Dreaming in Hindi (2 page)

In my own case, I took up with Hindi at a time when it seemed my life had buckled out from under me. I'd been fired from a magazine job and come to a reckoning: I wasn't sure I wanted to do that anymore. And since, other than early counter work at Burger King, magazine editing was all I'd ever done and, past the age of sixteen, ever wanted to do, I was disoriented in the extreme. The business, first in concept, then in fact, had been my fueling passion since high school. As a kid in the most straitening suburbs of Philadelphia, the Main Line, I'd hoped to be either an archaeologist, a circus performer, or a poet. Magazine work, when I hit on that idea, seemed like it might combine the best of all three. You'd dig deep into culture, perform high-wire acts with deadlines. And you'd be immersed in lyricism of a kind, wouldn't you?

Not necessarily, or not at the glossy journals where I ended up, or not so far as I could see, twenty years on, when a chant had begun to loop through my head:
I want to lead a more artistic life.
I looked around then and saw how my life, long set in this direction, was turning out. At thirty-seven, I had an extensive collection of giveaway moisturizers; as the second most geriatric person on staff at the magazine where I worked, I'd been required to test them. I had stacks of review copies of books I never read. My evenings were taken up with the rounds of business parties and merchandising
events that can blur whole years in New York City, where I lived. I had a closetful of shoes that were unnervingly expensive and a cat with bizarre proclivities—a kind of foot fetish, I'd say. The cat liked to eat the toes off leather high heels, but only the finest ones, only the Manolo Blahniks. I'd come home and find him on his back in the closet, cradling one half of a gnawed pair, a sated gleam in his eye. I couldn't say what psychological derangement was spurring him, but I could see this was a sign.

By the time, a few years later, when I was fired from the place that required on-the-job moisturizing, my life no longer made any kind of sense to me. Not bedrock, regenerative sense. Compounding this state of feeling uprooted from my existence while still in it was the fact that in the decade just passed, I'd had several encounters with a serious illness, had been sick with cancer twice. The last time of full crisis had been three, four years before, but I remained perpetually on half alert for a third siege.

That, then, is the place where I'd arrived first time I took a Hindi lesson:

I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's.

The whole year in India, I was never confused, though often, for days, I thought I was. "Vidhu-ji," I asked the teacher with the angular face, remembering to attach the "ji," an honorific that could also mean
yes
or
what?
—point of bafflement right there. "Vidhu," I repeated, promptly forgetting to. "How do I say 'I'm confused'?"

"
Main bhram mein hoon,
"he said: "I am in
bhram,
" and for the rest of the year, I used that sentence more than any other.

"
Vidhu-ji! Wait! I am in bhram,
" I'd say, flapping my hand, interrupting Grammar, Dictation, till he must have wished I'd yank myself out of it, must have regretted the day he ever told me.

I was in
bhram,
off and on, at the school and beyond: when I'd try to ask a shopkeeper in Hindi if he had this thing in blue, while he stared at me with his mouth half open, as if he were watching a trick. When India later on became like an opiated dream; when the poet Nand-ji bent my senses using words; when I sat and watched the deaf school boys flash language on their hands—all those times, too. And in bhram, but a dark, pernicious kind, when soon after I arrived, the world was exploded; when months after that, India went up in flames; when people by the hundreds then were slaughtered.

Many times throughout that year, I was in full-press brahm, in nonstop confusion, or so I thought. I wasn't till I returned to the States that I learned the exact meaning of the word. Illusion. The whole year in India, I'd been in illusion.

 

MY FIRST VISIT
to India had been a chance encounter. I'd wandered in by accident. Took a plane, to be exact, but I hadn't meant to go, hadn't meant to lie and tell a newspaper editor who was phoning with an assignment, "I can't. I'll be in India."

This was three years before my unveiling in the temple, at a point when I'd been contemplating becoming a full-time writer. I'd had a lot of time just then to consider what, exactly, I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. Four months before, I'd been fired from the magazine that was able, psychically, to prompt my cat to eat my shoes. It was the eighth one I'd worked for that had either folded or snapped me suddenly from the work force, and I was coming to a belated conclusion: I'd had enough of this whiplash. When the editor called, I was tottering between two lives: the old one, the one where I loved the execution of my work but where the practicalities of the workplace could inflict slow soul death, and this unimaginable one that kept trying to take shape, the ferociously uncertain one where I'd cut the tethers and become a writer.

I'd already made forays in the second direction. The last year on the old job, I'd written a book during evenings and weekends and accumulated sick days, one of the reasons I'd gotten bounced: divided attention. A chant in my head that had been prickling me had gained voltage.
I want to lead a more artistic life.
Though the book was now completed, and though it had initially seemed like proof of the direction I should claim, as time went on, it could with harsh clarity be revealed for what it would likely be: a stone, one that would sink without sound. Thousands of books did each year. This possibility would flare to mind, then I'd lose my nerve, then I'd talk myself back onto the dividing line, say,
But you can do it—have a voice, come into your own.
And I would think, for a time, yeah, I could.

But when the newspaper editor called, he called my bluff. The dividing line vanished along with my resolve. India seemed like a foolproof out, the most distant place I could think of, and I wasn't expecting him to say "Well, why don't you do something for us there?" Or for me to say "I will."

Two weeks later, India was flying by in tumbled glimpses. Turquoiseorangelime, the color stream of saris. Monkeys, black-faced in trees. A flat dun highway that shot straight ahead with the force of an exclamation.

"Have I changed yet?" I'd asked my traveling companion as our bus idled on the edge of midnight in the dank New Delhi bus station. On the plane over, I'd told her what a writer I'd worked with had said: "India will change you forever." Having just managed to blow up my life, I was thinking that might be appealing.

"Completely," she said as passengers filed by and took seats. "Totally now," she said and laughed as we started into the night.

On the bus, when people squeezed in beside us, she asked them about the next stop. We didn't need to know. She was practicing Hindi from a book. Mostly Hindi sounded like you just repeated the word
swaga,
but
swaga
was taking us a long way. "
Swaga,
how do you say that,
swaga,
" and next thing we'd be at the movie theater, so called but really someone's living room. "
Swaga,
oh what's the word, something,
swaga,
" and we'd learn that the monks brushing past us on the mountain path were hurrying to get to the temple before sundown.
Swaga,
we could find out things, we were about to learn more, and then it was over, we were back.

"I did not realize then that this sense of an enormous revelation about to occur is simply fundamental to the Indian experience," Anthony Weller wrote in his travelogue
Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road,
and he'd been going on English alone. We'd had a number of revelations—foremost, that contact dharma is a powerful high. And if my friend—or I—had been better practiced in the language, we could have had even more.

On my return to New York City, I decided to keep one dusty shirt unwashed to preserve the olfactory memory, then accidentally threw it in the machine. Didn't matter. A dun smell had settled in my skin, along with a desire: to put it into words.

 

ONE MONTH INTO
Hindi lessons, with a moonlighting Columbia professor named Susham Bedi, and the language was making my head smolder. One misplaced
m,
and you were no longer saying "weather" but "husband of maternal aunt." You had to learn to think in sentences whose verbs went at the end, which had the effect of producing vertigo: "
to the house the mother the child is taking.
" There was the fact I couldn't pronounce it, plus I couldn't write it. The beautiful letters, like stick trees that had bumped into a ceiling or a revue of performing snakes, came out shaped like cows' heads in my hands. I was frustrated, and fascinated.

Susham was handsome, with eyes like black ice and a manner so languid that sometimes when it took me a while to answer, I'd look to find her dozing. Relatives darted through the room, and once she asked a visiting sister to take over the lesson, but nonetheless she got the job done. Two months on, the snakes had become elegant script that, if pressed, would release words. I was reading Devanagari now and cranking, nursing a sensation like falling in love. In love with what? With the snakes, and the Sanskrit and Persian words they preserved, records of distant migrations. Whoever names something has power over it, and with the subcontinent's multitude of tribes and sects past and present, there have been numerous rechristenings in the Indo-Aryan languages, one of the subsets of Indo-European, which makes them distant cousins of English. Hindi, Rajasthani, Punjabi, all the close relatives in the north, echo with names that were staked in different tongues and beliefs—by Aryans and Hunas, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sikhs. And, of course, by British colonialists, 350 years' worth, who left the linguistic terrain mottled with Victorianisms:
svimming kaustyoom
for "bathing suit,"
motar gaadi
for "car." Just as South America is littered with antiquated cars, Hindi is strewn with words no one in America had used since Agatha Christie's time, and for that alone I loved it.

On a tape that came with the textbook, a mystery man sounded a little like he was making obscene suggestions. He recited the consonants with a regal insistence, and I was floored to find, three months on, that I couldn't tell the difference between
tha
and
ta, ra
and
rha. Na
was like he was clearing his throat, a sound from another world.

"If you speak English, you have one world. If you speak Navajo, you have a another world," a linguistics professor said in an article I'd found. And if you are able to have two worlds, I wondered, does that mean your original one has doubled?

I'd come across his quote as part of the research I was doing for a magazine story I'd pitched, on learning a language as an adult. "It doesn't make sense to write about French or Spanish," I'd argued in the proposal letter. "We've all muddied them up in high school. I want to try a more distant language in order to get a more precise view—a bas-relief—of what goes on with the neurons than I can obtain with a Romance language." The editors said go ahead, even though they couldn't have had any idea what I meant, as I didn't, other than that I'd screwed up French and Spanish several times in school, Turkish, too, at Berlitz. If the drive to acquire a first language is instinct, as many linguists think, perhaps the urge for a second is, too—at least that was the best explanation I had then for why I kept throwing myself at the wall. Mostly, all I produced were spider lines. Once, I'd caught sight of a door. It was, strangely, in an interview with Mick Jagger, who said he hadn't been able to crack French till he got himself to admit he didn't truly believe the French were speaking a real language, whereupon he was able to take a leap of faith: barriers fell; he was in.

I'd filed that idea away then, because at the time I had other leaps I had to make. In Hindi class now, it came back to me. The language was hard. All I had to go on was faith and perversity. Always before with languages, I'd started out with the conviction that I was hurtling toward fluency. I'd just sit down and learn French, but then French would collapse into unnecessary complications. Spanish would take on a crushing weight that had not been detectable in those first, friendly exchanges between
chicos.
Enthusiasm would wither. My interest would die.

Hindi was such a losing proposition going in, though, I didn't have expectations, which meant that every word gained was a bonus and small thrill. The word for green made me feel invincible. Since there was no way to explain this to anyone without looking tetched, I came up with an answer for when someone asked what it was I thought I was doing. I was doing this on a lark. I consciously believed that myself for a good two years, till sometime in India, the real reason became clear, and then I saw it had been obvious all along.

When one day on my arrival, Susham said she had no more time for private lessons, I was despondent. I'd grown to love the sunny Morningside Heights apartment: computer on the dining room table, shocking tiger skins on the wall, a lingering incense that merged with the alien words on the far plane I could reach. I'd been using all senses.

 

WHILE I LOOKED
for another teacher, I burrowed down in research for the magazine story. In my apartment, drifts of papers torn from journals covered books with titles such as
The Neurobiology of
Affect in Language.
In the way passions can, this one had spawned an offshoot—a sharp desire to learn what science thought a second language did to the brain.

Anyone with this curiosity will soon find themselves snowed under, for the study of second language acquisition, or SLA as it's known around the hundreds of conferences convened yearly to examine it, has become a vast field that's given rise to numerous professorships, fellowships, books, and journals. The speed at which the field has grown is astonishing when you consider that as recently as the early 1980s, it simply did not exist. You could find publications on language learning aimed at helping French or Spanish teachers back then, but that was about it. No one was debating where second languages were lodged in the brain, or what permutating crossover effect a second vocabulary can have on your first, or whether background TV sound messes with your Spanish lessons, or any of the thousands of topics, ranging from the silly to the momentous, that are now routinely thrashed out.