Dreaming in Hindi (19 page)

This stunning automaticity, moreover, has led to our brains being configured so that we reflexively deduce what's going on in conversations in terms of probabilities. It's a tendency that can misfire in the early days of language study.

By now, however, when I snap awake to hear Swami-ji saying, "
In that place, the festival of Holi
was very rude. They threw mud and also
gobar,
" and also cow patties, my brain automatically fills in the correct location. We're back on the mean streets of Benares. Of all the possible conversational destinations, that's the one that is most probable.

We tend to think in probabilities rather than possibilities, according to a widely accepted theory called the exemplar theory, for the same reason New Yorkers consolidate their worldly goods under their beds: space is limited. "With memory, speech, and voice, a debate's raged for years: how big is the brain's hard drive?" Michael Vitevitch, a psychology professor, told me. "Does it have enough memory to store every single detail?" Not nearly, according to the exemplar theory, and so memories have to be compacted. Specific details disappear, and in their place what you have is an amalgam of images, an exemplar. "It's as if you took a bunch of film negatives—well, if we still used film negatives—and laid them on top of each other," Vitevitch said. "You have all these details available to you, but your mind extracts the gist of it." He gave an example: Suppose someone says the word "bird." What will likely come to mind is the image of a common bird—a robin, let's say, and not an ostrich.

Or suppose someone says, "
For three days during Holi,
no one there went out!" In the instance above, what may come to mind are the apparently ceaselessly rampaging hooligans of Benares. In the guidebooks, the City of Light is described as one of the most sacred places on earth, where Hindus, if they can, arrange to come to die so their ashes can be placed in the nearby Ganges. But after enough personal tutorials with Swami-ji, I've got it fixed in my head as an Indian Newark-during-the-sixties.

"
When we moved to Udaipur,
" Swami-ji says, "we thought it would be like this.
But there was no
Eve teasing!" No pestering of women. "
There was no gobar
throwing! We were very very surprised."

By the end of the hour, all this talk has him wistful. "
There people are carefree!
" I learn. "
Boatmen are drinking chai next to scholars!
" I find. "
And there are four universities. No, five! One for Sanskrit alone,
" I discover, and what's more, the festival of Navratri there leaves the one here in the dust. With five minutes to go, he chuckles. He tells me again about his favorite Benares guesthouse. "
They had
a sign
outside,
" he says, and we both brace for the guffaw. "
This sign, what it said was,
STAY HERE AND DIE
! Stay here and die," he says, shaking his head, and I'm careful not to move my lips in time.

 

ON THE EVE OF
the break, Alka and I high-fived for the last time. Harold thinks he is in love, I reported as we stood in the driveway, after ten, late for the Jains. She'd come down to restrain the vicious Pomeranian Taffy so I could slip through the gate.

"
He's forgotten his wife?
"she asked.

"
Haan,
" I said, and gave a half head wobble, the one that means
This is life.

"Wow!" she said, and pressed for details about this love that had flared, for the Whisperer. With each one, she high-fived me, puzzling me as much as I must have perplexed her the first time I'd slapped her palm. Did she mean
You called it?
Of course not.
Way to go Harold?
Uh-uh. I think it was just an expression of conviviality, a physical connection to a laugh. We laughed and slapped in the soft hold of evening, then just before we went inside, I bid her
shubh rati:
"good night."

After friendly, small-town Udaipur, magisterial Jaipur was disconcerting. In the state capital, where I'd come to start the break, the roads were wide and dusty, not lanes so tight shopkeepers could lean out and examine your clothes as your rickshaw rolled past. The roads here were boulevards, lined with tarp shacks and, farther back, estates with clipped lawns, where small, brilliant birds were like scattering marbles beside the peacocks' sweeping trains.

In Jaipur, I saw how geography shapes the psyche, that three months in Udaipur had made me a yokel. Without the protective circle of the Aravalli Hills, I'd lost a sense of being in place. The buildings here were grand, the grimy air biting, the people both:
uunchi naak,
"high-nosed."

"You're beautiful," the women beside me in the hotel beauty parlor said when I cried "Beautiful!" to the pedicurist. Weeks of road dirt filtered through sandals had taken the pedicurist thirty minutes to scrub off. "But that's because you're white and we're black," the woman said coolly, before I could get out "thank you."

The shop girls in Jaipur were disaffected, as unwelcoming as any on Rodeo Drive. The street outside the hotel was rubble. The hotel bathroom became a disco whenever I opened the door. Just a crack, lights would flash, music swell, and this was before the trip turned hallucinatory. That occurred on the train to Bikaner, after I'd stayed up late talking with Vikram, a Brahmin physicist whose father knew a man who knew a man who knew my uncle. On the basis of those slim lines, the father, an economist, had placed his family at my disposal, had invited me to come up on my vacation, go travel into the desert with his son and see the educational institute they ran in Bikaner. Indian hospitality proceeds on connections as complicated as the gods', is every bit as divine.

Vikram, in his thirties, was slim with an aquiline face and a brooding air that was contagious. Between stretches of train silence, we talked about the water-management software he was producing for the villages, about Indian writers, philosophy. "Always judge someone by the best thing they've done, not the worst," he said, quoting a physicist, and I thought indignantly:
But this is the trip I thought I was going to have.
Lots of convivial chat with erudite individuals. Contrasting remarks from the school flashed to mind. "
Pesh aab
" means to present water. "A leak!" Vidhu had tittered yesterday in vocabulary. "Yes, but 'leak' is also something that comes from the ceiling," said Swami-ji, who had to make chugging sounds when he was unable to keep a straight face at this bit of fancy wordplay. For the next mile of the journey, the two of them hovered above me in the carriage, bad relations who wouldn't stop yammering.

The train rumbled into another patch of silence, into the night and the Great Thar Desert. "My Hindi is so bad it's embarrassing," Vikram said when, after a while, I pulled out a copy of
Teach Yourself Hindi.
His language was a dialect, Marwari, similar to, but not to be confused with, Mewari. The remark started the conversation up again. Above the creak of train wheels, we talked about the institute, named the Ajit Foundation for a brother who'd died, about how dalit kids came there to peer through its telescope. We talked about the mobile library they sent out into the town, about the lecture series they held. We talked till the train rocked us to sleep, and when I woke at first light to a lunar landscape—flat-topped trees that appeared to be strutting, ocherous land rushing back to the sky—the effect was to make me think I'd slipped the world.

It was 6
A.M.
and chilly when the train pulled in. "Look at that trash," Vikram said on the platform. "Indians don't have a sense of communal space." Four years away, in Utah, teaching physics, appeared to have left him with a double vision of homeland that could be irritating. Like one of those corrugated cards that blink different scenes depending on how it's turned. Here was the country, intact from before: the mirrored disks on girls' skirts; the shoemakers' tools spread on blankets over yellow dust; the lush blue shutters and pistachio doors. Here it was again: littered with waste and ignorance.

"If the station were private, they would keep it clean," he said. "But it's not theirs, it's the government's, and what is the government? Some big thing."

On the car ride in, a shimmering emerald mirage appeared up ahead, a rippled mound by the side of the road. Watermelons, I saw as we came closer.
Water
melons: for the first time ever, I thought about the name. Water melons, melons with water—but the name was descriptive. Before it had only ever been diffusely ruby.
This is why you go away,
I thought sleepily:
to see what you left behind.

The walled city of Bikaner formed in inches through the haze. Past the gate, goats on lanes as thin as kerfs slowed the progress of the car. The buildings, some of which dated to the year Columbus sailed, were ocher, with high balconies and pretty latticework windows. "When I was little," Vikram said, "we went to Verona, in Italy, and I thought,
It's just like Bikaner!
" An hour or so later, when we climbed, bleary-eyed, to the top of the institute, I thought of another Italian city. This high up, Bikaner looked like Pompeii. From here you could see where roofs had worn away, revealing staircases to nowhere.

Even intact, houses here were surprising. An uncle's house, where we went for dinner, was nothing much to look at on the outside. Inside, each room was a different carnival color. The silver ceilings appeared embroidered. Rooms unfolded unexpectedly off others. We sat in a crimson front room, then a jade-colored middle room, then a kitchen with roses on the tiles, then a persimmon back room that looked out over a courtyard. "When I was a child, they used to live there," Vikram said, pointing to a shuttered expanse of house. "But then they moved here."

A niece was conscripted into speaking Hindi with me. The effort made her shy. Everyone else took polite passes then switched off into Marwari. I tried to follow, but the language was like Hindi bent or rolled, all wrong. In three months, my ear had locked in on an exact set of Indian phonemes: the bouncing James Cagney Udaipur sound.

The dusty smell of garam masala drifted in and made me groggy. I was struggling to keep awake when a ripple like black mercury shot through the shadows, bolting me upright. On our walk over, dozens of rats had shot past us into drains, spillover from a nearby temple where hundreds lived and were worshiped as the reincarnations of holy men.

Between the heat and the comfort of Vikram's intelligence, I slept two, three times a day. Midmornings, toward dinner, I'd make my way back to a hot-pink room, where the cabinet contained a tube of Brylcreem. After months of being braced—for fleeting meaning, against danger—what a luxury it was not to have to parse all nuance and coding on my own, to have someone who could just say why my attempts to buy water all ended in failure ("It's your accent
and
your grammar"), why there were ads for "courses" plastered everywhere (because Indian teachers were ditching school, then charging students for makeup), that not all Hindus reviled Muslims en masse.

"That's why people don't want to learn Hindi," Vikram said with a moan when I mentioned the Mussulman talk. "The right wing has hijacked the language."

What a relief to have someone who'd also made himself an outsider, who'd had to circle into another country, mine, and so knew when to offer interpretation with his. Swami-ji et al. had never traveled farther from home than Udaipur, hadn't watched one world form word by word while they were only halfway gone from their own. They'd never been changelings and so couldn't act as intermediaries.

"Language intermediaries aren't that uncommon," the linguist John Schumann had told me before I'd left the States, when I'd mentioned that my Hindi teacher was Bulgarian. "People often talk about being in France and learning French from North Africans."

The neuroscientist Arturo Hernandez also remarked on the phenomenon. "When someone's had to go through the same process," he'd said, "they've had to go through the same brain remapping. When you're used to doing something one way, then try it differently, the second way's a lot harder than if you were learning it fresh. You get neural interference from the first." The principle can apply to language, but Hernandez used a sports analogy. "When I was swimming a lot, I wouldn't play tennis," he said. "If I was used to doing the crawl and went on a court, my tennis serve would have suffered." An intermediary, someone who's gone through the same wiring jams as you, will understand why your lob, or your verb, is off like that.

In Bikaner, the first morning, I slept through breakfast. The second, a man brought pink teacups and a dish of millet to my room. The third, when I was still vertical by noon, Vikram suggested that we get in the car.

On the drive, in the desert, small revelations appeared, though the first ones were more like warm-up appearances. At a camel farm on the edge of town, the fields were like sight gags. From above, all the bobbing, disgruntled, long-lashed faces resembled a convention of annoyed housewives; below, the spindly legs under barrel bodies made me think of accountants hiding with their knees exposed. In the high sun, I had to pull my dupatta over my head, take small stubbing steps as we went along. The sweat trickling down my back was pooling in my sandals, making me slide into the thong. A thunderous sound, like booming rifle shots stopped us. A stampede had started in a far paddock. Camels run like girls; that was the revelation then. Forelegs stiffly flying, heads strained for balance, they had the same look of resigned misery I'd seen in ninth-grade gym.

At the next stop, a complex of pillared domes, called chhatris, looked like a collection of pavilion tops, bizarrely festive for what they were: monuments to the dead. "
Sati ma,
"Vikram said when we came to one carved with small figures of a couple. Sati, ma: "virtuous woman," "saint." The woman had been burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. She'd committed sati, an act outlawed by the British in 1827, had climbed on his pyre to demonstrate her devotion. Or had been forced on; not all satis were voluntary. Sometimes villagers broke the woman's legs with shovels to keep her from crawling off. A sati, people believed, would confer boons on a village. People believed that, demonstrably, as recently as 1987, when one took place not far from here. "
Glory to the
sati ma,"
the crowds reportedly chanted, above the girl's dying screams.