Dreaming in Hindi (46 page)

My mood, then, was already somber when my cell phone rang unexpectedly. It was, of all people, the father of Vikram, the Brahmin physicist, the one I'd traveled through the desert with. "Where are you?" his father barked. Before, he'd been soft-spoken. "Your uncle, everyone, has been looking for you everywhere. Your father is not doing well." I hurried off the phone to buy a plane ticket. If Vikram's father hadn't tracked me down, I would have been stranded and missed being with my father in the final week of his life.

My last full day in India, I took a rickshaw out to the Gandhi museum. The designer was launching a line made of khadi, the rough-spun cotton that Gandhi had turned into such an enduring symbol of national independence that for years the Indian flag had at its center a
charkha,
a spinning wheel. Politicians still wear khadi to give speeches as a visual reminder of the transformative self-reliance movement Gandhi set in motion. Learn to spin your own cotton, he'd urged Indians in the days when the British Raj still had them under its thumb. Spinning became a gesture of defiance, an act of nonviolent aggression—a way for people to spurn foreign imports, demonstrate they could stand on their own. This symbolism and history had appealed to the designer, Christina Kim, who applies an archivist's intelligence to her work. So on my last day in India, I headed to the Gandhi museum to get a quote.

Of course I could interview her, the museum's director said when I asked for permission, in Hindi. By now, aside from when I was forced out of it to do my work, that's pretty much all I spoke. She'd be happy to talk, she said, setting aside an antique pen she'd been cataloging. But what about this—she had a better idea. It was Friday afternoon: did I know I was in luck?

As it happened, each Friday, the day Gandhi was killed, a group of freedom fighters, now very old, met on the lawn outside his memorial to spin khadi in his honor. The woman wondered: would I like to meet them? And she stopped what she was doing and walked me a half-hour through Delhi rush-hour traffic. The woman seemed every bit as generous as you'd expect the director of the Gandhi museum to be, but all the same, I had a suspicion she wouldn't have suggested this if I'd approached her in English. Many of the freedom fighters, being the age they were, couldn't speak English, either because theirs had rusted shut, or because they'd never been able to.

We arrived at a great lawn, where under a peepul tree, seven old men and women were seated next to a dozen children—orphans, the director explained. They were all leaning down over charkhas, spinning. The woman escorted me to where they sat. "
This is Kathy-ji,
" she said. "
She speaks very good Hindi. She just has some trouble with gender.
" She gave me a teasing smile. Would they mind, she asked, if I joined them and learned to spin?

An old woman in a rough-woven sari patted the space beside her on the mat. She welcomed me in Hindi. A boy handed me a wheel, and without much success, I gave it a try. The woman and I fell to talking. She rocked gently to the motion of the spindle, legs extended. From time to time, she broke into the high, gleeful Indian laugh I'd grown to love. The sound of it made me mournful.

"
Yes, oh yes, one time I met Gandhi-ji,
" she said. "
At this time, I was
a student. Gandhi-ji came to the university. This was near where I lived. He was giving a speech. I was at the front of the crowd. Afterward I was talking to my friend, and when I looked up, he was beside me. Gandhi-ji put his hand on my head and leaned over, and he said...
" And of course, at that moment, the listening device went out. I knew enough not to ask her to repeat herself; that never worked. People would always begin at another place in the story. I nodded in time, to keep her going, and tried to piece together what I'd missed. I couldn't. She'd moved along. And this kept happening: she'd lead up to what was surely going to be an extraordinary revelation, then, wham, just roiling sound. It was like watching a television that kept sliding off the channel. It was tormenting.

I hung in, though, and after a while, she told me she'd only ever worn khadi. Partly because by doing that she was fighting pollution, partly because of the spirit it represented, but really, she said, there was a deeper reason. I asked what it was.

"
Well,
" she said, "
it's like if you cook a meal yourself. If someone else does, if a servant or a restaurant cooks it, then the meal is different and useful, but in the end, it's nothing you remember. If someone else prepares it, there's no emotional attachment. No love comes. But if you make the thing yourself it's from the heart.

"
If someone else has made the cloth, what you have will be perfect, but in time you throw it away.
" She flipped the manufactured thing away with her hand.

"
If someone else has made the cloth, then it wont matter to you,
" she said. "
But if you make it yourself, it will have knots and imperfections, but you wont care. You will hold on to it.
"

I thought of all the loopy sentences I'd constructed that year, all the conversations that had been knotted and imperfect and that, all the same, I'd keep forever. And I was cheered some to realize this, but on this, the very last day, all that was, was consolation. I wanted more than anything I ever had to stay, to just keep on going. The language, in the past week, had gained even more momentum. I could speed now through that translucent green place anytime I wanted.

In that last conversation, on that last day, I kept writing down new words as they came up—
vikriti,
evil;
pavitra,
pure—on reflex, out of stubbornness, with rising anger. All the potential of the words was gone. They filled me with sorrow.

I bent down over my wheel and was uselessly sad. But I'd gotten so close, but the sounds were just forming right.

The woman laughed: I was holding my charkha wrong.

But I'd just learned a new expression that only native speakers used:
Aur nahin to kya?
"If not that, then what?"

Every thread I tried to spin broke.

But language was so ephemeral, this was all going to fade.

A boy readjusted my hands.

But I'd just had one immaculate conversation, but Vidhu had said six months, but I'd only ever dreamed in English and not Hindi.

And the threads began to hold.

Sometimes now, I dream in both.

Udaipur looked flatter and busier, both, four years on when I returned. The tourists had taken it back. I could see that much, but not much more. There was so little time, only enough for a couple of visits. But then again, most of the people I wanted to see weren't here anymore.

Renee had died two and a half years before, on Valentine's Day. Hindu rites of cremation were performed. She would have been pleased. Afterward, her beloved driver, Gopal, took her ashes the three days to the Ganges. Hindus believe that if someone's earthly remains are placed in the Ganges, they find
moksha,
"release," but I think Renee already had, when she'd found her true home.

The school was long gone from Sector Eleven. They'd all moved north, to Jaipur. Tui, the travel agent's daughter who'd invited me for tea, had, too, when she'd married. Priyanka was married now as well and living in the States. Chirag hadn't come through, this was someone else, in Atlanta, but still, I like to think I got that ball rolling. Helaena wasn't here either, though she was still on the subcontinent. After a stint working at a Motel Six in Pulaski, Tennessee, where the Gujarati owner had her waxing his wife's legs, she'd moved to Washington, D.C., and enrolled in a State Department training program. Now fluent in Tamil as well as Hindi, she was a junior diplomat in Sri Lanka, living, when he was around, with Sumair. Reader, she married him.

I met up with Ruby, briefly, also Nand. Ruby had started her own newspaper. Nand was still going strong. I got to see the Jains. They invited me out to Sector Eleven for dinner. Their driveway was even more intricate than I remembered. The kids were bigger, but Alka and Meena, Rajkumar and Rajesh, looked just the same. So did the grandmother, who now had my old room. Jain Dad 2 assured me I could come back and stay anytime for free, since we were friends,
FRIENDS
, and that's how friends were. The wives, privately, asked if I'd moved out because of him. I suspect that, perhaps, he might have been spoken to, but it was great,
GREAT
, all the same, to see him.

One afternoon, I visited Piers. He now lived ten miles out of town, on a serene hilltop estate with the houseboys and their wives; the boys had brought the women down from Nepal. It was one big family out there. Piers had a son now, an orphan he'd adopted from one of the villages and who, when he spoke to me in English, had a bit of a Midlands accent. In the few hours I had, Piers and I sat by his pool and talked about the year I'd been here. What a time! he'd say and laugh. Before long, a man appeared, a gardener. "
Ye ghaas nikaal do,
" Piers told him, pointing to some weeds. I did a double take. For four years, the story in my head had been that Piers would never, ever learn Hindi. But every story, of course, has more than one ending.

What I was mostly here to do, though, was try to figure out what it was I'd seen during my year at the deaf school. My second day in town, I swung by. Boys I didn't recognize were planting trees outside, raising dust clouds in the dirt yard. Inside, Anukul was in the same classroom. He had more gray at the temples now, had grown a bit wider around the waist, but you still would have had to agree he was photogenic. We sat and talked. He could not quite make out the mission I was on. I tried different explanations, which all began: I was here with a plan a linguist had come up with—"a very famous deaf-school professional in the United States." He nodded politely. He'd gotten that part on the phone. At her supervisory suggestion, I told him, I had made videos of friends' kids performing various activities: handing each other a glass of milk, climbing on a table and jumping down. I would now show these videos to children in different grades at the school, and he and I would film them describing the actions to one another in sign. By comparing the descriptions each age group gave, it might be possible to see if the language was evolving and how quickly. That was the plan. So did that make sense?

Anukul stared at me with patience through every explanation. Perhaps it was good he didn't grasp all the nuances, because that night my laptop went permanently black and scotched the video segment of the plan. The video camera also went on the fritz, though just temporarily, and a chutti, out of nowhere, shut down the school. "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans," as the saying goes. I'd forgotten that over here, with 333,000 deities to amuse, you could be rendered a comedy special in no time.

Finally, the school reopened. Anukul got the camera up and running; the friend I was traveling with agreed to reenact the video scenes with me live. Kids in all age groups were assembled. Plan on: I was cooking.

The less said about the next four hours, the better. I'll leave it at this: I now count among my video holdings one seasickness-inducing DVD, swaying shots of my friend perched on a child-size desk, muttering, "Is this what she said to do?" while crowds of children, flushed with excitement, point and laugh deliriously. (Whenever I play the DVD, I look again for familiar faces in the crowd, never find a single one. In my four years away, Hemant Patel, Banshi Lal, everyone I knew had moved on, gone to work in the fields, or at Hindustan Lever Factory, or, in the case of the girls, in someone's house.)

At the end of the school day, my friend went back to the hotel. I went over to Anukul's with a list of backup questions Ann Senghas had compiled for me. I walked into a far different house than the one I'd seen on my first visit. That one had been three plain concrete rooms in a dusty back division. This one teemed with color and life—my second sight had never really gone away. A fat, laughing boy tottered out from the back. "This is Krishanu," Anukul said, grabbing and kissing the son Rita had had when she went to Bihar. A slim, white-haired man was seated on the floor. He had a dignified air of self-assurance I recognized; Anukul didn't have to say "This is my father." After his wife had died, he'd come to live here. Rita was demure in a way I'd never seen her, spoke softly, kept her eyes down. But then Anukul picked up the video camera for a group portrait, and she bumped a girl out of the lineup to stand beside me. She stood there beaming. In the spin of time since I'd been gone, I'd proved myself trustworthy.

We crowded together for a bit on the floor, while Krishanu danced and Anukul's father and I spoke in Hindi. I'd been worried the language had evaporated, for I only used it now to startle New York City taxi drivers. But it had started to well up my first night back, well up and spill over, and after that, I was able to talk to people.

Behind the bebopping Krishanu, through the door, potted lemon and guava trees lined a small courtyard. Out along the slopes of the Aravallis, birds were riding currents below the clouds. We pressed together shoulder to shoulder, one compact line, and I was in place, nestled in happiness.

After a while, Anukul inquired, weren't there questions I wanted to ask? He'd spent all day restraining kids in the pursuit of a plan he wasn't quite getting, but if I needed to know more, if it would help the children, well, then he was greedy for his boys.

Rita brought tea, she brought snacks, she brought dinner, as I went through the questions. What about the town's deaf family; could he say if their verbs also came at the end of sentences? Was their language at all like what he used with his kids? Could the family have influenced communication at the school? What about the Bikaner school—how much overlap did he think there was there? Overlap, overlap—oh, he knew: how much was the sign used there like the Udaipur boys'? How much language did his students come in with? And so on. I asked every question I could think of, but by the refresher round of tea, I had to admit I still had no real idea whether the children had invented a language.