Dreaming in Hindi (25 page)

When you read, you subvocalize as well. When you read, are able to, in two languages, you hear, half-muted, a scattering like Esperanto. New MRI studies out of the Netherlands, the Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Information, reveal the somewhat startling news that when a bilingual sits down with a book, every word in it conjures every word like it they know, in every one of their languages. Every time, in a third of a second. A Dutch-English speaker sees
lief,
"nice," thinks of "leaf," can't turn off the associations. "Word" will cause its own brief chorus: "work" and
vork,
Dutch for "fork," the spreading activation network, but with print. "It's a really kind of stupid system," the researcher in charge of the study, Ton Dijkstra, said fondly when we discussed it. "It's stimulated like a coffeemaker—it simply activates all the working systems you have." Though not at first with an alien alphabet, he adds. To the beginning aspirant, the Hindi word
won't conjure "hotel," even though the word sounds out
ho-tal.
The Hindi
h,
, is still too different. Once the connection between the new symbols and their sounds have solidified, however, the same chain reaction will begin,
hotalhotelhopeful,
as the midlevel student scans the paper. Similar ripples occur with monolinguals—"word"/"work"—but don't raise as many intriguing and still-unanswered questions. Such as: If a babel lights up when you're able to read in two or three languages, how does any multilingual keep comprehension linear? How is it the book doesn't turn into babble?

Reading propels sound, and sound in turn triggers the imagination: So strongly, anecdotes from a book can linger like your own vague memories. So forcefully that when you come to an action verb in print—"pick," "kick," "lick"—blood rushes to the motor cortex strip in your brain, the part that, were you to enact the movement, would orchestrate it. In the mind, in the physical body, language and movement are linked.

You misplace your car keys, Harvard professor of psychiatry John Ratey notes, you scratch your head, stiffen in frustration, move your lips as you talk yourself through the routes around the house you wandered, smile as you feel the keys in your pocket. "Gesturing and speech are closely bound; they are acquired together in childhood and break down together in aphasia," he writes. It's the sequencing that the motor strip oversees that physically allows you to talk. The complicated movements of the tongue, face, and larynx necessary to produce words are orchestrated in that area.

When sections of the motor cortex were magnetically blocked in a group of epileptic patients, the patients were suddenly rendered incapable of speaking. When children, first graders, were given instruction in folk songs, were taught the melodies and rhythms (a form of sequencing), they scored higher on reading scores than control groups that weren't. Gabriela sometimes had me walk the room when I recited my homework; occasionally I set my written assignments to song. I can report, then, that pacing to the tune of the old R& B number "Oh Girl," relyricized with learner vocabulary
—Ohhh girl, Vimal does not eat meat
—will sure-fire, positively do the trick.

Unless you've had to move to an unheated hotel room so small that when you pace, you smack into the bed, where there's a cold-water shower down the hall and a wedding field out back with off-key bands playing the "Brazil" song till 4
A.M.
when not tattooing Bollywood lyrics onto your brain. Then, all the kinetic approach to homework is going to do is jangle your nerves. I know, having tried.

Because I was the next to go down.

For a long time, the chickens of Sukhadia Circle did not come home to roost. For months following the ill-fated drive with the Whisperer, Jain Dad 2's own clucking had been steady and, all things considered (his personality), good-natured.
Kathy, you have paid three hundred and fifty rupees for curtains; too much. Kathy, you have invaded Afghanistan.
Then one day, there were problems.

Around this time, early December, the first semester was drawing to a close. It was now Adhikmas, a sniveling, bad-tempered stretch when "the god is sleeping," as an Indian friend explained, a kind of horological bin for filler days. In the Hindu lunar calendar, the months don't add up neatly to solar years. When too many fall short, the pandits called for a leap time, usually lasting a fortnight. Adhikmas, "half month," was highly inauspicious. With no god on the case, you could not get married, purchase housewares, start a business. Whatever you bought now would jam, crack, or smoke.

An all-night chanting began, a low tumbling hum, impossible to locate, that quickened my pulse in the dead of night, when I'd pause on the way to the bathroom and forget why I'd left the bed. By day, the distracting echoes sounded in everyone's head. Later, I'd wonder whether this hadn't perhaps explained the lawlessness that mid-month slithered into Antriksh Flats.

It was on one of these afternoons without steerage that Rajesh, the Art Carney one, Dad number 2, started up in the kitchen. Alka had been reporting a pleasant remark the candy shop owner had made about me when he interrupted. "He said you were sincere because you pay whatever he asks you," he said. "You know, Kathy, he asks you three hundred, you pay three hundred. People in India think you are a ... child. Somebody asks you two hundred rupees"—he demonstrated me gladly peeling off two bills—"you give them two hundred rupees." The subject of the Jaipur curtain extravaganza was placed back on the table. "
You paid three hundred fifty. You could have gotten them here for fifty,
" he said, raspy voice rising in wonder. "
For fifty!
" he said. Alka nodded.

I would never live down the infamy of the nine-dollar curtains, I conceded then. The purchase would be remarked on long after I'd packed up my overcharged possessions and boarded the flight I'd paid too much for home.
I did,
I thought.
I forked over three-fifty, because the curtains were pretty and came from an elegant store and you, you marble head, wouldn't recognize good taste if it came sliding up the drive and bit you on your cherry-shorted butt. If you put one more plastic bouquet in the stairway-to-heaven room
— the unnaturally pink and yellow flowers having come to mind —
you're going to start getting mausoleum inquiries.

"
Haan,
three-fifty,"
I began, but he'd moved on. Having established that the man across the street did not, contrary to what Alka had indicated, like me, that he in fact regarded me as an easy trick and a chump, Dad 2 needed to know why, if I was so fond of the neighbor's baby, didn't I have one? You don't have a baby? Why? I'd been warned they'd do this in India, grill you on your plans for parturition, but actually "they" hadn't, only this smooth conversationalist had. But before I could get through my prepared dodge, Jain Dad 2 was on to my looks. Did I know I was a ringer for J. K. Rowling? He flipped to her picture in a magazine, poked it. She's your older sister. Normally, Rowling's appearance struck me as unremarkable either way, but just then, she snarled up at me, gorgonian.

When a lull arrived, I cut out and across the drive. In a flash, Meena and Alka were at my door, their arms in windmills. Some kind of plan had to be enacted right now, they conveyed. I had to go somewhere immediately, and with Dad 2.

Once I'd been pried, sobbing, from my room and placed in the car (I realized as we backed down the drive that three days of
Meena mata-ji
talk had meant that Meena's mata-ji, her mother, was having me over for dinner), I found he'd been thinking even more about my life and had a few more observations to air. There was one, I believe, about my being husbandless, to which I countered, "I have a good life!"

"Yes, you have a good life!" he agreed. I relaxed. "You are free!" Yes I was. "
But in five years,
" he said—somewhere in there we'd switched to Hindi—"
you will be old and have no husband and no child and somethingsomething in akelaapan,
" in loneliness.

"
Haan, but sometime then all the other husbands will start to be dead, and the women will also be in akelaapan because the men will dead,
" I parried. It was the best I could do. He didn't get it. "You're right. Some men are not honest with their wives," he said. "Some men are not good. You're right."

By the time we'd reached the neighborhood of Muslim shacks, along the stretch by the stacked poultry cages, he wanted to know what I thought of him. "The negative," he challenged. "Give me percentages." I kept my gaze fixed on the dashboard. "You think I am a bad husband. All right. Maybe there are times I am," he said, in a conciliatory tone that showed he was a soul-searching man. We pulled over beside a fruit stand. "You think I drink alcohol," he said when he returned with two clearly innocent OJs, and the whole picture clicked into focus. The beer offer that had been made and rescinded! All these months, Dad 2 had been stewing over the anonymous call to Swami-ji that had followed—had never been convinced, in any airtight way, that the Whisperer was the lodger who'd snitched.

Oh, poor Meena,
I thought as we sped toward her mata-ji's: poor Meena, irreversibly wed to this jabbing lug. Although Meena was not, come to think of it, a blazing IQ source. Then poor Alka! How could she live life in the same house saddled with him? By the time the car was overtaking the Horoscope Analysis and Remedy shop, I'd revised my position on arranged marriage once more. Because what if they fixed you up with someone like Art Carney Dad? The only piece of you anyone would see again would be your bubbles, rising up from under the water.

 

IN ADHIKMAS, WHEN THE
karmic laws of transgression and debt were suspended; when the god, snuffling deeper into dreams, could not be roused by prayers or chants; when bad luck could arrive in a wheeling free-for-all, people kept their heads down and felt a little like they'd fallen off the map. That sensation was nothing new for me; I'd been living that way for months. Now, though, I entered a more extreme state of dislocation, like homesickness, but more viral. The sharp dog teeth of depression shook me awake at night. I missed blueberries to the point of torment. In my room, I'd play the white noise machine to hear noises from home; that's how low it got. The "Crickets" setting was like insects roasting on a video fire, but it didn't matter. You couldn't get sounds anything like that here. "Oh! It's raining in America," Meenal gasped when I played "Thunderstorm" for her. Having only ever known drought, she was startled to hear what one sounded like.

This misery coincided with another leap in my Hindi comprehension. At four months in, it was as if some part of my brain, having realized I was serious—we were doing this; we'd cleared out and left home—had calculated that we were gone for good and had sensibly decided to make space for new words. These leaps, I should quickly add, were by no means pole vaults. My daily mantra continued to be "
What?
" I listened a lot more than I spoke. The silent period still lingered about me like a gas, though more oxygen was starting to get in.

Helaena, curiously, was in the same loquacious bad way: her Hindi was rocketing, she could barely get out of bed. It was as if our brain synapses were being tuned in sync by language acquisition, so much that at one point, we entered psychic mind meld.
I can see why they call donkeys beasts of burden,
I'd think in the rickshaw to school, passing a line weighted down by rocks. "You can see why they call donkeys beasts of burden," Helaena would note that evening on the way to dinner. "This is so weird," she announced one morning "All last night all I wanted was blueberry pie, and I don't even like blueberries. They didn't even have them where I grew up." (The Whisperer might have been in the same slough, though that would have been hard to tell. Since Harold's departure, she'd holed up in a side office and was insisting on private lessons.)

Up at Piers's, a mood of subdued unhappiness hung in the air as well. Often, when I went there now, I was the only guest. No parties flowing down the stairs from the roof, no jigris out on the front lawn chatting. We'd spend evenings, Piers and I, slumped down watching the swirling Ganesh show, till the revolving elephant heads on ovals (that was the programming in its entirety) made us one with the sofa. Or we'd pop in a Julie Andrews movie to try to soothe his mother's longing for England, but the appearance of tidy Julie in this florid, unbound place would at some point unhinge her, and she'd bang the table with her glass and caw, miserable in her illness. When Piers and the boys would take her up to bed, I'd stroll the edges of the room, examining the photographs from his unimaginable world—the honest-faced brother, the fleshy sister, black-and-white grandparents—and in my own layered misery, feel black-and-white. It seemed that all my certainties from before had been long, drawn-out spectacles.