Dreaming in Hindi (38 page)

We talk, and when a silence finally falls, it sounds like an exhalation. "Kit-ti," he says after a while. "When do you leave?" I give the date, only weeks away now, and he takes such a quick breath, I change the subject and tell a story.

I tell him about the fine hot day lately when I'd traveled out of town to a poets' conference with a new friend, a writer named Ruby, someone I'd met through Renee. I omit Ruby's name; like poets everywhere, these two spar. Why don't you try not writing lyrical poetry? Nand had inquired the one time we'd all met up. I leave out her name but report how I'd traveled for miles to the town of Nathdwara, where poets were gathering in a community hall. When I'd walked in, Ruby jumped up to introduce me. "Now the conference is international!" the poet whose recital I'd interrupted had exclaimed. Out the window, a singer in an off-key wedding band was belting out the refrain: "
I want a hi-fi wife!
"The poet began again and, above those lyrics, sang a plaintive ghazal he'd composed, which, like all ghazals, was about an illicit affair. I told Nand how I'd delivered a speech in Hindi at the poets' urging. I omitted the part about how it had collapsed into the usual dada muddle.

I said that after all the poems had been sung, after all the exclamations of
va! va!
had been made, we had walked through the early-evening streets, past slashes of neon and rickshaws with hearts on the back, till we came to an ancient inn where waiters circled our tables with pots of fragrant concoctions. Dozy, I listened to the poets discuss me: "
She is studying in Sector Eleven." "She has written a book." "No, no, in English.
" I mumbled a sleepy account of my life. "You speak like a poet," the poet I'd earlier interrupted said, the nicest spin anyone had ever put on my Hindi. Then everyone picked up their forlorn-looking suitcases and headed for the bus, and Ruby sang ghazals to me all the way home, and at this point in the telling, I'm lost again in India. For Nand's the person I'm closest to here, and there is no way to make him understand the punch line: Out of my old senses, the five I arrived with, I'm a poet and don't even know it.

My life at that time was full of poets. I visited the pathologist, and when I wasn't with Nand, I spent a lot of time with Ruby. In many ways, she reminded me of my friends from home: stealth-bomber sense of humor; possessed of smarts she'd arrived at on her own; resilient; engaged in a career. In addition to writing poetry, she worked as a journalist and an announcer at festivals. But then, too, there were the ways she didn't, the chief one being that, from time to time, she was possessed by the spirit of a prostitute from Jaipur. Ruby first told me matter-of-factly about Phulkumar, the name the ozonic floozy went by, in between ghazals on the bus from Nathdwara. Three months later, back in New York, I'd have occasion to think of Phulkumar again.

To understand how Ruby came to have a shade popping in and out, it's necessary to know a thing or two about her, mainly that she had the deep voice and beauteous heft of an old, black blues singer, and along with them, more man appeal than a crateful of supermodels. Ruby was big. Pheromones rolled off her. Although occasionally at a poetry meet, some mean-spirited male versifier would yell, "Get the sack of rice off the stage!" much more frequently she had to beat the men off with a stick. Her magnetism was such that the entranced would often show up at her house in the days following a conference, hoping to get better acquainted. These suitors were annoying in the extreme, especially since Ruby was married. In her gossipy Jain neighborhood, visits like these could lead to no end of talk. It was during a week, in fact, when one too many had turned up that she was first possessed by Phulkumar.

Initially, Phulkumar confined her activities to getting Ruby to make monkey lips at people. Soon, though, she graduated to induced monkey lips combined with rude noises, followed by slatternly poses. "Like this," Ruby said on the bus and demonstrated: legs akimbo. The priest at the Bhairuji temple she consulted said she was just depressed, though who wouldn't be with the uninvited calling the shots?

Ruby's housework had gone to hell, she was in a bad way, when Phulkumar decided to shape up. This happened after a swaggering doctor from one of the conferences appeared at the door, a guy who'd not only tried to make time with Ruby but had attempted to lay hands on her. Phulkumar took one look at his leering mug and evidently grew incensed. She beat him with shoes and put red-hot spices in his eyes, Ruby reported. When the next Romeo came around, Phulkumar again made herself useful and tried to strangle him. After that, she confessed that she, Phulkumar, had been the one who'd been casting come-hither looks at the men, using Ruby's eyes. She also claimed that she'd been the one writing all of Ruby's poems, which at first I thought was mingy of her, but when I considered the kind of flak Ruby took for pursuing the arts as a woman, I had a change of heart. After a time, Ruby and Phulkumar reached a comfortable accord. Lately, there had been no growling.

All the same, Phulkumar was a hungry spirit. "Aren't you afraid?" I asked Rajendra, Ruby's husband, one night when I was over for dinner.

"No, no," he said. "Now it is habitual."

"But Phulkumar is a prostitute?"

"Yes, yes," he said brightly.

Phulkumar was never in action when I was around. Soon enough, she slipped my mind. I had reason to remember her, though, on a day when I was newly back in New York. My computer had developed several untidy problems, the biggest being self-cannibalism. After it had finished consuming its own address book, it began devouring other pieces of itself, though not the 800 customer service number, which I called. A man by the name of Jeff answered, made diagnostic inquiries, delivered the news.

"Madam, you will have to buy a new computer," he said.

I didn't think so, I replied. Nothing was wrong with the computer itself. Only the software was affected.

"Then a new hard drive perhaps. We cannot help you."

I voiced one more polite objection, then leapt for his throat across the phone lines, began slapping him around long-distance. "What kind of nonsense is this?" I said with full-force hauteur. "You are entirely wrong. You will get me someone who can fix this. You are incapable of performing this job," I said, my vowels stretching into weird twirls.

It was as if I were hearing someone else, someone who could reflexively curl her voice and signal
I will not listen to any more monkey chat.
Someone—and suddenly I understood—whose tone sounded suspiciously Indian. A little like Jeff, in other words.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Where are you from?"

Bangalore, he admitted after a pause, and that's when I saw that I hadn't been the victim of some flash reincarnation by an aggrieved woman from India, had not developed my own Phulkumar. I was simply being myself, or one of my selves—one that had come into being in a place where notions of hierarchy are so entrenched, it's perfectly fine to address service personnel in the caustic tones otherwise reserved for servants. It had taken only a hint of Indian prosody, the faintest singsong, to trigger in me a whole neuronal constellation of a self that had formed the year before. "For every language a man learns, he multiplies his individual nature," Charles V of France said, to which one could add: and ends up becoming an actual multiple, if he doesn't watch it.

"I was someone else in that other language," I'd say often during that time, and while the split I was experiencing sometimes seemed like psychosis, this perception is common. When a Temple University researcher named Aneta Pavlenko posted a questionnaire online asking bilinguals whether they felt as if they had different personalities in their different tongues, 65 percent answered yes, a quarter said no, and the rest put themselves down as "ambivalent."

"It was as if in Hindi, I became another person," I'd say, though with a certain degree of caution if I was talking to a linguist. Linguistics is a contentious business—is "arguably," the journalist Russ Rymer writes, "the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians"—and of all the claims you can make that could lead to bloodshed, this one, in particular, is fighting words.

 

"
FOR THE LAST TWO DECADES
, the hypothesis that language affects thought—generally known as the Whorf hypothesis—has been in serious disrepute," cognitive scientists Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow write in their book
Language in Mind.
"Admitting any sympathy for, even curiosity about the possibility was tantamount to declaring oneself to be either a simpleton or a lunatic."

Up until the 1960s, people had been freely admitting curiosity about this possibility and for years, even before Benjamin Lee Whorf made his mark by arguing that the language you speak helps shape your worldly perceptions. Whorf was a linguistics scholar and fire inspector; he worked for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company at the same time the poet Wallace Stevens did, though the only evidence that the two ever met is a letter about language that was sent to Stevens and mistakenly delivered to Whorf. "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language," Whorf wrote in the 1940s, part of the theory that goes by the full name the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (Edward Sapir, a linguist, was Whorf's champion at Yale.) "The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face," Whorf argued. "On the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds."

The world is a rush of stimuli that each language makes sense of uniquely, meaning that the speakers of each language comprehend the world differently—he was extending a line of thought that the German anthropologist Franz Boas had taken up forty years earlier. Boas observed that every language contains grammatical elements that are "obligatory" and that these determine "what must be expressed." In other words, within a particular language, you can only say things a certain way. If you were to come upon a rhinoceros demolishing your car, to give an example, you would, if you were a Turkish speaker on the phone to the police, be required by the verb to convey whether you yourself were witnessing the rampage or someone had told you about it. In Turkish, verbs of observation are formed differently, depending on if the speaker saw the event firsthand or had it reported to him by someone else. Were the rampage occurring in Russia, however, you'd be obliged, morphosyntactically, to indicate whether the animal was male or female and whether it was finished flattening the car or still in the process of doing so. In Mandarin, you could speed things up. Mandarin has no past or future tense, so the exact stage of trampling would likely not be addressed. Each of these reports would relate the action, but with different shades of meaning.

Boas laid the groundwork for what would become a clash that continues to this day. The crux can be expressed in one question: if, as they do, individual languages make people focus attention on some aspects of a situation and ignore others (for instance, time and gender), does this shade their perceptions of the event? In other words, does language shape thought?

Any answer to this question will depend on the answers to several other questions, one being, How much, truly, do languages differ in how they describe the world? "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality," Edward Sapir declared, to which a lot of people have since responded with a sound
total nonsense.
Does language exist independently of thought—and if so, how would it be possible for language to affect thought? Which comes first in order of their importance in cognition—concepts or words?

Words, absolutely, according to Nietzsche. "Unspeakably more depends on
what things are called
than on what they are," he wrote, italics his. "Creating new names ... creates new 'things.'" No one got overly excited about this idea when it appeared in
The Gay Science
in 1882, but when, one field over, "Whorf came out with a far milder version of the idea in the 1930s, the hypothesis was first lauded as a breakthrough, then two decades later trounced. This pummeling occurred after MIT professor Noam Chomsky skewered the behaviorist B. F. Skinner in a book review. That attack sent linguistics spinning off its axis (or so it seemed to the then reigning behaviorists) and led to the downfall of Whorf and his theories. For years up till then, behaviorist assumptions had shaped how foreign languages were taught. Skinner and others thought that children arrived at fluency in their native tongues through the positive and negative reinforcements they received when they spoke. "Do you want milk?" the mother says as she pours some, and click—the information is filed away: "milk" is the right name for the white liquid that comes in glasses. "Isabella were eating cat poop," a child reports, and her mother screams, "Isabella was eating
what
?" "Were," it's ascertained, is wrong usage. Children were fine-tuned, word by word, into proper speech, the behaviorists thought; ergo, that's how language students should proceed. The assertion was accepted as common knowledge for years, until 1959, when Chomsky wrote his critique of Skinner.

In it, he made a number of points, one of the central ones being that it's ludicrous to suppose children learn to talk solely through the influence of "primary linguistic data"—how their mothers, fathers, and kindergarten teachers form sentences, or don't. If kids had to wait for chiropractics to be performed on every single utterance they made, they'd still be babbling into middle age. How was it, he asked, that by age six or so, a child automatically knows that sentences he's never heard before—"The man don't want that banana"—are grammatically incorrect? Because, Chomsky argued, we all have an inborn facility for language—something he later called a "transformational generative grammar"—which allows us to generate grammatically correct sentences endlessly, based on finite samples. In short, humans are hardwired to speak.