Dreaming in Hindi (18 page)

"My parents were coming for my wedding," Vanita says. "Their train was stopped for several days. They were having to sleep on the train," she says and swallows. In India, a stalled train has grisly associations. These date to 1947 and Partition, when the British, having agreed to end their long colonizing reign, helped engineer a plan to divide the country along religious lines. At the stroke of midnight, on August 15, India became two nations: Pakistan, a new Muslim homeland, and the Union of India (later the Republic of India), which, though not expressly given to Hindus, now existed in comparison to a Muslim state and so was associated with Hinduism.

Gandhi expressed strong reservations about creating this kind of communal divide. "My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God," he wrote. In the months after Partition, his fears were realized. Up till then in India, Hindus and Muslims had, by and large, lived together in outwardly peaceful coexistence, but now a division had been laid down, made official. Between fifteen million and twenty million people found themselves on the wrong side of the divide as submerged tensions exploded. Muslims turned on Hindus who'd been their neighbors for years; Hindus killed Muslims they'd welcomed into their homes. People rushed to board trains for the imagined safety of the new homelands, but at points along the track, mobs lay in wait. When the trains pulled in, they were ghost trains, many of them. Family members who'd come to meet their relatives found them grotesquely slumped in their seats, the floor slick with blood. When the carnage ended, at least half a million were dead, and a retaliatory cycle of violence began that continues to this day, that's resulted in the destruction of the Babri Mosque, the yearly murders in Kashmir, all the market explosions in Bombay or Delhi or the state of Assam.

"The Mussulmans at that time were killing many people," Vanita says in the same spare trance voice of forbearance Vidhu uses when the subject of the Mussulmans comes up. (Swami-ji presses his lips and stares blankly into middle distance. He dislikes Muslims more than either of them.) The subject comes up a lot less since Helaena suggested, sweetly, that Vidhu knock off the rhetoric in current events class. "Helaena-ji does not understand," he'd stopped our tutorial two days later to say. "Muslims
do
act as one." He'd sounded wounded.

"In Udaipur, they cut off cows' heads," Vanita continues, and I exhale loudly.
We both know,
I am hoping by means of breath to convey,
that this is not the full story.

By means of breath, I do. "But these people were killing cows," she protests, drawing up against her dupatta. Her voice has gone shrill. "That is how they are," she says, and sets her jaw against them.

"And what were the Hindus in Udaipur doing at that time?" I ask, sweet as Helaena, since I already have a good idea.

"Ohhh, the Hindus? Oh, maybe the Hindus burned some Mussulmans' houses," she says pleasantly. "Maybe some Mussulmans were killed."

I'm not learning in this place,
I fume in the week before the break, sick of this talk, of its firewall logic, of the flaring impulses it produces in me: self-righteous, reflexively oppositional, ignorant in their own way. Reactionary. In this rift so vast it's been echoing for years, I can't see where I'm standing. All that's immediately visible to me are the fetid streets of the Muslim neighborhood down by Delhi Gate. The inhabitants there are poor and small, with hard bright eyes, the men dressed in shabby polyester pants. They look worn and dark, like dalits, like outcastes. Because that's what they were, Helaena says one night when we're hanging out in her room.

"When the Mughals came through, the lower classes jumped at the opportunity to become Muslim, to try and escape caste," she explains. She's reclining on her side, in white
churidar
pants, polishing off French fries. "Although some of them," she says, "were converted at sword-point." The muted skirls of the palace bagpipers, remnants of the Raj, sound from outside somewhere. "But most of them? They stayed where they were. Nothing changed. That's why they tend to be uneducated, except in places like Hyderabad and Delhi, where many of them are descended from princes and the courtly Mughals."

These, then, are who Vidhu and Vanita are railing against: poor people collectively despised once for their caste, once again for their religion, pushed to the margins throughout all of history, consigned to subsistence jobs and decaying quarters, with no escape possible, not even karmically. Oh, the teachers' talk! It's heartless.

Telescoped down, attached to India only cerebrally really—tethered by dry facts and a meager collection of words: "
probably," "important," "not possible,
" today's vocabulary assortment—I'm unable to see that Vidhu and Vanita are reacting viscerally, are keeping their voices flat against the ghosts of Partition that still whisper through the country. Their jaws are squared not against the men with eyes like black centroids down by Delhi Gate, but against the stories everyone raised here knows: of how the corpses were piled so high, tank drivers had to get out and nudge them to the side; of how people were pulled off bicycles by mobs and hacked to death; about the stains black as midnight on the steps of the ghost trains.

Their jaws are set against all of that, but then mine hardens, too: not just against their rhetoric, but the way it catches in me.
Maybe Vidhu does know,
I'll think, before the firewall flares.
Maybe they do act as one.
In the unbearable intimacy that comes from building a second language with someone, you feel fully alive, at a price. You leave yourself open, to something like love, but also to hatreds that are no less powerful for being engineered. All the snippets can take root and not just some, if you don't look to see what's there.

 

"
LOOK, KATHY
," Anukul cries, hand tracing an orbit through the sky, over a moon so electrically bright you can practically hear it crackle. Everywhere else in the world, it's dawn that breaks. Here in Rajasthan, it's evening, when the planed black night comes on with such force it snaps the sun from the sky, when the heat cracks into a thousand rivulets (earlier now that it's November). "Look," he calls from several rows down in the bleachers where we've all gathered. There's a book open on his lap. "What they do for moon is this," and he makes the sweep, "but what we do is this," and he forms a viewfinder with his fingers. The American Sign Language book has arrived just in time, just before I'm due to take off for the break. I squint then smile to mimic concentration and enjoyment, but the day has now gone into its fourth language—English, Hindi, Rajasthani sign, American sign—and a landslide is threatening in my brain.

The bleachers are the only ethnographically incorrect detail in the anthropologically exact tourist village where we've been since noon, a Williamsburg with wattle and daub. Mostly Indian tourists come here now, but today there are no shambling groups up from the neighboring state of Gujarat, no women in veils leaning forward with cameras, looking like Victorian photographers. Today the village is reserved for a handicapped conference, a rendezvous of every specialized school from here to the Rann of Kutch. At lunch, blind boys in blue leaned together as they talked, each facing a slightly different direction. Posters on the walls declared
SEE OUR ABILITIES NOT OUR DISABILITIES
, in the universal language of social workers. Udaipur is an epicenter of NGOs—five thousand of them here, a reporter told me, 90 percent corrupt.

It was after lunch, during a postcard-drawing competition, that any polyglottal abilities I had began to go south. All around us, on rugs, children were crayoning happy scenes from the festival of light: clay Divali lamps gamboling merrily through the air, the beauteous goddess Lakshmi raining golden coins from her hands. My boys were sketching collapsing towers, a topic of persistent interest. I'd been absorbed in a perfectly pleasant conversation with several teachers, when one from Goa took sudden offense at the rate I was going with Hindi.

"You have arrived when?" he asked. "You are still speaking like this? You should be ashamed. Your school should be ashamed." A woman with English so broken it clattered piped up, "You Hindi like my English." I didn't think so, but soon after, I stopped capping sentences with verbs, became communicatively incompetent all- around.

"Look," Anukul calls to me in the bleachers as we wait for a show to begin. He claps his hands, and the American sign for "school" knocks the book from his lap. He bends, which is why, when the gang of thuggee Bikaner deaf school boys try to shake me down, he's oblivious. In fact, so am I, in my stuporous state. I nod eagerly when the tall boys surround me, all adolescent elbows and intent, pretending interest in getting acquainted.
Do I have parents?
Yes I do.
Brothers?
Oh, yes, one.
Sisters?
One there, too.
Ten rupees?
But they've picked someone too sludged for communication. I don't get it. The Bikaner visitors grow more forceful in their questioning, hands vigorously dotting mouths, 10-rupee note jabbing the air, till Hemant Patel, the Dustbin from the play, gets a load of what they're up to. Hemant Patel, all five feet of him, hurries over and signs stern suggestions to the Bikaner guests about what they can do with their 10-rupee note, then turns and taps my forearm, points to Anukul: "
And you might consider changing seats.
" His gallantry offsets my deep embarrassment at having been so dim.

On my resettlement, Anukul glances up from the book long enough to give the Bikaner boys a glare. He's busy figuring out the logistics of the word "cooking." "In America they do this," he says, then stops midway through turning his hand, "like a pancake," the book directs, which would be like a paratha. Down below, a man with a suspiciously puffed chest is ambling toward the bleachers.

Then the evening goes into drag time, then the evening soars, bobs high like the lantern fixed to a kite that's straining to escape into the night. For an hour, I don't care that I'm daft in three languages, that a loneliness comes on me now with such suffocating swiftness I can't move, as the boys in blue line up and sing a low, mournful song about what happened in my country in September
(No one there,
I think,
will ever know they have),
as a young guy gets up and dances a dance that's pure exuberance, on his hands. He has no legs. As kids with polio convene in the bleachers, then move fluidly down the stairs in a crab crawl—all but one, with braces, who makes his way haltingly. In the sidelight of the stage, where the group gathers nervously, the red ribbons in the girls' braids are revealed. An announcer's voice squawks, and they're bounding toward center, loping and swinging toward applause. I see their disabilities and abilities both. The kids are singing themselves into center light, into view and into being, weaving harmonies so agilely that even once the lantern's bobbed high and small and has disappeared, the lives they've made there will still glimmer.

 

"
WE ARE HAVING A CHUTTI
," Swami-ji says on a day just before. Not a moment too soon either. Commotion is riling all the ranks, new chapters starting up unexpectedly in the staff room, in the classrooms, sometimes by the minute. Staff side, the hubbub goes unexplained. Vocabulary is delayed when Vidhu shoots, black-faced, from the back and past us out the door. A few minutes later, he returns and clears his throat. "The ergative is required with compulsion verbs," he begins in collected tones. No one says a word. Dictation is postponed on account of tears. "Swami-ji has said I butter students," Samta says, lip trembling, and I know to add the preposition "up," not what she means.

On the student side, the troubles are too clear. The Whisperer is not speaking to me on suspicions that I masterminded her departure from the Jains'. "She's insanely jealous of my Hindi skills," she tells Helaena by way of explanation. Harold is in a turban. Helaena is in high dudgeon: Sri-ji, the maharana, has not called.

Only the Swamster, Helaena's new name for him, which has caught on only with her, appears chipper, though he's merry like a cat tripping to the kitchen before it's time for a can: insistently. "
Give them more! Give them more! Give them more!
" he sings to Raju when Helaena says she likes the new cookies. In tutorials, he piles on the English. "Under the surface, Udaipur
bahut
traditional
hai,
" he says in
kicheree
—literally, "rice and lentils," but slang for "mixed Hindi-English." At first I'm amazed that he's coughing up the English, but then a curious thing happens. I no longer notice that he is. When he speaks to me, I hear it as pure Hindi. Without my conscious knowledge, my mind has automatically sifted out the rice, and to such a degree, I find myself thinking,
So funny, but I can understand that guy like nobody else here.

Because he's practically speaking English half the time, hello? During the other half, when he keeps it to just a sprinkling, biological forces kick in, the ones that allow you to conjure someone's full face on a side glimpse, that fill in the blanks when your sister says "Did ... store ... up ... Mom's birth...?" while running the blender. "Narrative imagining is our fundamental form of predicting," the cognitive scientist Mark Turner writes. It's not just speakers who make up a story as it goes along, but listeners to some extent do, too, by determining the gist, the central patterns, then filling in the meaning of the words that streaked by. Storytelling is a collaboration between listener and teller.

Even in a relatively quiet room, you can miss 20 percent of what someone is saying. In the din of a restaurant, half the words might be static. But even if you were to chat with someone in a vault, their words wouldn't come at you clipped and distinct. In the flow of speech, there are no boundaries. Your brain imposes them.

The ability to detect and predict patterns, to wing it, is crucial to conversation, so much so that the capacity for it seems to be wired into the language regions of the brain. In one experiment, when subjects were shown patterned symbols, the visual sites in their brains lit up: no big surprise. What was unexpected, though, was that the subjects also showed activity in Wernicke's area, one of the main language sites of the brain, thought to govern speech comprehension. It didn't matter whether the volunteers consciously recognized that they were looking at patterns or if they thought the scenes were random lines; the same results were obtained. The researchers were nonplused: they proceeded to ask, Why would a brain site responsible for language comprehension be so exquisitely attuned to visual sequences that it would detect them in nanoseconds, even before the cognitive regions weighed in? Because, they concluded, language is composed of patterns—in other words, grammar. What is proper syntax, after all, but the predictable ordering of words, words combined in patterns? Given the "stunning automaticity of speech," the linguist Derek Bickerton's phrase—words come at us at the rate of a fifth of a second each—Wernicke's area needs to sort out the patterns at flash speed.