Assimilation To dream in Hindi
McGowan, Jo
OF SEVERAL MINDS JO McGOWAN ASSIMILATION The stuff dreams are made of The first time I dreamt in Hindi-nearly twenty years ago-I was both pleased and confused. Pleased because this surely...
...In Hindi, the passive voice is almost standard...
...Getting the chance to feel it again as an adult sometimes made me laugh out loud with pleasure...
...Pleased because this surely represented a quantum leap in my acculturation to India...
...Every time I hear the Hindi version of "The walls have ears," I get a hilarious mental picture of a wall covered with ears, all listening intently to something they aren't meant to hear...
...My every effort, from day one, has been greeted with universal acclaim...
...to me it was just cacophony...
...Then abruptly, one day I achieved some sort of breakthrough...
...I floated along, lost in my own thoughts and paying no attention to the spoken life going on all around me...
...Dim childhood memories of doing the same thing in English came back to me as I would stand in front of a sign in the bazaar, oblivious to the crowds jostling past me, and sound out the words one character at a time...
...Phrases which are, in English, so common as to have no meaning, come star-tlingly to life when heard literally in Hindi...
...We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time" (T...
...It was almost like losing my hearing and regaining it...
...Indians are by nature hospitable and welcoming, but toward a foreigner who attempts to speak in Hindi they are positively fawning...
...The smallest unit of time in Hindi is "hour...
...For one accustomed to being able to speak fluently and understand readily, it has been by turns frustrating, awkward, and painful not to know the language spoken by almost everyone I meet here...
...And even though I know it isn't true, it's still lovely to hear...
...As I began to study the language seriously, though, the odd word would suddenly detach itself from the white noise and stand out as something meaningful: paper, book, chair...
...Whole sentences...
...The triumph of painstakingly reading something like Chai ki Dukan (tea shop), and then looking up to see that, yes, people were in fact drinking tea inside, is a delight usually reserved for children...
...It was not silence (India is never silent), of course...
...Bhagwan ki Ma, the priest said, during a prayer...
...My life in India began to change then...
...For people so obsessive as to worry about minutes and seconds, English has to do...
...The future tense...
...In a hurry...
...I had missed the English Mass one Sunday and went instead to the Hindi one...
...Apart from allowing me to communicate, learning the language has given me linguistic confirmation of much that I know just by living here...
...The result is that my Hindi has improved dramatically over the years simply through practice...
...One of my favorite things was learning how to read...
...Learning Hindi has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life, providing me with a variety of startling insights into commonplace things, shaking me out of my complacency about language, communication, and even fundamental beliefs...
...You do not know how to say sari, I can assure you...
...The turning point came when I was able to laugh at myself as easily as everyone else did...
...Nowhere is this made clearer than in the inevitable perplexity of a Westerner trying to fix an appointment with an Indian: the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same...
...I said to myself...
...While an American would say, "I am hungry," an Indian would put it, "Hunger has attached itself to me...
...I had grown so used to not understanding what anyone was saying that I had begun to disregard it...
...How has this Hindu dogma made its way into the Mass...
...What the...
...With such positive reinforcement, I seldom worry about my grammar, whether I've gotten the gender right, or how I am pronouncing those funny words with the "flap r" that you have to be trained to produce...
...Finally, it was hearing a theological phrase in Hindi, one I have heard and repeated (mindlessly, I now see) all my life in English, that let me really hear it as if for the first time...
...It is still far from perfect, but it works...
...It took a moment or two for me to realize it was Mary he was referring to, and my image of her has never been the same...
...I can't count the number of times I have been told that I speak better Hindi than the natives...
...The Mother of God...
...I also loved the gradual, then precipitous, transformation of other people's conversations from background noise to meaningful speech...
...And unlike Americans, who are convinced they can control their lives and influence events, Indians tend to a more fatalistic view: things happen to them...
...confused because, just as in real life, I needed a translator...
...S. Eliot, "Little Gidding...
...Time, for example, is a fluid concept in India...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 1
