Dreaming in Hindi (37 page)

"
The neighbors are dirty people,
" she rushes to explain. "
They are very bad. The man sits out on the deck in women's clothes. And they are jealous of us because we are royals,
" she's saying, but my smile is going flat. I suddenly have a good idea what's gone on just now. The neighbors have seen an apparition. A product of the times. One state down, in Gujarat, just a four-hour drive, sectarian tensions have boiled over, warping people's perceptions there and here.

What had happened to cause this is still hazy knowledge to me. Later, I'll piece together facts. On February 27, a train carrying Hindus was attacked by Muslims. The Hindus, right-wing activists, had been returning from Ayodhya, the temple town where extremists had razed the mosque a decade before, setting off waves of violence. For ten years, the site had been rubble policed by guards. But the passengers on the Sabarmati Express had gone to Ayodhya with the intention of doing puja, of worshiping, and thereby sanctifying the grounds, so that in the months to come, a temple to Rama could be built on the site. They'd been planning to take back the land. Incendiary business, and like other BJP contingents before them, they'd been turned away.

If the puja had gone on, it would have had the effect of gasoline on sparks. The prospect of a temple to Rama being built on what, to Muslims, was now a desecrated site was not only outrageous but ominous: a threat. For years now, the Hindu right had worked to recast Rama as a symbol of triumphant nationalist identity. Rama had been victorious in vanquishing the rakshasa demons, just as, the RSS and other right-wing parties made clear, the purified Hindu nation would defeat their own latter-day threats: the Muslims. In case anyone missed the parallels between Rama's struggle and the
shudh
Hindu nation's, when the popular made-for-TV movie of the Ramayana aired, various party leaders spelled them out in articles and speeches.

In areas where sectarian tensions were running high, in conservative precincts such as Rajasthan and Gujarat, Rama's name was now often used menacingly. "
Jai Ramji ki,
" people said increasingly all through Udaipur: "Victory to the followers of Rama," what used to be a greeting transmogrified into a threat.

Or "
Jai Sri Ram":
"Hail Lord Ram"—what Bajrang Dal workers traveling on the Sabarmati Express had forced Muslim passengers to say when the train neared Godhra station in Gujarat, on February 25. The Bajrang Dal brandished iron rods, to emphasize the immediacy of the request. Two days later, when the same train, now carrying the spurned
karsevaks,
"spiritual volunteers," pulled into Godhra station, a mob of angry Muslims was waiting. Words were exchanged. Stones were thrown at the carriages. The passengers locked themselves in, so that twenty minutes later, when one of the coaches went up in flames, people were trapped inside. Fifty-nine Hindus were asphyxiated or burned to death—the result, later forensic evidence would suggest, of a Hindu passenger's malfunctioning cookstove. But at the time, shrieks went up throughout Gujarat: the Muslims had done this thing. Party leaders led the howls.

They had done this thing and they would have to pay, the party leaders declared. If the Muslims wished to be safe, an RSS official said once the state had gone up in flames, "they will have to earn the goodwill of the Hindu people." Madness reigned. There was no means for the Muslims to obtain goodwill. Mobs of Hindus prowled the streets, their faces contorted by the leers of the righteous. "
Kill! Hack! Burn!
" they screamed as they fell on Muslim families trying desperately to hide. Children were stabbed to death. Mothers were set on fire.

Oh, but Gujarat,
people would lament in the months to come, as the violence continued at a slow, steady boil till nearly two thousand had died, most of them Muslims.
Gujarat!
Gujarat was Gandhi's state.

At the Singhs', I can perceive only the vague outlines of this. I can sense something very bad is happening, but I'm trying to decode it with my slippery Hindi, from snippets, body language, and intuition. My newsgathering abilities are sorely tested. In America, the papers are still concentrating on the country's own perceived threats. Gujarat barely rates a mention from what I can tell at the cybercafe, during the five minutes the computer stays up. That leaves me with several options, none ideal. I can try to navigate the Indian papers, but Hindi newspaper language is byzantine, as I've learned to my frustration. The last time I tried to decipher current events this way was when a friend e-mailed, horrified, about something that had occurred in this part of the world. What happened? I wrote back. "You don't want to know," she answered. I found the story in the
Dainik Bhaskar
and, with a dictionary, tried to make sense of it. Twenty minutes on, I was one paragraph in, and dawning understanding was freezing my mind. Numbed, I contemplated words instead of meaning. So odd how the word
galaa,
"throat," contains a letter that looks like a long, exposed neck:
. And isn't the hard clacking
t
sound in
katna,
"cut," exactly like the one we have in "machete"? And then I couldn't look anymore at what had happened to Daniel Pearl.

The Hindi papers are out. By default, my chief news source becomes the clipped
Times of India,
which runs short, sterile accounts that in their terseness convey the message: whatever is happening in Gujarat is unspeakable.
SIX MORE KILLED
, a headline reads, then just names, ages, and towns follow, never the details, never the full reports that have begun to cause cries of "Genocide!" to go up in Europe. "Six more": one a Muslim man who was first beaten so bloody, he could no longer move his arms, at which point someone produced a tire and placed it on his chest. Someone else found a match as the crowd shrieked with laughter.

FOUR MORE KILLED
: among them a pregnant Muslim woman who was gang-raped. Afterward, one of the participants sliced her belly open and impaled the fetus on a sword.

FIVE MORE DIE IN GUJARAT
: most likely from burning, the preferred method of slaughter, a pointed reference to the train deaths.
MUSLIMS, LEARN ARSON FROM US
, graffiti on the walls of Ahmedabad sneer.

One, five, ten more. In our town, a curfew is imposed when violence threatens, but then it turns out that the trouble was just a rumor; we can all go out again. A Muslim shop owner in Udaipur is nearly lynched when word spreads that he's molested a Hindu girl. Shops shut down. Then they reopen. Apparently, he didn't. Apparently, what that was, was one more apparition. On the streets, on the roofs, the bogeyman's appeared.

 

"
IN SANSKRIT
, they had sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing—oh, yes," Nand said as the afternoon waned, carrying on his examination of the ancients' ten senses. Once the whirling particles began to slow, a pale focus was restored to the mind. Sanskrit speakers had the same five we do, he said, called collectively the
jnanendriya,
the agents of perception. But perhaps the path to sensuality was twice as wide then, as Sanskrit speakers had five senses more—the
karmen-driya,
the agents of action. These were grasping, walking, excretion, sexual reproduction, and one more so obvious that it's astonishing to think we haven't made it a sixth. For if the senses are the means by which we take in the world, then this one, speech, has to be the ultimate. Consider: In one language, you have five. In another, you have twice as many to speak of. Speech is so powerful, it can double the senses.

Now that my own have been altered, I'm beginning to understand how interconnected all the senses are, all five, or ten. Change one, and the others are transformed with it. Change your speech—the word for "fine," say—and your sense of vision may be altered, too.

I discovered this when I passed a Western woman on the street. There still aren't many tourists here, so she was immediately visible from a distance. I tensed on a side glance. Her movements were bizarre. At first she looked like she was stomping. All around her, women in saris moved in a glide, in slow fluid lines, but the Western woman's legs chopped the air. And what legs! Hard and knotted as a laborer's, blatantly exposed by high shorts.
Slap in the face to all decency,
a singsong voice in my head pronounced, the new language having apparently tamped down all memories of the high shorts in my bureau back home. Passing the woman, men on the street looked nervous, as if they had caused this sight. They glanced away. A few gawked or giggled. Most of these men had never seen their wives naked. ("The women lift up their saris at night," Helaena, working toward an off-label degree in Sexual Mores in Rajasthan, had explained.)

The woman came closer. Worse, the shirt she wore was sleeveless. A word, unbidden, flashed in my mind. It was one Govinda had used.
Sharmnaak.
"Shameful."

If the word had lodged in English, another, reproving one would no doubt have followed: "priggish." But because it hadn't, a tracery of all the others to which it was linked in its network flickered:
Pakka:
"proper"; more specifically for women, "demure," "restrained."
Shudh aurat:
a woman who's devoted in her worship of the gods, a group that, quite literally, includes her husband. Her
patidev,
exact translation: "husband-god." There are no "wife-gods" in Hindi, but there are
patrivrata,
"one who fasts for her husband." In Hindu belief, women are born so sinful that they stand less of a chance of coming back as a man than an animal does of returning as a human. Though a woman does have one route to salvation open to her. If she accepts her husband as her god, the way Sita did Rama, she can achieve
moksha,
"liberation."

"
Fine,
" like most every other word I've learned, leads straight into religion. I'm perpetually bemused by how entwined this language is with Hinduism. Sometimes I think I can't begin to speak it without a thorough grounding in the religion. Sometimes I think that's what I get in vocabulary class. It is my
dharma
to visit my father, I find myself thinking. The shower is now religious purification:
snan karna
is both "to bathe" and "to cleanse oneself spiritually." They say there's no conversion rite into Hinduism, but there is: learn Hindi.

Now that I'm "
fine,
" I've achieved double vision. On the street, for a minute, I can see the woman the way she would have looked to me before: healthy, tanned, in shape, striding tall through the town. She would have been all these things back when I was who I was before: a woman who came by independent thinking naturally, whose great-grandmother had been the mayor of a town in Florida, whose grandmother was an artist, who'd strode up plenty of hills and so would never have tsked audibly at a woman in hiking shorts. Which, to my delayed shock, as she came within hearing range, was precisely what I'd done. It was as if I'd been possessed, and I have been: by words.

Over the line, I have the second sight I've been dogging ever since those first heady glimpses I had of a far world. Half the time now, I can see what they're talking about. Half the time, what they're talking about are only the kinds of concerns people expressed in the textbook the first months: How many rooms are in this hotel? Are they large? Or are they small? Still, ordinary as much of it is, this double vision is always slightly spooky. A straight view into places that were once off-limits? There's something taboo about it. A sacrilege, perhaps, for this new sight comes at a price.

I'm an accidental Hindu, and I'm an Episcopalian. I'm not like those women, but of course I am. Daily, truths crash, and for the divine experience that follows, of being rattled into new sight, a price must be paid. As one sense is altered and changes the others, the old senses are suspended, including one that's an amalgam of all the rest. With each collision of worlds, for a time, I lose my sense of self.

 

THE LOO IONS CONTINUE
to spin down as Nand and I pick up speed. We talk about the Indian sense of speech, how it has to be the most acute in the world. "In India, we have been criticized for our verbal hobbies," he says. The British had made digs about how they went on. "We have an oral tradition," he says. "Therefore, much was put into poetry. Even books of astronomy and medicine. Poetry can be learned swiftly." English, he observes, has a written tradition, and so "it is informative in nature. Its knowledge is encyclopedic. Other languages explain the world more celestially."

We talk about how the international boom in Indian novels has been confined to books written in English, how many extraordinary Indian writers, because they can write only in their own tongues, are consigned to obscurity. The first group's "money is always talked of," he says, "and that has created a frustration among the Hindi writers. The writer is supposed to be a crusader against the evil designs of a society, but what I find today are writers who want to be crusaders and at the same time become businessmen. If I see a prosperous neighbor, a prosperous market, a prosperous life—how big a crusader will I be? Writers are part of the social ambitions in which they live." We talk, as always, with a sense of urgency, with the understanding that there's still so much to say, with the belief, I'll think later, that if he can keep it to eternal truths, he can keep us both here forever.