Dreaming in Hindi (24 page)

No, what was truly surprising was that he'd appeared as hurt and disbelieving as she had. In those seconds when their voices had been unguarded, there'd been no mistaking: they'd both got their feelings bruised. Yet he'd known about the nephew for a while. She'd been aware of the in-house palace assistant countdown. Surely, anyone would have had to agree: the writing was on the wall.

 

Just the sight of Devanagari makes me nervous, 2.

One gray December afternoon, in the middle of judging yet another beauty competition (that theme having begun to haunt my days), I came to the blinding insight that I'd been reading Hindi the wrong, drawn-out way. Now, smile-and-flash shows aren't ordinarily a catalyst for orthographic understanding, but first of all, what is? and secondly, that was just the drift my life had taken. By now there was nothing unusual about my sitting at a long table, holding a number up, and thinking about other matters as a Miss Rena Menara did a perky folk dance in purdah, with a scarf over her head. I'd given her an extra point for not falling off the stage. In the postcolonial hangover that existed here, being Western meant you were in demand as a judge, for anything. By the end of the year, I'd have presided at a terrorism symposium, an envelope-making competition, a kindergarten opening, a poetry meet, and at this, the local university's beauty and talent exhibition, which was rapidly turning into a Michael Jackson impersonation contest.

"You can practice your Hindi," the university's blow-dried, strutting student union president had said in persuading Helaena and me to sign on. But so far all we'd practiced was flashing rating cards, through three moonwalkers dressed as "Beat It"—era Michael; a girl in a sky blue costume who gave an homage to Krishna her all; and one Miss Jahi Janee, who wiped the stage with her previous competitors, a dispirited group of girl singers. Miss Janee had stormed on to whoops and paper airplanes and delivered an enthusiastic MTV-inspired performance.

"There are no gay people in India," the teachers at the school periodically insisted, but someone had neglected to tell the next contestant, who was astonishingly slinky in all-black. He'd put in a lot of time practicing in front of his bedroom mirror, you could see, and I was giving him a 9 for swivel, when a chant went up from the stadium: "We want a song, yes! We want a song!" I heard it distantly, assumed they were asking the guy for a reprise.

"What Hindi songs do you know?" Helaena whispered beneath a stage smile, and then I keyed in. They meant from us.

"None," I said. "Well, kind of one," I said, and gave the name of a song whose lyrics contained a lot of English, one I recalled from film class.

"Huh?" She frowned. I scrawled the title on a judging card, in transliterated Roman. I assumed she'd appreciate the conversion, that she automatically did what I did: skipped the Devanagari and wrote the words the way they sounded in Roman, if no teachers were looking.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's so weird, but I have to see Hindi words in Hindi writing to get them," and it was like a bolt of clarity had struck. Helaena, I suddenly perceived, was reading organically, not regarding the Indian print as nuisance stand-ins for substantive letters, not translating one script into another before doing the same with the words. She was not, in other words, proceeding in the most cumbersome, book-shredding way possible. She'd rigged it mentally for herself so that Devanagari letters produced sound directly; hadn't built in extra, time-delay steps; wasn't detouring back through the U.S. to get to every sentence. Small wonder, I saw, my homework took days, while she had time to laze around with the nephew. A flurry of questions distracted me: Why would anyone settle on the hardest, most convoluting method of reading, a veritable bench press each time, when common sense should have led straight to Helaena's approach? Why didn't I just read Hindi right? I wondered if our orthographic differences had to do with a difference in age—whether learning a second script gets harder, the way, majority opinion holds, learning a second language does?

But there wasn't exactly anyone to put the questions to then, and besides, the blow-dried student union president was hustling us toward the stage.

 

"
WRITTEN LANGUAGE IS
a cultural invention," Ken Pugh, Yale University researcher and senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories said at the start of his presentation in Toronto. This was several years after my Bollywood possibilities had been eclipsed by the fellowship's end. "Spoken language is a biological specialization. Speech is mastered naturally. But there is no natural reading zone in the brain," he said. "It's a challenge of brain plasticity to learn to read." All around, people were adjusting their handouts, rummaging in pockets for pens. What Pugh was saying was warm-up, old news to them. But I straightened, leaned forward, as it became clear he was indirectly addressing the central question I'd had about second script: is there a window of opportunity for learning one?

The brain is configured differently for spoken language than it is for written, Pugh continued, alluding to the well-known observation that humans are built to speak, the point at which this discussion begins. A number of biologically based arguments support the idea. Our larynxes, for instance, are lower than the early hominids', having descended into this position for the reason that, though it puts us at greater risk of choking while eating, it also allows us to produce a wide range of speech sounds. (Though this particular theory was briefly called into question when it was recently discovered that dropped larynxes aren't unique to humans, as everyone had been thinking, but can be found in red deer and koalas as well—presumably to allow males of the species to bellow more ferociously. At the end of the analysis, however, a general conclusion was reached that the mating-roar belief did not cancel out the better-speech hypothesis.)

For years now, to give another example, the argument's been made that the capacity for speech is encoded in our genes, passed down through the DNA. Certainly, many speech disorders appear to be genetic. The best-known example of this is the so-called KE family, which lives in England. Sixteen of the thirty members studied display an identical, genetically programmed constellation of language problems, including serious difficulty with verb tense. The ones with the gene disorder are missing the natural ability to use the past tense of regular verbs. (With irregular verbs—"swim," "swam"—they're generally fine.) Even after the
-ed
principle is explained, they won't automatically generalize. "Tell me about your weekend," the teacher will say, and they might answer, as one man did, "On Saturday I watch TV and I watch
Plastic Man
and I watch football." "No, you watch
ed
TV," the teacher will say, and the correction will stick, but only for "watch." When asked the next time, the man in question replied, "On Saturday I got up and I wash myself and I get dressed and I eat my breakfast and I watched TV all day and I went to bed."

Speech, the ability for it, is preordained. In his book
The Language Instinct,
about the potent, innate quality of the drive, Steven Pinker remarks on how difficult it would be to
prevent
a child from learning to speak. Under ordinary circumstances, the ability just comes—in the form of babbling at about six months, in two-word exclamations at around two years—predictably, so long as children are exposed to words. It's through the instances when children aren't—sometimes as a result of deafness with no exposure to sign; rarely through some terrible isolation—that scientists have been able to determine there's a cutoff point for acquiring full language. Beyond a certain point, a child who's been blocked can't. In the case of Genie, a girl whose disturbed father kept her alone in a dark room, frequently strapped to a toilet seat, for her first thirteen years, she was always, after her rescue, stymied by tense markers. Pronouns eluded her. "Momma love you," she'd say, pointing to herself. "In all, Genie inhabited a prison not unlike a stroke victim's, with more to say than she was able to say, and aware of her inability," journalist Russ Rymer writes in his extraordinary book
Genie.

With reading, however, there's no biological cutoff. People can learn to do it at eighty. That's because we're not hardwired to read: there are no crucial print centers in the brain, no Broca's or Wernicke's area for written words, no innate mechanism that propels us toward books by a certain age. Take a child and raise him in a family, surrounded by words, and he'll be babbling his head off by the time he's toddling. Raise him in a library, surrounded by books, and unless someone shows him how to decipher the print, all they'll be are blocks of paper to him.

You have to be taught to read, an activity humans have engaged in for only five thousand years. It's not, as Pugh observed, a biological specialty like spoken language, which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We're built to speak, the theory goes, because speech is a survival skill. Reading, by and large, isn't. Sure, if you're a Wall Street mergers and acquisitions specialist, you could get steamrollered if you couldn't check the business pages. But if you belonged to a warring Amazonian tribe, you'd have as much need for frontal gyrus semantics action as New Yorkers have for poison darts: possibly, from time to time, but not often. That's what Pugh meant when he called reading "a challenge of brain plasticity." The brain, with its finite resources, co-opts space for it if needed—gray matter that could be put to other uses. When I asked a neurologist named Ragnar Steingrimsson
what
uses, he observed that one of the areas that lights up during reading also sparks when a birder has a prized sighting or when a car fanatic flips through an Aston Martin catalog. "Some people argue the region has to do with expertise," he said, adding the standard qualifier: "But it's not a done deal."

These regions used for reading aren't ones synchronized to any internal timing. Check the demographic composition of the local birding club: there's no cutoff for acquiring the skill to spot a semi-palmated plover, except maybe dementia.

That, then, is the answer to the question of whether there's a biologically decreed window of opportunity for picking up a second script: highly unlikely. But here's the catch: this isn't the same as saying, however, that it's as easy later on.

If you wanted to start a flap among the L2WS crowd—which might be impossible, as they seem to constitute one of the more mild-tempered assemblies I've met—you could try to by asking why it's tougher, if it is. Everyone has a theory. Pugh's is that reading in a foreign alphabet initially replicates a reading disorder. "When you're learning a language, each word in another script can take an eternity. What happened to you with Hindi," he said, for I'd described my travails, "is what happens with dyslexics. A bottleneck occurs. By the end of the sentence, you've forgotten what the beginning was." This pileup can seem like more of a block when you're older.

Psychologist Charles Perfetti casts a dissenting vote. He simply doesn't think it's more challenging later. "Acquiring the visual forms isn't hard as an adult," he said. "You show Mandarin 101 students made-up Chinese characters, and after only two, three months, they can figure out the ringers."

Paradis believes it is. All skills, he argues, get harder to learn as you get older, and that includes this one. First off, you have interference from any similar pursuits you've already mastered. If you're a pinochle player and take up bridge, you can expect scrambled plays due to old impulses kicking in. Second, it just is. "If you tried to learn to ride a bicycle at fifty, it'd be very, very difficult," he said. "If you tried learning to drive at sixty, it'd take a long time," and I was glad when we stopped the examples there. Had I known that a second script in my forties might be classified hieroglyphic, I'd have closed the book at
namaste
and missed the decoder thrills that come even with lettering that makes you jump. I didn't want to know what else I couldn't do.

 

ONE SKILL SET
that doesn't get rusty: social skills, or not in Udaipur, where I get chances to exercise them daily. "That's really something," I say when Piers takes me to dinner at the home of a Gujarati princess named Lucky Singh. Lucky has a tender heart. At the family estate, down in Sudarshana, she and her daughter Sweetie take in injured street cows, camels with broken legs, dogs that have been abandoned. They pay a man to give the animals Ayurvedic treatments. A Pomeranian's tumor disappeared. A Samoyed is in very good health now. "The security factor is so important in animals and humans, Kathy," Lucky says, and in her indolent voice, my name sounds full of regret. "It makes you feel calm." She's an animal rights activist, she's been telling us, when her husband appears with a small lacquered box. Mr. Singh is barefoot, in a military jacket. His head is shaved, which, combined with the regalia, gives the impression he's expecting an overthrow after dinner. He brings the box to me, opens it. A leopard's head, glares through cold glass eyes. "Really something," I tell him.

Lucky Singh on that first night: loose wavy hair spilling down her back, lime green sari, in a small modern home with numerous heavy frames, a sign of decaying aristocracy I recognize from having grown up on the Main Line. An improbable Playboy ashtray on the living room table, English novels from the fifties, one by the writer Dennis Wheatley, who'd been an admirer of Mussolini. Blown-up cardboard cutouts, pasted with black-and-white shots of various ancestors, propped on tables. Paintings of forebears everywhere, unsmiling rajas: "The men who came to paint them were not their equals, Kathy," she says to explain their flat expressions; several startling tiger skins: "I shot that one," the husband says.

In my memories after, their voices break through. Memory is primarily phonological, Ragnar Steingrimsson said when we met. It's preserved more in sound than in visual detail.

"'Oh, mummy,' that girl said, 'he is very nice, and I would like to marry him,'" Lucky tells a friend once more in the ozone of old thought, one of many woeful stories I remember them telling one night about Rajput women marrying out of caste. "At first the man was very kind," Lucky tsks again in memory. "But then there were problems. When they had a birthday party for the child, we—"the Rajput collective"—would have had everyone come, but his family just wanted a cake." The friend, forever out of my earshot now, might be nodding. "Eventually, he was taken out of his job, for a reason I don't know," Lucky Singh informs her. "Then he just sat there and drank all day. After ten years, she divorced him," I hear her say again, and remember the sideways cock of her head, the preserved tiger in the entry hall behind her. "Guests keep plucking out his teeth," she complains when Piers and I are saying our goodbyes. There are holes, either moth or bullet, in the skin. Piers pats its back. Dust clouds his hand. "Oh, the guy next door is building," Lucky says, embarrassed. "The cement is getting all
over
him. I'm going to vacuum him tomorrow," she resolves, as we prepare to leave. He's really something, I assure her again in memory, barely audibly:
sreallysomething,
but imprinted forever.