Dreaming in Hindi (12 page)

In the yard, the drumming has stopped. The kids are catching their breath. I continue to stare, cross my arms against exposure. If, as Naipaul wrote, India brings out the concealed parts of us, this was a rapid unveiling.

"I was kind of deaf when I was a kid, and then I had an operation," I blurt out to Piers as the drills are ending. He regards me quizzically, then exclaims, "Oh! Let's tell the headmaster. You can make a speech." He rushes off before I can stop him.

In the inner courtyard, I have a long time to contemplate how completely I'll make a fool of myself. Under a canopy of bright fabrics, the students stage a play about the drought. A boy in a hat with a paper band that says
DUSTBIN
excels at air-trash comedy. A beautiful tribal kid, face already sculpted with the planes of adulthood, does a fine turn as a water pump going dry. The honored guest is up next. "
Jaanewale
technological developments," he intones, chest puffed out. "
Bindihindi
Osama Bin Laden." I whisper to Piers, "When you get to Osama Bin Laden, the speech is over," but it isn't. It rolls on and on, till the school's founder, a doctor, gives it a spin. He's full of suggestions, hygienic and otherwise. "Let us not dig ourselves into bad health with our tongues and our teeth," he tells the children through a translator. "Let us not be burdens to our families." Then the headmaster motions to me; there's no way out. A teacher stands by to sign. I take the proscenium, take a breath, see I've miscalculated. The answer to the question of how foolish turns out to be: Completely. My talk, which with grace is unintelligible in sign, starts with a mention of Hollywood actress Marlee Matlin, ace role model for impoverished Indian children there, then meanders through the promise of cochlear implants (promising here if you have the equivalent of enough to fund a space launch) and into my own story, which as soon as I begin it, is insipid beyond belief. These are kids, some with holes in their clothes, who've had to leave their families. I said "What?" on the playground.

Before shame can finish me, I'm off. On the floor, guests are chatting, tall islands in a choppy pink and cranberry sea. A man approaches, says, "Very, very good." Piers, from a distance, beams and waves. I hold up a finger—
Back soon
—and press on toward the yard. Out in the dusty courtyard, I'm clear, and then I'm surrounded, by the sensation of questions fanning my skin, by twenty gesturing boys. The Dustbin pulls me down to examine my ears. Someone else lifts a hand:
You're okay?
All I can think to do is to say "
Theek hoon. Theek hoon
"—"I'm fine. I'm fine"—hoping he can read my lips. A third signs a plane flying, shrugs: what?
When do you leave?
maybe. I try:
Not for a long time.
The boy shakes his head. He repeats the question, only now I see that his other hand has flown up to make a wall. No, a tower; all around, brown hands are crashing, followed by shrugs, and I'm smiling. Because this is the first time in all this time anyone's asked, even if I don't know what exactly they're asking.

The sensation of connection fresh on my arms, I locate the teacher from drills. "But what would you do?" he says when I say I'd like to work at the school.

"I don't know. Maybe help in the kitchen?"

"We have people to do that," the teacher, whose name is Anukul, says with Brahmin detachment.

"Chop? Clean?"

But they have people to do that, too. This is India.

"Come. See my class," he finally suggests. "Maybe you could think of something." He wears thin red glasses, precisely tailored trousers, has the self-possessed manner of an Italian architect. "Why not?" he says with a cool British accent. It's only later, when I visit his house—three plain concrete rooms in a dusty back division—that I realize,
Oh! He's a poor schoolteacher.

At home, Alka wants to know about the kids. "
Badhir,
" I tell her: "Deaf," easiest vocabulary word of all time because of the way it's pronounced, "bad ear." Badhir/bad ear: they're practically identical if I say them, but here's a curious twist: they prompt entirely different images depending on which language I say them in. In English, what I get is zany, a tin horn, the kind a cartoon mouse would hold. A joke, but in Hindi, in a sentence with Alka, what comes is gleeful, a sense memory of talk fanning skin and, in my mind's eye, a wash of cranberry. It's extraordinary enough that when you learn a language, the new words, if you're lucky, quickly connect to emotions. In a little over a month here, the word for "peace,"
shanti,
has acquired a sense of yearning, reminds me for some reason of the melancholy strains of a chant I heard one night on leaving the palace. But how can the same word, or nearly so acoustically, get the brain to produce entirely different emotions, different pictures, depending on its setting? The answer is probably related to an idea the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure suggested more than ninety years ago. The linguistic structure is a network, he proposed, and after nearly a century of contention among theoretical scholars, many neurolinguists are inclined to agree.

In the spreading activation network theory, as the contemporary hypothesis is called, every word you hear or read calls up every other word like it, rhymed cousins and distant cousins, "bell," "hell," "ball," linked
concepts:
belles-lettres. "You read a line in a newspaper story, 'Something is rotten in the state of Florida,' and from there, everything connected to Hamlet rises up because everything is connected in the network," Rice University professor emeritus of linguistics Sydney Lamb says. "Or you tell a friend, 'Are you ready to zoom to the camera store?' Why did you use the word 'zoom'? Because activation spread from one node to another and you were thinking of cameras." "Nodes" in this hypothesis refers to bundles of neurons arranged in cortical columns. Theoretically, they process information, an extrapolation from the discovery that cats' eyes depend on optical columns in the occipital lobe to do the same. Since that piece of information was arrived at by inserting microelectrodes into feline brains, it's unlikely that the spreading activation network theory will be conclusively proven anytime soon. "They don't do this on humans, and you can see why. I wish they wouldn't do it on cats," Lamb says.

Spreading activation, like all compelling theories, explains a lot. It explains, for example, the mechanism of puns, which, from this viewpoint, are managed network processing. "A talking duck goes into a bar, orders a drink, and says, 'Put it on my bill'" is what you might call willful activation of "bill" in both senses. It also explains malapropisms, why you might see the headline
MUST-SEE TV LACKS MUST-HAVE BUZZ
and read "Must-Have Bugs." And it explains, or comes close, why I was getting different images from the same phonological arrangement. "When you're speaking Hindi, then it's the Hindi nodes in your system that are getting activated," Lamb said when I phoned. "You're reinforcing the Hindi connections. When you're speaking English, the same thing happens.

"Connections are strengthened with use," he said, and as I string together wobbly nouns and nicked verbs to tell Alka about the kids, a strong connection is made: between the sound "bad ear" in a Hindi stream and this revelation that occurred in a small dirt yard, arriving through words that couldn't be spoken.

At dinner that night, it's just me and the grandmother. Usually she keeps up a steady stream of chat, posing questions and waiting fruitlessly for my answers. Until today, I've been a poor conversational partner, because to my ear, she's been sounding like a power motor—
Wrrrdiwap? Wrrrwrrrwrrrdiwap?
—but tonight, for the first time, I understand her. She's slamming down aluminum plates, darting in and out of the kitchen, when suddenly she begins to speak. She's been speaking all along, of course, in what I've thought was clattery Mewari. But now I hear, in a clear, raspy voice, "Where's the upstairs dweller?" The upstairs dweller? The Whisperer! I feel like Thomas Edison.

The grandmother cocks her head for a reply, as she's been doing since I moved in. "
She's at the doctor's,
" I say, and the grandmother doesn't look the least surprised to find me responding when till then, all I've done was repeat the word "
yes.
" She nods. "
Oh,
" she says. "
The doctor's.
"

 

THE NEXT MORNING
, we assemble in the main room to reports of a disturbance. "
Ji,
" Swami-ji says slowly, tone of stark disbelief. "
Ji.
" Venerable students. "
I am hearing that one of our students has e-mailed to Delhi, inquiring about the kidnapping of American citizens. Could this information possibly be true?
" All I'd said in my e-mail was that I'd heard rumors to this effect, simply wanted to know what they thought down there. But I've botched the nuanced Indian protocol I'm only starting to get, have made Swami-ji look bad by going over his head. Class is postponed till I get on the phone and straighten out the confusion.

"I am completely fine," I tell them in Delhi. "The students of Udaipur are concerned for the welfare of our families, but we are resting assured in Swami-ji's capable hands." Even so, he cancels my trip to Jaipur for the weekend.

By personal tutorial, two classes on, it appears I've been forgiven. We discuss forms of address. The talk turns to caste. "
Not like in America,
" he says so often I'm provoked into an explanation of de facto caste before I realize I don't have the chops. "
In America too is,
" I argue. "
Bankmen is not eating with janitors.
" Swami-ji looks startled.

"
But, Kathyji,
" he says in a rush, "
the students come here, they want Samta-ji and Vidhu-ji to sit down and eat with Raju,
" the cook; no "
ji." "I try to say in India that's not how it's done. They say in America, everyone eats together, servants and teachers.
" In America, everyone would eat together once for show, then striations would reappear, I want to say, but we'll be here all day if I try. "
Ask the students how many times last year their parents dined out with black friends
" is morphologically possible, but tinged irony doesn't translate well into Hindi. Swami-ji would be handing out questionnaires on the subject tomorrow. I settle for "
We are having there a famous saying,
'Class is America's dirty little secret.'" "
Claj ish,
" he repeats, rapidly feeling around for a pen. When he breaks into English, it's somewhat embarrassing, like a dad appearing at a slumber party.

In vocabulary, Vidhu leads with the sounds animals make. A
singh,
a lion, says
dahaarna.
Monkeys go
kitkitana
in the infinitive. I'm suspicious whether camels grumble
balbalaana,
don't think that donkeys say
renkhna.
Amazing, if they can manage the
kh
sound. The class is Hindi hip-hop. "
'Weak' and 'man who doesn't work' are linked,
" he says, building rhythm. "
Patience
" and "
slowly
" have the same root. "Antidote" is
tor,
from
torna,
"to break." "Indians just make up words like magicians," he says, cutting tempo for an aside. "They amaze me. They are uneducated, but they come up with these words.
Tor
is something that breaks the poison."
Ji-tor-kam:
"spirit-break-work." "
Jitorkams
when your heart is stretched to such limits, you don't give emotion to anything but the work," he says. "You don't give a second to your parents, your friends, or even to yourself." More felicitous than the English "workaholism." And
munhtor jawab,
"a mouth-breaking answer": you leave someone speechless.

Udaipur, increasingly, has become a mouth breaker. More and more, it leaves me speechless, even as words accumulate and by their weight pull me in. As words build to centrifugal force, Udaipur begins to seem so familiar, it takes exertion to see it's not. To notice that a street dentist sits on Station Road with used dentures for sale. That scooters speed past auto rickshaws, domed Ambassadors stall behind ambling sacred cows: Elsies with red bindi marks and humps. I don't register the rickshaws stirring up the yellow dust anymore, the low rows of open-air shops across from the cybercafe. My eye adjusts, I adjust to the sweetness of life here, sweet as Raju's morning lemon chai.

Late morning, I excuse myself from film discussion class, meet a visiting Australian journalist for lunch at her hotel, at its pretty rooftop restaurant. It's October, but we have to find a table in the shade. I splurge on spinach paneer and a peanut butter sandwich. "No thanks," she says. "I don't much fancy that." We stop by Biotech, an improbably elegant lotions shop, and drop way too much on saffron face creams and pistachio face packs and something called Bhringraj Therapeutic Oil. Afterward, I lie in a charpoy, a string bed, in the back, and a woman coaxes me out of my clothes, piece by piece, and as her sons scramble back and forth under the drawn curtain, gives me a long, full massage, even to my breasts. I doze and then wake with a particularly deep stroke, doze and wake.

The natural rhythms of life here begin to arrange my day. Afternoons, heated, are now largely indolent, evenings fantastically lush: rounds of raga concerts and poetry readings, dinner parties at Piers's. On his terrace, I listen to English ghost stories in the ruffly summer night air (except it's fall), debate whether ghosts exist in India. "Reincarnation probably puts them out of work," a dinner guest says. We eat perfect lasagna the Nepalese houseboys have made and watch the eerie diamond lights of the Monsoon Palace go on. I'm astounded, again, that I've stepped out of my old life and into this incense-laden one, at one month so fully formed. I hadn't known
Brigadoon
was a Hindu myth. "I've never been so happy," I e-mail a friend back home, leave it at that. My mouth is broken. I can't convey how I shine with happiness, roll in happiness, look again to see this extraordinary place I've come. Days, brilliant lime-colored birds swoop down from the palace to skim emerald green Lake Pichola; even an algae infestation here seems magical.