Dreaming in Hindi (35 page)

Most jokes, most aspirations, most everything trivial. Over here, I had a different zodiac sign, every bit as accurate as the other one. And on and on, till I realized that all I had to go on here, the only thing that would register, was goodness. That's the only trait I could find that people could perceive—when I went, for instance, to volunteer at the deaf school, the act was clear, it wasn't fogged. India was causing me to amplify goodness if I wanted to be seen—about the last turn I'd ever expected.

In the dining room, Piers stood and walked over to me. He put a hand on the back of my chair. Everything was all right, was it? he asked. I smiled, gave a light, brushoff answer. Out of translation, you lose the habit of explaining yourself to anyone, including yourself. The lightest answers, the thinnest stories can suffice. They can tangle and mat, torn nets on the water—but they'll be nets, covers, all the same. This far from home, nearly any story will hold, or it will for a while. Your son hasn't phoned due to covert obligations. Or: You're on an adventure; this is one big lark. These nets will keep everything below, unless the real explanation is blasted up despite you, exploding the skeins all at once, revealing them to be as poorly made as they really were all along. Of course, this can happen at any time, but if it occurs at the end of what linguists call the silent period, this timing, then, later, will seem ironic.

 

HANUMAN LOOKED LIKE
an orange blob the afternoon I began to understand what I was, deep down, really doing here. The temple keeper had been repainting him when I'd hurried past the shrine and through a door to the left. Hanuman, lieutenant to Rama, is the erect-tailed monkey god, but in street shrines, the statuary can amount to no more than rounded daub on the wall, just the divinity's head. The temple keeper hadn't gotten around to applying his eyes, and so Hanuman's head was still a large lump when I went by.

Upstairs, past an Indian-style toilet, outside the room where jars of fetuses were displayed, I explained to the pathologist that my oncologist wanted the blood tests done again. For most of the time I'd been here, my doctor had been e-mailing patient, reasoned replies to questions I'd hit on when I'd lain awake too long. My right hip hurt: could that be progression of the illness, or did he think that was from a rickshaw ride? But when I'd sent the results of the last blood tests, he'd written back just three words: "Run them again."

The pathologist listened, nodded. Yes, that would be very good. We would do them over. I could call in several days for the report. He brought me to the other room, where a nurse lit a rusty Bunsen burner set beside a jar of needles. She threw the match onto the floor. "
Aapke pas bandaid hai?
" I said when blood began to trickle down my wrist. She stared at me blankly: no Band-Aid, no comprehension. Masking tape over alcohol-soaked cotton, what she tried, canceled each other out.

The temple keeper was pasting flowers onto Hanuman by the time I came back down. The god's new eyes had gone on skewed and given him a fun-crazed look. Would I like
prasad?
the old man asked: sanctified sweets? I took the opportunity to inquire whether Hanuman handled health. The man made bulked-up monkey arms to suggest strength, a yes, then perhaps registering how my face looked, reconsidered and suggested I go straight to the top, to Hanuman's boss, Rama. That sounded prudent. My tumor markers, the blood tests that measure cancer activity, had come back ten times higher than normal.

"
Does Rama do health?
" I asked.

"
Madam, Rama-ji does everything,
" he said.

I went in and knelt down.

 

IT WAS IN THE
1980s that the phrase "silent period" first entered the lexicon in linguistics, around the time an argument started in the field over whether people who are trying for a second language follow the same physiological sequence, the same stages of development, they did the first time. Do all subsequent outings retrace the sturdy, straight-shot, original highway to fluency? The debate has never been fully settled, as no debate in linguistics ever fully is, but the two sides are now well defined.

The camp that believes second-time learners recapitulate their linguistic infancy points as evidence to, among other things, this so-called silent period. Every student of French/Cambodian/Lithuanian, teenager or adult, has passed through it. So has every baby. It's the frustrating early period where you understand infinitely more than you can say, where you recognize five hundred words tops and your surest bet is to point. It's typified, the ESL Web site I consulted said, by "performing actions, gesturing or nodding, saying yes or no," but the reactions mount from there. Staring glumly at a woman shelling peas while being hurtled back to the infinite powerlessness you'd last known in fifth grade—that could be another one. The silent phase is also called the "shock stage," for a reason.

On the other side of the debate, you get the camp that weighs in with a resounding "yes and no." Yes, you obviously go through a mute passage. But while it can feel as if you've been dropped back onto the playground, there is one huge difference: the second time, you have the fully formed brain of an adult. You're setting out to learn a language with a head full of language, with prior comprehension of all kinds of rules of grammar and syntax that can be used, if necessary, as handholds along the way. Yes, you've kind of been dropped back, but no, not really. Because you remain the age you are, you're more accurately, this group thinks, going sideways.

If the debate could be moved into the realm of metaphor, a third, compromise position might be possible. What you're doing in the silent stage is making yourself like a child, in the Buddhist sense. Buddhists believe that in meditation, you aim to become like a child. And language study, as anyone who has stayed with it knows, becomes a form of meditation as you chant the alien words to yourself. In both instances, meditation and language study, you try for a state of receptive infancy, usually with variable success.

The 1980s, when this debate started, was also the time when Noam Chomsky advanced his principles and parameters theory. Babies' brains are hardwired for language, he and a number of other linguists had long maintained, but in the eighties he fine-tuned that theory. What infants are hardwired with, Chomsky proposed, are fundamental principles, the deep structures of a language. From there, in time, through parents' and bystanders' cooing and baby talk, the parameters of the local tongue get set. Spanish babies absorb the patterns of Spanish, that it's fine, for instance, to dispense with subject pronouns—more economical to say "
Was going to the store,
" since the pronoun is implied by the verb, than "
She was going to the store,
" which infants born to English-speaking parents learn. They're fundamentally drawing on inborn knowledge of a universal grammar, Chomsky's belief, just adding local embellishment. And it's at this point that the debate begins: if there is, in fact, a well you had access to when you learned to speak, can you return to it for a second language when you're older?

"That's where it gets interesting," Martha Young-Scholten, the Newcastle professor of second language studies, said. The field, she said, splits evenly: "Fifty percent think adult learners are using general problem-solving mechanisms, the kind of thinking you use with chess. Fifty percent think they're using the same mechanisms young children do." She puts herself in the second category. Having more than once, when studying with Gabriela, known with surprising assurance the answer to a question about material we'd just begun, I'm open to persuasion. In those early days, I'd sometimes have the brief sensation of just knowing Hindi, and studies indicate that's not uncommon. When adults and older children learn languages, it turns out, they convert directly from their native tongue far less often than anyone had assumed.

"We're using much more detailed questions and finding adults get implicit knowledge of things they weren't taught, very subtle things that weren't present in the input," Young-Scholten said. I thought of the scanning studies Lee Osterhout was conducting, the ones showing that language students' brains know the right answers long before their slack selves do. "
Homo sapiens
are born knowing things about human language. It's just part of the genome," she said. Then why, she and others argue, couldn't that knowledge carry over to foreign languages?

Here are some other characteristics of the silent period, as outlined on the ESL Web site. Many so-called silent students are actually engaged in private speech. They're rehearsing survival phrases to themselves. Chittering snatches are running through their heads, while the whole time, they appear mute. This phase, the Web site said, can last between ten hours and six months—on the shorter side if the student is enrolled in an immersion program, longer if there are extenuating circumstances. These calculations jibed with my experience. In India, around the time I crossed the line, I was then about five months in.

 

HANUMAN STARED AT A
point above my head, through disappearing curls of smoke. He looked like he'd seen someone who reminded him of the good times. On my knees, I was perplexed what to say. Pieces of old Episcopalian doxologies rose up, were smoked out by the incense. I could hear an arriving worshiper beyond the door invoke Rama's name in greeting to the temple keeper. The shrine was big enough only for one.
Just speak from the heart,
I told myself. Under Hanuman's sideways gaze, I remembered the psychic who'd said I'd witness a spectacular healing and thought,
I'm sorry, Rama, but I'm taking it.
As if in the ozone, you could wheedle your future into place.
I'm taking the spectacular healing,
I thought. I heard how craven and arrogant this sounded, but that was the extent of what I came up with.

Five evenings later, when I phoned the pathologist, I saw that this truculence had been ill-advised. "I am very sorry, madam," he said. "The lab has told me they have already done them twice."

 

AFTER THE SILENT PERIOD
, there are other stages in adult language acquisition that parallel the first go-round. Older students use a "no" construction similar to the one toddlers do—they say things in the new language such as "No want that" or "No do that" before the correct form takes over. Adults, like young students, over-generalize rules. They make irregular verbs regular, the way preschoolers do: "Mommy wented to the store." Adult learners have to struggle to pull themselves upright. It's only after repeated bruising and scuffing that any flowering will occur.

 

"
RUN THEM AGAIN
," my oncologist wrote back. A third time. The pathologist immediately agreed, professional courtesy. But he also sent me across town to a general doctor, the man, apparently, people went to here when they needed to know about their chemotherapy options in India. "There is no reason, madam, you will have to return home," the pathologist said on seeing me off. "You can fly to Bombay."

The second doctor's waiting room was an enclosed front porch. I sat down next to a thin, young tribal woman, recently in from the country. A veil covered her face; she continually tugged it back into place, appeared ready to flee. A baby in her lap stared agog at my face, at the unfamiliar color. His mouth trembled. When I cooed, "
Nam-as-te!
" he started to bawl. The mother swung him away from me.

In the inner room, the doctor gave me the number for the hospital in Bombay. The phone booth I stopped in on the way home was next to a Rama temple. In my prayers, this time, I was humble.

The third test came back. The numbers were normal. Forever since, I've had to wonder: could that just have been a matter of two bum test tubes? My doctor, I've noticed, neglects to include the miraculous Rama healing in my chart. Lab error, I'm certain, is what he concludes. But
twice?
Twice, the blood was mixed with God knows what? Or was there someone, somewhere on the subcontinent, celebrating her indisputable good fortune—two clean bills of health, who could argue with that?—at the very moment, perhaps, the baby started to wail. Someone who, months after receiving the two reports, felt a nagging pinch, followed weeks later, perhaps, by the same ominous electric buzz in the bones I'd had ten years before. Catastrophe almost certainly would follow: tumors expanding, biting into bone, blackening and ossifying tissue. Perhaps, or perhaps the spectacular healing was so potent, it swept through us both. Maybe the woman in Bombay recovered and got on with her life. I had—or, at least up till the moment of the second bum test, that's what I'd been telling myself.

 

THERE'S ONE FINAL
stage that exists in children learning a language and is often repeated in adults. This phase, called "the naming explosion," happens the first time around age three and is like a sluice of passion. Young children are suddenly, ecstatically deft with words—woefully fluent, their exhausted parents might say. Adult learners sometimes find the same thing occurs with them—they cross line after line, come into the far world they've been hankering after. Passion is what has kept them going during the long, grinding silence, and now that they've been rewarded for their determination, passion intensifies. In his book
Seeing Voices,
Oliver Sacks refers to this stage as it occurs in children when he describes the "love affair with the world" that the nineteenth-century German wild child Kaspar fell into on being taught to speak: "Such a rebirth, a psychological birth ... is no more than a special, exaggerated, almost explosive form of what normally occurs in the third year of life, with the discovery and emergence of language." The world, till then chaotic, uncertain, becomes lovely through the order imposed by words.

My silent period, coincidentally, ended just before the three markers were run. It was followed, not long after, by a naming explosion. In that fertile state of mind, I was able to cross the desert. The blinders I'd used to narrow my life fell away; I came face-to-face with the reasons why, exactly, I'd withdrawn from a career, pulled back from romantic engagements. The physical illness I had was treatable, and for years, but it wasn't curable, and while I didn't constantly register that fact, my psyche, apparently, did. My psyche, I saw now, had been prompting me to respond the way animals do in the face of danger: if fight or flight isn't possible, they play dead. Playing dead! When I'd been given this extraordinary gift of so many extra years. I saw how preposterous that was, saw, too, how I had, without realizing it, begun to free myself from the bind.