Dreaming in Hindi (11 page)

The rickshaw guy who drops me off scolds me when I thank him: "You should say
shukriya.
" I'm momentarily confused.
Dhan-yavaad,
what I'd said, is perfectly fine in every "Speak Hindi" book, but then I realize: he's Muslim. I'd used the word from the Sanskrit. He's insisting on the Arabic-based one. All year, every time I give thanks, I end up putting someone off.

A block from the Chandra Prakash, on the corner by the Titanic Travel Agency, I manage by the determined unfocusing of my eyes to avoid the attentions of the overwrought cybercafe owner who wears a zoot suit. He has a business proposition he wants to discuss. I can scientifically guess what it is: I should come to his place only. I'm worn-out from his other business proposals, sympathetic nonetheless. There's a drought on, all the tourists have vanished, the merchants are desperate or dulled.

I pass an elephant standing on breakfast, curling sweet-smelling chickpea greens up in his trunk. A round old lady, head hennaed a silly orange, pulls a little girl across the street. Four old men in red and purple turbans lounge at a table, watching me,
videshi
television, foreigner TV, and that's it for the block. Even when you turn a corner and suddenly encounter a crowd here, it's never the full-press crush of people in Benares or Calcutta.

At Renee's, she yells, "It's open," when I knock. "Almost ready," she calls from her bedroom. "Just using your bathroom," I say in reply. What I'm after is her scale. The needle shows another pound gone. I'm down six, the Jain vegetarian miracle diet. Sometimes I stop by after school just to check. The count is compelling, proof of what I suspect: I'm no longer physically quite myself. These days, my hair looks electrocuted no matter how much conditioner I apply, a mystery that won't be resolved for months, till Helaena says, "Oh, no, you've been using the green shampoo? Oh, God, you want the red. The green strips your hair. It's made to take out coconut oil." My hair, still light brown from the American summer, is going dark at the roots from the blasting sun here, from the need to keep my head covered. My feet are cracked: constant exposure in sandals. My English is somewhat, too. A weird crossover effect from my studies has occurred. Hindi pollutes my English and vice versa. I construct clunky Hindi sentences using English syntax; total groaners, all wrong. The courtly politeness of Hindi filters into my English, "by your kindness," "I am obliged to your honor." It leeches my American personality, makes me feel I've gone pale. I never realized before the extent to which we reside in language. We are how we speak.

The way I speak, my pronunciation, is sometimes different now. Just as the formalities of Hindi have begun to appear in my English unwanted, unexpectedly, when I go to phone home. I open my mouth and notice that my vowels are tighter, the start of an Indian accent. It's odd, automatic, like spirit possession. It brings to mind a remark the linguist Jenny Saffran made during a discussion we had of how first and second languages most likely share the same neural systems, as opposed to, say, being separately lodged in the brain. "There's evidence a second language begins to cannibalize your first," she said, a revolutionary rethinking of transfer.

Transfer, as it's been conceived for years, is the way a first language, an L1 in the vernacular, interferes with a second, an L2; the way you inevitably try to press foreign words on an English template and end up sounding like the local version of Peter Sellers on a roll. "Individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings ... of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture," the linguist Robert Lado writes. L1 imperialism, but just recently several researchers have observed transfer goes both ways.

A second language can, weirdly, start to revise the DNA of the first. The implications are rather remarkable: study French intensively enough, and you're no longer speaking the same English you were. (But only if the effort's intensive. Experiments with students in Hungary found that at two to four hours a week, no real permeation occurred.) Study French long enough, you're no longer speaking the same English as your countrymen. In their book
Foreign Language and Mother Tongue,
linguists Istvan Kecskes and Tünde Papp argue that a German-English bilingual speaks a German that's different from that of a monolingual German speaker and an English unlike that of a native English speaker. "You can tell a French speaker who also speaks English," the British linguist Vivian Cook says. Or an English speaker who also speaks Hindi.

"We'll see you at seven," I told Renee one day. Confused, she snapped, "Who else is coming?" Only me, and I didn't realize till I'd hung up that I'd adopted the Hindi habit of using "we" for "I" in English—more humbling, a quality that's become pleasing for how it makes me feel more connected to the world.

Study French or English or Hindi long enough, and the way you perceive the world will change. Or so the case can be made.

In Renee's bathroom mirror, I twist my mouth to see if, aided by weight loss, my cheekbones will stand out. Somewhat, though on the whole, my face is no different: green eyes rimmed in black, an aunt's bump on my nose, a long space above my lip. It's the same, will remain the same two weeks from now when I'm jolted from bed by the conviction it's been terribly altered: Why not? Everything else has been. But even as I get lucky—ordinary face in the mirror, just pasty at 3
A.M.
—even as relief beats in my veins, I'm waiting for the day when I look and I see that I'm no longer there. A day that, when it comes, will be no less unnerving for being expected.

In Renee's living room, it's peaceful and airy, India and sanctuary from India. Cool blue walls, dark wicker chairs, day bed beside wicker stools. Cool light, like morning no matter when I stop by. Prints of the Hindu gods, Haitian art, jazz. Afternoons when she puts on Cleo Lane, for an instant I think we'll have brunch. Instead, we drink spiced tea, and I tell her gossip from the school. Each time in the stories, everyone's a little crazier.

"Gopal should be here in a few minutes," she says, lumbering in. Her arms appear to be so long, her fingertips nearly brush her knees, effect of old arthritis. The handsome Gopal is her rickshaw driver, but she calls him her son, a complicated affair of the heart they have going.

"For you," she says, handing me an article on teenage suicide, text in the ongoing tutelage she's conducting with me. "They're having a real problem with that here." She sighs and takes a seat.

Renee, late in life, has discovered her one true passion: the anthropological study of India. Sometimes her love borders on the fanatic if you don't agree with her interpretations, and then Helaena says, "Renee thinks she owns India." We both believe our proprietary stake is greater, that the language has crashed us farther in, that we pay for what claims we can make to greater knowledge by being unshielded.

Renee, in English at all times, can start all sentences with a distancing "they," the anthropologist's pronoun. When another story of a kitchen fire appears in the paper, she can say, "They're not allowed to leave the new house once they're married. It's the culture." Kitchen fires, a particularly gruesome kind of death, occur here each year in the thousands. A new bride's in-laws, retroactively displeased with the dowry, furiously demand more—another refrigerator, more rupees—till the girl's parents balk. When it's clear the parents won't pay beyond what they already have, the husband holds the girl down while the mother-in-law, above her, tips the kerosene jar. Afterward, he'll be free to collect another dowry.

"They aren't allowed to return home," Renee can say, expressing sympathy, but "they" aren't "me." In the study of a new language, you use all the pronouns. You say "I," you say "we," and knowledge slams you sideways. When Friday quizzes, say, are dark muttering haiku.
For three points each, you will write the following in Hindi:
"Beautiful songs will be sung at my house / Would you like some oranges? / My sister is often beaten." As time and my immersion go on, I'll press my lips when Renee gets didactic.

Gopal is taking more than a few. "Tell me again about Pauline and the uniforms," I say to kill time. The phrasing's the lead-in to a family story, though just then I don't notice. My own mother died three years earlier. Renee has a kid about my age who hasn't been in touch in years, perhaps, she thinks, because he's in the CIA. In this place where the days are all circled by the past, it's easy to blink and incarnate someone.

"Oh, yes. The time I wrote about her for Piers," she says. Pauline is a seventy-eight-year-old Christian-Brahmin buddy of hers who, with church lady backup, makes trips to the villages to dispense medicine. "When the story came out, I got a call from the palace. They were sending a donation. The next day, thirty-nine packages big as bales were at my door, all old uniforms. The palace had cleaned out their closets." We're grinning in advance of the ending.

"So we loaded up taxis, and Pauline took them with her. Now there are four or five villages outside town running around in City Palace uniforms." Liveried villagers in fields, by huts; the image is as good the second time around. Then Gopal knocks, and we bolt. We have to get to the deaf school in time to meet Piers. "It's way the hell out," Renee says nervously in her carbureted Brooklyn voice.

Twenty minutes later, we pull up to the gate. A tethered goat tries to stand, reconsiders, sinks down. Like a mascot: everything about the school suggests a slide. The small yard in front is dirt, not grass. The pink trim on the khaki stone buildings has faded. Even the name on Renee's invitation, turns out, suggests decline. Viklang Vidyala.
Vidyala,
I know, is "place of study."
Viklang,
I assume, is a word for "deaf," till Vidhu explains: "It's translated as 'handicapped,' but it comes from
vika,
'something defective.'
Ang
means 'part.'" Viklang Vidyala: "place of study for defectives." With each word learned, a world comes into view, sometimes in infuriating glimpses.

In the yard, we join Piers and the other visitors. We're a half-hour late but still ahead of the honored guest, a traditional figure at Indian ceremonies, usually some kind of dignitary, though the farther you go from the palace, the lower the stature. At fifteen minutes out, you begin to get puff-chested minor officials.

Across from us, fifty kids, mostly boys, are lined up in rows. Their uniforms are cranberry and pink, an, uh, vivid combination, even for India. The effect is throbbing, though the rows are so neat, they look combed. Then just as a white fender becomes visible through the gate, a line gets tangled on an argument. Car doors can be heard opening. A teacher in his thirties sweeps down. Arm behind his back like a brigadier, he puts all errant parties on notice with his free hand. Then, turning, he signals a drummer to begin as the first sandaled foot comes through the gate.

Lulled by two beats, of the sun and the drum, I'm sleepy for the garlanding of the honored guest, in a trance as the students begin welcome drills, and then I'm snapped to, awake. A little girl in sneakers too big is moving out of time, marching right when she should step left, banging ahead as the lines pull back. I can't stop staring. It's the look on her face, concentration laced with misery. For here's the thing: I remember it.

As a kid, I had trouble hearing, a situation that, once it was resolved, wasn't much remarked on in my house beyond its curiosity value. "Kathy was deaf as a child," my mother liked to say for shock effect, a family story that became the one line. The full narrative, with its nuance, was boring.

Till I was six, I had a double set of adenoids that repeatedly grew infected, blocking my eustachian tubes and sound. The condition, chronic otitis, is fairly easily remedied now and may have been then, except my parents were Christian Scientists and didn't go to doctors. Untreated, I gave teachers fits. Sometimes I was visibly sullen, ignoring all entreaties, and other times I was compliant; nobody noticed that the first always coincided with an activity such as coloring that required my head to be down. If I had looked up, I might have read their lips, an ability I retained till high school.

"There were times that child wouldn't have heard a cannon go off," the doctor my mother brought me to after she broke with the First Church of Christ, Scientist, said, one of my few distinct memories of the experience. Absences don't imprint on the mind directly. I hadn't thought about this in years.

"They took out your tonsils and a second set of adenoids fell down, and after that you were fine," my mother concluded. And now, as the lines turn on the drum's vibrations, I reconsider this epilogue that has stood for so long. I have a hazy recollection of loathing the rude, bright, unyielding new sounds, of wanting to return to the cocoon. And another, sharper recollection of jeering kids around me, of fast-talking faces pressing in, shrieks each time I said "What?" Four years after I'd gained full hearing, I still compulsively said "What?" Automatic leftover repetition; old necessity become OCD. I hadn't noticed I did this, but the kids had. On the playground, they murmured sentences at me; each "What?" provoked was a score. They circled round. I kept a tense dog smile as the understanding came: this wasn't friendship. After years without friends, I'd misread the intent. I was a loner by default. I hated to talk, could not grasp forms of conversation. If there's a developmental brain stage for discourse, I'd missed it. At night, I remember now, out in the yard, I'd record exchanges from the day, try to figure out what the man had said to cause the woman to answer that way. I remember a college boyfriend who looked me up in my thirties saying he'd called it off "because you never said a word." The epilogue crumbles as it falls.

Multiplications click in my head. I became fluent in my twenties after taking writers to lunch for my job and imitating their rhythm and words. Connections rattle together, and there's no one to tell. You spend years growing up writing down conversations; that's the apprenticeship for becoming a writer, isn't it? You acquire language, aspects of it, late, you'd spend the rest of your life in repetition compulsion: a conjugant. Well wouldn't you?