Dreaming in Hindi (29 page)

Christmas is coming:
bada din,
"big day"—the one when the Raj, indisposed by merriment, tossed their retainers a bone and let them knock off. It's coming, but so dyspeptically, I'm not sure it'll make it all the way. Down in Bapu Bazaar, a blow-up storefront Santa has lost his shape. His head is lolling. He looks beat. Then one day, fresh tidings appear. As my rickshaw passes the folk art museum, I spy, poking up above the wall, a treetop strung with lights. Shaking the driver's seat, I call, "Pull up."

In the yard, children are engaged in a tree-trimming competition. They're working with what they've got, and they don't have the details straight. The trees—peepuls, ashoks, every kind but firs—look more trussed than adorned, with strands of tinsel and flashing lights, plastic garlands that call to mind leis, shiny purple and yellow lanterns left over from Divali. One branch tried to escape its bindings and has gotten piled down with crepe on its way to freedom. One entrant does look vaguely plausible from a distance—blinking star on top, triangular lights—but I prefer the Seuss-like ashok, with its buildup of celebratory detritus on one side, the two banners that proclaim
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND SALUTE TO THE PEOPLE OF KERALA
.

"Wow!" little kids say as they walk by. "Wow!" "Happy Christmas!

Christmas is coming, trailing leis, dodging cows, plowing straight for Adhikmas, and the days leading up, as they stumble in, will be some of the most haunting of my life.

 

MY HINDI CONTINUED
to rev, so hard, it flew around a corner. "Some people say you've turned the corner when you can make jokes," the linguist Ellen Bialystok says. "Some say it's once they're translating, others when they dream in the language. People put up landmarks of progress."

All my landmarks till now have been more like excavations: bare starts. I've always wanted to dream in another language—to speak one with the same dizzying ease I'd known as a kid when, asleep, I could fly. But so far my dreams in Hindi resemble real life. People natter confusingly, and I'm lucky to get ten words. My translations have been similarly dispiriting: homework that comes back red with corrections. But then one night, to my surprise, I make my first successful joke.

At the Trident, with Piers, one of his posse says, "I saw your photograph in the paper," a comment I'd been hearing for days. When Helaena and I were dragged onstage at the beauty competition, a photographer had been in attendance.

Piers grins. "She's off to be a Bollywood star."

"
Yes. My new film is
Oh What a Fool I Was,"
I say, punning on the name of a hit movie. The man laughs. I'm surprised. I've been making jokes for weeks, to everyone's befuddlement, but this is the first one that's stuck.

My Hindi careened. My love for Bollywood movies deepened: For the villainous maharajas, draped in fat pearls, who issued adenoidal commands to bring more girls. For the lithe women chained in dungeons, liquid-eyed but bearing up. For one film in particular,
Lekin,
a ghost story set in Rajasthan. The movie is about a woman who's died at the hands of an evil maharaja and is now consigned to flicker in and out as a haint till she can figure out how to be reborn. In some of her apparitions, she sings. Then Vinod Khanna shows up and, between posing homoerotically in just his pants, declares that to escape the netherworld, she'll have to cross the desert.

Every time I watched
Lekin
and the ghost would sigh, "
But I can't go into the desert. I'm afraid of the shadows,
" I'd turn into Swami-ji, choked up and lip-synching. I couldn't stop watching the movie. At home, in the evenings, I'd play the soundtrack for hours. I liked one song especially, "Yara Seeli Seeli."

"I'm lying in bed," I wrote one night, "listening to the haunting 'Seeli Seeli,' and crying, because I'm lonely and afraid I'll be forever."
Beloved, little by little
—"seeli seeli"—
the separation of the night is starting to burn,
the ghost was keening in the voice of the venerable playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. "The taste I've had here, of strong emotion, of being cared for, is seductive and isn't enough, won't last the plane ride back," I wrote, already in longing for India. "'You should have called us when you were ill,' Nand scolded recently after I was down with a bug. 'We would have taken care of you.' 'How do you think I lost my tooth?' Vidhu asked this morning in class. 'I had three sisters and on the street there'd be
chhedna'
—and he used a word we'd just learned, for molestation. 'I had to defend them.' Ever since, I've wondered what it would have been like to have a man protect you."

Uncommon questions have begun to drift through my mind, ones that if I were to say them aloud, would shock me. Such as: But why couldn't you just recede into a gated life, the way the women have here? Why not give yourself over to a man's protection? The feminism I was weaned on was so absolute, these questions, at this remove, seem revolutionary. Breakthrough thinking:
Moka
is "opportunity."
Mauksha
means "release." In giving yourself up, through the release of self, you'd meet with opportunity, wouldn't you?

With shadows looming, I can't make out the forces contributing to this advanced new thought: the seduction of cultural persuasion, the jolts of social disapproval, my own recent street chhedna. Unattached, these thoughts prattle in my head, combine with the Hindi snatches. They'll mumble and trill,
That life is com-ple-te-ly fine,
right up to the morning Vanita's nearly killed. Then every question will be starkly answered.

 

VIDHU AND I HAD
been translating my alarm clock, the Hindu chant that it played, when the door to the classroom flew open. Vidhu jerked his head up. He was filling in for Samta, who'd phoned first thing to say she wouldn't be in. She was too banged up, having crashed her scooter into the gated wall downstairs the afternoon before. In plain view of anyone who might have been looking, someone would later point out.

"
Praise ... be ... the lord of the world,
" and with a crack, Helaena was in the door frame.

"You have to come. Something's wrong with Vanita," she said. "I mean, really wrong. She's saying she fell off her scooter." This odd detail—two spills, so close together—hung above the confusion, bumping and skimming but not taking root, even when Vidhu said softly, "Something's fishy." We took off at a run.

In the back office, Vanita was pressing her head, moaning and swaying, so small at her desk, she looked like a filament.

Swami-ji arrived in a blast of air. "
The ambulance will be here in an hour,
" he said. He'd waited to file a report with Delhi before phoning the hospital.

"An hour, no way," Helaena cried. Vanita sunk her head down.

"We can't let her go to sleep," I said. Reluctantly, she pulled back up.

"She has a head injury," I argued. "She has to go now."

"You are supposed to register at the police station first. Even if you have a head injury," Vidhu was explaining, but we were already coaxing Vanita onto her feet, steering her toward the door. The others caught up with us at the elevator.

In the rickshaw, Vanita bumped between us, while outside, India turned surreal: two yellow dogs by the side of the road were tearing at a dead one's chest. A nursing pig with a thick, long face stared balefully at us above her young. Black tears were running from her eyes. The rickshaw came closer. My vision cleared. The tears were revealed as blood.

"Hurry!" I called to receding backs in the hospital lobby, from the benches where we'd all assembled. "Hurry! Her arms are going numb!" We sat and watched hospital personnel ignore my commands, and after a while, we'd been there so long, Vanita began to revive. She asked Swami-ji to call her father, started to tell me what had happened.

"For months I have been getting threatening phone calls," she said, related how beginning in October, one month after she'd come to the school, her starched, orderly life was repeatedly yanked into some overwrought Bollywood film. A man with a muffled voice began phoning her at home. "Your health is in danger," the goonda would say. "Quit the school," he'd purr through fabric. "You had better quit the school. Stay out of Sector Eleven unless you would like your legs to be broken." Indignation squeezed her voice.

The calls kept coming. Vanita was rattled but refused to back down. She had every business being in Sector Eleven. She kept showing up there with the same diligence and show of certainty she applied to her master's, even if all day she'd worry herself into an enervated trance state. But this goonda wala could only be crazy! She could go wherever she wanted. Then this morning, he'd made good on his warnings.

Vanita-ji had been putting along on her scooter toward the school, mulling over a host family matter, when just past the Paras Theater, "oh, my God," she snapped to. Two men, faceless behind helmets, had jumped into her lane and were speeding straight for her. Before she could yank the wheel sideways, they'd already slowed and were slamming her to the ground.

"Never in my whole life have I thought this thing would happen to me," Vanita said with a wail as an orderly came to escort her back. "Something's fishy," Vidhu said again, with such a showboating shake of his head that I did a double take as I realized: he had some kind of inside scoop. Around the classroom, Vidhu had a reputation as a man who could be made to spill. Usually, it took three questions, but today he needed only one: "What's going on?" And that's when I found out who'd tried to kill Vanita.

Samta's husband.

The story came pouring out. As soon as Vanita had been hired, she'd acquired the high-gloss, immutable shine of a golden girl.
Swami-ji had been dazzled by her crisp efficiency and appearance, by her determination to get ahead, by the way she took notes on everything he said. This girl was meticulous, a comer, just like him. Samta, meanwhile, was left to suck up the injustice of this: to seethe. She'd been on staff for years, but her star had never risen this high, and what's more, she'd come to be regarded as a bit of a dim bulb, one with any number of limitations. Unlike Vanita, who turned up for every one, she couldn't, for instance, go on field trips. Her husband, Manesh, forbade it.

Samta had lost whatever luster she'd had, and it was all that upstart's fault, she realized with greater acuity as she grew increasingly distraught. She took to weeping about this unfairness at home, thereby getting on Manesh's already frayed nerves. His nervous system had been taxed by a long stretch without employment as either an astrologer or an architect and by the well-founded suspicion that the whole town sniggered about it behind his back. Although Manesh did hold a well-placed position with a local right-wing Hindutva organization, it was honorific; organizing thundering brown-shorted nationalist marches didn't pay. The nightly sobbing, then, emphasized two unpleasant facts: One, his wife was the sole breadwinner in the family. Two, his mainstay stream of support was about to be cut off, if there was anything to Samta's bawling. It was all he could do not to hit her. Sometimes he went ahead.

When the threatening calls to Vanita started, the finger of suspicion quickly tapped Manesh. "A conference was held at the school, and he was brought in," Vidhu was telling me when a disturbance in the hospital lobby drowned him out. "Till now, I have not interfered in the affairs of the school," a burly man was shouting. "But now I am going after that chap! That chap does not even have a job!" Two men calmed Vanita's father down and showed him to the back. Vidhu continued.

The year before, Delhi headquarters had begun receiving letters accusing another, now departed female teacher of gross misdeeds. When Manesh was accused of mailing them, he hotly denied the charge, even after it was pointed out that the letters had been signed with his name. Vile slander, he maintained, and offered as proof the fact that whoever had sent them had spelled his name correctly, while he, Manesh, preferred to spell it incorrectly.

This struck me, as it had the others, as a less than airtight defense—a feint, perhaps, to throw off suspicion, as Samta's scooter crash had almost certainly been. Although Samta, in the strained state of protection she inhabited, had likely been ordered to enact her own accident, Manesh would have been acting of his own volition.

An academic adviser was flown in. He was from the U.S., but not high ranking enough to have a tilak shot on the wall. "We are taking culturally appropriate measures," he announced, but the troops were in no mood. The troops were in revolt. "I've had it with this overgrown study abroad program," I said. We'd discuss it over dinner, he told me.

At dinner, the adviser outlined what the culturally appropriate measure would be. A policeman would stop by Samta's and give the husband a warning.
Bas:
that was it.

We finished up with polite conversation, and at the meal's end, I caught a rickshaw home. "
Mera yaha,
" I told the driver: literally, "My here," though the expression meant more like "That's my place, there."
There
was now irrefutably
here,
where for months I'd wanted to be, and even so, the next day I quit speaking Hindi.

 

IN SCHOOL, I BEGIN
to use only English, casually, defiantly. I don't want to make the laborious Hindi sentences anymore, which now strike me as fetters to thought. The teachers, who didn't do anything about Harold's death threats, don't do anything now. They answer me in Hindi, as if that's what we're speaking. I reply in English. Conversations are really quite comfortable this way, each doing what we do best.

VIDHU
:
Kathy-ji, are you planning to have literature class tomorrow?

ME
: Yeah, sure. That's what we agreed.

VIDHU
:
Of course, Kathy-ji. You are the students. We are the teachers.

ME
: Good. Then let's meet at three.