Dreaming in Hindi (36 page)

It was only in the scented air of Rajasthan that I perceived the connection between the illness and the passion that had been propelling me for so long. First time around, language jump-starts the brain, Russ Rymer says in
Genie.
"The organization of our brain is as genetically ordained and automatic as breathing," he writes, "but, like breathing, it is initiated by the slap of a midwife, and the midwife is grammar."

In going back for seconds, I was trying to replicate the process. At the edge of the desert, surrounded by camels and pleasure gardens and high palace walls, I'd been slapping myself back to life.

"
Behosh. be. hosh,
" Swami-ji says in my vocabulary class of one now. The Whisperer has permanently barricaded herself inside one of the small classrooms. Helaena has never returned from Jodhpur. "
Be
—means 'out of.'
Hosh
is 'the senses.' This is how you say 'unconscious,'" he says, and I consider whether I've gone unconscious over here or come fully awake. Across the line, I'm out of all senses as I knew them. My skin continues to absorb the smell of heat. My ears fill with color, for in India, the seed, or basic, mantra of each god has its own shade. Toward dawn, when I wake into musty light, I can hear the soft red sounds of Rama's chant from a temple by the haveli where I've moved.

A friend of a friend named Rashida, a Muslim woman who makes batiks, steered me here after two lodging arrangements back-to-back grew irrevocably strained. After leaving the hotel, I'd moved into a house where the patriarch was Sri-ji's priest and where his son was a live example from the orientation seminars:
A man insists on lurking outside the three-quarter-length shower door. He is standing there silently. You can see his shoes. What do you do?

At the next guesthouse, volubility was the problem. The mother embraced her mission to help improve my language skills with urgency. As her thin, gliding daughters, Minki and Chinki, stopped and stared balefully, Mrs. Prasad conducted hysterical Hindi lessons at 7
A.M.
"
Did I want pancakes? Paranthu? Porridge? Toasti? Sweet carrots? Would I like to try saying the word 'carrots' with her? Was I familiar with the word 'sweet'?
"

At the haveli, the batik artist had said, they'd grown used to Westerners and their perversely solitary ways.

The haveli, to a Westerner, looks like what Gaudí would have designed if he'd been seized by Gothic inclinations. Its high fortress face is so old, it appears to be sliding to the ground. The last time any touchups were done, the
Octopussy
crew was in town. The house had a cameo. Payment was a paint job. Since then, flakes have appeared. An air of genteel poverty hovers over everything, though at one time, the Rajput family that lived here was so stupendously rich, when anyone opened the massive front door, gold coins spilled onto the street. This is just one of the many interesting tidbits that the owner, Mr. Singh, a resort manager and impoverished descendant, delivers along with breakfast. Once, with the chai, he brought the news that a Hindu nationalist group had been calling him at the office and rebuking him for answering "Hello."

"
You should say 'Hare om'!
" the anonymous voice scolds. "
Are you so westernized that you say
'Hello'?"

"But this is a resort," he tells me he replied. We both titter. Twice, on days the phone bill has come due, he's tried to sell me the haveli. He smiled amiably beneath his wire-rim glasses when I had to decline—regretfully, for I love the new place.

Most of the time, I have the whole top floor to myself, a gallery with marble floors and peacock arches and a small bedroom at either end. Bats flit through the long hall at sundown, and you can sense the ghosts of the old Rajput women who lived here, but on the whole, during the day, it's cheerful. Afternoons, tinted glass casts a confetti of light across the floor: red, green, and blue, colors of the seasons. (Spring in Rajasthan is so abbreviated, it doesn't get a shade.) Plants fill the tinted bay windows in the gallery. Seventeenth-century paintings of tiger hunts festoon the walls. In my bedroom, an elephant has a tiger by the tail and is hoisting it into the air.

Late at night, though, the bedrooms become convection ovens. That's when I drag my bedding out to the long hall, arrange it under one of the bay windows missing glass. The bedrooms are essentially hermetically sealed, for the windows in there are no bigger than a woman's head, large enough only for someone to watch a passing parade below without being glimpsed in return. They were designed when no one dreamed that throughout the world, temperatures would begin a steady, beating rise—were expressly ordered at that size, in fact, and for functional reasons: to further conceal the already veiled residents. The original inhabitants here were all in purdah. I'm living in what was the zenana of the house. This is where the language has led me: not into the heart of India, not exactly, but into ancient women's quarters.

Up in Jodhpur, Helaena's Hindi has deposited her in a zenana as well. Sumair's family took one look and dead-bolted her into theirs. "I am so bored in here," she sighs when my cell phone rings in class. The family won't let her out. If their son is seen on the streets with her, a Western woman, he will get a reputation. Sumair, it seems, is in accord with this assessment. He's out most nights on his own, Helaena says with exasperation. But the next time she calls, her mood is lighter, despite the fact Sumair has ordered her not to "increase" the marriageable young sister who's in lockup with her.

"
Badhaana,
that's the verb he used," she says lazily into the phone.

"
Badhaana?
" I ask.

"Oh, you know, 'to widen,' 'to increase.' We had it in class, I think. He was talking about her mind." She sounds unruffled. Days in modified solitary have given her penetrating insight that the other members of her haveli lack. What the family, even Sumair himself, doesn't understand is that his kismet has taken up residence in the house. Helaena has come to see that's what she is, knows it the way she knows that the black-tongued goddess Chamunda Devi turned her tongue black the first time Helaena prayed to her. She just woke up that way the next day, and it wasn't the result of Pepto-Bismol, the way some people tried to claim. This new understanding has allowed her to settle into the small rhythms of the floor: tea at four, Sumair's secret visits after midnight. That, and hand-held video games. "Things are much better," she says, "since I discovered Nintendo in the zenana."

In mine, I occasionally discover that a German or French backpacker has moved into the other bedroom for a night, dragging in annoying reminders of the current century. But otherwise, it's always the same time here as it is up at the palace: four hundred years ago, not one mote different.

At sundown, the ghosts' chattering can drive me out into the streets, which smell the same at that hour as they have since the Mughal era: scents of cumin and fennel and fenugreek condensing into one muddy brown rill. The light slanting down soft yellow makes the lanes look like misty stage sets. Women in filmy
lahenga
skirts come toward me in the haze, a few balancing copper pots on their heads, and it's easy to believe that they're phantoms, or else I am, that some vectors have crossed and as a result, my own mind has been increased. My senses have doubled: that's the only reason I can see them.

The idea that the senses could be multiplied was planted by Nand last week. "In Sanskrit times, they had ten," he said one afternoon when I visited. This was a day when the loo wind's ions were whirling at a frantic speed. In the morning, a rickshaw driver, driven mad by the whine, had pulled back a fist when I'd objected to his price. The other drivers gasped. His body shrank down. When I got to his house, Nand was out of sorts.

"But Kit-ti, how will you ever pass it?" he said when I mentioned I had a test coming up. He made his voice squeak to suggest incredulity. He widened his eyes in disbelief. Nand is of the freely displayed and often voiced opinion that my language advancement remains undetectable.

"Your father doesn't think much of my Hindi," I'd said to one of his sons as I was leaving on the last visit, after he'd said, "Hey, you're really getting good." He'd smiled conspiratorially. "My father thinks
my
Hindi is bad," he'd said. This son, like Nand's other eight children, is a Hindi professor.

"
He believes he is your father in India,
" Mrs. Singh, the proprietress of the haveli, said when I described how Nand is always on me: How do you not know bhakti poetry? Why are you not married? "
He thinks it is his dharma
"—his duty—"
to say these things,
" she decided. In the event that Mrs. Singh has had Freudian training, I neglect to say that my flesh-and-blood father back in the States has just been moved to a ward for people who can no longer stay anchored in time. I keep this piece of information to myself for another reason, too: I know how bad it would look here. People tell me things in Hindi they wouldn't in English. "
We think Westerners are animals in the way they raise their children,
" a man I'd gotten into a conversation with at the train station had said. "
They raise them, and then when the children are eighteen, they have them leave. Who does that but animals?
" It wasn't a leap in understanding to guess how the man would view grown children who had their parents leave for assisted living, even if the move had been the parents' idea.

"Did you get the birthday check I mailed?" my father wrote back in November. "You probably didn't," he said, "because I sent it to Mexico." Mexico was where we'd all gone six years ago when my mother was still alive, but the whole time I've been stockpiling words, my father has been losing them.
Maybe,
I think, with every disjointed letter and phone conversation,
it's time to go home.
But I can't get a bead on where my dharma lies here. My father, who's lived his life in one place, has always taken vicarious pleasure in my drive to light out for parts unknown, has always encouraged me. I'm either being true to him in India or I'm an animal of a daughter, I can't tell which. Probably both.

On the way to the cybercafe, I calculate how much longer till the school year wraps up: not that much. So I put off the decision and phone my father instead, tell him about the astonishing sights passing before my eyes, even if I have to make them up. "Oh, man, Dad, an elephant just went by," I say, hoping to bring him into my present. But my present doesn't match anything he's ever known, and as usual, by the time we hang up, we're both more confused.

 

"
FINE" AS I'VE BECOME
, in Govinda's use of the word, the new neighbors aren't able to see it. In fact, when they learned that a Western woman had moved in next door, they began to see pretty much the opposite: me performing acts so degenerate on the third floor, they were forced to come over and speak to Mrs. Singh about it. Mrs. Singh defended my honor, though the week before, I think, she wouldn't have bet on it.

"
Kathy, you are alone up there?
"she'd called me in to ask. She and her daughters were lounging on pillows in her bedroom, which resembles a harem room, all furnishings draped and low to the ground. Of the four, only Mrs. Singh has the requisite curves for the décor. The three daughters, bespectacled and thin, look dutiful even when they're sprawled. One other woman lives on the premises as well: a bucktoothed
dadiji,
a grandmother, who has a room on the ground floor. Whenever I come in, she peers out at me through a crack in her door.

"
Yes, ma'am,
" I said in Hindi. Mrs. Singh is in a complicated state of purdah that has curtailed her English. She doesn't wear a veil at home, but on the other hand, she never leaves the house. In her grandmother's day, if a woman of her status, a royal, was required to go out, servants would creep along beside with silk panels to shield her on her way to the litter. The masses would not have been permitted to see her. Mrs. Singh probably wouldn't need panels nowadays, though it's hard to know for sure, since she keeps confined to the second floor. This limited mobility hasn't prevented her from knowing, to the rupee, what everything in town should cost. When I'd gone out to buy the air cooler, she'd commandeered the bargaining by cell phone.

"
You are alone?
" she repeated dubiously.

"
Ji,
" I told her: Yes, I was. "
Ji.
" For sure.

She cocked her head. "
Alone? You are certain?
"

"
Ji,
" a third time, as the daughters glanced at one another nervously. She and I were at a stalemate. The daughters tensed to see what I'd say, then the oldest one whooped with relief.

"
It's a tape!
" the girl cried, and everyone laughed, including me, once I saw what the problem was. Vidhu had given me a Hindi tape that used a man for the call and response. I'd been repeating after it up there. They'd assumed they'd been hearing sordid love talk.
Kitna achchhaa mazaak tha!
What a good joke! But a week later, I'm back to account for myself again.

"
Kathy,
" Mrs. Singh says, her tone uninflected: she will brook no nonsense. "
You have been throwing condoms on the neighbors' roof?
" The daughters lean forward.

Uh-uh. Can't say I have. No, that is one thing I have not been doing.

But the neighbors, it seems, have complained about this. They've marched over to report that they've seen me flinging rubbers from my window onto their terraced roof. Needless to say, they want this behavior stopped. Mrs. Singh defended me and told them to beat it. Now, though, she's, well, wondering.

"
You have not been?
" she says hopefully, on my third denial.

I summarize the situation as it stands: "
I have not been bringing men up to my room. I have not been throwing condoms onto people's roofs.
" She grins.
Of course not!