Dreaming in Hindi (20 page)

In front of us, offerings were piled on the weathered marble: marigolds whose scent fuzzed the back of my throat; a wall clock still wrapped in plastic. A glint behind the clumped flowers caught my eye. When I leaned in to see what it was, I felt sharp fear: a copper brazier, frosted white with live embers, left to the glory of the sati ma. The clarity that came then was searing, for it forced me to admit what I hadn't wanted to: I could not handle the knowledge that kept expanding, of how grotesquely women's lives could end here.

We continued through the field, past other chhatris that, the longer I stayed in the sun, looked more like tipsy umbrellas, till we found our driver by the gate, a film of sweat on his face. In the steamy back of the car, I turned and felt a sting. My hair, tangled and damp, had caught on the ornamentation of my head covering. On the drive back, we slowed for goats, stalled at a blockade of cows. Before dinner, Vikram showed me the library. The long, cool room was lined with stacks of
Scientific Americans
and newspapers written by kids, filled with the bright cries of the reporters themselves. Children ran over. Vikram disappeared. Boys crowded around, chattering in a cappella Hindi. I scanned the room. Vikram, dignified somehow, bent into a small child's table, was watching intently from by the door.

The girls held back, shy, then two approached. What did they want to be? I asked. "A teacher," one answered. "An economist," the other said softly, and I started, then remembered: Vikram's father, a beloved figure here. And that was the final revelation of the day: it's through your devotions that your future begins to come in.

On the last afternoon, we stopped by the house of a family friend, a writer named Nand Kishore Acharya, well regarded, Vikram said, throughout India. Mr. Acharya's tiny front door was set three feet off the ground. We had to fold ourselves in half to get inside, then wait for a servant to come find us. Upstairs, a gray-haired man in his fifties rose to greet us from a day bed. He appeared the way I'd imagined a venerable Indian writer would: loose white pants and glasses thick and black as drafting tools. A ceiling fan stirred air that smelled brackish, like years of concentration was rising from fabric.

"Growing up, I spoke Gujarati with my family and Marwari with friends, but I think in Hindi or I couldn't write in Hindi," Mr. Acharya said in English when I tried to establish what language he was speaking out of. I grew excited when I saw he was willing to indulge my obsession with India's panoply of tongues, still unaware that everyone else here shared it. In a country where language had redrawn the lines of geography—when state boundaries were reestablished in the middle of the last century, the decisions were made according to linguistic groupings—the multiplicity of tongues was an all-round wonder.

"When we interact in Jodhpur, we speak in Hindi," he said, referring to one of the meetings attended by the most illustrious poets—by speakers of Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, all the official tongues, and any number of the nearly inestimable unofficial ones. No one without God on their side has ever had the courage to calculate how many languages are found in India, but when the U.S. missionary Bible translators tried, they came up with a mind-blowing count: 415 living, 13 extinct, putting the country behind only Papua New Guinea (820 live), Indonesia (737), and Nigeria (510) in numbers. "Though Hindi is not the mother tongue—of anyone. Very few use it in their households," Mr. Acharya added somewhat darkly, edging back into the discussion he'd started to have earlier when he'd said his parents forbade him to use it at home. Any talk about India's language tangles quickly gets you into the subject of English, which gets you into linguistic imperialism and the countervailing legislative attempts that have gone into trying to make Hindi the official tongue, which gets you into bloody riots.

People died in the south of India when, in 1963, Congress, in acknowledgment that the country needed a unifying language, voted to make it Hindi. English, and before that the courtly Urdu of the Mughals, had been serving as the bridge, but when the government decided to elect a more homegrown language, violence erupted. Men burned themselves in protest. People worried they'd be cut off from the state jobs, that they'd be severed from any national discourse. This was in the states where what they speak—Kannada, Malyalam—is as alien to Hindi as English is to Mandarin. Hindi never exactly took, but its appearance in the south can still be rancorous. An Indian friend reports that recently when she traveled through Kerala, a man threatened to harm her when she asked a question in Hindi. "If you speak that to me again, I will abuse you," he said.

"Every Indian boy hates Hindi," Mr. Acharya said from the day bed catercorner to the one where I sat. The fan was causing a literary journal to make small slapping sounds. "They teach it pedantically in school, like badly taught math," he said in a disparaging tone I'd heard before. Once in the States, when I'd brought
Teach Yourself Hindi
to the doctor's, an Indian nurse asked curtly, "What do you want to study that for?" Overlooking the edge in her voice, I tried out a pleasantry. She straightened, gave attention to something outside the window, glanced to see if the other nurses had heard. They hadn't, and I got the message: neither would she.

I told the men about the nurse. A shadow crossed Vikram's face. "Oh, the same thing happens here all the time," I said. "I can barely get anyone to speak Hindi with me," I added, not stopping to consider all the possible causative reasons: that my Hindi was still so blundering, some found it too trying; that others looked at my white face and heard what they thought they would, English. The brain naturally supplies the expected, as demonstrated by a story a university professor in Manhattan told me. The professor, who is half second-generation Indian, half African American, teaches Mandarin to American-born Chinese kids. One day, as he was leaving the class, he spied one of his girl students playfully shove a boy and say something in a sweet, high voice he was sure was an ancient Chinese aphorism. Disbelieving, excited, he rushed over and asked her to repeat it. She did. He frowned. "Say it again." She obliged. What she'd been saying, in a perfect homegirl accent, was "Mooooove, nigger"—a line from a rap video the kids all knew.

On the day bed, I recounted how the previous week, I'd tried to use Hindi to buy a notebook. The elderly shopkeeper had stopped the transaction and demanded, "You speak in English." But I need to practice, I'd insisted. "Okay, then, you speak Hindi, but I speak English," he said, and we proceeded haltingly. Vikram's face went black.

"We don't want our own language!" he cried, sounding as if he'd barked a shin. "We are living in a postcolonial hangover! We do not want our own languages!"

"English is the status language," Mr. Acharya agreed, and the ads for fast-track classes plastering Sector Eleven came to mind—
ARENA MULTIMEDIA: CREATING WINNING CAREERS, ACE COMPUTER EDUCATION: FIRST STEP FOR A SUCCESSFUL CAREER
— all in English. The meaning was clear: if you knew only Hindi or, worse, Mewari, you could forget about a beautiful career.

"Companies use Hindi as a line of demarcation," Vikram said. "Civil servants look down on people who speak it, but that's all they have, their ability to speak English." By exercising it, he said, people were trying to show they were as good as Americans. Mr. Acharya nodded.

"We can say, 'We're better than the Chinese. Look, we can speak it, they can't,'" Mr. Acharya said, and for the first time, I began to understand I'd been plowing ahead naively. When I forced people into Hindi, I was signaling, in some minds,
You're not as good as me.

"In Hollywood movies, Indians never speak properly," Vikram said heatedly. "The BBC puts subtitles on our politicians! That's why you're getting the response you are. Those people you're meeting are saying 'Don't make me like that.'"

Don't make me like that
—a plea impervious to the argument "But your language is so beautiful." I'd tried. And for a while, it seemed the Indians and I were operating at cross-purposes: they were speaking English to separate themselves from themselves, and I was doing the same using Hindi. The real configurations, though, were more complicated. Among other reasons, the Indians, like everyone else, were using English because it was the global market language. But there was some truth to the equation, too, foremost the fact that I was speaking their language to divide myself from myself, though it'd be months before I'd understand exactly what I was keeping myself from.

In Jaipur, on the return, I spent several days at Vikram's family's home, a blinding-white cubist marvel, with a plashing fountain in the living room and exquisite Rajasthani miniatures on the walls. At dinner, the talk was soft and restrained. All conversation was subdued and orderly.

 

"
KA-TY! THE GEEZER IS HERE
!" Meena when I come dragging into the Jains' late morning from the train. Meena and Alka are cleaning furiously—someone, I swear, has just finished hosing the living room down through the window—but everyone takes time out to show me the new geezer, purchased, Alka says, not in some backwater Sector Eleven shop, but in a fancy store downtown. At this allusion to cost, the grandmother makes a face.

"
See?
" Meena says as we all crowd into my bathroom. A gigantic coiled contraption is now bulging from the wall.

"
See?
" Meena, in her nightgown still at noon, shows me how to work the switches. "This is hot. This is cold. This is hot. This is cold," as if I've never encountered the hot-cold principle before. Ten minutes hot: does this strike me as good? Ten minutes' hot, it does.

"
See, Ka-ty? The geezer is here. Are you still going to move out?
" she teases. The gleaming new appliance is making her bubbleheaded.

"
Just to the Lake Palace,
" I say with an absolute straight face. The Lake Palace hotel is five stars. "I'm moving there. You come."

The women return to their cleaning, leave me to my ten minutes hot. I fire up the tank, step under the water. My inaugural geezer shower shuts off all the electricity in my half of the house. Snatching a towel, I dash out my door and through the floral grotto to try to locate the circuit breakers.

At lunch, I think I'll miss the hushed talk at Vikram's, the mannerly exchanges ("Ravi says he knows a scientist who was interviewed by Naipaul. Wasn't too bad." "Oh?"), but I'm too distracted by commotion. A small, dazed man keeps wandering into the kitchen, wearing an unlikely
FISHERMAN FROM HELL
T-shirt. "I'll ask the
nauker
"—the "servant"—"to bring a bike up for you," the oldest girl says, and I guess that's who that was. There was no servant that I knew of when I left, and now we have a nauker and a geezer.

On the train down from Jaipur, I'd loaded up on Hindi, inhaled half the textbook, and I'm hoping they'll all be impressed, but everyone is talking so fast, no one can tell I'm speaking double time. The dwarf at the phone shop across the street can, though. "Wow, your Hindi is good," he says, after listening in on my conversation.

"You've certainly improved," Vidhu says when I stop by the institute and find all the teachers in the back room working during the break.

"You guys are really toiling," I say.

"Swami-ji has put in the most time of all," Vidhu says in the deeply admiring tone he uses to refer to his boss when his boss is around.

I have improved; the signs are there. When reading, I can crest now, can hear rhythms that will boost me till the verb kicks in. "The verb carries the meaning," Gabriela had said, and since in Hindi the verb comes at the end of the sentence, the meaning often isn't revealed till you've sat through clause after clause. But overnight, I can make the pieces hold. This development and the others I'm discovering are slightly odd. I went away and, except for one train blitz, blew off my Hindi, and have returned vastly improved. I know instinctively now that if I imagine Meena saying the sentence I want to read—imitate in my head her verbal pauses for commas, the way she runs a clause up the scale then lets it drop—I can keep the long assembly in my mind. I know how to tell the candy shop owner, "
I was touring
"—easily, offhandedly, in the past tense. I no longer have to speak in one strange, singular dimension. I know how to skim a paragraph for just one word, the way I can with English. Before, the snakes would writhe into one ball.

Shabaz:
I've made great strides, but it's all slightly spooky, for this all happened when I gave up the struggle. I'd worked feverishly, and as soon as I stopped trying, I made enormous progress. This kind of experience feels bizarre, though it's a frequent occurrence with creative undertakings. You struggle fruitlessly at your desk to come up with a presentation, are seized by inspiration listening to
The Amazing 80s
on the drive home. You take the dog out and turn a corner, literally: suddenly you know what that letter should say. Cognitive psychologists have known for years that knocking off leads to creative breakthroughs, but they couldn't say why. Lately, brain scientists have gotten a handle on the mechanisms.

"In creativity research, we refer to the three Bs—for the bathtub, the bed and the bus—places where ideas have famously and suddenly emerged," Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer told a reporter from
Time.
"When we take time off from working on a problem, we change what we're doing and our context, and that can activate different areas of our brain.... If we're lucky, in the next context we may hear or see something that relates—distantly—to the problem that we had temporarily put aside."

With language study and all the challenges of the mind, breaks lead to breakthroughs. Swami-ji, with all his chuttis, turned out, had been a linguistic visionary all along.

 

BACK IN THE KITCHEN
, I hear a thwacking. Meena is in the next room cleaning. "
You are happy with the geezer?
" Dad 1 asks, after telling me that Pakistan is collapsing from internal complications. I'm not about to say that the geezer has the unusual ability to cause light switches to shut off spontaneously. I'm a little worried about all this light and air locking I'm able to provoke, but the family didn't notice me dashing from my room in a towel, and I think we'll just keep it that way. "
I am liking the geezer very much,
" I tell him.