Dreaming in Hindi (6 page)

JAIN
3
TO JAIN
1:
Five hundred? I think she is telling us six.

JAIN
4: Haan.
Six.

JAIN
5:
She is saying six. No. Maybe she is saying five hundred sixty rupees.
(To me)
Are you telling us six hundred rupees?

ME
:
I think that's what I paid: six.

JAIN
5: Haan.
She is saying six.

JAIN
1:
Six hundred rupees? She paid too much.

JAINS
2, 3, 4, 5: Haan, haan, haan.
She paid too much.

The dinners I'd attended had been women and children only. The men ate separately, or they came home late, sometimes not at all. I saw the men so infrequently at first, in fact, I thought they had the same first name.

"I'm living with two brothers called Raj in the state of Rajasthan," I gleefully wrote a friend, then learned they were actually Rajesh and Rajkumar. "Kingly" and "Prince," which, since Kingly was younger than Prince, led to further confusion. I tried appearance mnemonics, Jerry Lewis Raj and his younger brother Art Carney Raj, before settling on Jain Dad 1 and 2, their religion being easier to pronounce than their last name.

The Jains were a joint family, a typical Indian arrangement wherein several nuclear clusters join together to form one sprawling household. With the help of the girls, I diagrammed them on Post-its. The family took up three squares, two more with identifying notes. Jain Dad 1 and wife Alka, bedroom upstairs; one boy, two girls. "Rajkumar: straight arrow"; "Alka: self-possessed, face like heart." Jain Dad 2, married to Meena, room off the kitchen; one boy, one girl. "Meena: rolls her hips when she walks, spirited," by which I meant tart.

Meena's marriage, Alka's too, was arranged. "There are no love marriages here anymore," one of the girls explained, in a tone that let me know they were a poor idea, that's why. Meena's husband, Rajesh, was goofy and gangly and wore cherry red shorts. He was making a lot of snorting fun of my cultural exchange attempts, according to a fellow student who'd moved in upstairs. I kind of got that.

"You bought a mobile?" he asked one afternoon, sliding the phone from my hand as I stood in the driveway trying for a connection. "How much did you pay?" he said. "You don't know? You don't—
hey!
" he shouted into the kitchen. "
Hey! You have to hear this.
" Although Swami-ji had put them under orders not to, the Jain Dads, Jain kids, too, often broke into English with me. Relieved, I'd answer in kind. Only the women, married out of educations, were sticking to the student-immersion plan, only because they had to.

"Hey," he yelled. "She doesn't know how much she paid for her mobile!" The wives rolled out from behind the screen-door, stopped. "
Haaan,
" they said, tilting toward me like sea branches. "
Nahiiiin?
" They tilted back. Just then, the other student emerged and supplied the figure. Four thousand rupees, one month's rent, and the damn thing didn't even work.

Generally, though, the men were otherwise engaged, at the marble mine they either owned or worked for. "
You are naukers?
" I'd asked, trying for "workers." No no no, they said hastily. "Servants" I saw when I looked it up. "Upper management" would have been a safe bet, for their house was a testimony to the fortunes of marble, charting the family's rise.

One half, the first half built, was modest with scuffed floors and a few tiny bedrooms. Then ten, fifteen years back, the family had clearly lucked out, for the newer half was a Sector Eleven fantasy: gray-veined marble floors, zebra-striped marble baseboards, a serpentine marble staircase that spiraled above a sitting room filled with plastic flowers. The bouquets, candy-dye pinks and yellows, were arrayed in marble vases. And the showstopper—a marble drive. The driveway, though hazardous to pedestrians when washed, possessed a peculiar grandeur: inlaid circles set against squares, rich browns fitted into mossy greens; a display fit for a museum, a board game leading out to a street of pigs.

My room was in the newer half and therefore august. Just off the sitting room, it had white marble floors, a sunken marble bath, spacious built-in shelves. It was grander than any place I'd imagined myself living here, but all the same, it made me antsy, particularly when I wasn't permitted to venture out, which occurred for a time early on. The surfaces of the room were unyielding. Neon light rods jutted from the walls and turned my face a sickly green. The first night, I discovered that, amplified by the marble, the clicks from the Vishnu alarm clock were lethal to concentration.
Chulha-chakki,
"routine chores"—tick, and the words would fragment. Tock:
Chulha fumkna,
"to keep busy with cooking," gone. Crack:
Bu-naa-i,
"knitting," another homework word splintered.

"You will ask five questions," Swami-ji had said earlier in the day, handing out a vocabulary list. A weekly guest, a representative member of the community, was coming in tomorrow. We'd had one guest try to stop by that day already, but the visit had had to be aborted. This man, a cobbler, had been lured up with promises that American students were eager for information on stays and lasts, but once he'd arrived, he'd been struck mute by the incomprehensible outbursts, the scowling attendance on his every word, and had had to be allowed back to work. Now we'd be having another conversational go, with a young housewife who'd been corralled from two flights below. "Later there will be dignitaries," Swami-ji promised.

The vocabulary list hinted at a life spent in drudgery, but the actual housewife, when she appeared, did not look downtrodden. She had the pep and lip liner of a talk show host. Her sari rustled as enthusiasm edged her forward on her seat. Only the braying of a donkey outside gave her pause. Her smile held till I tried my question, "
Dowry to your husband of family is? Paying you think?
" Four times, and then her face assumed the tight, polite expression I'd come to know well.
Here's an idea,
it said.
We could all just speak English.
She could have, no doubt, except she was under orders, along with the teachers, office aide, and cook: Hindi only.

Swami-ji was an advocate of total immersion, not one of the popular contemporary approaches. As a science reporter who'd done a college stint in Borneo told me, "We called it the aural-anal method. If you didn't get it by ear, they shoved it up the other end." In the States, where immersion, no boosts, has fallen out of favor except in language chains like Berlitz, it's called now, tellingly, "submersion."

With total immersion a Catch-22 sets up: If you don't have coaching, it's hard to have exchanges. No exchanges, no memories formed. No memories to draw on, more disjointed conversation about big books and small chairs, interrupted by persistent questions about whether that man was here yesterday. Is a banana blue, or is it yellow? Out of context, this would be talk that called for Haldol. "Never fully to understand and constantly to misunderstand," A. L. Becker writes, "are linguistic pathologies that characterize a wide range of phenomena from the strategic understanding of the schizophrenic to the persistent confusion and uneasiness of one who is learning to use a foreign language."

On a study abroad, though, don't you naturally absorb, say, Italian, the way watery breezes plump your hair on the Emerald Coast: by osmosis? The truth, though it sounds cynical, will be: You wish. "The data shows an immersion overseas is not a hell of a lot better than staying home with a fast-paced course," the psycholinguist Brian MacWhinney said on my return. He ticked off reasons. "In the field," he said, "you've got the adult problems. They want to speak English with you. You go home and want to listen to English news. They're not talking to you like a child. They're talking over your head or beneath you."

You've got the communal talking problem, you've got the inability to concentrate in a strange place, but all the same, all the data in the world can't measure the irreproducible pleasures that come as well, from being left, for a time, speechless. Of being blasted into a world that, because it's not yet named, is limitless. "The delight of defamiliarization," Becker writes, exuberance breaking through the fusty vocabulary of philology, "is one of the genuine pleasures of languaging." Forcing yourself back to the start, finding names again for everything, requires you to look at everything fresh: sky, dirt, air, your feet. In bhram, in the sweet illusion you get without words, nothing in the world can remain what it was. Nothing can possibly stay ordinary.

Around the end of the second week, I'd light out from the Jains' and go on long, observational walks, trying to take in all the alien sights so that later I could apply the right names. "You can't learn a language without noticing," the linguist Richard Schmidt said, and while he was referring to morphology, the argument can also be applied to the place that gave rise to it. Certain words make sense only in context: the things they describe have to be seen. A
haveli
in the Hindi-English dictionary is only, flatly, "a nobleman's townhouse," no mention of the walls that are high and crumbling, of the massive front doors studded with pikes to block the marauders now dead for centuries.

On those walks, I was voracious for new sights. The hunger propelling me was nearly greedy, for at this time, I was busting loose. At the end of the first week, there'd been an incident in what was now the far world which had spawned rumors of violence here. For a number of days, we'd been confined inside. In the room with white marble, the walls bounced my anxiety back to me during this stretch, when my brain stayed turned on all night. Clicks became cracks at 3
A.M.
Words I was trying to read would form, then revert to snakes. Once they did, my mind was free to try to imagine what the world outside was like now. Between the rumors and the neon light made cold by marble, I imagined the world around me gone white: an India turned ghostly and covered with ash, drained of color by the echoes of violence. White India, still and spectral as the room.

Afternoons then, once we were free to, I'd head out the gate and into a kaleidoscope of distractions. Posters were the best:
HIGH STATUS ELECTRICAL ACCESSORIES
, on the corner by the school.
A HUMBLE REQUEST FROM SURESH CHOWDHURY
, the pop-eared Mr. Chowdhury having several years ago hoped to be made vice president of Bhupal Nobles' College.
DECENT ASS. SOLVING PROBLEMS
; whatever it was, I'd take it.

Flatbed spilling bananas as light green as if they'd been bleached, old poster board rippling on brick wall, signs for courses, fading green house, rubble, litter, limping pig: each day, my mental notations got flatter as my English began to thin down.

The landscape that came into focus was dusty and matter-of-fact, but as my sight adjusted, it brightened some. Sky blue shard of pottery; butterfly wing, brown velvet with a red eye. On a dirt pile. But still.

 

EVEN THE FIRST WEEK
, time begins to slow, thickened by the Rajasthani sun. In the classroom, our bodies are musky by ten, all last night's spices exuding from our pores. By noon, we're no longer answering
haan.
We slouch and say
hmm,
conservation of effort. At school and at home, only confusion can lift me above the torpor, imbued as it is with the promise that if I focus hard enough, on the point of fuzziness, some revelation will follow. Bhram, then, is a little like speedball: about to be elation, about to be thunder, about to let me get what the junior wife in the new family has just said. "
What?
" I frown. She repeats it.

"She is saying do you like the soup," one of the girls translates. One of three. I know the numbers exactly now. Five children, four parents, one tiny grandmother with a thin gray braid, an ill-tempered Pomeranian named Taffy. Two boarders, too—me and another student, who's living upstairs and who is not, currently, at the table. She has large, hard eyes magnified by glasses, but her voice is tremulous, little-girlish, breathy. She's the whisperer from orientation. That's how I've come to think of her: the Whisperer. At school, she asks questions into her dupatta scarf, as if she needs protection from the big, bad oblique case. No one can understand her. At home, she'll suddenly bark out orders at the Jains, and her Hindi then is revealed as turbocharged. She grew up in the States, but her parents are from India.

"
The soup is very good,
" I say, estimating how many adjectives I know for "good." Three. I'm down one.

"
Oooooh, really? You like the soup?
" the senior mother says coyly.

"
Very much,
"I say. "
The soup is very tasty.
" Two.

"
She is saying the soup is tasty.
"They repeat the sentence down the line like "telephone," though I've said it in Hindi and they can all understand. Now the wisp of a grandmother hops up from the floor, points at my bowl, says something glottal. The old lady, a Mewari speaker, seems to mistake my bad Hindi for bad Mewari.

"
Haan, haan, haan,
" I say, fixing the soup with a wide smile of delight. "Please tell your grandmother it is very good," I tell the girls. A discussion in Mewari follows.

The grandmother circles back. The junior wife is up again. "
This soup is tomato,
" she begins, leading with logic, then slyly nudging the point around. "
You like tomato?
"

"
To me tomato soup is very good.
"

"
And you like
this
tomato soup?
" Her tone is triumphant.

"
This tomato soup is magnificent!
" "Magnificent,"
kamaal:
I'm out on the edge, and we haven't even had the okra.

Dinners go like this till one day, playing badminton in the drive, I give an automatic high-five. The gesture startles everyone, shuts down the action. From then on, I high-five often. Did I like the soup? High-five! Did I like the lentils? High-five me more! They laugh so hard when they slap my palm, it ends all further discussion.