Dreaming in Hindi (17 page)

As with so many neural discoveries in the field of second language acquisition, Osterhout could only say what he'd found, not what the findings ultimately mean. Neurolinguistic exploration is still in its infancy, at a point where it's short on explanations but long on tantalizing speculation. If a foreign language, even just elements of one, exists within us so deeply that we aren't even aware of it, does it affect us? Is there a way to pierce the barrier? Does that language exist in the stratum of dreams and puns, in the layer of metaphors and visions? Was Noam Chomsky right: is there a language acquisition device in our heads, part of the innate mechanism that automatically generates grammar? Those in the Chomsky camp will find Osterhout's discoveries appealing, and French teachers, he said, "are going to want to hear this. In learning a second language, the learners' brains evidently know how to do this really well."

 

HAROLD'S RESTLESSNESS
seems to seep into me. The narrowness of the Jain women's lives is always apparent to me now. The white room once again closes in. In the mornings with Vidhu, I plot my escape. Afternoons, I return long enough to drop off books, then bolt again for anywhere: for tea with the travel agent's daughter, Tui, who'll answer any question I have about India. To pretty Dudh Talai park, where I go to study and, bored, pay twenty-five cents to ride a camel. For a tour of hospitals with the deaf school founder, which started as a polite invitation to come to tea and ended up rattling me to my core.

When I'd approached Dr. Aggrawal at the school, it was to ask if he could recommend an oncologist. He couldn't, for good reason. There wasn't one for hundreds of miles, which put me in a bit of a bind. Mine had allowed me to come only after extracting the promise that I'd get checked regularly. My blood tests, called tumor markers, were in the normal range but could, my doctor had reminded me, spike at any time. "Remember," he'd said, "you need monitoring."

Dr. Aggrawal invited me to his home. Let us talk, he said. He was a gnome of a man, with a gray plume of hair and a fondness for aphorisms. "Cakes, creams, curries clog coronary arteries," he said in his living room when the subject turned to the recent spike in obesity here. "
C, c, c, c, c,
" he added, apparently commenting on the wordplay. "The greatest battle of life is the battle of the body bulge," he continued. "
B, b, b,
" he said, and paused to gauge my reaction. I had no idea what he was getting at.

"That style of speech is from the
kalas,
" an old gent told me later when an opportunity arose to ask about Dr. Aggrawal's alphabetic peculiarities. The kalas, that man explained, were what the cultivated studied in Sanskrit times, arts that ran the gamut from forehead adorning and creating music with water to mynah bird training and the use of alliteration. Dr. Aggrawal, I deduced, had been displaying erudition.

"Oh, no one talks like that anymore," a third old gent scoffed when I reported what the second one had said. As soon as I learned anything here, someone else harrumphed it down.

In the living room, a daughter-in-law brought spiced tea. The doctor had just come from an appendix operation during which he'd found tuberculosis. "A surgeon is married to a wife, knife, and camera," he said. I was unsure how the camera figured into the union till he produced a collection of photographs. We flipped past a colonoscopy, a tubercular chest. "I've never seen a guinea worm before," I said, automatically adopting the tone for family albums. In one photo, a woman craned her head away from a breast festering with small bubbles. "What do they think of cancer here?" I asked, exhaling. "That it is a cancellation," he said.

The doctor's driver knocked on the door. Dr. Aggrawal had lateafternoon rounds still to go. He asked if I'd come. In the car, he outlined the plan that would have to be set into motion if I wanted to have tumor markers done. What we would do would be like a water-bucket relay: He'd phone a pathologist, who'd draw my blood and have it airlifted four hundred miles south to a lab in Bombay. There, a technician would candle the vials and mail a report back, whereupon the pathologist would phone with the news. The monthly cost would be 1,000 rupees, only $25, but easily half a month's rent locally.
How could anyone here afford to get cancer?
I thought, then shifted uneasily when the answer came.

The conversation turned to the subject of the new India. Udaipur had become an aspirational town, Dr. Aggrawal said: lots of cell phones and MBAs. "These days, everyone wants a top position," he said. "They go by hook and crook. They live in tension." He shook his head. "Aspire less. Perspire more," he said, smiling benignly.

At a nursing home, our first stop, a man in a robe was helped onto the veranda. His eyes were still jaundiced from the gallstones that had been removed. His nurse leaned down and brushed the air above Dr. Aggrawal's toes. Gallbladder operations cost between five rupees and ten thousand, he was explaining. "What he has spent, he has spent. These people are not insured," he said, waving the uncollectable sums away with his hand. The consultation took place on the front steps, as scooters and jeeps whizzed by. Dr. Aggrawal and two men from the nursing home held x-rays up to the setting sun. The patient peered over their shoulders. I tried to breathe shallowly against a stench that rose from somewhere beneath the veranda.

Dusk was gathering when we entered the gate at Saraswati Hospital. In the grassy courtyard, a family surrounded a man asleep on a blanket. Already they were receding into darkness. I was flying on new adventure till we got to the operating room, where a small dark man with an amputated leg lay naked from the waist down. At one time he would have been a laborer. I felt dread to know my vicarious interest would mount, that I wouldn't look away. I tried to make a face that conveyed I was sorry for intruding. The man stared back, incurious. Dr. Aggrawal lifted the man's penis. He motioned me over. "Opening too small," he said in comradely tones. The stump kicked reflexively. "Learn something new every day and be wiser today than what you were yesterday," he said, laying out a tube of Xylocaine jelly and three dilators of increasingly large size. As the first dilator slid in, the man clenched his hands. The third rod made him groan and arch his back.

Downstairs, in an office, we found a man dazed and fiery with tuberculosis. The two brothers with him were twitchy as caged cats. A nurse arrived with x-rays that shone incandescent around a blur. A tumor, Dr. Aggrawal suspected. The man left with the scans. Parents brought in a deaf boy with a neatly slicked cowlick. "Mildly retarded," Dr. Aggrawal said, though the boy was bright-eyed and working multiplication tables. The parents looked like country people. They murmured appreciatively when Dr. Aggrawal interrupted the consultation to pass around photos of cases he'd had in Lucknow: A man with one terrified eye peering out from the elephantiasis folds of his face. A speculum propped between a woman's legs. "Big smell," Dr. Aggrawal observed. The boy hummed.
RESTING IS RUSTING
, an office sign read.

His driver reappeared. On our way to the exit, we stopped outside a room. "Uterine cancer," he said at the door. "How is she?" I asked. "Miracles are not very common here," the inspiration-happy Dr. Aggrawal said flatly, twice, because I made him answer twice, unable to believe he didn't have a peppy reply.

"Don't look so glum," he commanded the woman when we entered. She was curled up on a bed, about my age, I learned, though I'd have said twenty years older. Thin wisps of hair looked tickly on brown scalp. "Don't lie around frowning," he said. "Look at her." He meant me. "She has had cancer, and she is not crying. She is happy and hale." I cringed. The woman's eyes widened. She struggled out of bed. "Thank you," she whispered, bowing gratitude on shaky legs, beaming at our connection, at this solid proof of hope, and in that moment, it was as if I'd been socked. All this time, I'd thought what I'd had was miraculous luck, but in this plain white room, the knowledge came, inescapable: miracles are limited by place. What I had was a pharmacopoeia of treatments. She didn't. To stand here and present it any other way was to be the lowest kind of fraud.

"If you smile, you heal faster," Dr. Aggrawal told the uterine cancer patient, but away from her room, in the dim scruffy hall, he said simply, "If you get cancer here, you die." And her? Too advanced, he said matter-of-factly. He brightened. "If you make a patient smile, you make them healthy," he chimed.
So cruel,
I thought, breathless with anger, then I saw. That's all he had. All he had were words.

The language twists; it burrows and soars. It pulls an inverse maneuver. The more Hindi I understand, I find, the more perplexing my life becomes.

One morning, a week before the midsemester break, the sink in my bathroom sputters air. I press the handles, stamped
KRISHNA
, a plumbing supplies brand. No water. No reason. The
dhobi,
the washerwoman, has not been in this week, could not have siphoned off the reserves. The Whisperer, who twice left her taps open and drained the tank, has been relocated, unhappily, it's turning out. The breathy calls about the family have begun. "They've taken me somewhere, and I don't know where I am," she phoned Swami-ji to say, alarmed when they tried to include her in an outing. "Harold, I only feel safe with you," she said the next day from the floor by his feet.

Though Harold is no closer to being what might, with any true certainty, be described as a safety zone. "All right, all right. Cut it," he explodes on the street whenever a driver honks the horn. Many drivers do, which might explain the topic he selected for conversation class. "Weaponry," he said gruffly from beneath the turban he's begun turning up in.

We outvoted him and went with Divali, the festival of lights, ended up learning synonyms for "meddlesome" instead. Helaena, annoyed, was having problems with gossipy palace staff. "
To put your leg in the matter
(nosy)," "
personal, mentality, talky
(nosy)," "
bad mannered," "foul mouthed,
" my notes from that class read. Lately, Helaena has been jittery. She confessed all regarding his nephew to the maharana, who is now not returning her calls. "Tell me again. He's busy," she says hastily to Jen, a new palace arrival, who's here for a month studying traditional dance and whose room gives out on an expansive view of the lake. Helaena's offers a thin peek of courtyard. "I may talk to him about that," she said after a visit to the luxe other digs. Equally distressing, the marriage charts the nephew's parents sent out for comparison in October have never come back. The month's now November. It should have taken the pandit ten minutes to scan the astrological layouts and say if it's a match. "I'm submitting a new birth time," Helaena declared at the end of class, having located several more propitious ones in
Linda Goodman's Love Signs.
American can-do will trump Indian mysticism, at least in this room.

"Closed chapter," Swami-ji had said when the Whisperer moved out of the Jains', meaning on all this student hubbub, but that's not what it's looking like. No, it's looking like things were just getting started—that that was just the prologue.

Across the drive, I report the problem with the sink, provoke a rondelet of speculation.
Water is not working? Is not working in her room? That is because you are evacuating it by means of your washing. No, no, we have water here. She is not having it there?
(This last from a latecomer.)
Yes, this is a true report. A true report. Water is not working.
The Jains go into medley slide, which sounds like a legal summation and where I have to supply half the meaning in my head:
Yes, sometimes the water does not come to her room,
for arcane reasons that will be divulged, but only in the fullness of time.

When the situation isn't resolved after breakfast, I bring my toothbrush to the kitchen. "
Water is still not coming?
" Alka asks. She and Rajkumar are deputized to investigate. They lead everyone into my bathroom, where Rajkumar tests the sink, squeezes the wall faucets, straightens and delivers a verdict. With my Hindi improved, it's a lot more confusing than it might have been.

"
Ah, Kathy, in the evening, you are creating an
air lock."

"Air lock?"

"
Haan.
" He points to the ceiling. "
You have been creating an air lock upstairs,
" he says, followed by fast, cupping hand gestures and the judgment, "
isliye
vacuum of your making." ("Vacuum?" "Vacuum, vacuum.") This is a problem, I determine, that can be averted if I pound on the wall tap with my foot. Rajkumar, in flip-flops, demonstrates.

"
Only five minutes,
" he says, and the dangling clause adds complication. Hard to say if he means five minutes of stomping required or five before the water returns, but no matter; it's only five either way. We gather round the sink and wait expectantly, till he nods and pushes on the handle. The water comes roaring back.

 

"
THE MUSSULMANS CUT
off cows' heads," Vanita says in flat-lined tones as we edge on into the break. In English, her usual means of communication with me. Some days I coax Vanita into Hindi. Then there's fuzziness to pay. "Vanita-ji, I have to make a phone call," I say. "This person does not know English. How do I ask when her husband will return?" But this person cannot understand when I repeat what she said.
What?
this person will frequently exclaim;
Whaaat?
then fix the sentence for me.

"I was living in Calcutta only then," Vanita continues. In 1992, the topic of today's tutorial, a time when communal riots swept the country. In December of that year, Hindu extremists demolished a 450-year-old mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya. They'd been whipped into a frenzy of outrage by the BJP, which was claiming that the mosque had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama and was therefore an abomination to Hindus. Never mind that Rama is a mythical figure with no carbon-datable place of birth, or that, by a strict reading of the texts, he was not a god but a man. He was a legendary king, certainly, the hero of the epic Ramayana, and over the past decade and with the help of a popular TV miniseries, the BJP had worked to elevate him into a triumphant deity, one who, in his revised nationalist version, symbolized the rightful dominance of Hindus. Just as Rama, aided by his devotee Hanuman, had vanquished the rakshasa demons, so, too, would good Hindus one day rout the internal threat the country now faced—that is, the Mussulmans, the Muslims. To further this end, right-thinking Hindus could raze the blasphemous Babri Mosque, and they did, touching off furious riots that left three thousand dead, most of them Muslims.