Dreaming in Hindi (27 page)

"
Sing a Hindi song,
" the smiling relatives on plush sofas had demanded, but even my Christmas carols were gone. Nearly every song I knew had disappeared into the far recesses of my brain, all but a few left over from one obsessed patch I'd put in with the radio in ninth grade: a Jesse Winchester number called "Yankee Lady," several others from the same year. I was like the people in nursing homes who can remember only the music of their youth, except in my case, I was limited to one narrow band.

"We're supposed to hold hands," Helaena whispered: a Bollywood convention; maidens clasped hands when they warbled. We did and fumbled through "Just Yesterday Morning" while the relatives leaned forward and stared intently, then I launched into "Yankee Lady," and they all resumed talking. "
Sing a Hindi song,
" they repeated when I was through.

Now, on this birthday night, Divendra's friends sat soberly on the doily-covered couches, taking turns breaking into song. Between numbers, one of them, Siddharth, recited
shayers,
Urduized rap, composed on the spot for gentle, tweaking fun. Helaena and I got "
You are fair-skinned and beautiful, but you are leaving one day, so you are not one of us,
" which I'd taken from the reaction, before Divendra's translation, to be a minor knee-slapper. Guffaws went up all around when Siddharth rolled the bones at an adrenalized Young Turk, an engineer who kept whipping out his cell phone. He'd gotten off a good one, you could tell, by the way people were holding their seat cushions. "
What?" "What?
" Helaena and I pled, and Divendra, pausing for air, delivered the English: "If you think your arms are strong, try to shake the building. But if your arms are not strong," and here he had to stop, to brace himself against new convulsions, "then have some wine and watch the building shake." The room broke up all over again, and then Divendra stood. "Now you will enjoy cake and photographs," he said.

The guests filed over to a garage as long as a warehouse, past the Packards and Bugattis and Humboldts and gleaming Rollses that had been reparked outside. Inside, I found myself shivering, then startled into forgetting the cold when I noticed Divendra and Siddharth with their arms entwined, Siddharth feeding Divendra cake.
How homoerotic, and with his parents right there,
I thought, then realized every guest was supposed to grab a sliver and step up to the plate. "Small piece," Divendra groaned when I reached him in the cake line. "I will feed you big, but small for me."

The cake line progressed. Helaena and I hunkered against a wall, seized by the need to exchange a few words about Mr. Singh's hair. For safety's sake, we decided to gossip in Spanish, a language hardly anyone in India knew and which we'd both studied, but when we tried to speak it, something literally dumbfounding happened.

Two words out, the Spanish would disappear, then reappear as Hindi. One of us would make it as far as "
Este hombre
" then continue, as if possessed, "
aisaa lagta hai jaise usne baal chippakke rahka hai,
" thereby remarking, within earshot of the host, "Man looks like he's got glue in his hair." We'd try again: set the sentence up hopefully in Spanish, watch dismayed as it slid back into Hindi. On the fourth try, Helaena opened her mouth to speak and closed it. "I ... can't," she said. I couldn't either. It was confounding—like one of those party tricks where they get your arms to rise no matter how hard you squeeze them down.

"It's absolutely common, reported by everybody. It's like the new language shoves the other to the background," the psycholinguist Ellen Bialystok said when afterward I canvassed people in the field for theories on how my Hindi could have jettisoned my Spanish like that. Michael Chee, a cognitive neuroscientist in Singapore, mentioned a similar scenario, where English stomps out a rickety second language you're attempting before you've finished the sentence. "
Donnez-moi
the pen, could you?" This will occur if you're monolingual in English and fairly new to lessons, the reason being, Chee said, you've had stronger exposure to your native tongue. "The evidence suggests that when you're processing a second language, you actually have to inhibit the first," he said. "When you switch back, there's a carryover. It takes time."

This switching back and forth may account partly for why language study in later years has been shown to protect the brain against deterioration. Synaptic pathways are strengthened. People who are bilingual and who use both languages every day delay the onset of dementia by up to four years on average, according to one study.

Michel Paradis, when I phoned him, wanted to know how many martinis I'd had "at the time of the incident." When he'd finished joshing me, he observed that if people had been speaking Hindi around me for a while, my Hindi was already primed—the neural voltage needed to activate it would have been far less than what my Spanish would have required. It would have taken a lot more juice, so to speak, to get the Spanish for "looks really weird" up and running than it would have to activate the Hindi. Once you've allowed a second language to lapse, its activation threshold level goes way up, he said. But Paradis thought there was more at play here than the activation threshold hypothesis. Second languages are more likely to interfere with each other than a second is with a first, because, he believes, seconds draw on a different memory system than a first does. They seem to rely on what's called declarative memory—math equations, the combination to a locker, anything that you can declare how you know it—whereas a native tongue draws on automatic memory, which is processed differently in the brain. This is knowledge acquired before the age of five or so—knowing, say, that two cows are called "cows" and not "cow." All second languages, in Paradis's configuring, are run along the same wire, as it were, which is why they have more of a tendency to short each other out.

Back in the garage, our Spanish was fried. "You still planning to head south at Christmas?" I asked. She couldn't, Helaena said, now that she was engaged. "Engaged!" I almost fell over. But she hadn't said a word. Yes, Aditya had asked her to marry him that day, she said in a voice that meandered, as if the thought made her sleepy. A second later she was bright-eyed, awake. Divendra, cheeks patched white, was hurrying over. He stopped and motioned toward the house. "Now you will enjoy the disco floor," he said.

In the dining room, they'd cleared out the table and chairs. Klieg lights flashed from the perimeters. In the center, it was movie star Hrithik Roshan all the way as the guys, faces tense with concentration, reproduced film moves: the arm pump, the shoulder shake, the rapid light-bulb screw. The four sisters in their saris swanned across the floor, executing beautiful, sweeping Rajasthani dance movements against the Bollywood actions. No one was drinking. No one got loud. Servants marched in with trays of warm milk. "Just when you think it can't get any more wholesome, it does," I turned to tell Helaena, but she had taken Divendra's hand, was pulling him toward the door. "Did you say that tape was in your room?" I heard her ask above the bhangra.

By the time Divendra reappeared, his guests had lost steam. They were chatting in groups by the wall. He strode onto the floor. He had something to say. "Now you will enjoy the campfire," he declared, and in the crossed swords of klieg lights you could see, there weren't any crumbs on that boy.

 

LUCKY SINGH
, Piers's friend, calls to fill me in on her multiple rounds of socializing. "... I was desperately trying to reach you because we had so many people over for a cocktail party. There was a German man here who was interested in our forjee." Her what? "Our forjee. Forjee. You know forjee?" I don't. "Forjee. Fordjeep." The words chug into view. And how are my studies?

I mention a story I'm writing, about a thousand brides who drowned at a
shaadi,
a wedding. "A
what?
" Lucky Singh says, amused. "A
sha-di,
" I say, emphasis on each syllable, uncertain how her comprehension could be lapsed. She's a Gujarati speaker, but even so, we're newly out of wedding season, when we all heard the word night and day; she's got to know it. "
Sha-di,
" I enunciate.

"Oh! Oh!
Shaaadi!
" She says it like a flirtatious taunt, sings it: "
Shaaaaadi.
" "Prolong the a," she says, and I do, till I sound like a backup singer.
Shaaaadi,
not shoddy. Up till now, the double Hindi
a
has been theoretical, something I employ when reminded. It's taken all this time to fully understand that it's a bona fide, discrete speech sound, entirely different from the short
a,
that it means something and that it's not up to me to correct it with my pronunciation so the native speakers don't sound, to my ear, so whiny, which is what I've been doing. I go ahead and stretch it, feel silly as I do, but as Lucky says, "It's not enough to know the word if nobody can understand you."

Lucky Singh phones often now. I'm glad she does. The conversations we have reach a conclusion. My other attempts at local communication have a circular, stoner quality. Every chat seems to repeat a previous one. They go round and round: "
Does Indian food strike you as good? It does! You like it? And do Indian movies strike you as pleasing? They do? Good! Are you interested in Indian culture?
" I'm always perplexed to be having this same discussion again, like when you think you've made the turnoff but find yourself back on the cindery stretch of highway. Even the videshis are sounding as if they've spent too much time in opium-scented air. "Every molecule you breathe has been breathed by everyone through history, they've shown that," Helaena says one weeknight when we meet to laze around, and we get caught up in a debate over whether we're breathing Queen Elizabeth. Up at Piers's, Ganesh's face spins and spins; the loose ends of the days pull and stretch till they lose all elasticity; my mind is becoming dangerously unfocused. And that's when I remember: oh, the poet.

 

"
WORDS USED IN
poems are not only words. They're cultural memories, part of the collective consciousness," he says on one of the afternoons when we meet, in a voice that goes along thin and creaky, then suddenly turns lit and fire-breathing. Nand Chaturvedi's a Brahmin and a social democrat, a combination I'd have thought was contradictory. "Poetry was a social obligation. I wanted to expose the difficulties of my people," he said the first time I came, several visits ago. This was in his study, where the linoleum floor reminds me of a waiting room and where in his unsmiling portrait on the wall, he looks like a raja in the realm of ideas, looks, too, a bit indignant, like he's drawing up against ill-considered remark. Today, there's sun. We elect to go outside. In a small flagstone yard, behind a peeling red gate, we sit and talk while children peer over the fence and giggle, till one by one they drop off and run away.

When I arrived, Nand was on a translation project, putting verse written in Oriya, an eastern Indian tongue, into Hindi. Which is more difficult to translate, I ask as the afternoon light makes thin shadows on the ground, poetry or prose?

"Poetry is harder, because poetry is itself a vehicle for the translation of culture," he says, voice davening. "The poet is trained to convert the inner world into words while creating from the external world an experience of the self. It's a two-way process," he says, and I'm reminded of something a literary critic at the symposium had said: "Nandbabu invented a newborn Hindi in the sixties." Even in English, when Nand gets on a roll, it feels as if language is being invented in my head.

"When you read a poem," he says, "you forget time, and you forget space, and you forget person. Only consciousness remains. Everything's mixed together. The images and the dreams and the visions of people, all put together." He pulls an oatmeal-colored blanket tighter around him, looks to see if I've put that down. My notebook is out. I'm writing. Even though he's nearly eighty, there's no other position for me to take here than acolyte. He's slight, nearly frail, with a conspicuous absence of several front teeth. Even so, it would be scandalous for me to be simply a woman come calling. Besides, Nand doesn't think men and women can be friends.

"You can't love what is concealed," he's said, a statement that makes sense on this side of the world, where women are always concealed.

Several visits in, I'm still not sure what he is to me, only that his words take kaleidoscopic shape in my head, that I'm happy when the rickshaw drops me off. This afternoon when I arrived at three, the family was still napping. Backing away, I settled onto a stone ledge to wait. A flock of schoolgirls in droopy white socks soon surrounded me. "Why are you sitting where we feed cows?" the tallest inquired. Had me there. "What's your name?" another asked shyly. On this leafy residential street, foreigners are a curiosity.

"Poems exist beyond the limits of dimension," Nand says. In the pale December sun, he knocks his knees to speed his thoughts, sends the word "guru" flying into my head.
Gu
is "dark,"
ru
is "light"; a guru takes you from darkness into light. "No poem can be translated completely the way prose can. The language is more charged, more concentrated. A translator can only exchange a word for a word, so a lot of meaning is left out." And that's when I throw in the observation that Hindi has no way to say "privacy," hoping to be impressive. His face assumes the dour expression that's up on the wall, as if someone has slipped him a lemon.

"Yes, but you have only one word for moon. Moon and moon and moon and moon," he shoots back. That's what he thinks about my alleged English vocabulary bonanza. "
I
have ten, and ten ways to say sun, and each one conveys a different softness." The word "guru" that's taken up residence in my head gets poked in the side by another word, one that's pulled itself up from the pit of disuse. Through the rest of the afternoon, "guru" gets jabbed.

"What would he want with her?" he says, throwing his head back and cackling when I report that my friend Renee, whom he met at the symposium, has a suitor her age.