Dreaming in Hindi (41 page)

"Yes, he just wrote. He's been asking about you," I tell Priyanka at the table. "He's going to write you." He'd rushed off with a mention that he might. A mosquito coil by our feet is sending up lazy wisps of smoke. Yellow lights are strung overhead. Monkeys are scampering through the trees. In the romance of the setting, Chirag has come through, and she's the one who needs convincing. "You know, Chirag is really terrific," I say. "He's a really nice guy."

"He is a cow?" Ruby suddenly, mysteriously chimes in. "Do you mean Chirag is a bull?" she cries, funniest thing either of them has ever heard, judging by the way they're rocking and snorting. "What?" I ask, irritated. The joke has sailed over my head and rear-ended a monkey, which hoots and bares its teeth.

"You have said Chirag is a 'guy'?" Ruby has to dab her eyes to explain. "But 'guy' in Hindi means a 'cow'?" Spelled
gai,
but all right. "So I am saying Chirag is a bull." More rampant hilarity ensues, then she takes off into rapid-clip Hindi, reprising some of her best lines from the Indo-Pak conference she just moderated: "
The blood of our concern should remain in our veins." "As much as we know, that much we have to learn.
"

The conference, attended mostly by Hindus, repeatedly erupted into outbursts against Muslims, she reports. Relations between India and Pakistan have grown ominously strained. The threat of nuclear confrontation is on everyone's mind. India seems to be on the verge of going to war with Pakistan over the attack on the parliament last December. The Hindu right, furious that the invasion was almost certainly carried out by Muslim militants based in Pakistan, has called for Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to crack down. Musharraf's response has been viewed as tepid. For months now, Indian and Pakistani troops have been massing at the border.

"At the conference, a poet got up and said bad things about the Pakistanis," Ruby tells me, breaking for English to be sure I'm still with her. "Everyone clapped. But when I suggested understanding, there was silence. You can't win at these conferences if you don't say you hate the Muslims." Then she slips back into full-fire Hindi, and I remember how, beginning of the year, the necessity for tolerating ambiguity nearly killed me. I'd never cried as much over a man as I did over Hindi then, I'd just told Vidhu in class. He'd just confessed that I was, on arrival, one of the worst students they'd ever seen.

"We don't often get people with so little Hindi," he'd said. "When we have, they didn't make it. They lost heart. But you didn't. For three months, you hardly made any progress, and then your Hindi went straight up." He'd soared his hand into the air. "Six more months, Kathy-ji, and people would take you for a native," he'd said with courtly exaggeration, and the sentence fractured me. Six more months? I didn't have six weeks.

Below the table, smoke from the mosquito coil is lowering mosquitoes down onto my feet. Distracted stabbing my sandals to try and shake them off, I miss the unveiling of Ruby's plan.

"... is what I am telling you, this thing could be very, very good for you," she's saying when I tune back in. Priyanka is nodding emphatically beside her. "And it will be broadcast on the Mewar channel," Priyanka says. None of this sounds good.

None of it is. Something called the "Videshi Competition" is coming up, an event held each year at the puppet museum. The name says it all: hapless tourists lured into a stumbling salute to Rajasthan for the amusement of the locals. "I'm not doing that," I say preemptively, in case that's what they're getting at.

They are. "But all you'd have to do is wear traditional Rajasthani dress and sing a traditional Rajasthani song," Ruby says. While everyone in the audience snickered.

"But you will win," Ruby says, noting the look on my face. Hers is lit with the brilliance of the plan, which she proceeds to spell out. But do I understand who my competitors would be? Tourists! Tourists, who do not speak Hindi! Do I see I could wander on looking clueless, as if I were one of them, then open my mouth and blast them off the stage? The idea makes Ruby cackle. "We will win," she says with verve and confidence, using "we" because she's going to be writing my speech, and Priyanka will help with the coaching. "No way, Vijay," I tell her.

Undaunted, she proceeds with the bombshell inducement: "But first prize is a night at Kumbhalgarh," she says, her face now 120 watts. Kumbhalgarh is the mountain resort where Helaena used to meet Aditya, the place where the students gathered at the start of the year, back when leopards, all manner of retransfiguring wildness, were just about to appear. Ruby says the name with such low reverence, memories come flooding back: of attar-scented water glasses, of silver chandeliers, of stone steps rising and falling through the greenery, rising and falling like a song. It's a king's existence, all right, for as long as you stay, which in Ruby's life, will be not ever. She could host a thousand panels, could sell a million poems, could force Rajendra to get a real job, and she'd never have enough for even one night at Kumbhalgarh. True, yes, but still: the year is coming to an end, and exams are coming up, and I'd sooner eat the algae in Lake Pichola than parade around like a tourist.

Ruby is staring at me, calculating my response. I shake my head, firmly. In the yellow light, her face dims. "But you would win," she says slowly. "You would win, and then you could take Priyanka and me with you." She laughs quickly to show
That was just a joke,
but her expression is serious. Coaching, speechwriting, don't I see? She's proposing an even trade. Ruby has never let the fact of my relative wealth—the vast comparative sums I have as a Westerner—come between us. She's made it emphatically clear: in this friendship, we're equals. She's always met me halfway: cooked me numerous dinners, taken me to poetry meetings and journalism conferences. This thought makes me consider all the boons I've received here all year: how Vidhu frequently stayed on for hours after class, unpaid, to help me resolder my sentences, all Nand's fussing attentions, the way Anukul has thrown open the doors of his classroom.

Really, all Ruby's asking me to do is to make a fool of myself, which I've been doing all year anyway.

"Well, I do know a song," I say. "And it is Rajasthani." I demonstrate my mastery of "Yara Seeli Seeli."

"That is Rajasthani with a pop beat," she says in a monotone. I smile at what I think is a compliment, then remember she'd specified "traditional." She takes it from the top, sounding a lot more like Lata Mangeshkar than I do. I try again. She shakes her head. "It is a song by a woman who's died and wants her lover. You're supposed to sound sad," she says. I thought I did.

"And you shouldn't do that with your head," Priyanka pipes up, indicating my head wobble, which I'd assumed could mean grief. It means everything else here. I try again. "No, sad," Ruby says. "You come to my house, and we'll work on it."

Late that night, tape player on the bed, I tell myself,
You can do this.
But when I put the cassette in, try not to head-wobble to the first keening line, alien phonemes and morphemes and nasality trip me up. Lata Mangeshkar's voice trembles, and I can imitate her for one word, but I can't push it into longing without sounding like a dog that's had it with a squirrel. My howl cracks. I lose my bearings. Swelling emotion has never been big in American music, so God knows when swelling is good or when it's bad. Except I do. I do because I can hear it when she does it right.

I listen, again and again, because the singer does it in a way I can tell is perfect, because the music on its own terms is haunting. I will figure out how to sound naked and pleading and to ignore my American notions of decorum. But up against my own cultural reserve, I can't. I play the first four lines over and over, and each time her voice gains power. Each time, I see a little more of what she's doing, injecting despair into the word "
night,
" going low then rising in protest on "
burn.
" I listen, and finally I can come into the music unshielded, un-American, not with anywhere near her talent or grace, but I can make my voice slide and plead, beg; I can restrain a shriek, though not for too long. I don't wince as my reserve peels away. Reserve has always been protection and dignity, but it can be reclaimed anytime. What I've never done before is to wail—express full pounding sorrow at all that happened to cause my ghost life—and now, with the fan set on High, I do.

 

"
AA-O, KATHY
," Mrs. Singh says when I poke my head into the television room. "
Aa-o!
" Come! Her daughter Ritu has made a special Gujarati dish, sweetened grains. "
Bhaitiye,
" sit, and I do, to lots of food and TV. Not the Indian
Weakest Link
tonight, too bad, but Hindi movies that freeze from weak cable and no one cares. Ritu serves me, serves her mother, who's a temperamental cook, she says. "
She can't give cooking lessons. She has to be alone in the kitchen. If anyone else is in there, the food will be spoiled.
" The word she uses,
bigaad,
is one Vidhu just taught me. Words lately keep magically appearing the day I learn them. I show the women where I've written "
spoiled
" in my notebook, which occasions a vocabulary quiz.

"
What does
dil
mean? What does
ghar
mean?
" Ritu asks, nabbing words from the film.

"'Heart.' 'House.'
Bahut asan,
" I say: "Too easy," which I've pronounced like "too is-ee."

"
Asaan,
" she corrects.

"
What does
muhabbat
mean?
" Mrs. Singh asks, Asiatic eyes crinkling in a grin. Okay, she's stumped me. "Love," she says, and smiles triumphantly, though I'm not sure why. "
Main aapse muhabbat karti hun,
" she says: "I love you."

Mrs. Singh exhibits the same equanimity my mother had, has the same wry regard for life. I've become fond of her, in all aspects but one. When this one appears, I make myself think of it as a tic. The troubling part of Mrs. Singh's personality is that she's not terrifically fond of a number of nationalities. Can't take the Israelis who sometimes stay here: they lock the room and leave the fan running. Could do without the Americans. When relatives stop by, she insists on telling them I'm French. And Muslims ... Mrs. Singh's eyes narrow. I'm exempted, however, and so's her Muslim friend Rashida, the one who helped me find this place. Rashida is all right; "
she is a good Muslim.
" For a while, the tic can be like when someone burps in the West—the conversation pauses, you look away—then in no time, around the afternoon I go to a homeopathic doctor for a sleep remedy, exemptions are revoked. On both sides.

Can a homeopathic cure take effect after just one dose? I wonder the morning after the visit. The whole time I've been here, my sleep has been largely barren—snippets of unintelligible Hindi, never a fast glorious ride, or else dreams in my own tongue so weighted, they can't unfold, they sink down as soon as they begin. I rarely have the sensation of having dreamed, as if most of my energies need to be siphoned into the task of laying down language, at all times. But on this particular night, I dream in vivid rushing images, of men murdered with their hands bound and hospitals where the doctors are wasps and dwarves, scenes so horrifying I bolt awake several times.

When my brain continues to heave up gruesome images over several nights, however, I have to conclude it's not the homeopathic pills that are the cause, but most likely the nightmarish stories that are arriving here from Gujarat. I catch bits and pieces now, enough to haunt my dreams, not enough to understand that the nocturnal imagery is tame compared to what's going on a hundred miles to the south. It's anarchy down there, I'll learn later. I'll hear the full stories in time: Several Muslims, racing to escape a howling mob, made it to what they thought was the safety of a hospital but were captured on the third floor and thrown to their deaths. In one village, a family of eleven Muslims tried to escape after their homes were destroyed. They hid in a field under a large tree, but by nightfall a mob of five hundred had found them. The men in charge reassured them, "
You will not be killed.
" People gave them water, asked only that they leave. The family made it twenty feet down the road when they were set on from behind. A thirteen-year-old girl was gang-raped first. Then they were all hacked to death, and in a "conversion" to Hinduism, their bodies were burned on a funeral pyre.

The official death toll has now reached nine hundred, or that's the number that appears in the papers. The official death toll, however, is meaningless, since only intact bodies are being tallied, not the many that have been incinerated by mobs with gasoline cans. Eighty percent of the official dead are Muslims. The other 20 percent, the Hindus, have, for the most part, been shot by police while they were rioting. That particular figure has been kept low by the fact that the police often stand back and do nothing. "We have no orders to save you," they frequently tell the Muslims who beg them for help.

Cries of genocide, of ethnic cleansing, have gone up around the world, as representatives of human rights organizations begin to arrive, to tour the refugee camps where an estimated 175,000 Muslims without homes are living. The BBC has sent reporters. The outcries and concern have come from any number of countries, though not the United States. There no one seems to be aware that any of this is going on. My country, it appears from over here, is in a vacuum of self-absorption, dissecting and analyzing what happened to it months ago, endlessly, to the exclusion of others. Meanwhile, the anti-Muslim rhetoric that started up then has mutated into something equally savage here.

"It's terrible down there. Don't go in that direction," a woman, the wife of an NGO head and a friend, says when I call. Her husband is touring the camps, where conditions, she reports, are miserable: a single toilet for five hundred people, inadequate food and water, outbreaks of disease, fragile security. At one camp, loudspeakers set up outside the walls by Hindus broadcast the chant "Kill! Kill! Kill!" through the night. The state government, she says, has refused to donate even one rupee toward the camps.