Dreaming in Hindi (8 page)

At a renovated
haveli,
a manse built for a nobleman, she showed me where to find the erotic art painted low on a wall for newly-weds to see. "I can assure you," she said, laughing, "no Indian man is that well-endowed." Previously, she'd described her investigations. In Jodhpur, site of her last study abroad, there had been several scandals, she said, adding in a contrite tone, "And I was at the center of all of them." Two teachers' marriages had been undone by enthusiastic investigations into the oblique case. There'd been a scrape with a Rajput prince, romantic torsion with his Rajput cousins, an ill-fated excursion with an older Rajput man to Bangkok. "I have a weakness for Rajputs," she'd said.

Outside the Lord Ganesh wing, she reported the latest piece of palace intrigue. "I think your puppet has become smitten with someone else," a courtier had told the maharana, alerting him to what the palace spies had discovered—that Helaena appeared to be on the verge of committing some indiscretion. But the grapevine was clueless about the extent of the perfidy—that the maharana's own nephew was involved—and therefore, the maharana was still oblivious too. On hearing the report, he'd only laughed and said, "It won't get very far." In fact, neither had he, yet.

Each time we emerged from another informative folk exhibit, Swami-ji announced the latest international development, usually a dastardly act by Pakistan. "Pakistan is going with Bin Laden," he informed us when we returned to the bus for the next leg

By the end of the day, China was rolling toward the border, Israel had bombed Afghanistan, and I'd figured out Swami-ji's news source: the bus driver, who was getting his facts from other drivers when we stopped. If Swami-ji noticed this, it didn't deter him. "India is on red alert," he announced as the bus pulled out of the Garden of the Maidens. "Within twenty-four hours, America will bomb Pakistan." The teachers all shook their heads gravely.

 

AROUND THAT TIME
, I was perpetually flummoxed, one reason I was fond of an ad that ran in the
Times of India,
urging readers to enroll in a course that would, by means of "three simple truths," leave them "one hundred percent English-Fluent." Its tone conveyed the hysteria I felt. "
And remember this,
" it insisted, "You can't pick up fluency in English thro' any other language. NO! Course designed by the eminent scholar Mr. Kev Nair. Don't wait for an emergency! Ask for prospectus now."

I liked the concept of a language emergency in theory, till an afternoon following the mountain getaway, when I returned home to find one in progress at the Jains'.

I'd brought my shortwave radio into the kitchen to use as a conversational prop. Everyone had gathered round to see it. "You have bought this downtown?" Ekta, Alka's thirteen-year-old and the designated translator, was asking when Alka had barked at her, "
Hindimein bolo":
Say that in Hindi. Turned out, we'd all been busted. At school I'd say "
Oh, yes
" when Vanita asked if I ever spoke English at home. Her tone had been so offhand, I never imagined the question was investigative. But Vanita was in charge of student-family relations, and she executed her duties with the utmost gravity. She'd been by on her motor scooter, not an hour before.

Till then, I'd assumed Alka was shy. Now she became a Hindi commando. Returning home from a hard day at the mine, the poor Dads, in an attempt at conversation, were forced to ask four different ways if I believed in God.
Did I like Indian food? Were there arranged marriages in America? NO? Was I really forty-five? Why wasn't I married? Had I never been married?
The wives leaned forward, incredulous at the thought, while I lied and said no. But being divorced in India is suspiciously similar to being widowed, and widowhood here is a deeply reviled state. Widows must have done something so foul in a past life, the thinking goes, to have caused their husbands, their sole means of support, to die in this one. With sins that black, who's to say any overflow of bad karma won't go on a frenzied spin through the family? Given their radioactive pasts, widows can be stripped of all jewelry and cast out to beg. The social reckoning with divorcées follows the same line as with widows—they're both subject to a bad fate they brought on themselves. All around, better just to say "never married," which implied only "so ox-face ugly your parents could not buy you a husband" and not "past-life felon."

Evenings, the Dads sprang pop quizzes. "
You ate what?
"Jain Dad i asked after dinner, and when I had trouble following, he answered:

"
You ... ate ... daal.
" Lentils.

"
I ate daal,
" I repeated.

"
And ... also ... chaaval.
" Rice.

"
And also chaaval.
"

"
And what is this?
" No go. He was holding one of those thin wafers they always throw down first in Indian restaurants. No one ever orders them by name. "
And you ate papadum,
" he said when I shook my head. There were five children racing in and out of the house, batting a cricket ball in the drive, shouting over music videos. I marveled at his patience. But he was willing, and for once I was able.

"
I ate daal and I ate rice and I ate papadum,
" I concluded, and everyone cried, "
You did!
"

Afternoons, I'd make my way across the drive to the kitchen, where the wives were always amenable. The kitchen through the screen door would look beckoning, with Meena in her housecoat shelling peas on the floor and Alka by the sink chopping fennel. They'd look up when I entered; we'd have a companionable talk. Except I was a companion with one active verb tense, a language ed student tearing forward on one gear. The talk would rev, then I'd screech through an intersection, then we'd all fall quiet again. I hated the silences, reminders of how powerless I was, though had I only known, silent was exactly how I needed to be then.

"If you take a child, six or seven, and put them in France, the child will go through a silent period," says Martha Young-Scholten, a professor of second language acquisition studies at Newcastle University in England. "They won't use the target language, then suddenly, after several months, they'll open their mouths and start speaking fluently, and everyone's amazed. Adults and teenagers often struggle against doing this. They think they have to try right away. But listening without speaking is important." Only months later did I find that the dread silences had allowed words to set.

The Jains rallied, and soon in the manufactured infancy I'd entered, I was acquiring vocabulary at five, ten times the rate I had in my first. Words settled at the bottom of my brain in aggregate, they fermented, and not always to good end. "
Brash pati,
" I'd call to Alka, up on the balcony, where she waited nightly for me to come in: "Goon tight." "
Shubh rati,
" she'd correct: "Good night." Through the force of rapid acquisition, the press of so many words at once, actual structures of words were being changed.

 

THE ACADEMIC YEAR
stumbled back into place. Classes resumed—empty exercises, for the most part. From time to time, scientists conduct investigations into what effect sleep has on language learning. In one study I read, test subjects were seated before a speech synthesizer that added distortion to the words it reeled off. After a while, everyone was able to make the words out anyway. The group was then divided and one half sent off for a good night's sleep. The others had to keep their eyes open all night. The next day, when the groups reconvened and listened to a second staticky round, the rested could still decipher words; the exhausted were no longer able. This showed the "sleepers retained the ability to generalize," the team leader told a science journal.

This showed they'd only kept it up for one night, I'd have added. Had they gone longer, there would have been plenty more the deprivation group would not have retained. Running on two, three hours sleep a night, too blasted from nerves and diffuse fear to go under for long, I found that most new words might have been Mandarin for all I recognized them twenty minutes on.

My brain could digest nothing ordinary, not "
high," "stand up," "I must be going.
" It blocked the list of animal comparisons we were given, though normally those would have made an impression for the differences in anthropomorphism they revealed. But each time I saw in my notes that "
cowlike
" here was a positive quality, implying life-giving, or that "
doglike
" carried the implication of "dirty, goes about the street snatching food," I was like Chauncey Gardner in
Being There
again, mildly surprised and, for one brief flash, curious.

Not every word crumbled on impact. Neurons that fire together, wire together, neurologists say, meaning that repetition is how the new gets fixed in the brain. "Evidence suggests words first acquired when you're learning a second language are responded to much more quickly, perhaps because they've been repeatedly used," the British psycholinguist David Green says. There are Hindi words from those days I used so often, they're hardwired for all time: "
terrorism," "fanaticism," "safety," "exploitation," "war.
"

"
There is a deep bitterness in the minds of the Indian people. If the Muslim world disappeared, no one would heave a sigh,
" Vidhu, the teacher with the planed face, said in a monotone. The previous week's theme in conversation had been village life. "
You cannot know what a Muslim is thinking. Muslims act as one.
"

"
One side American exploitation is whose democracy's cloak come dressed in. One side fanaticism is. War is inevitable.
" In a homework assignment, I labored to unscramble a newspaper story that, once I had, made it clear that American capitalism was as pernicious as Islamic fundamentalism.

Chuli:
"palm hollowed to collect water." I missed the gentle language from before, the one that fussed over when to drop the auxiliary verb. The Hindi I learned now was a Hindi of dark impulses and invasion. "We know how to say 'Terrorists killed the man.' We don't know the word for 'side table,'" Helaena said.

I missed full language of any kind. During these months, I existed in half language. Early on, I'd made an effort to swear off English, and the results had been astonishing. In no time, my English had become lumbering. In the Cyber Planet café, I'd construct and discard the same e-mail again, frustrated by my lack of surety about anything. Was the man who sat on his haunches out in the driveway all night a servant or a marauder? Was Meena angry because I accidentally used the bathroom hand at dinner? It was as if the loss of cultural certainty I was experiencing was being reflected in my language. Was the way you said that in English "lively"?

In Hindi, of course, I was a moron, and would have to be for months. But as much as I'd coach myself—"I'm prepped, I'll just plunge in"—it all got wearing.

In half language, I couldn't make full sense of the world. I'd note and accept the inexplicable: Each morning, Alka would answer the red phone that rang all through breakfast, her voice crisp and official. It was as if she was engaged in helping to run a business, though she never reported any messages to the men. By nine, when the phone was silent, her tone was once more hesitant; she had now only ever been a housewife. In half language, it's the shape-shifting that gets you, the casual mutations in yourself and others.

To learn a second language, you have to be willing to give your self up, the self encoded in your first one. You are no longer a person who speaks with facility and authority. You are less than what you were as a child: You cannot transact a phone call without help, discuss matters more complex than the color of fruits and vegetables. You cannot signal who you are. Most of us, by the time we're adults, speak in so many words. We convey information through tone:
I am sad,
or
I am displeased,
or
Is it not clear? I am important.
Our speech acquires layers so that directness, when employed, has power through force and rarity: "I don't like what you did." But at the beginning in learning a language, you can only be direct. You can say "
Tea is required here,
" not "
Can I get a cup?
"—a vast difference in terms of your popularity.

In half language, you're half what you were, half an overgrown child. You speak like a child, are received as a child. In this other state, you lose abilities.

"I was amazed at how quickly my English..."

"Fell apart?" a cognitive neuroscientist named Arturo Hernandez, who'd also done time abroad, said, and laughed. This was a year or two after my return, and we were comparing notes. "There's this very weird thing that happens where your language starts to bust apart. It's because there's language in your head and there's language in the environment." The one absorbs the other, he explained, the external one filters into your thoughts, becomes, to some extent, your inner one. "We think of language as ours," he said, "but it's not. It's on the news, and we speak it with people. We use other people's language all the time. It all makes you question, What is knowledge? What about that—is knowledge in our heads or in our environment? And if it's in our heads, how fast can it break down?" He mentioned that overseas, when you're aiming for fluency, you try to suppress your first language. "You don't want to use it," he said, then paused. "It's interesting. Language is a lot more fragile than we think it is."

Those weeks of white India are stamped in babble in my head, in Hindi, mostly, in Hinglish, in American, Indian, Victorian English—a problem when you consider, as David Green says, that "there's an intimate connection between language and memory. If you cue people in one language"—that is, people who have more than one—"you get memories from the times they were using it." If you ask Russian immigrants to the United States about their lives, as Cornell researchers did, you'll likely hear stories from Russia if you speak to them in Russian, from the years after if you speak in English. Bilingual patients in therapy, bilingual therapists note, often dodge feelings by relating painful events in the tongue they weren't using at the time of a particular incident, a muting effect that provides safe distance from what they're attempting to stare down. Though "people who speak about trauma in the language it occurred in get a sense of relief they don't in the language it didn't," Green says.