Dreaming in Hindi (22 page)

"You can be dyslexic in one language and not another," he points out, and elaborates: you can get reading glitches in Chinese but not English if you have facility in both, in French but not in Italian. That would indicate, Paradis surmises, that the brain is running the Chinese and English words, the French and Italian, on separate tracks: same highway, different lanes, he believes. Up in Toronto, they were arguing entire other blue routes for Chinese.

Chinese script comes up a lot in these discussions, attracts numerous studies, being so starkly different from Roman—it's through contrasts that information is revealed. Chinese-English bilinguals are popular with scanning teams because they're fluent in two of the world's three major writing systems: morphemic and phonemic. (If the testers wanted to go for all three, they'd include syllabic, and get someone also versed in Blackfoot, Iberian, or hiragana Japanese, systems where the symbols represent syllables:
to-yo-ta,
spelled with three characters.)

With Chinese, which is morphemic, each symbol stands for one thing or action or concept. Each arrangement of brushstrokes has its own meaning, is, in other words, a morpheme. The system seems staggeringly inefficient if you're used to a phonemic one, the Roman alphabet, say, with its letters that can be perpetually reassembled to spell out thousands of words. With Roman, all you need to know are those twenty-six sound-based symbols. With Chinese, nothing about the brushstrokes tells you how to pronounce them. You need to be able to recognize each character, or ideogram, and since there are five thousand to six thousand of them, that's a hell of a memorization effort at the start. This might seem like a lumbering approach, but actually it's streamlined to fit the character of the language. Should the Chinese vote, as the Turks did, to convert to the Roman alphabet, they would no doubt immediately elect to switch back, because Chinese, unlike Turkish, is tonal. It'd do them no good to transliterate words into alphabetic form;
mao,
for instance, can mean one of eleven things, including "mother" and "horse," depending on which tone is used. Chinese is full of homophones like that. Each one needs its own character.

Chinese-English speakers are popular on the MRI table for another reason, because they can cross a basic reading divide. In the overall scheme of things, some people, monolingual Chinese being among them, read mainly by sight; some, the alphabetically inclined, us, read mainly by sound. You can sound out words in English,
c-a-t,
although English is notorious for how often it confounds this rule. Italian and Finnish, Spanish too, are straight-up phonemic, not booby-trapped like English, which springs irregularly spelled words on the poor, increasingly suspecting learner every time they think they're moving. Just when they've gotten the hang of "through," the language throws in "tough." It's so loosey-goosey that the word "fish" could be spelled "ghoti," as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, using the
f
sound from "rough," the
i
sound as it appears in "women," and the
ti
from "nation."

On the whole, written English and Chinese are apples and oranges,
and
so drastically different that all you have to do is see them laid out side by side—Chinese rippling top to bottom, English tumbling left to right—to suspect what Paradis contends: the brain handles them differently. And though you might not arrive at the same conclusion comparing French and Italian, same alphabets, he believes that the same argument holds. As evidence, he cites the numerous cases of bilinguals who have suffered a stroke, or advanced syphilis, or a bad car crash, or some other event disastrous to the brain, and subsequently lost reading ability in one language but not the other.

Looking over the cases in Paradis's textbook—Patient M., half-Georgian, half-Assyrian, after a blow to the head could recognize one letter only in Georgian, nearly all in Assyrian—I wondered whether the afflicted lost, along with their lettering, the larger perceptual effects that apparently go with it. Recently, arguments have been advanced that the alphabet you use shapes the way you see the world. You can, if you want to, test the proposition at home. Take a copy of Picasso's frenetic
Guernica
and hold it to the mirror, and you'll find, guaranteed, it looks flatter. The reason is, it's been composed so the elements—the trampling bull, the knifed horse, the howling woman—rush right to left, against the direction you're used to reading in. The result is abrading, gives a sense of imminent pileup. Though presumably, if the painting were to tour right-to-left-reading Saudi Arabia, museumgoers there might wonder what the fuss was about.

In the L2WS camp, lately there's been a lot of testing of perceptual effects. Some of the studies have been boondoggles: someone got the big funding bucks to document that with laundry detergent ads in right-to-left Hebrew, the "after" shot, the sparkling-clean clothes, runs on the left, while in English it appears on the right. Some have been mildly provocative: Japanese students, one investigation determined, have better visual memories than the English do, for the reason the Japanese are schooled in Chinese ideograms and so get a prodigious workout in the corresponding brain areas. Bilingual Arabic readers, another found, accustomed to an alphabet in which vowel sounds aren't indicated, complain on reading English of a sensation they're being given "too much information."

And one was chilling—or it was to me, given the sectarian divisions I'd come to witness in India. In this study, the researcher showed Indian subjects who spoke either Hindi or Urdu a straight line and asked them to say where the middle was. (Spoken Hindi and Urdu are very nearly the same, but are written using different scripts: Devanagari and Arabic.) Repeatedly, the Hindi speakers insisted on a spot that was, in reality, closer to the right. That group were left-to-right readers, and mostly Hindus. The Urdu speakers, right-to-left, Muslims, consistently skewed to the left. "Even though they thought they were bisecting [the line] in the middle, there was an error," Jyotsna Vaid, the researcher, observed, and as she did, I was needled by a thought: if something as slight as lettering can slant the way we see the world, what does that imply about our ability to transcend the stone gray barrier of words?

 

DUE TO HIS SUDDEN
change in plans, Harold is not in attendance at a local symposium on terrorism that's being held, though just about everyone else I've met is. The event takes place in a plain oblong building, like a Kingdom Hall, I think, having mentally converted the Ganesh statue onstage into background molecules. Renee and I are shown to seats in the front. To the right of the elephant god, Udaipur's graybeards are taking chairs for a discussion of "chaos and creation," the euphemism the organizer came up with for recent events, more grandiloquent than another we'd just recently heard: "9/11."

A live American, I'm asked to go first, get up and say a few words. At a loss for any, I read a poem a friend, the poet Dennis Nurkse, sent by e-mail, which hit like a smack when I opened it. He wrote about lines of stockbrokers shuffling north, about the odor that lingered for days, and the dimension of smell, filling in so suddenly, arriving so late, blasted me there in the cybercafe, was expiation for escape.

Next, a kindly faced—what? poet? artist?—gets up and speaks in Hindi. English surfaces, glistening, slippery: "republic of thought"; "we wait for final reality"; "in India, we are immune to temporary situations"—then he's lost to me across the gulf of understanding, and I'm keening, cursing my traveler's Hindi (
as far as you'll ever get, admit it
), and he holds his palms out, his intelligent face up to the light. I'd give all my first language to know what he said. The man has a high forehead, wide black glasses, shocking white mantle of hair. His upturned palms are a plea —
This is the way;
his tone, too. He smiles. The audience chuckles. I just want to know.

"
So, our ... wins, but when
"— two sentences sunk —"
other desire that other world is built.
" Then the relief of English: "I do not know any kind of liberty except artistic creation." Then I'm plunging again: "
Jhanjhaton ke beech hi hota hai lekin jhanjhaton se mukta hone ke liye.
" I think of the deaf boys: how do they ever stand the weight, the layers on layers of incomprehension? "
Har baar hum likh kar ek choti si duniyaa se mukta ho jate hain. Saara lekhan swadeenta hai.
" Outside, a cow lows. I'm grateful for pure sound.

Afterward, when everyone's milling around, the man comes over. I ask him his name. It sounds familiar, which seems eerie, till I remember, but it is. Nand Chaturvedi, a respected Rajasthani poet—the Bikaner writer had mentioned him. This same sense of
kal,
of yesterday winding ahead, continues to loop through the rest of our conversation, so that by the time he asks if I'll visit at his home, each rise of his voice has already become a reminder of something else he said.

 

WHEN SWAMI-JI WAS
the next to be kneecapped, Helaena and I were briefly lanced with guilt, sure we'd somehow scuttled his career when we'd facilitated Harold's exit with the letter. Then we reviewed the events. What the bulldog-faced Indian head of operations had told us, specifically, when he'd appeared one day in the flesh from Delhi, was that he'd received "hundreds of complaints" about Swami-ji. Hundreds. It was a puzzling figure, since at the school, we'd only ever numbered four at our greatest, and since, furthermore, you had to request official permission to contact the man, which would have slowed the complaint process. But perhaps he meant he thought he'd get that many once he hauled us into a back room one by one and grilled us for dirt. Which is what he did, immediately.

When I'd seen movies in which forcibly detained men ratted out their leaders, I'd jeered. They were curs. Now I was yapping within minutes. Classes were starting late or not at all, I complained. Homework was coming back ungraded. Cooking class? Waste of time. The weekly guests were lame. The Whisperer and Helaena barked, too, then everyone was reunited in the main room. When Swami-ji joined us from down the hall, he strolled in casually, but pieces of his hair were pointing straight up.

In movies, the troops pay for their treachery down the line, but this was India, where they invented karma. At the source, it comes instant. That night, the supervisor took Helaena and me to the Trident, for dinner and to hint at the sweeping changes we'd see. Like what? I asked. He thought about it, glared. "That's for you to figure out," he said cryptically, then relaxed into chummy confessions. "When I asked them to talk to me about Swami-ji, the women teachers cried," he said, alluding to whatever ruckuses had been going on behind closed doors. The sudden confidence inspired me to respond in kind when he asked about my plans down the line.

"... and possibly write a few newspaper stories while I'm here." I was up to the part about how I thought I'd maybe look for a dalit to interview, when a low vibration in the room seemed to make the potted ferns sway.

"A dalit?" he began. "Did you say a dalit?" "Da-leet," two traveling syllables, the second stretched so wide, it was halfway to Jaipur. Slow to catch on, I smiled. I had!

"And can you define what you mean by that?" he said. "Do you mean a street sweeper? No? Are you discussing this in a political sense? Ha! You can't even say what a dalit is." He leaned back; that's what he'd thought.

"People believe they can talk to tribals. They believe they can talk to dalits," he said. "They do not know what they're talking about. Have you applied for my permission for this? No, you have not. I'm afraid if you do decide to go ahead with this plan, if you do decide to talk to a dalit, then you will be blacklisted."

My head continued nodding as I tried to fathom: from what? Further educational pursuits on the subcontinent? The next semester at the school? The blacklist possibility was confusing, but I was gaining clarity on why, when the phone rang from Delhi. Swami-ji answered. "
Kab tak?
" How high?