Dreaming in Hindi (21 page)

Dad 2 is delighted to see me.
DELIGHTED
."
You're back!
" he says. "
Back! You were away! And now you're back. You didn't like Jaipur? No, you don't like Udaipur. You do? You like Udaipur? Truly? The
mithai
you brought us was bad.
"

I think he says the sweets, the mithai, I brought them from a fancy Jaipur store have given somebody food poisoning.
Who?
I ask, horrified.

"
The mithai
could
have given someone food poisoning,
" he repeats: multipart verb; still a bit beyond my grasp. "
It had
fungus
all over it.
"

"
But it didn't yesterday,
" I say.

"
Yes,
" he says sadly. "
The mithai was bad.
"

"
That Jaipur,
" I say. "
Not nice, like Udaipur.
" But he's already on to American misbehavior in Afghanistan, how I paid too much for curtains in Jaipur, and I'm pleased to note we haven't said
one word
in English. Except "fungus."

Harold was the first to go down, and soon after, others followed. Because these events occurred in a cluster, they would always later on seem connected, like an implosion that had happened in segments. The episodes weren't really linked, however, except perhaps by centrifugal force. If they had been, I might have been better prepared for all that happened, but Harold's was the only fall I saw coming.

That wasn't hard, though, of course.

 

"
IN THE JUNGLE
, a greedy lion was living. This lion was eating all the animals." Swami-ji is telling me a story from the
Panchatantra,
a collection of fables compiled in the fourth century to educate the sons of a king. I'm worrying about how I've ruined the school's one copy, having secreted it out in my backpack for practice, then dodged my own good intentions for so long, the book looks like it's been chewed. This is one of several school publications I've shredded through long-term ferrying, along with a Jain true-confessions magazine Meena hasn't guessed yet is missing. A pile of dead reading material is growing in my room, evidence of the troubles I'm having with Hindi script. After so many defeats and masticated hopes, just the sight of Devanagari makes me nervous.

"
In time, all the animals met,
" Swami-ji says in the rosy tones of storytelling. "
They came up with a plan for the lion. Each day, one animal from a species would volunteer to be eaten. When it was the rabbits' turn, they chose a rabbit who lived for many, many years and was very wise.
"A cry drifts up from the street, a man collecting old newspapers. "
This rabbit took his time in going to the lion's lair. When he arrived, the lion was angry. 'Venerable lord!' the rabbit said. A thousand apologies, but the delay could not be helped. Another lion has attacked all the rabbits and eaten the others. Only I have escaped.
'
The lion roared in fury to hear this. But the clever rabbit was remaining calm.
" Swami-ji, then, is the picture of calm himself, his face set in easy concentration. Helaena and I have not yet gone to his apartment to tell him about the letter. "
'Where is this lion?' the lion cried. 'Not far from here,' the rabbit said.
I
will show you,' and led him to a well. 'That is his cave,' the rabbit said, pointing, and the lion, seeing his own reflection, attacked it and drowned.
" The letter is to the governing advisers, the ones with the forehead marks in the photographs. One of the students has been making death threats, it reports.

Harold had, in, of all places, his Hindi journal. "
There is a young girl,
" he'd begun one rambling story after the Whisperer had balked at sealing the deed and turned him down. "
I am watching her broken body. She is going to die.
" On a train the two of them had taken from Jaipur, he'd apparently screamed, "You're getting what you want in India. Why can't I?" The Whisperer was so startled, it took her three days to squeak out the words "sexual harassment."

"Harold-ji, in this sentence, the word 'body' does not take the oblique case," Vidhu said in journal class the day Harold read his opus. He was not quite grasping the story line.

This student must be sent home immediately, the letter urged, citing this example of his conduct, though truly, the rest of us weren't taking his blather all that seriously by then. What ultimately did Harold in weren't the death threats. No, his real fatal error had been to shout an Anglo-Saxon epithet at Helaena while she was getting a manicure, one they didn't toss around freely back in Tennessee. Or in the posh Trident Hotel, where she'd been counseling him to lighten up with the Whisperer after he'd tagged along. "Why, that wasn't very nice," she'd said slowly, and from then on, he was headed for the well.

Poor Harold. He'd skipped the orientation seminar on sexual harassment, so had no sense of the terror those words struck here. But Helaena and me, we'd gone.

"Maybe he will get better," Swami-ji says weakly when he answers the door that evening and we tell him about the letter, the one we composed and e-mailed to the supervisors of his supervisor some time earlier. Not possible, we say, and in low voices explain: "Harold has committed sexual harassment."

"Sexual harassment?" Swami-ji swallows, then, shaking his head, acquires the bemused look of a man accepting his fate. Within a day, another one of his charges will be ingloriously packing it in.

 

Just the sight of Devanagari makes me nervous, I.

That profound, stubbing freeze that written Hindi brought on—puzzling betrayal, briefly, each time:
But always before, books were such comfort
—continued so long, troubled me so, that after my return to the States, I investigated. One group of researchers I found, also wondering whether second writing systems bollixed reading abilities, had rounded up Chinese students fluent in English and tested them on passages in Roman, the script used for English. The results could not have been startling to the students, who probably had tattered copies of
Aesop's Fables
in their dorm rooms: they came in "four standard deviations" below their American counterparts, notably lower. People are slower in foreign scripts, many studies report, partly for obvious reasons—because they're reading in a foreign language, with all the bumpiness that entails. But also, partly, for reasons having to do with the effects of the writing itself on the brain.

For years, hardly anyone (Western) was much concerned with second scripts, with the neural ramifications of them, or any aspect, when you got right down to it. The feeling was that unless you were a Bible translation missionary, who really cared? even though, as missionary translators could have reported, a multitude of scripts exist in the world: alphabets, syllabaries,
abjads
(alphabets that are mostly consonants), complex writing systems composed of ideograms. How many, even a rough figure, is impossible to say.

"It depends on how you count," UCLA professor emeritus of linguistics William Bright wrote to me. "Is the French writing system, which uses â à ê è é etc., different from English? Probably most people would say no. Then what about Icelandic, which uses the two additional symbols 'thorn' and 'edh' in addition to accented vowels? Or the uncial script of Irish, or the blackletter 'fraktur' script
^*
used for German until the end of World War Two?

"The short answer is," Bright wrote, "there are a couple of hundred."

And yet 90 percent of what specialists know about reading is based on studies involving one alphabet, guess which one. Although that's changing. With scores of immigrants arriving in the West, with shop signs in West Yorkshire and Rome and Oakland written in forms like waves or snakes or squares, with the all-around boom in second language studies, it was inevitable that an offshoot field would emerge: second script studies. Just as surely, it has, in no time, acquired its own jargon—the metallic-sounding term L2WS, for second language writing system—and a rally is on (with luck, shortlived) to refer to someone who knows a second script as "biscriptal." Gabriela, with five, would be "polyscriptal."

At a reading symposium I attended in Toronto several years ago, three panels out of sixteen were devoted to second scripts. At "Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Reading Fluency in Second Language Learners," it was seats down front only, the talks roiled with news. A research team had discovered what it was calling a "Chinese region" in the brain, an area in the left middle frontal gyrus that lights up when people read Chinese but not English—and gets lit even when someone's grasp of Chinese is limited to a few weeks' lessons. No one could say for sure what the area did, only that it was part of a larger pattern being observed: Chinese writing fires the brain differently, in certain key respects. On scans, it activates both brain hemispheres, whereas English engages mostly just the left, the half where language functions generally reside.

"Something about the visual properties of Chinese requires recruitment of the right hemisphere," Jessica Nelson, a grad student who'd worked on the studies mused, then added the refrain of the day: "But we don't know why that is."

Although the focus of the symposium was on children and reading, there was a reason the participants, mainly educators, were flocking to these side discussions. Between 1998 and 2000, the number of U.S. kids who spoke "a language other than English at home" more than doubled, according to one study. By 2015, the same study predicted, they'd constitute 30 percent of the American school population. When you consider that increasingly, the other languages spoken around the house aren't written in Roman, it's easy to see why the auditorium was filling up. As more and more kids go through school with knowledge of two scripts, educators are going to need to know whether there are peculiarities to that kind of wiring that convolute reading.

So far, where they're most up to speed is in understanding the universals, the common ways all writing scripts affect the brain. Be it in Manchu script, Cyrillic, or Hebrew, within five hundred milliseconds after your eye has swept over a word—any word, let's say "fleece"—three main neural areas act to produce a brief and woolly image. So quickly that you have no sense of it, one area of the brain, the left inferior frontal gyrus, gauges contextual meaning: the fact that in the sentence you just flew past, the author was referring to a lamb's coat. Another area, the left parietal-temporal region, is busy calculating the phonemes, the sounds, encoded in the print; it also analyzes the lines of print—ascertaining that they amount to letters and aren't random squiggles. A third area, the left occipital-temporal region, has gone to work to automate recognition, to speed things up. Through some as-yet-unidentified mechanism, all three areas fire in coordination, symphonically, whether the lettering reads
,
, or
—Manchu, Cyrillic, or Hebrew for "fleece," respectively—so long as it's familiar to you.

The process sounds both miraculous and exhausting—if you had to enact it using will, you'd end up running screaming from the chair. And things get more flabbergasting when it comes to the differences in the way the brain processes
,
, and
or they do as far as anyone can surmise. The guys who have the most-worked-out theories on this are the ones who make deductions from observing the aftermath of neural trauma. They were at this before the advent of machines and technological advances. They've had longer to formulate their beliefs. Michel Paradis, for instance, through his studies of bilinguals with brain damage, is convinced that in people with two, three, or four scripts, what you have are two, three, or four subsystems at work. If you're talking broad overview, he agrees with the neuroimaging specialists—all lettering flows through the same three brain sites. But at the most microscopic, theoretical levels—so minute, no scanner invented has the facility to explore them—he believes that each script, each written language, is processed separately.