Dreaming in Hindi (15 page)

We join together in regarding the battered ledgers on his desk. "Some teachers won't like it," he says after a while, in the direction of the woman's departing back.

"Indians aren't generous," he tells a wall calendar.

"Ask Anukul what he thinks," he finally says, and when he looks at me and smiles, the effect is jolting, like metal crashing by my head.

When I stop by Anukul's classroom to tell him we're on, he decides to get a jump on my signing lessons. "Ask that boy what his mother's name is," he says, nodding at a thin kid who glances nervously right and left. The boy's about eleven. The ages in the classroom range from nine to a gawky fifteen. "How?" I ask. Anukul shows me. "You," he says, and points to the boy, who appears to be forcing himself through nerves of steel not to bolt for the door.

"Mother," Anukul says, and brushes the side of his nose.

"'Nose?'" I interrupt. "A mother is a nose?"

"Nose ring," he says. "For daughter you do like this," and we go off on a digression, with me attempting "daughter" (nose brush, swing fingertips to the shoulder) and Anukul correcting my hand positioning.

By the time we return to the boy, he looks as if he's stopped breathing:
Youmotherdaughter,
Anukul has just signed, gibberish, and this is a test.

We try foods. "
What do you like?
" Anukul asks the class. "
Mango?
" He peels one. "
Apple?
" He takes a bite.
Potato
is a tap on the cheek, because, he explains, a potato's peel is the same color as skin.
Chicken
is a hand-on-hand finger flap, fun to do but gets no takers, the majority of the class being vegetarian and Hindu. The one Muslim, the only girl, doesn't eat poultry either. A few hands shoot up on
goat:
forefingers pointed skyward against temples. Several Rajput boys, one tribal, and as Anukul counts the goat eaters, a thought occurs:
This is the one place I've been in India where the castes and religions come together.

The signing word order seems to follow Hindi's exactly:
To me ... potato ... pleasing ... is,
verb at the end. Some of the boys keep on track precisely, a little stiffly. Others get to midword,
potato,
look befuddled, drop off. It helps to know what I figure is the template language to remember this gestured one. "Learning Rajasthani sign was like learning kinetic Hindi!" I'll excitedly report to friends when I'm back in the States, but when I told the linguist Deborah Tannen this, she sounded puzzled. "It's my understanding that signed grammar doesn't follow spoken grammar," she said, and she was right, of course, when I checked.

Turns out, there was a reason for all this. But I wouldn't come to discover it for a couple more years.

Do I eat meat, a boy, looking slightly green, wants to know. When I see how you sign that one—head decapitation—I do the sensible thing. I lie and say no.

We fly through meal possibilities, express gustatory preferences, and by the end of the hour, gawkers are lined up four deep outside the door. They discuss the proceedings. They sign what I recognize is my name: vertical right hand speeding into the raised left palm. Name signs, like spoken nicknames, evolve from some association about a person that immediately springs to mind. Anukul's name sign is squared hands to face: "Glasses." A rangy reporter who wrote about a Nicaraguan deaf school he visited came to be known by the sign for "tall." The whole year, I'll be startled again whenever someone excitedly greets me by my name here: "Plane Crashing into Tower." On the outskirts of Udaipur, I am the World Trade Center.

 

ALL THESE SIDE
excursions conferred benefits beyond revved language. They meant I didn't have to hang out with Harold, who was becoming more of a live wire each time I looked. At a temple, he got choked up at the sight of Shiva's lingam, Shiva's iconographic penis statue. Near the school, I ran into him wandering the streets, shaking his fist at passersby. "That's right, bud," he was saying with a sneer. "That's right. I'm speaking English—what do you want to make of it?" Harold had had a little too much Hindi.

At school, when the day ended and we'd sometimes stay on, he was itchy, at loose ends after more than a month of no recognizable Saturday nights, no Friday nights, no goddamn, for that matter, Wednesdays. He'd been in the same day too long. "You've found the deaf school. Helaena's found a prince. I'm going to find a bar," he complained. He'd resumed a drinking habit the previous summer.

The Whisperer, too, was showing signs of strain. Some mornings, she was spotted being led, trembling, from the back office, overcome, she said, by incessant pestering by men. A yoga instructor was sexually harassing her, and an art shop owner, then gangs on the street, but after she left a letter lying around in which she apologized to the art shop guy for going over and taking her shirt off, concern lessened.

At school, that is. At home, she was making me jumpy. She'd developed an odd tic: whatever I had, she had to have, too. "I'm going to go in early and read the paper," I'd say at breakfast, then arrive fifteen minutes later to find her gripping the
Times of India,
a triumphant expression on her face. I mentioned a camel safari I had planned for Christmas. She hopped a train and journeyed to the Great Thar for the dromedary action that weekend. I got on the school's computer. She needed it immediately. ("Oh, right, make the Indian go," she said darkly when I suggested she use the cybercafe down the street.) The Whisperer, it was becoming clear, spoke softly but was a flaming ball of competition. She called people she'd never met, with whom I was lunching, to say she'd be joining us, slid in between when I was with a Jain and fuel-injected the conversation to levels I couldn't follow, stole a study date with Harold out from under me.

That should have been the least of it, but for some reason, it was the last straw. "Final answer?" Vanita asked when I said I was moving out. "Final answer," I said sadly, but when I went home to tell the Jains, a remarkable thing occurred. In Alka's room, on the bed where we'd all assembled, the wives and kids began wailing. Alka grabbed my leg. Various family members flung themselves on top of me.

"You can't leave us alone with her!" one girl wailed through her sister's hair. "We cry to have her in the house."

"She calls Swami-ji to complain about us."

"She said my father asked her for a beer."

"She will not speak to us, or even
namaste
us."

"And we do not like her clothes," Meenal, the youngest, said.

"
It's us. Tell the truth,
" Alka said, crying. The weeping and flinging continued for an hour. Finally, I was no match for the commando Jains. I left to visit Renee, and in my absence, the upstairs dweller and her questionable clothing were shown the door.

On my return, the mood in the kitchen was exclamatory. "Tensionfree!" Alka cried when I walked in.

"Yay! We got our room back!" one of the girls shouted. The arrival of the Whisperer had forced the kids to bunk down with their parents.

"I hear her new family is very mean. Sometimes they don't give food," Meenal, the youngest, said hopefully.

"Karma," I said, but she just looked perplexed.

When it started to become clear that Harold was losing his mind, it was around the time I lost my face, not long after the Whisperer had to go live with the family that did, in fact, forget to feed her. Dissolution by language was taking us all down, though in Harold's case, he appeared to have help.

Harold had developed an extended back problem, one that required a number of visits to the pharmacy. "If you're a videshi, they'll give you anything, so long as you don't send your servant," a friend of a friend in Delhi had e-mailed when I wrote from the States to ask about drugstore supplies in India. I thought about Harold's back when he glowered at lunch, threw bread at a chair. He hadn't agreed with the opinion I'd just expressed, that Raju used too much salt. When my mispronunciation of a long Hindi
a
nearly made him choke, I ate Raju's weepy spinach and watched him. "Oh, he's just like that," the Whisperer said after. This was before he revealed plans to kill her.

"That's just the way he is" was the covering line the other two used for a long time. "Oh, that's just the way he is," they'd say, as if he were a puckish coot in overalls instead of a guy in tight shorts who'd go off his rocker at the sight of Indians speaking Hindi. Mine was "Well, he and I are different." That one worked as long as it did because it was so roundly applicable. When Harold and I encountered wedding fireworks on leaving the palace, for example, I didn't stand glint-eyed on the balcony, making hallucinatory comments about how Helaena must have arranged these for us. This was one instance in which our differences put me ahead, but there were others, particularly in language learning styles, for which I envied him.

There are two kinds of language learners, Gabriela, my New York teacher, had said when I'd complained that I couldn't absorb Hindi by ear, was compelled to write everything down. The i-dotters, the ones who don't take the reflexive lightly ("Why do they say
se fue
in Spanish? Doesn't that mean 'he left himself'?"), linguistic Felix Ungers—these were one type, though Gabriela didn't describe them this way. "The analyticals," she'd said, using the correct term for the category into which I fell, "want to figure everything out. Even if they understand an expression, they want to know what's going on in it. What is that verb doing there? Is it always singular? They're more meticulous in note taking, in deducing the rules." The other type, called globals, can listen and learn. They are intuitive, visually oriented, approach problems spatially. When asked to take embedded-figure tests, they detect patterns, don't—as is the analyticals' tendency—key in on the figures and miss the overall picture.

I was unhappy in my division, even after the neurolinguist Michel Paradis told me that in adulthood, my kind did better with languages. In one experiment he mentioned, globals had excelled only when instructed with global methods—that is, any that emphasized conversation. Analyticals scored well with either conversational or rule-bound techniques. In Unger style, however, some of the analyticals went too far and invented grammar rules that didn't exist. And of course, Paradis added, "there was nothing to have prevented them from sneaking off and buying grammar books on the sly," in between tests, an action that did sound like one we'd take.

We were fussbudgets, and I knew it, and so I longed to be my opposite: the rakish, expansive global. I could learn from the globals, Gabriela said; their strengths were my weaknesses. Harold, for instance, was a textbook global: more interested in knowing when to use an expression than in diagramming it; undaunted by the prospect of failed verb constructions; uninhibited, willing to plunge into discussions. So even though I was instrumental in getting him kicked out of India, he and I made a good study pair, and from time to time, I'd faintly miss him.

 

AN INNER VOICE RETURNS
in late October—a chorus, in fact, most of these voices belonging to someone else. Hindi fragments I've picked up set and blend. "
Gayab ho-gaya,
" I mutter, feeling under a shelf for my shoes. "
Gayab ho-gaya,
" what the cybercafe wala said when the computer screen went black and he fluttered bird fingers: disappeared. "
Ke saamne,
" "in front of," comes back, a snippet from the directions a tea vendor gave me. "
Is my pleasure
"—that one dates to a visit with a restaurant owner's polite, veiled wife. With Hindi acting like a stain on my thoughts, I can see the astonishing number of people, or bits of them, I've incorporated in such a short time. I'm taking the town into my head. But if words this banal could root unnoticed, couldn't more charged ones settle in as well, in a second or first language? Could half a remark the sour office gossip made—"only out for himself"—take hold and whisper to us later, make us view the man in question with newly cautious eyes? We are, through language, a lot more permeable to each other than we'd like to know.

Stray Mewari appears without warning.
Shakkar,
the Mewari word a waiter uses for "sugar," drives out the Hindi one I know:
chini.
My brain absorbs
shakkar
so quickly, you'd think it was English, and you'd be nearly right. It's a distant cousin, though I don't realize that as I congratulate myself on being such a language sponge—
you name it, it just comes to me.
The word is descended from the Persian
shakkar,
which in turn looped down from the Sanskrit
sharkaraa:
"candied gravel." Reports of sugar's existence first appeared in Europe in the first century, when cohorts of Alexander the Great returned from the subcontinent with stories about an Indian cane that could produce "honey without bees." The word itself, in its Sanskrit form, surfaced soon after in the Latin and Greek texts that lauded this exotic new medicinal tonic. In the Middle Ages, Arab traders carried the Persian derivation along with the sweet stuff to Italy and Spain, where the word became
zuccero
and
azucar,
respectively, then proliferated, evolving into
sucre
(France),
Zucker
(Germany),
sakhar
(Russia), and sugar (England and points west). "Oh, you can use
shakkar
in Hindi, too," Helaena says when I tell her I'm advancing in Mewari as well, whereupon it becomes clear: I've been learning Hindi on the circular plan.

Creaky Briticisms startle me midthought. Indian English hijacks my reflections. "I have been on this posting too long," I sigh to myself one night, weary with India. "I am merging with Udaipur," I find myself writing in a journal, have to stop to figure out what this character channeled from the soap opera
The Flower of Delhi
is saying. All I mean is that I'm more used to it. To the commuter goats: at sundown, whenever I take a rickshaw into town, I pass a herd scuffing dust along the artery from the Lake Palace hotel, being driven home by tiny women in billowing skirts. To the post office: at the open-air stall across from the school, the postmaster waves me to the head of the line, preferential videshi treatment I either accept now uneasily or decline and, in the process, confuse everyone. Caste and social hierarchy shape everything here, post office lines, verbs. There are seven ways to say "Don't touch that plant," depending on whom you're addressing. At the beginning, when my American impulses still triumphed, I'd insist that rickshaw walas use verb forms of equality with me. They'd smile oddly or lower their heads. When I caught a flash of fear on a driver's face, I understood that I was forcing him to be cheeky. I'm supposed to be imperial; that's how it is. At the head of the line, I give the postmaster my envelope. He delivers two stamps, which I bring to a glue pot and dab with a glue-encrusted pen. That's what you do.