Dreaming in Hindi (45 page)

 

"
YOU WILL COME DOWN HERE NOW.
" A week and a half left. The downstairs grandmother and I are alone in the haveli. A marriage proposal for the oldest girl, a sterling offer, has come in. The family's gone off to meet the fiancé's parents, negotiate details of the dowry—get those swindlers to back off their demands for first-class AC bus transport for forty people, that's what Mr. Singh had said. Up until the moment of their departure, the grandmother had been a tiny blur, a shadow with eyes peering out her door whenever I came in. Then the family took off and the main entry door was locked and she immediately emerged onto the second floor as a purple-saried, bucktoothed wrath of god.

"
Get down here right now,
" she's calling huskily up the stairs, using a verb tense I've never heard live before. The second person singular, "used with loved ones and small children," the textbook instructs—also for slapping around daughters-in-law. The grandmother doesn't know how else to address a younger woman who's living in the house. She hasn't left the haveli in fifty years.
You wanted to blend in, be treated like anyone else,
I remind myself as I skid into the hall.
There you go; now you are.

"
Sit,
" the grandmother commands when I arrive downstairs. I fall into a chair. I'm getting the hang of female hierarchy. When an even older stepgrandmother came to visit last week, I dropped down and brushed the air above her toes, knew to without thinking. The woman was about eighty-five; for the first thirty years of her life, the Raj was in charge. She was so incredulous to find a foreigner speaking Hindi and behaving normally like this, she expressed her exuberance by banging on my head and punching my arm throughout the conversation. I think we were having a lovefest, though maybe not.

"
I thought I lost the dog,
" the grandmother from the first floor says now with agitation. "
But I looked under the bed, and I found him.
" She asks for 100 rupees for the dinner she's cooked, the usual meal charge. I explain that I've made weekly payment arrangements with the family, stand up to go. "
Sit,
" she rasps.

"
You will wait till the milkman comes,
" she says. "
You will go down and fetch the milk.
" She bangs a metal bucket for emphasis. I try not to jump. "
My son is gone. We are all alone,
" she says nervously, mostly to herself. She probably went from her father's house to an arranged marriage to living with her son without once spending a night alone. No telling what's lurking outside the front door. Or what variety of stranger she has before her in the house. Up till now, we've never spoken.

I smile to try to calm her. I ask her questions to salve my nerves, and little by little a fast-shuttling discussion in Hindi begins. She's lived here ever since her marriage, for a time on this floor; the upstairs used to be closed; her husband died when he was thirty-nine; that's his picture there; she had to pump water today even though her knees are bad; she came from Gandhinagar in Gujarat; it used to be beautiful there, but now it's spoiled
(bigaad;
there's that word again); so much fighting. So many deaths.

And it's one perfect run; one immaculate conversation. Everything goes through, and she's not adjusting down. I really think I'm there. I want this language to go on forever. I can roll in it. I can slide, I can tumble downhill like there's no tomorrow, even if there is, and it's all just so fine.

 

"
MADAM, I DO NOT
see your name here," the man behind the desk at the swank Kumbhalgarh hotel had said when conquering Team Videshi pulled up. The winner's circle weekend had begun on a low note. Turned out first prize wasn't a night at the fancy resort we'd all just assumed it was, but rather at the place down the street—the one with lackluster staff, the one that looked as if convention-planner architects had whipped it up in their spare time. Beyond the terrace, soaring girders were supported by metal poles strategically placed so they truncated the scenery. Over dinner, you glimpsed the mountains in triangles, but no matter. We were thrilled to be here, Ruby, Priyanka, and I. Piers, who'd been dragged along, was a good sport till he struck up an acquaintance with a member of the staff and disappeared for much of the weekend. Ruby, Priyanka, and I were sharing the spoils-of-victory room down the hall. Lodging for Piers had not been included in the bargain, but I'd happily sprung for it.

Giddiness buoyed my coaches and me through numerous side trips into the cultural discordance zone. "Hope you girls brought your bathing suits!" I exclaimed when we reached our room. But as I struggled into one I'd picked up at Bapu Bazaar that was proportioned like a fat diver's suit, I vaguely registered that they hadn't unlatched their suitcases. I went on ahead, and after twenty minutes in the pool, I looked up and understood why: there were the girls, wading into the water in their street wear, their salwars blowing up around them like flotation devices. It was my gaffe not to have realized that Priyanka and Ruby, good Hindu women that they were, couldn't go prancing around in a bathing suit. It was also my strong suspicion that neither of them had ever been in a swimming pool before.

Priyanka, once in, took to squealing and flicking water, which is how women in Hindi movies behaved in pools. It was slightly annoying, especially since I had to flick back till she got it out of her system. Once she had, the three of us did what people in pools throughout the world do: we stood against the wall and tested water resistance with our arms and talked. "Your teeth are
nakli
" Priyanka stopped the conversation to ask, staring hard at mine.
Nakli
meant "fake." I flew my hand up to my mouth. "Nakli! No! Why?"

She couldn't take her eyes off my mouth. "I was thinking Americans have false teeth," she said.

I tried to speak without moving my lips. "Why? Does something look wrong with my teeth?"

"
Haan,
" she said. "Because our—how do you say?—gums are pink, and yours are white. That's why I was thinking your teeth are nakli."

"Look," Ruby said, bringing the discussion to a close, "the bearers are coming with chai." We seated ourselves on submerged concrete barstools, and once the men had arranged the tea and samosas on in-pool tables, we asked them to take our pictures. Priyanka made me cover my chest with a towel. We ate samosas, then went for a stroll through the water. When we were back on the stools, I filled them in on swimming pool etiquette. For instance, I told Ruby, it was considered bad form to masticate snacks and swish them out through your teeth. We had more tea and lazily floated our hands with the pampered assurance of maharanis.

The hours continued to spin us into a dream. Up above the terrace that night, one of Nand's ten moons, perhaps the most brilliant, the
nashratn,
"jewel of the night," was shining down as we ate dinner. Piers had joined us, and afterward we all tiptoed down through the dewy grass and arranged lawn chairs in a line by the pool. We told jokes across the various voids of background—Brit, Indian, American—and pretended to laugh at each other's. I told one about an old couple that ended in the punch line "Fuck or drown," and Priyanka laughed hysterically, but when she translated it for Ruby, she made it "
Fuck or down.
" Piers and I went all out for Ruby's jokes, even though we couldn't make heads or tails of them, but the mountains were silver in the jeweled moonlight, and we were all feeling heady from the air that smelled like jasmine. The hours spun along, and when we got up to leave, a light flashed on behind the pool. A bearer who'd been stationed on the lawn had been waiting to escort us to our rooms.

The next morning, the female members of Team Videshi elected to hang out in the room. We flipped on Indian MTV the minute we woke up—Macy Gray and Train, back-to-back Bollywood choreographed numbers that blurred into background sound, except when film star Hrithik Roshan appeared and Priyanka went on point, turning up the volume. She was wearing my jeans. Cut loose from home, she'd asked if she could. We'd taken a number of souvenir pictures.

I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. Ruby's brown salwar kameez was stretched out to dry over half the tub. I climbed back into bed. Ruby and Priyanka were lolling in the other one. We talked and talked, like girls the morning after a slumber party, which is pretty much what we were. "
Hindimein, Hindimein,
" I croaked periodically in my morning voice: let's move this over into Hindi. Priyanka and Ruby were once again speaking it only with each other. "
I can, you know,
" I said with hurt dignity. They capitulated, and it was three-way, slow-going Hindi for twenty minutes, then they switched over on me again, fell into a round of fast talk between themselves. I lay back on the bed and listened. "
Something is wrong with his mind.
" Shahid was being his usual annoying self. I nearly made it to the final thought in "
We were in the kitchen, and he wanted me to cook, and...
" but then the sentence became static, and I was left hanging. My comprehension continued on like this. I'd get all the way to the end of one of Ruby's shaggy-dog stories, when the listening device in my head would short out, at the precise moment Ruby and Priyanka would shriek and bang the bed. I kept being torn between insisting on Hindi and following an anecdote to the end.

English eventually started up again. Ruby and Priyanka peppered me with questions, aired mystifications over Western habits that had been weighing on them. "How can couples kiss like that in American movies?" "What was the meaning of so many X-rated movies in America?" "Why was Renee's underwear so big?" Frequently, when you went to visit, Renee had a set of undies drying in the bathroom. "Because it's old ladies' underwear," I explained.

"
Nachizkanam Kathy Rich hai.
" Priyanka was standing on the bed in my jeans, unsteadily reprising my winning speech into the pink plastic microphone Ruby had brought as a pool toy. Ruby grabbed the mike, started in on a ghazal, remembered another fact about her marriage she wanted to convey to Priyanka. Midway through, she moaned, "Why can't Indian women live alone?"

"Oh—the World Trade Center," I said sadly. In a Bollywood round-the-world montage that had come onscreen, a couple were dancing in what looked like New Jersey with the Twin Towers rising behind them.

"The World Trade Center," I said softly. "See?" I wondered again what the altered cityscape would look like. An amputation? Or, worse, unremarkable at first, and then you remembered? I wondered whether people who'd lived through the attack chronologically were still flooded with sorrow whenever the World Trade Center appeared unexpectedly in a movie. Here, where this thing had occurred in shuffled time (it had happened, then it hadn't; could be made believably unreal, then you remembered and it happened again), the sight was a fresh shock each time.

Priyanka regained her balance. She bent down to examine the screen. "
That
is New York?" she said with interest. She had her hopes pinned on Chirag. All weekend, Ruby had been starting sentences with "Priyanka, when you go to New York," then crying out, "But
I
want to go there. How do
I
go?" We talked some more. Ruby's attention strayed. "Britney Spears is having very Indian looks," she said, examining the screen.

"Britney Spears?" I frowned at the Britney Spears swingy blond hair and pert American cheerleader nose. "How can you say she looks Indian?"

"Is true," Priyanka concurred. "She is having very Indian looks."

"But how? Why?"

"
Haan,
" Ruby said. "Because her looks are very Indian." End of that discussion. No further explanation forthcoming.

Then we all got back into our bathing attire and went down to the pool, and Ruby trudged away from where we stood in the shallow end. She waded too far out. "Priyanka, I am drowning," she kept calling, till we looked over and saw she was. I swam into the deep end and pushed her to safety. We ate more samosas that we'd won, and drank more chai that we'd earned; we flicked the water a bit, and then it was noon. On the jeep ride home, we were a jumble of legs in the back.

 

INDIA AND PAKISTAN
were teetering on the edge the week I left India.
MUSHARRAF WILL UNLEASH A STORM
! the newspapers in Delhi were screaming the morning I got to the city. The troops at the border were poised at brinkmanship. Hospitals were gearing up to receive casualties. My brother in Pennsylvania had e-mailed to say the State Department was advising all U.S. citizens to clear out immediately. First I'd learned of that.

"Oh, that's how we always hear about things, too," a diplomat I had dinner with said and laughed. "We only ever know what's happening in India when people in the States write and tell us." She'd looked slightly sheepish at my mention of the State Department communiqué. It had been, um, she said, a mistake. They hadn't meant for it to go out, but when someone accidentally sent it around, everyone just decided to take a holiday and collect the pay. India, the feeling was, was grandstanding, in part to force America to take diplomatic sides. Instead, half the Americans here were quickly packing up and leaving. Panicked businessmen who hadn't heard that the order was the result of a snafu were rushing to get their families onto planes. You couldn't get a flight out now if you tried.

Earlier, I'd been planning to wait to make travel arrangements, was thinking of staying on till my visa ran out, but something had happened the week before that had made me hurry to secure a ticket. The school year had ended. My old life had found me, in the form of a magazine editor who'd e-mailed to see if I'd go on the road with a clothing designer and write a profile. The designer and I were down in Gujarat, where she was talking to fabric makers and I was numbly surveying the aftereffects of the carnage. On the walls of some of the burned-out stalls near the university where we stayed, you could see the claw marks desperate shopkeepers had made after they'd been locked inside and firebombed. I asked students what they had seen. One said coolly that they'd barred the gate to one of the school's Muslim gardeners who was trying to flee a mob. "We didn't want those people inside," she said.