Dreaming in Hindi (44 page)

The categories they build are grammar, a grammar that's entirely different from the one present in the spoken language that surrounds them. Signed grammar is as different from spoken grammar as English is from Navajo. ASL, in fact, has more in common morphologically with Navajo than it does with English.

Often, however, well-meaning teachers in deaf schools will insist that their students use grammar that the instructors recognize as proper: the one they know from the language they speak. This kind of signing is called "manually coded" English or French or Thai, and it is, to deaf people, stilted and artificial. It doesn't come naturally to kids. It doesn't take into account corporal factors, doesn't incorporate the dimension of space. It may even stunt academic growth. In Ireland in the 1960s, deaf students were required to switch from Irish Sign Language to an English-coded system. Immediately after, their literacy rates plummeted.

"It happens everywhere," Senghas said. "It's hard for the teachers to understand that this other sign, the one the kids use—one they're only going to get from a bunch of other kids who may look like scrappy street kids—that it's going to enable them to have cognitive development." I'd just finished telling her about the school in Udaipur, about Anukul's deep dedication to his kids, but also that I suspected he'd been using manual Hindi. That might have explained the discrepancy I'd seen between the more ponderous signing in the classroom and the bullet train gestures outside.

"If the kids' sentences when they were with him followed Hindi word order, that would be a pretty good clue," she said. As far as I could tell, they had.

We talked some more about the Udaipur school, which had been founded about the same time as the one in Managua, and then I asked her a question I'd never come up with an answer for: had those kids, did she think, invented their own language?

She was, she said, logically enough, unable to tell me from so far away. She suggested some questions I could try on Anukul over the phone, inquiries that might provide illumination. Nuanced inquiries that the more I thought about them, the more I was certain wouldn't survive the complications of long-distance and barely matching tongues. I explained that the questions would probably derail before they got to France. Well, then, she said, there was really no other way but to observe firsthand. To go back. I was on the Internet the next day, comparing flights. The decision might have appeared spontaneous, but it was anything but. India, for once, hadn't reached over and pulled me across. For four years, in some part of my mind, this is all I'd been planning every day.

"Yes, why not?" Anukul said when I phoned to try to explain what I wanted to do, when I called to ask if I could barge in and disrupt his classroom one more time. Our conversation was brief. He found it staticky. "You are sounding like an American," he complained.

The day before the videshi contest, Udaipur is rolling in festivals. Today's, the kickoff to a week's worth to follow, has thrown the institute into another chutti. At 11
A.M.
, then, I'm free to go to Ruby's. The costumes are in: massive, ten-pound Rajasthani wedding outfits, Piers's request. Mine is spectrally pink, with blinking additions of glitter fringe. His is more sedate, except for the turban, which is a whopper. The costumes and speech are now under control. The only advance work left is styling.

At Ruby's, the kids aren't around. Neither is her husband Rajendra. Cleared of three-quarters of the family, the apartment looks airy. Priyanka and Ruby place me in a chair and, from the black shag couch, coolly appraise my face, my physique, my chances. They trade judgments I can't catch, then every so often Ruby disappears into the back room. One time she reemerges with a stack of shawls; another trip, with silk pouches that contain numberless golden forehead ornaments, miles of bangles, tangles upon tangles of black-threaded pendants. She upends the bags one by one. Damn, no earrings. "The kids were playing with them. They must have put them somewhere," she says, lifting a curtain to see if the earrings might have migrated back there. They haven't, so we give the business of adornments a rest while she decides what she'll wear as festival announcer that night. Hauling suitcases from the bedroom, she turns layer after layer of precisely folded silks into piles of color-burst clouds. "I have two hundred and fifty saris," she says, "and I can never find one to wear."

After the matter of her outfit has been decided, we return to mine. "You put this, and this, and this," she says, loading me up with anklets and head baubles, with waist chains, bangles, bottles of dark nail polish, tubes of lipsticks in shades so severe, they make my
gori
-white face appear shrunken. Once the entire getup is in place, I look like a
hijra,
an Indian cross-dressing eunuch, although Priyanka and Ruby are dazzled. "Oh, so beautiful," they murmur to each other. "Can you believe it?" They demand an immediate dress rehearsal. Standing and balancing myself against the sewing machine, I proclaim my deep hope for rebirth in Udaipur, evade the birthday trap, smoothly round the curve into the ghazal, stop cold, glare. My head coach is laughing so hard at my accent, she's slamming sideways into Priyanka.

"Ruby, you are not advancing the cause," I tell her. "No, no, go on," she says between gasps, and I finish with only two nearly undetectable snags. We are the champions. We relax after that, kick back and gossip. "Don't tell anyone. They will think it's your fault," Ruby warns when I describe how a music teacher made a pass at me, then rushes to tell Priyanka in Hindi.

By lunchtime, the heat has made us stupid. We call it a wrap. When I go out, only the stalwart or desperate are still on the streets. Back in the zenana, I lie on the bed with the air cooler positioned so that it makes my salwar pants billow. Till the heat puts me out, I practice some more. Once again, I cannot say
duahuan-ka.

 

THE NEXT MORNING
at school, it's just me and the boys. Helaena was supposed to have lined up a weekly guest, but it's now been weeks, and she's never come back. With no one on the docket and an empty hour ahead, I appoint myself the last weekly guest of the year. A student! Swami-ji and Vidhu giggle at this inversion of hierarchy. They sit up straight as I take the teacher's chair and describe in Hindi the life I had before: how I was a writer and before that, an editor, whose work revolved around taking authors to lunch and making investigative forays to island resorts and sometimes bearing witness to the decline of postpubescent models who could not stay away from the beer. Or that's my talk in a nutshell, and all of it's news to the guys. In the formality of the Indian classroom, wide swaths of our backgrounds have never been discussed.

"
Then one time,
" I say, beginning another story from the vaguely louche existence I led, aiming to get them on the edge of their seats, when I see that a blankness has come onto their faces; their bodies are sagging into inattention:
What thing is this?
Although my sentences are lining up in correct Hindi, none of this makes any sense. The world I came from cannot be dragged into Antriksh Flats, so I bring the talk to a close and ask, as a proper weekly guest should, whether they have any questions. Swami-ji has one: "
Kathy-ji. Have you spoken to Helaena?
"

"
Sorry,
" I say with a grin, "
but I don't speak Hindi,
" and as the last weekly guest class winds up, we both chortle till our shoulders shake. It's Swami-ji's kind of joke, even if he's not precisely sure what it means.

 

ONE LATE AFTERNOON
soon after, wedding shawl planted on my head, I creep out the door of the haveli, hoping that, since I'm supposed to look like a Rajasthani woman, I'll make it to a rickshaw unnoticed. Fat chance. Because actually what I look like is not so much that, but a large, motorized confectioner's cake gliding pinkly down the street. I get as far as Lakshmi's General Store next door before I'm spotted.

We've all just recovered, the street and I, from the time last week when I left the house attired, uncustomarily, in a fancy sari. On any given day, my every Western move inspires loud play-by-play commentary from here to the Clock Tower, but now the sight of me attempting to sneak along like this causes busloads of people to appear. My progress is stalled as a crowd forms and onlookers shout out questions. Other bystanders provide live-at-five commentary: "
Yes, she is wearing Rajasthani clothing." "Yes, tonight, at the puppet museum.
" I reach up to make adjustments to the shawl, and a beaming woman at the window above Lakshmi's calls down. She flicks her fingers in the air to illustrate her point. "
Yes,
" I shout up, "
I decided to go with nail polish for the big event." "No, I don't usually wear it." "No, you're right.
"

I've shaken the crowd, am nearly halfway to the rickshaw stand, when there before me, cresting a hill, is a rabble of festivalgoers, all women dressed vaguely like me, all balancing statues of the goddess Parvati on their heads. We stop dead in our tracks. Their mouths drop. Then shrieking with glee, several women grab my wrists, and as the Parvatis tipple side to side, they pull me along. I'm saved only by the intervention of a quick-thinking rickshaw man. "Madam, you are looking very smart," he says, staring into the mirror as we proceed in the direction of the museum.

Once there, I find Piers moodily wandering the grounds. He looks pained in his wedding suit, as if his curled-back Aladdin shoes are pinching his feet. "Um, yes, well," he says with British reserve when I exclaim over his eyeliner mustache, say he's looking very smart. You can tell he'd like to strangle me for roping him into this.

A man from the tourism board shows us to our seats. We're in the front row of bleachers that were constructed for the evening out of stacked planks and white sheets. We can see everyone up close as they arrive. There's the travel agent's daughter, Tui, who used to answer my India questions. A number of past weekly guests. The guy from the candy shop. Just about everyone I've ever met. Priyanka and Ruby hurry over, so excited they're squeaking. They take the sheeted plank behind us. Renee arrives with her camera and won't stop snapping pictures, which puts Piers further out of sorts. But then accidentally I spill my Coke into the side of his shoe, and that, strangely, improves his mood.

The bleachers fill, all but the competitors' row, which remains empty except for us. Then twenty minutes before showtime, the tourism board guy leads two foreign women in and seats them beside me. One's Canadian; one's English of Indian descent. They're both wearing pink veils. "It was really hard to find these," the Canadian one says. "Where'd you get yours?" We live here, I answer. "Oh. You live here," she says, implying hometown advantage. Hey, where's your male escort? I'm tempted to ask, but I stay collected. The brown-skinned English woman complains that the tourism desk asked twice where she was from, implying she was a ringer. She's not. She's wearing sneakers.

No contest, these two, but at ten minutes and counting, a spectacular double-cross is revealed. Ramesh from Ashok Fabrics—our patron—shows up in a long pink scarf and turban, with a magnificently outfitted Japanese customer in tow, and proceeds brazenly to the videshi section. "Yeah, what country are you from?" I lean across the Canadian to hiss.

The announcer comes on. We tense, ready to take the stage. But no, first, we will all enjoy a long warm-up extravaganza—the broken-glass dance, then the peacock dance, then the interminable fire-shooting-from-the-head dance—while I mumble the speech furiously under my breath and a Mewar channel cameraman stares, unsure whether to film that or not. Priyanka passes me a note.
"Don't do that with your skirt," it reads, meaning clutch one side when you walk, what I'd done when I'd gone to greet Tui.

Then the slinky snake girls salute Shiva, then the announcer says, "Ladies and gentlemen..." We're on. I do that with my skirt. The videshis are lined up in order of appearance. Piers and I are at the back. We're last, which is long enough for me to flood my head with oxygen, to feel I've left my body and am riding the lights, to tell myself it hasn't all come down to this one moment. Except it has. Then the announcer is signaling, and without benefit of locomotion, we're in front of the mike. I compose myself and drop the side of my skirt and try not to think of Ruby and Priyanka staring. I calm my breath and begin: "
My humble name, so small and of no consequence...
"And the speech bolts, it takes off, the sucker is carrying me, for a miraculous thing has occurred: after hours of listening to Lata Mangeshkar, her grace has somehow transferred over. The New Year's greeting is butter as I glide through it, head high, and after that it's straight on for the ghazal and morning. I'm speeding toward the end, blessed and possessed, the speech now the rushing essence of every sound I've learned here, I'm compressed down into the lights and the Hindi, right up to the moment one tiny lumpen word appears on the track, one small putrefyingly stubborn word, and I'm flipped off course. Sent flying, kicking, through the air.

I blow it.

Right there, right in front of everyone I know, on the home television sets of people who know me and I don't recognize, I blow the whole thing. Because once I've caught on that word, the whole speech falls apart. I stand there and, with a roar in my ears, whir through the same four words, like one monster-size replication of a cake that's got a broken tape recording inside.

This goes on for a while. No one knows what to do. Till some compassionate soul out there on the planks begins to clap, and to my horror, applause spreads through the crowd. Show's over. The announcer is turning toward us. Desperation or the grace of Lata Mangeshkar clears my head. I know what to do.

"
No, no, no,
" I say, smiling, leaning into the mike. "
Now I will sing you a song,
" and I belt out "Yara Seeli Seeli."

All Indian peoples, you better believe, laughed that night. But after the votes were finally tallied, Piers and me, we had the last laugh. For when the verdict came in, we'd taken it by a mile. Kumbhalgarh was Ruby's. We'd won.