "Oh, just a small one."

"You're safer here than in the States," said Renee, who had a steel gray pageboy, a perpetual cough, and some basis for comparison. A Brooklynite by birth, she'd directed theater in Minneapolis until she was in her sixties, when the calls for work had stopped coming in and she'd discovered how bleak growing old in America could be. After five years of contemplating the view from her front window, she sent herself to India for her seventieth birthday. On the stop in Udaipur, an unplanned detour, a voice said,
You're home.
The return trip had lasted long enough to sell the house. Now four years into this unexpected incarnation, she'd acquired a second career as a photographer, an apartment near the Chandra Prakash hotel, and a handsome swain named Hukam Raj, a Gandhi freedom fighter two years her senior.

"The biggest danger you face here is stepping in cow patties," a jowly Australian journalist about to ship out assured me.

"I heard that's lucky," Renee said.

"The one thing," the Australian said, "is how often you get propositioned by men. Oh, all the time! In the bazaar." Prostitution, he meant. In sleepy
Udaipur?
I thought. It was the hundredth reminder I'd had that day that I couldn't be sure what I was seeing, couldn't know what I was hearing, that I was unattached to surroundings by familiar sights or words. "You have to be able to tolerate ambiguity if you want to learn a language," my teacher Gabriela had said, and now I saw this extended beyond sentences.

All night, I'd had a peripheral sense of Piers watching me. I'd wait till he was in conversation with someone, mistime my glance, catch his eye.
Interesting,
I thought, but as the evening broke up, a slim Indian man appeared beside him at the table. "Shubra Singh?" I said to Piers, reading the name on the card the man handed out.

"When you see me, you'll often see him," Piers said. "He's my
jigri.
"

"Jigri?" The word sounded a little too onomatopoetic.

"A jigri is—what did you say it was?" he asked the man. "Right. A close friend."

"Very close friend," the jigri said.

"Not
that
close." Piers laughed. At the curb, he hopped onto the back of the jigri's motor scooter. He put his hands on the man's shoulders. They sped off into the night.

Hundred and first reminder: in New York, I could have read the scene with both eyes shut, but here, where men stroll the streets holding hands and male friendships strike Westerners as erotic when they're not, I stood frowning at the tailpipe.

When my rickshaw pulled up at the house, the Jain wives tumbled out the door. Back in the kitchen, they held a debriefing. Where had I gone? What had we eaten? Rice, lentils, bread, I answered—about what I ate everywhere. "
Haaaan?
" they said wondrously, as if they'd never heard of this combination before.

"
What do you cook at your house?
" Alka asked. I didn't bother running across the driveway for the dictionary. "Take-out" was not going to be in there. I said I went to restaurants.
All the time?
they cried. Okay, then, I didn't.

"
Rice,
" I said, stretching the vowels.
Riiii-iice.

"
Haan. Rice. And?
"

"
And vegetables.
"

"
And?
"

"
And lentils and bread.
"

"
And?
" But I'd covered the acceptable bases. Steak and chicken were out of the question. All Jains are vegetarians, so strict that the devout avoid root vegetables for fear that an insect might have been crushed in the harvest. The family, modern businessman Jains, did eat garlic and onions, all except the grandmother, but any answer more respirational than that was pushing it. In Hindi, I considered, how did you say "tofu"? You didn't. There went my one specialty.