Dreaming in Hindi (4 page)

"You're prepared to live in India for a year?" Gabriela stopped one class to ask. The week before, my oncologist had stared at me when I'd said I wanted to. Stared, then smiled. He and I had a longstanding congenial accord, unusual in a relationship in which one member had had to nearly poison the other to death four times not that long before. That was, essentially, the protocol with bone marrow transplants, a now abandoned desperation treatment for a desperate group: stage four breast cancer patients, women who, on average, had two and a half years to live. If a little chemo was good, then earth-scorching amounts would be better, the thinking went—mistakenly, it turned out. But stage four is subject to experimental approaches, being, by and large, endgame cancer. My own illness, in the four years since the transplant, had been kept in check with lightweight hormone treatments, with pills that were portable if someone were to request permission to leave the country for a stretch. "India, huh?" my doctor said. "All right, but you'd have to be watched closely." He said this after a pause. In the annals of medicine, I was guessing, there weren't many case studies of patients with this diagnosis expressing a desire to light out for parts unknown. But he and I were in terra incognita, and besides, he'd helped keep me alive all these years. He wasn't going to keep me from living.

"In Bulgaria, they think that's lucky!" Gabriela cried after a bird spattered my textbook as I was hurrying down to tell her the acceptance e-mail had come. "Welcome aboard for a world of experience!" the attached leaflet said: twenty hours a week of pronunciation, grammar, and film discussion ahead, with time off for holidays with names like Makar Sankranti and for chatting with the Hindi-speaking host families. Tips were included for cultural navigation, for engaging in life without toilet paper. I scanned them from a growing distance of disbelief. I was in, and stupefied to be. But they'd said two college years, and I wasn't even in college. How could this be?

"We could have been speaking Swahili and they'd have taken us," one of my co-academics, a metalhead turned Indology major, would remark upon our arrival. In the wake of several scandals, it seems, applications were down.

As the months sped by and departure hovered, I could have used a more encouraging omen than sudden bird shit from the sky. There were days I couldn't believe I was doing this: Throwing my life over? Why? About to jettison it, I saw with clarity that it was finally where I wanted it. And days when I saw that was the reason to go.

The last month passed in a whirl of inactivity. I postponed a visit to the foreign-diseases doctor till I was begging for a case of malaria down the line; made lists I misplaced; ordered novels there wasn't room for; knocked off from these activities to see a psychic, a bon voyage gift from a friend. His predictions were fanciful—I'd be taken up by kings and queens, would teach in a school on the outskirts of town, would witness a spectacular healing—but I succumbed to suspension of disbelief and for several days occupied myself lazing around, imagining how I was going to talk my way into the heart of India. I sent out a mass e-mailing asking if anyone knew of someone who'd sublet my apartment and look after the cat. I decided that if I couldn't find anyone, that would be a sign I shouldn't go. I heard from a husband-and-wife team willing to clean the litter box and pay the rent. With the fellowship's monthly stipend, my expenses were covered.

Coming down the homestretch, I had a dream that the girls in the host family I'd been assigned staged nightly porn films once their parents went to bed. The day before I left, I packed and repacked and, when the driver rang, repositioned things some more. I dragged the suitcase to the elevator, pressed the button, grabbed the handle.

And then I took a flying leap.

Orientation was held in Outer Space. It followed on the heels of the warm-up welcome-aboard sessions we'd had the first day in Delhi. Those had taken place at the guesthouse of the governing institute and were attended by ten graduate students who were setting off for various language programs around the country. One woman was about to embark on a year of Tamil study in the southern state of Tamil Nadu; one young man was aiming to immerse himself in Marathi in Maharashtra, to the southwest. The Hindi students numbered four—the largest group, given that Hindi, being the country's official language, was the institute's flagship program. We did not make a great showing. When a grad student taking off for Urdu in Lahore introduced himself as "Iqbal," one of our contingent, the only guy, snickered audibly. "Sounds like 'one hair,'" he said under his breath, grinning:
eek
= "one" in Hindi,
bal
means "hair." I regarded this person closely, considered that he and I would be spending an entire year together. In the northwest state of Rajasthan; that's where we were headed, to a school in a blocky mid- rise, judging by the brochure, with a sign that read
ANTRIKSH FLATS
. "Outer Space Apartments," in translation.

At the front desk in Delhi, old men with kind faces cocked their heads when I asked questions. They didn't speak English, and contrary to what I'd thought, I didn't speak Hindi, and the situation continued in Udaipur, the city, size of Cincinnati, where the program had recently resettled. Apparently, there'd been some problems in the school's former locale, Benares,
^*
though it never became exactly clear what they were. "
During the festival of Holi, bad men threw cow patties,
" the local headmaster, Swami-ji, would periodically recall throughout the year, face darkening, and that was as close to an explanation as I got.

I'd heard about Swami-ji once on the South Asian studies circuit back in the States, again the first day in Delhi. He turned out to be a small man in his forties, with a small round face and a boyish mop of hair that throughout the year never perceptibly changed length. After years of teaching hormone-addled students, he'd adopted a defense of looking simultaneously concerned and surprised. His nervous air of watchfulness was understandable, as a number of scandals had occurred on his watch. The year before, a (male, Western) student had run off with a (female, Indian) teacher—such an unthinkable breach of hierarchical order for India that news of the transgression washed up on the shores of every South Asian studies department in the States.

"Rumors go around about Swami-ji," the director of the institute, a man with the defiant jaw of a bulldog, had said during one of the seminars in Delhi. "But I have investigated and learned they were all a matter of misunderstanding." He mentioned an assistant cook who'd been hired perhaps unnecessarily, but at a cost of only 1,500 rupees per week. Thirty-five bucks—a demonstrably mild offense, we could see.

"I have investigated," the director had said growling, then caught himself. "They were all just misunderstandings."

 

TWO THINGS
I knew about Udaipur before arriving: One, it had been a featured locale in the James Bond film
Octopussy,
a fact every news wala, every news vendor, I'd quizzed back in New York had mentioned. Two, it was a curious choice of location for a Hindi program, in the news wala consensus. "Why are they teaching you Hindi language there?" as one put it, though no one articulated the reason behind the sentiment.

Once we arrived, I got it. The inhabitants, in fact, preferred to speak Mewari, which had been a language until 1967, when the government voted to recognize only eighteen official languages in the constitution, and it wasn't one of them.
^*
Now it was a dialect. Mewari has an illustrious history—it was the devotional poet Mirabai's tongue, for instance—but what it didn't have was "a senator in Delhi to push for it," as a local Mewari writer later told me, a variation on Max Weinrich's remark, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." In India, thousands of languages go unplatooned.

As it turned out, though, Udaipur was so romantic—two marble castles rising from a lake like floating mirages, others soaring grandly on the hill above them—its crenulated beauty so staggering, that I'd acquire a thick Mewari accent and be happy about it.

The town was located a night's drive south from the Great Thar Desert, a day's drive east from Pakistan, and off the main rail line from Delhi. This last fact cut down on big-city grifters, though not on tourists: for years Udaipur had been a featured stop on any travel excursion that touted "the Raj." Before that, it had reduced Victorian adventurers to babbling. On our first day at the Quality Inn downtown, we caught sight of the splendor that had sent a Miss Norah Rowan Hamilton into paroxysms in her 1915 book,
Through Wonderful India and Beyond.
Rapture mounted as she related encounters with "temples gleaming white through the green gloam," "blood red flowers flaring insolently against the molten sky," and the "story book palace, ... where fighting elephants, tusks tipped with metal, were kept." When, toward the end of my stay, I found the book on a dusty back shelf in the palace library, I was struck by how little things had changed. There was still flaring and gloam all over town, though the elephants now functioned more as wedding limousines than as tanks.

The area was only forty years out from being a princely state, the kingdom of Mewar, with its own language and king, or maharana (a lexically enlightened concept of government: "rana"—"raja," too—comes from the word
ranj,
"to please": it is the ruler's duty to please his subjects, through right actions.) Every other princely state in the area had a maharaja, but Udaipur had a maharana. When I asked one of the other students, a girl with a southern accent, what the word "maharana" meant, she said, "A bigger deal than a maharaja."

"Udaipur, I am thankful to say, is incurably medieval," Miss Hamilton wrote, and downtown, this was still true. The spill of palaces dominated life and thoughts locally, to the extent that a number of citizens seemed unaware that they were no longer living in a feudal principality. The fact that Indira Gandhi had stripped the Indian royals of their titles in 1971 was widely regarded as a technicality here. Hurrying through the winding lanes in the old town, you'd pass wall paintings of maharanas in saintly nimbi, wall paintings of maharanas astride tasseled elephants, and in one montage on a hot-pink balcony, oval portraits of both maharanas and Indian film stars ringing a lurid Durga.

Out in the suburban stretch where the school was located, however, a cure for the medieval had been found. Fifteen years before, when Udaipur's population had numbered 100,000 and television in the home had been only a rumor, the neighborhood had gone by another name, Hiran Magri, or Deer Hill. Then the economy had swelled on technology, and a local boom in mining and education tripled the population. A couple of canny builders realized that pretty, wooded Hiran Magri was just fifteen minutes out of town by rickshaw, five by Maruti, if you had a car. They quickly descended and carved out tight subdivisions, then gave the acreage a more alluring name, Sector Eleven, which sounded like a
Star Trek
fuel stop only to Western ears. The old one was no longer accurate; there were no more deer around, and besides, no one wanted to live in a place with a Hindi name.

Including Swami-ji, the head of the Hindi school where I now found myself, who'd happily moved his family into the apartment next door. To the Indian eye, the homes in Sector Eleven trumpeted "arrived," though to my untrained one, they looked bulky and showy, as if an architect from Ursk had been ordered to design for expanse and lay off traditional details: no peacock arches, no fanciful cupolas, ever, ever. What the people wanted in the new environs was Western, and they got it, a Miami-Eastern bloc blend. At the Paras Hotel, behind the school, the pool was shaped like a mango. The Paras Theater next door was geometry in concrete.

The school itself, in a fifth-floor unit of Antriksh Flats, was furnished in functional décor: gray rugs, black sofa with thin wooden arms, metal shelves with books that had titles such as
Rural Indian Development: 1971 to 1982.
The first morning, the layout reminded me of a suburban cooking school I'd seen once in a Japanese film, but that was early, when my overtaxed brain was still trying to process details and frantically making them familiar.

The first morning, Swami-ji instructed us to call him by that name, at what seemed like some length. The word means "teacher," he repeated several times. Later, I'd learn that fate had bestowed a trick name on him at birth. His given one literally meant "Beloved of Vishnu," but when it was mispronounced, by a thick American tongue, say, it came out sounding like Achut Anand: "He Who Loves to Be in," um, "Women's Privates." This startling dual property had not become apparent till his first restaurant outing with students. "Hey, Achut Anand-ji, how do I ask this guy for salt?" one of his charges had called out. The whole place fell into stunned silence, and from then on, Swami-ji was Swami-ji.

Orientation continued. "
To you rajanpathinehiunkahi downtown market lugikimarudiran,
" said a teacher named Vidhu, whose long angular face made me think that his ancestors had swept in from Turkestan. The other students wrote it down. Vidhu was in his thirties and was Swami-ji's right-hand man. His pleated black trousers and spotless white sneakers lent him the air of a hipster, an impression deepened by his laugh when he laughed: reverbed, cosmically amused. More often, though, he kept the polite and gracefully fawning demeanor of a majordomo.

"
Because you have said korengiratko,
" Vidhu added. Orientation in Udaipur was hours of Hindi, so hours of flickering sentences. In the draining heat, only every fifth word penetrated my brain, every twentieth when the fan cut off and words thickened to a glaze. At normal speaking rates of 3 to 7 words per second, you could calculate, and I did, that was between 171 and 390 words each minute I wasn't getting.

Occasional warnings came through in English. "If you see a group of sacred cows, we ask that you not disturb or frighten them, as that can make them rush this way and that and possibly brush you. Last year cows strained a girl's leg. And she was a dancer," Vidhu warned, and then I was desperate to know what else they'd said.