Dreaming in Hindi (33 page)

We stopped once more for supplies. Pauline's white bun was already coming undone. Before we got out, I handed her a 500-rupee note, about ten dollars, enough to cover food for the three villages we'd be visiting. Returning to the car, we resumed the same formation. We stared out the windows as the buildings grew lower to the ground, then sang Christmas carols, "Dashing Through the Snow," but I forgot the words and, after all the years I'd spent in malls, had to hum. The town fell away. Pauline taught me a hymn that began "
Kushi, kushi, manaanaa":
"Happy, happy when we praise him." I thought about how the word
kushi
had resurfaced in English, and how odd that variant, "cushy," would seem here.

The car slid by scrubland, by people huddled around a fire. We passed two peacocks that had commandeered a hill. "Scabies, lack of water, conjunctivitis due to flies. In rainy season, malaria," Pauline was saying, tallying the ailments she'd encountered in the seventeen years she'd been going out to the villages.

Pneumonia, bronchitis, cough, diseases of livestock. Once someone had asked her to pray for a cow. "I thought about it and thought,
Well, God created cows,
" she said, so she did.

Hunger, a white-hot, brutal anger after four years of drought. With the crops shriveled to paper, men's tempers flared. "The last time we went," Pauline said, "a husband had just thrown his wife into the well. The body had just come out." Mrs. Bishwas nodded at a stone fence.

Night blindness from vitamin A deficiency; worms from bare feet; malnutrition, terrible malnutrition. The list thinned down as the land grew sparser, shot up higher, turned rocky. Anemia among the women. We rode for a while in silence. Pauline said, apropos of nothing, "You must miss your family." To my surprise, I started to cry.

Pauline had experience living abroad. As a young woman, she'd gone to college in the States, a spectacularly improbable turn of events, given how bleak her life had been till then. In the back seat, she told me the story again: She'd been born into a rich Brahmin family, but then her father had died and her mother had converted to Christianity, and her father's family, outraged, had kicked them out. Pauline and her sisters had ended up in a Christian orphanage. The conditions were stark. She had to rise at 4
A.M.
daily to start breakfast, but at some point, Jesus or Ganesh intervened. A nun, remarking on the quickness of her mind, applied for a scholarship to the nursing school at Syracuse University on her behalf. She got in.

At this point in the story, I was always startled for I always forgot that Pauline and I were fellow alumnae. I'd graduated from Syracuse, too, but these two aspects of my life refused to converge in my mind: SU Orangemen/Pauline. In the back seat, I tried to picture her as a coed on a snowy upstate New York quad in the 1950s, got only an image of her there at the age she was now, hurrying along in her black socks and worn purple sari.

In the years after Syracuse, she'd taken jobs at health clinics in Thailand and Laos, trained nurses in Fiji, worked for decades in Delhi before a sister who'd settled in Udaipur wrote and offered her a room. "I come from a poor family. I know what is hunger," she said, bringing us up to the present and her missions to the villages.

A truck emblazoned with the sign
HORN PLEASE
screamed past, causing the car to swerve. We righted ourselves, and Mrs. Bishwas started a long story in Hindi, something about a mutual friend who'd suffered dire misfortune and was languishing in an ICU. I was able to follow until the road rushing toward us became a ribbon. When next I glanced over, Mrs. Bishwas was folding a 500-rupee note to tuck into her purse.

At the first village we came to, a dozen mud huts on a rise, eighty people were waiting, mostly women and children, a few old men. Anyone who was younger and male was in Udaipur looking for day work. The women were veiled, with heavy iron ankle rings above cracked bare feet. The children, too, were barefoot in the sharp cold, though many were wearing bulky sweaters. These had been Christmas gifts one year from a now departed expat who'd set her relatives in England to knitting.

"
You will sit,
" Pauline said, and they did, in tight rows. In the car, her voice had been quavery and small. Now it was commanding.

"
We will sing,
" she said, and led the assembly in "
Kushi, kushi, manaanaa,
" after which she went to see about the supplies. "Perhaps you can teach them English," she said as she left.

"My name is Kathy," I began. "My name is Kathy," everyone repeated. The women in front were grinning shyly. "No,
my
name is Kathy," I said, tapping my chest. "No,
my
name is Kathy," they all boomed back.

Pauline returned with the driver, who was huffing under vats of food. Two villagers followed with a charpoy on their heads. They set it down near a pair of dogs that were sculpted ovals in the cold light, and Mrs. Bishwas and I took seats on either side of Pauline. People lined up. We distributed Christmas presents, which this year doubled as Christmas dinner: salty flour sticks called
namkeen,
white dinner rolls, the sugary flour balls called
ladoo
that are the favorite sweets of the Hindu god Ganesh. "Last year, I gave them soap," Pauline said. "The trouble is, there's no water."

A frail old woman came and sat by the bed. "She has fever and diarrhea," Pauline said, taking two Advil from a canister. The woman was joined by a boy with a fat belly. A fly landed on his face. He didn't blink. Pauline pressed on his stomach. "He has a high fever," she said, and diagnosed malaria.

The procession of people suffering ailments continued: a boy with a deep burn on his buttocks, a tiny girl who clung to her brother's leg. Mrs. Bishwas and I helped dispense medical provisions. I learned the Hindi for "bottle," how to say "measles." I practiced sentences:
Who has not had a biscuit?
Mrs. Bishwas poured gentian tonic from a jug labeled
GOLD CREST
. "Shhh, whiskey bottle, don't tell," she said with a giggle.

A skeletal young woman in a dirty cloth approached. She leaned down, whispered something to Pauline. "
Any cough?
" Pauline asked. The girl shook her head, whispered something else. Pauline pressed on her chest. "She has been beaten," she said.

"Beaten! How old is she?" I asked.

"They don't know their age, so I look at their faces. She is very young. She must be recently married."

A while later, I saw the girl talking to a young man, about eighteen, who had short, sharp cheekbones and a checked shirt that hung on him. He said something I couldn't hear. She took off at a run in the direction of the sky, till she grew very tiny and was swallowed up by yellow dirt.

People continued to stream in from the horizon. Before we left, I took a count: 130. But at the next village, only 10 people were waiting, mostly children whose brown legs were gray with dirt. One girl could not contain her amazement at seeing a videshi. A boy, the youngest, was staring at us expressionless as tears ran down his face.

Pauline said she'd go look for the others. Mrs. Bishwas and I waited beside an enormous ad that was plastered across a building. Water was cascading down a Western man's ecstatic face:
LIFEBUOY, FOR HEALTH
! the slogan read. Underneath that, someone had attempted a translation in scrawled Hindi: "
Take water,
" it said. "
It's good for your health.
"

Pauline reappeared, out of breath. "A young girl has died just now," she said. "A Christian. From an infection. She was fifteen. They are all with her."

On the bumpy road out, we didn't speak. Then Pauline broke the silence. "They come together if one is in trouble, or in sorrow, or in joy," she said in a high voice. "From them I have learned to be satisfied with so little. They have so little, and they are so happy." I started to say something, as an image came to mind: dense black hair, gleaming, eely, rippling above a body in a well. I thought better of it, nodded. "I knew this before, but I learned it again," Pauline said dreamily.

At the third village, we sang gleeful songs in Hindi and counted to twenty in English, and the whole time I couldn't stop thinking: of the girl who'd just died when fifty-seven cents' worth of antibiotics could have saved her, of the emerald bauble that would be stashed back in the vault as soon as winter break was over, of how this was the truest Christmas I'd ever had. Even if it was sort of Hindu.

In the square near my house, the haveli where I live now, in noontime sun so severe it can prick like sharp ice, the fruit wala wants to know all the code words. Please can I tell him? But honestly I can't, even though it's a matter of some urgency—clear from the fact he's on his feet when he asks. Other than me, he's the only one in town who is.

A fierce heat has come on Udaipur, changing everything. "Come at five, not three-thirty," Nand says now when I call; earlier, he'll be too groggy. In the high, open shops in the ancient quarter where I've moved, shopkeepers curl up on mattresses half the afternoon, the soles of their feet on display. Out on Bedla Road, dogs loll in the shadows of brick mounds. Cows sprawl in a way that looks drugged. The heat puts down people, dogs, cows, but I don't mind it during the day. In full sun, the colors on the old homes are vibrant, even the palest lavenders, which grow so vivid, they could break your heart.

At night, though, the heat is churlish: petulant and demanding, of air, of attention. I sleep under a window on a marble floor, wake drenched at dawn with the call of the muezzin.

A fidgety loo wind has blown in from the desert. Its hot, frenzied ions make everyone cranky. Two days ago, a baby cow tried to charge me on the street. I bopped it on the head with my purse. There's no air conditioning here, only air coolers, gargantuan contraptions that take days to fill with water. I bought one and discovered that what it does is turn the hot air humid, then aim it over your bed. By noon, the air cooler has scattered all my papers around the room. By 1
P.M.
, a mango shake is the only recourse possible.

At the fruit vendor's, I take a white plastic stool. His neighbor, the gangly photo wala, hurries over to join me. They watch intently while I nurse my drink. "
Madam,
" the fruit vendor says when I'm finished, "
what are the
code words
to use with foreigners? Like you say,
'Hello! Hello!'
I think.
"

"
The expression
code words'
is not known to me,
" I tell him. Other than "code words" and "hello," we keep it to Hindi, easier all around. For the men, because they don't speak English. For me, because I stay mainly on this far side now. Sometime back, I crossed a fast black line I never actually saw. The new language didn't judder into view, the way I'd imagined when I was scrambling across stones toward it. It was just suddenly there. One day I couldn't tell what the woman on the other end of the phone was saying. The next she was clearly reporting that all lines were busy, try back later.

"
Yes, yes!
" the photo guy says. "Hello! Hello!" He nods vigorously.

"
Or I think you also say,
'Excuse me!'
when you want to call them over,
" the fruit vendor says, carefully extending "excuuuse."

"
Or sometimes you say
'Ki-yu! Ki-yu!'"
the photo guy says.

The fruit man and I look at him. "
I don't think
'Ki-yu!'
is a word,
" I say, but the photo guy looks so crestfallen, as if he's suddenly realized why his business has been so bad, that I relent. "
Well, not in English. Maybe
'Ki-yu!'
is French.
"

"
Yes!
" He brightens. "
It is French. Or Israeli. A lot of Israelis come here.
"

"
So, madam, what are some other words for the foreigners?
" the fruit man asks, but the photo guy is on a roll. "
Or you can say
'Weee-Ooh!' 'Weee-Ooh!'"
he's exclaiming, sounding like he's making a birdcall.

"
That is
really
not a word,
" I say with some annoyance, imagining an entire street doing that as I walk by. "
You cannot say
'Weee-Ooh!'" The fruit man ignores him.

"
But, madam,
" the fruit seller says, "
what can we say? Can you tell us more code words for foreigners?
"

And I try, but I can't come up with a single one, at least nothing that won't put people off, so I tell him I'll think, then add, "
But there aren't any foreigners here anyway.
"

They both sadly agree. No there aren't.

 

IT'S MONTHS ON
, decades if you factor in perception. Early April, if you go by the calendar. A while ago, the language began to set, and as my accumulation of words sped up, so did time. Back in the fall, when I had to name the world from the ground up, time slowed, then stopped so I could. I existed in eternity. I had been here forever. I'd found a worm hole. But inevitably the extraordinary became ordinary—classes, tests, dinners with the same people, all routine—and life resumed at the speed of sound. You can only get exemption for so long.

Months on, and mostly now, I stay in Hindi. In Hindi, people tell me things they wouldn't in English. When I stop by the travel sundries store near my house, Govinda behind the desk drops the practiced English weather talk he uses for tourists. He pops me open a Coke, and we discuss how bad the year has been, all the scattered terrorism and invasions. Before, they could count on the Israelis, but now that Israel and Palestine are throwing the solid stones again, even the Israelis aren't coming. We talk about how many people have died in this heat: five hundred, all poor, people forced to work for hours under a sun so brutal that if you lay down under it, you'd be dead in an hour. Five hundred early casualties of global warming, I consider. I wonder how anyone will possibly survive here at even five degrees more. We talk about how movies are making Indian girls dress immodestly, which gets us onto the subject of impropriety in general—how Govinda for years has seen the women around Lal Ghat, the Western tourists, dressed in short skirts, no sleeves.
Shameful!