Dreaming in Hindi (13 page)

At the Jains', I've begun to chafe at the curfew they impose, 9
P.M.
, but otherwise I'm nestled in. It's steady state, companionable. In the mornings, we have thick oily fenugreek pancakes. Then Jain Dad 2 takes us out for a spin. After that, everything falls apart.

Afterward, you could have summarized it like this: One day, for reasons that were highly suspicious and quite likely extremely perverse, Rajesh, Dad 2, took the Whisperer and me downtown and dumped us by the side of the road. I wouldn't have put it that way, but apparently a report in that form reached Swami-ji, for we were scarcely back home when he was on the horn. There were official visits, pointed inquiries, strong denials. And even once the dust from the scooters had settled, there was trouble that lingered for a long time.

I'd have described events more like this: One Sunday when there was nothing to do but sit around and pretend to admire the neighbor's baby (whose butt was never covered, so made me extremely nervous when he was placed in my lap to coo over, which was frequently), I was crossing the driveway back to my room when Rajesh asked me to go for a ride. He extended the same invitation in animated Hindi to the Whisperer. I was surprised when my housemate, who had a dubious regard for Indian men in general and Jain Dad 2 in particular, agreed.

"
But where do you want to go?
" Rajesh asked as he and I waited in the car for the Whisperer to get her things.

"
I don't know,
" I said. I was confused. His tone suggested I'd roped him into this outing, but his invitation had been quite enthusiastic. He'd stood by the Maruti and, waving his arms toward the interior, exclaimed, "Come on! Let's go sightseeing!"

"
You don't know?
" He shook his head like I was incorrigible. "
But where do you want to go?
" he repeated.

"
I thought you said we were going sightseeing,
" I said in my cryptoHindi, which, translated, went, "Touring ... not?"

"You want to go for a beer?" he asked, switching to English. I blinked. First they all ate garlic, now this? When I said I wasn't much of a drinker, he backtracked. "That's good, that's good, that's good," he said.

The Whisperer climbed into the back seat beside me. I asked where she thought we were off to. "The bazaar," she said tightly. "That's what he told me." But bazaar plans appeared to have been scrapped. We drove down the highway, past the old army cantonment and the signs that said
AVOID FORCIBLE SHOPPING
, and occasionally Dad 2 would note a point of interest: a traffic roundabout, the place where he brought his office printing.

"I'm a tour guide," he said with a chuckle.

"How do we pay you?" the Whisperer snapped. She gave me a look.

"Not much," he said. "Just a beer." Eventually, we pulled up to Sukhadia Circle. "I need to go do business matter for five minutes," he said, pointing to the curb. "I'll be back at six, okay?" It was now 5:20.

"He'll show up at six-forty-five." I gave the Whisperer my best psychic estimate as we stood on the sidewalk brushing ourselves off.

"Yeah," she said, "and he'll probably plow into us." We sat on a bench by little Chetak Lake and watched the swan boats, then waited on a bench as a nearby Indian family watched us. At 6:30, the Whisperer couldn't hold out any longer. We flagged a rickshaw home.

Late that night, long about one, a car could be heard sliding up the drive. At breakfast, the Whisperer was regarding her plate with a look of strained forbearance. By afternoon, the Jains' phone was blaring. It had not been six months since Delhi had had to speak to Swami-ji about the carousing that had gone on under his nose the time the student ran off with the teacher. His response had been swift: calls to the Indian FBI to see if he could press trafficking charges against the guy, but all the same, the stain was not diminished. If one word of this situation—a host father cruising for beer with two charges—got back to Delhi, he could expect to be conjugating verbs at the elementary school down the street. For a while, I thought he was going to airlift us out of the Jains', but when no consequences attended the drive of infamy, I decided all parties had moved on. "Well, the swan boats were nice," I concluded, assuming the event was now behind us. The event, however, was only out of sight. It had not, whatsoever, been forgotten. Not in any quarter.

 

MID-OCTOBER NOW
. The mornings are colder. The water in the bathroom is like a lake when I rise. "
We will be getting you a geezer soon,
" Jain Dad 1, Rajkumar, informs me, in the nasally local lockjaw that makes the men here sound like James Cagney on Hindi:
Were getting you a geezer, you dirty rat.
"What's a geezer?" I ask Helaena at school. "A water heater," she explains. Spelled "geyser."

Mornings are chilly, but midday is desert hot, ropy air through till three. The concentrated heat is like a scent, dust made muddy, which enters through the pores. When scientists announced they may have found olfactory receptors in the skin, no one who'd been to India could have been surprised. The heat slows the blood, thickens marrow, warps thought. A friend sends an e-mail about a fall bonfire she attended instead of a crisp orange-leafed setting, I imagine a scene out of Thomas Kinkade: pulsing, irreal glade with radiated foxgloves.

The e-mail's one of the few I've received that hasn't been about the attacks. From this side of the divide, the preoccupation appears feverish, relentless in a way that's self-absorbed. The event, from over here, seems to be spinning off into its own world, disconnected from the other longitudes. "How does it feel to be in a country without terrorism?" an acquaintance e-mails me the day after thirty-nine more were killed in Kashmir. I could write back and say, How does it feel not to know that seventy thousand, by some counts, have died from terrorism here in the past thirty years? Except then I'd be ranting.

On the shank end of an afternoon, when it's cooler and I can move, I phone Anukul, the teacher from the deaf school, the one with the red glasses. "Come visit," he says, and gives me directions. His house is way out, almost in the foothills of the Aravallis, the ancient mountain chain that encircles the town. "Yes, come." He has a plan for what I can do at the school.

"Simple life, high thoughts," he says, quoting Gandhi, when he shows me into the main room: flat white walls, one day bed, metal grates on the windows. On the floor, a sweet-faced girl is propped on her elbows above a book. "She has a sharp mind, but she does not want to read or learn," Anukul says, giving his daughter a scowl. She and her younger sister collapse into giggles.

Rita, his wife, beautiful in a green sari, nods somberly when we're introduced, takes a seat on the floor. Anukul pulls a book down from a shelf. It's called
The Indian Signing System,
a handbook of official Indian Sign Language. He and I practice the alphabet. Rita leans back and stares at me. Anukul pages ahead to words. "Address." He demonstrates how to sign it: palm stamped by fist. I try, giving mine a wide, merry flourish, smiling so Rita can see.
Oh,
what fun! I am compelled to come here and learn deaf school signing in the spirit of friendship.
Her face assumes the expression mine would if a guest in my home had, uninvited, begun doing the merengue across the floor.

Anukul advises me to tone it down. Apparently I've just signed "AD-DA-DA-DRESS!" "My children do this," he says, repeating the more restrained version. "But in the book, you slap your palm with the back of your hand," he notes with interest, and I vaguely remark on the fact that the kids aren't using standard Indian sign.

After an hour, my concentration is shot. "How do you say 'love'?" I ask. "Already today I teach you," he says, but he shows me again: one hand petting the outstretched back of the other. He calls his oldest daughter over and strokes her hair. She lays her head in his lap. He and I knock off, and he outlines his plan: I can come to the deaf school each Friday and help him teach an art class, on two conditions. We discuss the main one: would I be willing to try to learn sign language?

How long, I wonder, would that take? "An hour," he says, and the prospect that something in India, finally, could be grasped in finite time makes me exclaim, "All right!" Later, when I'm more educated in sign, I'll realize he meant "per session."

Sign language isn't a kind of freewheeling pantomime that you make up as you go along, contrary to what many people assume—contrary to what most specialists believed up until the 1950s. Even in schools for the deaf, it was regarded as "a sort of broken English of the hands," as the neurologist Oliver Sacks says about the perception U.S. educators had, but in actuality, sign is a full and bona fide language, in every sense of the word. A sign language has its own proper syntax and complex morphologies, a precise grammar that jibes with what Noam Chomsky described as a generative grammar, meaning that an infinite number of correct sentence constructions can be produced (generated) once you know a small number. Sign is protean, the way all languages are: dialects develop; initially startling slang runs through communities and then sets as quotidian words and phrases. It is "the equal of speech," Sacks writes in
Seeing Voices,
"lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic—to philosophical analysis or to making love—indeed with an ease that is sometimes greater than speech."

Sign can be learned in an hour, in other words, if you're John Travolta with a supernatural brain disorder in the movie
Phenomenon;
the same rule of thumb applies here as with any spoken tongue: mastering one will take you a good five years, the e-mails that promise "Learn a Language in Your Car!" notwithstanding. At 60 miles per hour, consider, you'd have to drive around for 2,904,000 miles before you could pull over to the multiplex and skip the subtitles.

"Wow, but then you could communicate with deaf people everywhere," a friend said when, a couple of years on, I described my efforts to learn Udaipur sign. The idea is appealing—a visual code that transcends all languages, a workable Esperanto at last—but it's another common misconception. There is no universal sign language. At least as many sign languages exist as there are countries in the world. One article puts the figure at two hundred, but going on caseworker reports from India, I'd say there are that many on the subcontinent alone, hardly any of them mutually comprehensible. If you use one kind of sign, you'll be no more able to follow another than a French speaker will be to understand German. In Udaipur, an extended deaf family lived downtown. They'd learned their gesturing elsewhere, and whenever they paid a visit to the school, the kids were as stumped as I was.

From the corner of the room, Rita continues to regard me as the conversation wheels out to include general questions I have. Why aren't there more girls at the school? "We know thirty are waiting to come," Anukul says. "But the court has banned building in the area, so we are not getting permission for a hostel. We have limitations. We can't have big dreams. We have small."

And have I really seen only one hearing aid at the school? "We have hearing aids," he says. "The government provides them. But we cannot afford to replace the wires that are necessary to make them operate." He gives the figure for the cost of a new wire: the equivalent of thirty-seven cents.

So it's all set: I'll come then? No, he says. Better if I type up a formal proposal and present it to Mr. Paliwal, the headmaster. And maybe don't tell him that he, Anukul, knows about this. And maybe don't say that he thought of it. I'd forgotten: strictures of hierarchy.

I ask him about his marriage: was it arranged? Of course it was. "How can you fall in love that way?" I blurt, immediately regretting my rudeness, but the process still startles me. Without knowing I had one, I've maintained a lifelong position on arranged marriage: no one in the U.S. does that because it's a poor idea, that's why. "I don't know," Anukul says, face softening as he looks over at Rita. "But we are."

My driver raps at the door. We all stand. Anukul decides to try to broker an alliance. "
Do you want to ask her any questions?
" He asks his cool customer of a wife, nodding toward me. She shakes her head, smiles in a way that back home in the South would mean
Ahgwine.

"Do you want to ask her any questions?" He turns to me. I'm equally at a loss. An intensity appears on his face. "Ask her if she thinks her husband loves her," he says. I do, in Hindi, and she answers in kind, too rapidly for me to catch. Her cocked eyebrow suggests she's won this round.

"What did she say?" I ask. His face has lit up.

"She says she wouldn't be here if she didn't."

On the rickshaw ride home, I think about his second condition. Could I track down journals about deaf education and teaching materials for deaf students? Could I find him a book on American sign?

"I am helping you," he said, "because I am
laalchi.
I need to tell you this. I have a bad motive. I am
laalchi.
I want to teach the children literature." There were, he said, no extra funds, for anything. "I earn..." and he named a sum that was the equivalent of a hundred dollars a month. "I have not bought new clothes in two years. But I am not a poor man. I have my heart. And I have my hands."

He was, though, he repeated,
laalchi.

"
Laalchi?
"

"
Laalchi.
Like, oh,
laalchi.
You don't know it?" I didn't but I said I'd get him the book.

At home, I found the dictionary, opened to the Ls.
Laayaq, laar,
there it was,
laalchi. Laalchi
meant "greedy." Anukul was greedy for his boys.

 

IN SCHOOL I'VE
entered the long-haul trudge. Novelty's worn off. The catatonia that came from jet lag mixed with numbness—cultural, worldwide shock—has subsided. I pick my way along the path, keep my eyes on the ground, try to get to the next plateau. "Language learning is not a linear process," a brochure we received during orientation advised. "It works as a series of plateaus." Students would swear they weren't making any progress, then magically find they'd been bumped up the mountain. But the brochure didn't mention any complicating factors—the adrenalized sprints, for instance, that result when students conduct their studies with a guard posted at the door.