Dreaming in Hindi (34 page)

"
Not like you,
" he quickly adds. "
You are fine,
" and I nod. For I am, absolutely. I'm so "
fine,
" in Govinda's sense of the word, that yards of fabric flutter around me when I walk, enough to swathe a beekeeper. So "
fine
" you can just about see my nose.

We discuss how kids understand everything these days. And on and on, and every so often, I realize it's full Hindi. Glee shoots me up above the words.

The language increased exponentially after my main English cheat source relocated to Jodhpur, the Blue City, a hundred miles north. Not two months back, Helaena was still engaged in her usual approach to Hindi language acquisition: causing serial breakdowns among the male population of Udaipur. It's an apparently fast-forwarding technique, for she'd achieved dizzying heights of fluency while only sporadically cracking a book. Aditya, on the other hand, had reached new depths, of despair. He's been regularly calling his friend Karni to weep over their breakup, unaware it was Karni's handprint he'd detected on Helaena's breast once after a wedding.

Then a month and a half ago, Helaena met her match: Sumair, a minor prince from Jodhpur who, to the detriment of his personality, had placed fourth runner-up in the Mr. India competition. "People will say a lot of things for this face," he informed her. She reported this with a wry smile. But Sumair had many glittering qualities. He knew people in Bollywood, could arrange introductions. Sometimes in those movies, they used Western girls. He was a Rajput and a first son; he stood to inherit. He was also a man with hormonal gumption, something I'd observed firsthand the time we met.

This was on a trip that she and I made to Jodhpur, for Holi, the Indian springtime celebration, when revelers toss colored powders at one another. The plan had been a soigné party at the palace, but the weekend, as Helaena's India often did, turned rambunctious when competing festivities set up down the street. I hesitate to use the word "debauched," since that would imply wholesome fun was not had, and it was, for a good two minutes. After which we ended up getting flung repeatedly into a tub of water and rubbed with powders, by four princes from Jodhpur dressed in jodhpur pants.

In the driveway, turbaned servants played flute music, alongside the family Rolls-Royce. "Down, tiger!" the most square-jawed of the celebrants shouted each time he pushed us under. Sumair had perhaps been made a bit addled by the opium the retainers offered on trays.

From an upstairs window, a round woman dourly surveyed the proceedings. "Oh, mother!" the prince whose place this was would call up. "Don't be in such a bad mood for Holi." "Oh, mother! I phoned that man back," and then we'd get dunked again.

A servant held out a hose. Another soaped his master's face. A dachshund ran by; we broke for lunch.

All in all, a blue time was had in the Blue City, in the film sense of the word. The next morning, Helaena put me on the bus. "Tell them ... I know, say I'm up for a part in a Bollywood movie," she said. She'd decided to stay on for a while.

The bus down passed bedraggled donkeys covered in purple Holi spots. A young cow was the same glaring pink as my face. A sticker beneath the window caught my eye. "
There are only two ways to be happy,
" it said when I leaned down to examine it. "
Choose work that's indispensable, and be in harmony with your circumstances.
" I settled back smiling—I had, I hoped; I was, for sure—then did a double take. But I'd just read that, casually, easily, like cutting through clouds. In Devanagari.

 

ACROSS THE LINE
, on the far side, my sign language has also revved some. Though not enough for the day I arrive at the deaf school and find Anukul leaving. Rita is going to have a baby. He has errands to run. "You can take the class for the rest of the day," he says—till three o'clock, and it's only ten to two. I panic. But what will we do?

The question's soon moot. I've brought sweets, and in no time, word gets around. My classroom and the hall outside are a mess of kids. "
Aren't these a lot of boys for this class?
" I ask Mr. Gupta, a teacher who's wandered in with a group of itinerant students, but my Hindi, in crossing over, jams.

"
No, we have one hundred and five students in this school,
" he says. All of whom are in here now. Kids are arguing with their hands, making high-pitched cries, signing insistent questions I mostly don't understand. When I don't, they tap my shoulder again to draw my attention back from the next one. I'm getting tapped from all sides. Hardly anyone is drawing. No one will sit down. Anukul, when he hears, is going to kill me.

Attrition sets in when a volleyball game starts up in the courtyard. I'm left with a core group, six guys eager to discuss any subject, any way. "
What is your name?
" one asks in sign, and when I frown, he inquires again using chalk. "
Your name?
" I ask back.
Your town? Your age?
All ground we've covered before, but it's invigorating; we're sparking. One boy can speak some answers. "
Sixteen,
" he says. In Mewari, but no problem. By now anything goes.

Bits of India wink as we talk. Someone mentions "
Wednesday,
" Ganesh's day: two-fisted elephant trunk. A boy says he's about to take a wife: line along the part of the hair, the vermilion mark that shows a woman is married. I ask for names for things around the house. "
Cupboard
" is a cognate to English: door described, then opened, then many lines or boards. "
Radio
" is easy: dial being tuned. I haven't seen radios at the school, wonder if the kids know them from their visits home, which, according to a teacher named Mrs. Punamaya, are infrequent. The parents rarely come, she told me when I went to her house. "In India," a visiting daughter added, "the feeling is
Well, he's deaf; we'll just have another.
Even if you threaten and say, 'If you don't visit, we'll send them home,' they say, 'Fine, send them home; we'll just leave them in a room.'" In the classroom, I notice a band of dull metal on one boy's finger: iron, for protection. I hope a parent slipped it on.

We talk so much, my senses are compressed into gestures. Later, my brain will imbue the gestures with sound. "
You are Christian? Me, too!
" the slant-eyed tribal boy says in memory, in spoken words, prompting a fascinated colloquy from the Dustbin on how Jesus got his hands nailed. Feet, too. The Dustbin demonstrates. "
You will take me to America?
" he asks me slyly, makes a face:
Don't like it here.

"
That boy's bad,
" a little boy complains.

"
Yes,
" the kids all say. "
He hits him.
"

"
You shouldn't hit him,
" an older one chides.

When I look at the clock, it's quarter to three. I've forgotten all about the art. I quickly hand out pencils and paper. Draw your house and your family, I instruct the boys, and ten minutes later I get back six Shaktimans. Six Supermen. Family in, action figure out—about how it goes with my Hindi, too.

One crayoned hulk is in a hot-pink jump suit with the maharana's crest on the front.
Who says chivalry is dead?
I think, placing him on the stack, then can't remember what exactly that meant.

 

LUCKY SINGH PHONES
. She asks me over for a party. When my rickshaw gets lost and I call for directions, her husband thinks I'm a teenage Hindi-speaking prankster. "We get calls all the time asking 'Where's your palace?'" he apologizes when we establish it's me. His wife is listed in the phone book under Rani Sahab: "Madam Queen."

In the living room, ten guests hold plates of mutton. The women are on one side of the room. They're all in their late forties, except for a beautiful young wife, early thirties, who touches toes all around, then meekly listens, head covered, from a side chair. The forties are when women here come into their own. Before that, they show obeisance.

The pistol to my right, a woman with a comfortably assured air, tells me about her arranged marriage. "I didn't get married till I was twenty-nine," she says. "I was running a school and happy. But then my parents said, 'You are going to.' I hadn't even seen a photograph of him." She shakes her head, smiles. "The day of the wedding, my sister told me, 'You have to look shy'—you know, Indian brides are supposed to look shy? I said, 'But how will I? I've never looked shy in my life.'"

When Rani Sahab and her best friend leave the room for a minute, the woman makes a beeline for the men's side. She kicks up a conversation about India and Pakistan. Should India invade or not? Tensions have been increasing since the attack on the parliament.

I lean forward to listen to the men's response, hear dirty-Mussulman talk, with plummy accents. I catch mutterings of it everywhere now.
India should attack:
the men say this with huzzahs. "We have taken enough nonsense!" one exclaims.

"Even the Hindu religion says you should not take nonsense from other people," a second adds. "You should not do harm to anyone, and that includes yourself."

"That man Gandhi was talking rubbish," says a third, a statement that to me, of course, sounds like sacrilege. But every one of the men nods:
Oh-yes, oh-yes, that man was.

 

AT THE TRIDENT HOTEL
with Piers and his entourage a few nights later, I told his Nepalese houseboys the story about the Shaktimans, partly because I thought they'd appreciate the word-confusion, partly to distract them from the flinty looks a waiter was giving them. "This is not done here," Lucky and her friends will say when the startling subject arises of how Piers brings those boys to restaurants. "He does not treat his servants properly"—with the proper decorum and strictness. "This is why they eat all his bread."

I was up to the detail about the royal crest—Bharat, the one who did a perfect deadpan Mr. Bean, got the twist—when I remembered I'd promised Anukul I'd report in on how my solo teaching day had gone. I ducked into the hall.

Not good, he said when I called. His mother was sick. Hepatitis. Our voices slowed, found unshielded grooves. His mother had begun to vomit blood.

"Oh, Anukul. What's her name? I will pray."

"What is Rama's mother's name?" he said, his spirits rallying on pedagogy. "You don't know?" he scolded, ever the teacher. I mugged mock exasperation at a potted palm, saw Piers through the glass door watching.

"I will give you a quiz," Anukul said. "Is it (a) Parvati, (b) Durga, (c) Lakshmi, or (d) Kaushlya?" I picked (d). The others were too well-known. "
Haan,
"he said. "That is her name. Good."

"Anukul, I am so sorry." In India, a turn like this wasn't temporary.

"We will see what God does," he said. He sounded so forlorn that I told him my cancer history, which I'd kept almost entirely to myself. Over here, through omission, I'd regained my health.

"... and that was ten years ago," I said. "And I'm still alive."

"You know why you are still alive?"

I didn't, actually.

"Because you help people. When you help me, I say only thank you, but every cell in my body is happy, it is going to you. We call that a boon. Every cell is giving you a boon."

Back at the table, I tried sending boons to Anukul's mother, felt only air. The waiter brought new plates. Bharat and the boys looked stiffly miserable. They shook their heads hard when Piers offered them nan.
Maybe when nothing about you translates out, all you can show for yourself is goodness,
I thought, the idea of goodness still playing on my mind. I was still slightly surprised to have been referred to as someone who helped people. Last I'd looked, in the States, I'd been as self-absorbed as anyone. For years, I'd stayed juiced on career preoccupations and passions. That kind of spree produces a pleasing buzz that keeps your focus from straying from what's important: you, after a while, if you keep at it too long. But change your passions, you change yourself.

Last week, in this town I'd come to love, I'd been returning home one afternoon when I'd felt someone seize me from behind at the elbows and drag me to the side—out of the path of stampeding sacred cows, I saw when I turned. I hadn't, till that moment, been afraid, just confused. In New York, adrenaline would have flooded me the moment the person grabbed me, but here I'd reflexively known that whoever it was (a rickshaw driver) had only good intentions. There was a goodness to this place that sank into the reflexes.

At the Indian end of the table, a policeman said something to a jigri that I could tell had been barbed. Contempt flashed across the jigri's face. No one else at that end seemed to catch it.

Maybe out of translation, I thought, you kept the pragmatics part of your brain, the right side, constantly fired. You kept the pathways that handle inference sparking, as you constantly had to rely on dog vision—the clear sight you gain without words. How high you kept the burners probably had to do with how much of your old life had stalled at the line, how little of the familiar you had to rely on. I considered, again, which parts of my former life wouldn't cross over.

Words, of course. My ex-husband, the fact of him. My age, which in Rajasthan didn't match my face and made people, when I gave it, look like they'd seen a ghost. Women that old were papery-skinned grandmothers. "Don't tell anyone at the school," Anukul had all but shouted recently when he'd asked, sounding as startled as if I'd been exercising sleight of hand. The next week when I came in, every staff member converged on my classroom: Was it true? Was I really that old? But how could I be that old and not be married? Did I want to get married? I stopped to consider what the correct answer would be, decided to go with yes. A bride at forty-five! Everyone gasped. "If you get married now, all Indian peoples will laugh," Anukul said cheerfully.

Looks, however much I had. While Helaena's went through the roof here, mine cratered through the floor. In India, not to put too fine a point on it, I was a dog. I knew this because I could see it in the mirror and because there were no cultural proscriptions in place in Udaipur against offering hot-or-not appraisals on the spot. I knew because people told me. The other day, Nand had broken off in the middle of a soliloquy on Sanskrit-era notions of beauty, to stare thoughtfully at my face. "Your features are not very beautiful," he said, then added helpfully, "But in India, inner beauty counts." It was the second inner-beauty pep talk I'd gotten from a geezer that week.