Dreaming in Hindi (32 page)

"
No, not the tiger!
" She and I had saddle sores from three days of rocking past snake holes and lime green flashes of parrot, the occasional tiny donkey. I was keeping my mind off my tenderized behind by practicing Hindi. Away from the school, I forgot I refused to speak it. The boy was going for the squeals the exchanges produced. I was going for the mastery of the aspirated Hindi
g
you could get by repeating
baagh,
"tiger," about a thousand times.

"
You tiger.
"

"
You tiger.
"The producer was going to kill us.

"
Tiger eat girls.
"

"
No! Not the tiger!
"The producer sighed. She and I had met only once, the year before, at a wedding in Manhattan. Over dessert, we discovered we'd both be in Rajasthan. "Well, we should travel," she said in comradely tones, for this was back when I still resembled someone who might be a comrade to her: someone edged and shaped by New York, who could be counted on to know the drill and not to exclaim, "Hey, why don't we sing songs!" as the car pulled out of Jaipur on day one of a trip together.
That's what we do here! It's how we have fun! We do that and then we drink warm milk!
I didn't specifically say any of that, but it had been fairly implicit in my tone.

"I'm not much for songs," she'd said quietly. I was in violation of hip.

"
Tiger eat girls.
" Gradually, we'd both come to see that our winter vacations had been invaded by an alien, in the person of the other one. I'd arrived at this conclusion when in a grease pit, I'd become reacquainted with a word that had faded from memory: "co-dependent." The sullen driver we'd signed on had been muscling us into restaurants I knew would be flyspecked. The producer had been overriding me. "Hey, what can I say, I'm co-dependent?" she said in singsong, as across the room, our driver glad-handed the manager for his kickback. I glowered at him across the lentil-encrusted table. Then, next, at her.

"
Tiger eat boys.
" The look was similar to the one she'd given me when I was in the middle of the Indian bargaining dance with a hotel manager. "How long are you going to keep doing that?" she'd interrupted. Her speech, the fast, sharp, rejoindering talk that's entirely ordinary in New York, was, over here, unnerving: suddenly naked and direct, like a streaking. In a place swathed in veils—veiled references, displays, emotions, half the women—directness was shocking.

"
You tiger.
" By the camel safari, she and I had arrived at measured silence. But I'd been primed for imitation for so long now, I quickly fell into an automatic groove with the boy. With each round of tiger frights, I caught what felt like his exhilaration.

"
You tiger.
" Giddiness flowed, one to the other, with each exchange.

"
Tiger something-something-that-seemed-to-mean-boogers.'
" I held off on that particular rep. I wondered dimly if my cold wasn't affecting my brain. I considered whether something hadn't wormed in that caused the afflicted to pack Buddy Holly hiccups compulsively onto their
g
's. And years on I decided that while what had been addling me was most likely not a bug, one could argue with some conviction that it was catching.

"I think the process might be better called contagion," Chris Frith was saying in the course of an interview I was conducting with him after I'd returned from India. Frith, a professor of neuropsychology at University College London, was discussing empathy, the fact it's now commonly believed to be produced by the subtle, reflexive, neurologically induced mimicries we all engage in throughout the day. At the start of the conversation, I'd mentioned the tiger rounds I'd engaged in back in the desert. I was curious to know how important he thought imitation was to learning another language. From there, the talk had quickly veered into this other stretch, about contagion. The two topics were, believe it or not, related. Or so Frith was making a strong case.

"There's clearly a tendency in all of us to imitate other people automatically," he said. It's a pull that's expressed when you're with a colleague who limps and you find, to your horror, that you've started dipping alongside him. Or when you look up and see you've adopted your dinner companion's exact pose in reverse form: her head's tilted onto her left forefinger; yours is propped up by your right. This monkey-see reaction begins as far back as the cradle. As many a gleeful older brother or sister has discovered, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, the baby will automatically thrust hers out at you, as if she's been possessed by rude, controlling forces. Later on, the impulse is curbed enough that we don't go around spontaneously aping other people, but nonetheless, it remains, and throughout the day our bodies briefly reenact gestures we've just seen.

This innate drive isn't so odd when you consider that infants, unable to ask questions, have to rely on imitation to learn how things are done. A researcher once got toddlers to turn on a light box with their foreheads after producing a woman who leaned down and did just that. One week later, when the group was reassembled, two-thirds labored to bop the light box on with their heads, though it would have been easier to use their hands. "Mindless Imitation Teaches Us How to Be Human," a
New Scientist
article about the study was titled.

"We don't just pick up other people's movements, but their expressions and emotions," Frith said. "If I see someone smiling, I'm more likely to smile myself." In one study, when participants forced themselves to smile artificially, they reported an improvement in mood as a result. Given our tendency to synchronize with other people's gestures, moods, it turns out, really are contagious. "It's one aspect of the mirror neuron story," Frith says.

This mirror neuron story, at the time he and I spoke, was one of the bigger headliners in the field of neurology. Mirror neurons are brain cells that seem to download other people's gestures—to encode the movements, so that they're then patterned in the observer's head, for the observer's own use. When your friend is demonstrating with an air key the tricky half turn her actual key will require, your mirroring system will, without your awareness, be recording the sequence of motions. Later, at her apartment, you'll draw on the template that was laid down in your head to jiggle the lock with prepatterend ease. The cells create an automatic link between the observer and the observed. "They're not so surprising when you think how social humans are and how important the intentions of others toward you are in the development of a sense of self," says Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland. "Almost everything you do is a reaction to something someone else has done, or you're doing it to affect someone or something."

When the mirror neuron system is damaged, some scientists believe, the result is a condition that imposes isolation. You get people who are unable to read emotions on a face, who balk at human contact, who can't feel empathy. You get autism, in short, according to one theory. "They're Martin Buber's I-thou space," Nancy Isenberg, an autism researcher at Princeton, said in a fervent moment when we were discussing the cells. The I-thou space, as Buber, an Austrian theologian, described it, is the deep psychic realm where humans meet in their most authentic forms. Mirror neurons, Isenberg was saying, provide a place of unshielded connection, are how we take each other in.

There's no consensus on how, precisely, mirror neurons affect us, on what their limits of influence may be. Many neurologists say that the cells code hand or mouth gestures, that's it. But there's one camp, to which Frith belongs, that suspects the mirroring system may, ultimately, turn out to have a broader range—that it may in fact link up with other neurological networks to produce, for instance, empathy. Another crossover area has received a large amount of attention: language. "When you look at the literature," Molnar-Szakacs said, "the language functions are located in the inferior parietal lobe, the superior temporal cortex, and the inferior frontal cortex, which incorporates Broca's area." Broca's area is involved in speech production. "These are precisely the regions that are now considered to be the human mirror neuron system. I don't think it's a coincidence they overlap."

Language is dependent on the brain's motor strip, which controls actions. In fact, language likely evolved from gesture. Some scientists believe that the protolanguage our earliest ancestors used consisted of sequenced gestures and that they're what gave rise to grammar. We literally talked with our hands then. Given all this—that language resides partly in gesture and our brains contain mirroring cells that automatically download others' gestures—does that mean language is, to some extent, catching?

No one has anything like a definitive answer to this question. Going on my own experience, I can say that body language certainly is. Within three months in India, when I spoke Hindi with someone, it was in physical concert. They'd head-wobble; I would, too, without thinking. This synchronization gave me a near-visceral conviction that we were engaged in more than just talk, that we were coming together. The joined motion was a little like dancing together as we spoke. It left me with the belief, later confirmed, that these connections would remain deep within me for years. Most likely, reduced down, though, it was simply the side result of mirror neurons, which automatically try to synchronize people. Because of these, the more you're exposed to someone, the more you'll feel the same thing. And the more, if you're abroad, you'll assimilate.

Does learning a language promote imitation? I'd asked Frith. He'd put it the other way, he said. "The more you're trying to interact with someone, the more this kind of imitation would occur. We take in culture through the mirror system." We become aligned with the person we are talking with to the extent, he believes, "we start imitating words and sharing concepts." If that's true, language is indeed catching.

But through the automatic response, you can take in more than you'd expect to. "Inevitably, when going into another environment, you absorb values that aren't yours," Frith added, something I'd observed firsthand. Even by the time of the camel safari, the values of the place I was from—hipness, reflexive edge—had come to seem, when I encountered them now, galling and strange. In turn, I'd begun to feel I wasn't myself, although at this point, I could still believe that really, I was only playing at that.

 

THREE DAYS PRIOR
to the evening with the niece, the 25th of December, early.

Christmas dawned colder than any day since I'd been here. At quarter to seven, when I left the hotel, the rickshaw walas around Jagdish Temple were nested in blankets. In the eidetic winter light, their outlines were precise, as if they'd been caught in a flashbulb. Two hurried over to supervise my order when I stopped at a tea stall. "
Chai, brother! And anise sticks, there! There! Wrap them in newspaper. Madam will take those with her.
" A man in a gray vest dropped me off at Renee's. If I gave him 30 rupees, he'd be happy all day, he said.

Renee, at her front door, was the color of putty. The burning chill that rose off her unheated limestone walls had braised her lungs, turned her cough to a burble. "I just stopped breathing last night, nothing dramatic," she said. Inside, her apartment was shadowy. She waved off my offer of antibiotics, purchased the day before when I'd stumbled out of the desert after days of febrile travel. The cost of seven pills was roughly the same as daylong happiness: 20 rupees, 57 cents.

We placed wicker chairs around a stool to make ourselves a table. She'd changed her mind, she said. Her knees were bad; she didn't need to be tromping around in the villages with Pauline. We'd made plans to head out with Pauline on her annual Christmas run. "You go," Renee said, would not admit the bronchitis was stopping her.

I felt in my backpack for the package with the anise sticks, paused to tell her about the latest chapter at the school. Samta had been dismissed, then Vanita was, too, on the grounds that her family had brought a lawsuit against Samta's. Samta's family was now countersuing: one big mess.

"I don't know what I did to her," Vanita had said the day before when we'd gotten together for tea.

"Well, she's insecure," I'd replied, repeating the adviser's observation for want of anything better to say.

"And killing me would have made her more secure?" Vanita wailed. She had a point there. "And I was trying so hard," she added.

So hard?

"Yes, I was trying so hard to learn Hindi," she said, and I started.

"You're not a Hindi speaker?" I asked my erstwhile Hindi teacher.

"No!" she said lightly.
Of course not.
"No, I am a Bengali speaker."

Renee twisted her mouth out of a grin. Well, that was just like the school.

"No wonder none of her sentences ever worked," I said. I asked how much Renee thought I should give Pauline toward her expenses. Pauline funded these trips through the kindness of expats and fellow congregants from the Church of North India. "Whatever you give her, watch that she keeps it," Renee said. "If there are people around, they'll take it."

I found the package, set it on the stool. She reached over. The power cut off. We ate breakfast that morning by candlelight.

A cool blue light was driving shadows from the room when we heard a car pull up. We stood. In the alley, Pauline got out, long and tall, to greet Renee, and I was struck again by Pauline's stubborn beauty. Neither age nor the hairy-black-socks-under-sandals she had on could diminish it. Even at nearly eighty, she had an elegance that was preserved in the bones.

Her hefty driver polished the windshield while Renee made her excuses. Pauline and I slid into the back seat. On the way out of town, we stopped to collect a parishioner. Mrs. Bishwas, round as a robin, with a precise gray bun, had the brisk air of a lieutenant. "Happy Christmas!" she trilled, marching down the walk. Settling into the back, bumping Pauline to the middle, she smartly slapped possible dust motes off her knees.