Dreaming in Hindi

     When I was a high school junior, back in the Dark Ages, my favorite subject wasn't English, but French. Years before, I'd fallen in love with the language, and with the idea of language itself, when I came across my father's old high-school French textbooks stashed away in the attic, my secret hideaway in homage to my favorite heroine of that time, Jo March. 

The books were cloth-bound, faded, but suspiciously free of any markings suggesting they'd ever been studied. (Follow up with Dad confirmed as much; the real mystery here is why he'd saved them.) Some were skinny, dull-gray volumes, abridged and foot-noted versions of short novels by the likes of Alphonse Daudet, free of any scholar-distracting illustrations. I set them aside for "someday."  (Which has yet to come, in fact.)

But one book became a favorite. I can still see its dark reddish-brown cover impressed with a gilded fleur de lys, and I can still call up the aroma of musty paper when I cracked it open. This was a real textbook, a series of numbered lessons, each with a vocabulary list of words and phrases, the French in boldface, with phonetic spellings in parentheses, then  the English in italics (I loved lists).  Each list was followed by strings of numbered sentences, one paragraph in French and the next in English: you learned the language by reading and writing it, translating back and forth these quaintly formal sentences on general topics apparently suited to life in a Parisian townhouse with a servant: Ou est ma parapluie? Je veux aller au magasin aujourd'hui. Ouvrez la porte, s'il vous plait. And that is what I started to do. 

Around that same time, in fifth grade my class began spending a few minutes each week on a French lesson, and I was excited to match real French sounds (or what passed for them, from a non-native speaker in Schenectady, New York) to the strange accents and vowel combinations in the text book, at least for days of the week and counting from one to ten. Eventually, with the misery of middle school (or as we called it then, junior high) came real French classes, where the teacher played LPs--I said this was the Dark Ages--of short conversations, recorded with pauses for us to parrot the speakers aloud. The conversations were set in places like the school cafeteria : Qu'est-ce qu'il y a a manger ce dejeuner? Des saucissons, sans doute. Corny as it might be, for me complaining about hot dogs for lunch, over and over, was the highlight of a day filled with duller repetitions.

I'm sure this approach to learning a foreign language will strike my colleagues today as hopelessly out of touch (English teaching has changed just as much). But it hooked me. Writing was more fun with the accent grave, the accent aigu, and the circonflet that cloaked an "s" in English, not to mention the cedilla. I loved the sing-song sentence rhythms and the breathy quality of vowels, the earthiness of consonants. I loved the surprises of new words, weirdly assigned genders, often familiar roots with odd affixes, and sometimes bearing the gift of an idea not expressed by a single English equivalent. By high school, I was a strong reader of French literature (I loved Balzac), a decent writer, and an enthusiastic speaker, though no one would have confused my spoken French with a native speaker's. Then came the exciting news that our school would sponsor two students for a summer in France through the Experiment in International Living program. Students interested would compete for the honor through a series of interviews, references and a written application. I was the least competitive, most shy student of the swinging 60s, but I had to do this. I had to. 

One night finalists were called back for our last hurdle, a scheduled interview with a panel of teachers, the principal, and a representative from EIL. For someone afraid to raise her hand in class (even though an A student), this was sheer terror. I knew a few of the teachers, not all; I knew the principal, barely, since I never got into trouble, but I also knew his daughter was a competitor too. I don't remember what they asked. Maybe one of the questions was something like, Why do you want to do this? Or even, why do you like French? I only remember part of my answer, and it was a moment of epiphany for me, the first time I realized, consciously, something I'd known all along, about the joy of learning and especially, learning a second language. I remember struggling to express this (even now it's hard), and I found myself saying at one point, "You see the world differently. It's as if you become a totally different person."

Here's why I remember that: because to my shock, one of the teachers I didn't know (not the French teacher, certainly)  interrupted me. "Surely not," or "Hardly," or whatever she said -- her actual words are lost. I only remember the shock, what felt like a put-down. Not just disagreement or incomprehension (or the rudeness of being interrupted mid-thought), but a sharp rejection of some inmost, essential part of me I had tried to share, perhaps marking me as foolish, most unsuitable for this public honor of representing my school and my country abroad. What kind of person, after all, wants to be a different person? A loser, no doubt.

And here's why I recommend Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich. Her memoir of the year she spent in Udaipur, Rajasthan, learning to speak Hindi, captures the hard-to-describe sensation, inspiration, trepidation, exhilaration, of immersing oneself in another language, and the world that speaks it. 

Rich didn't go to India to inhabit a tourist bubble, staying with a series of host families and studying and making field trips with her tutors and fellow expatriates at the language school they'd enrolled in. She went out into this new world on her own, she met people, she made friends, she volunteered at a school for deaf boys. She struggled to read the news, attended a literary convention, visited poor villages on a health care mission with a Brahmin nurse at Christmas time. She chatted up shopkeepers, she joined in the street festivals, she went to parties, pushing herself to use her new language to make real connections. Even, sometimes, connections that got her into trouble. Her high-caste Hindi teachers were deeply offended that she would want to talk to untouchables, for example. Lower-caste Hindus, and Muslims, were offended that she would want to speak in Hindi instead of English, which now represents a neutral zone between Hindu right-wing extremists and their opposition. The unrest following 9/ll, which happened soon after her arrival, complicated the challenge of navigating in her limited Hindi through a complex social scene.

Rich juxtaposes the sights and sounds and smells of this part of India, and her intense experience of culture shock, with a back-home investigation into second-language learning, trying to understand her struggles with her learning process from the angle of brain science and linguistics. Whichever way she looks at it, I feel vindicated. From the scientific viewpoint, for example, Rich found that second-language learning draws upon different parts of our brains than our native language. (And it's easier for this to happen when we're younger, which is why she struggled.)  A hefty majority of bilingual speakers say they feel they have a different personality in their second language. No wonder, when the language script we use actually shapes our perception of physical reality: In one fascinating study, Indian Muslims speaking Urdu (written right to left in Devanagari script) consistently skewed the mid-point of a line segment to the left, while Hindus speaking Hindi (very similar to Urdu, but written in Arabic script, left to right) skewed the mid-point to the right. 

And Rich's experience gradually led her to the insight of her motivation for this extraordinary venture: she was trying to become a different person. After ending a marriage, ending a career as an editor to strike out as a writer, and ending a long treatment and recovery from a cancer for which there is no cure, Rich was learning to live, as she puts it in her subtitle: "Coming Awake in Another Language." And succeeding. 

Wanting to be different, to explore a new language and a new world and open oneself to change, is not the mark of a loser. Not at any age.  BTW, I did win the opportunity to go to France that summer with the Experiment in International Living. (So did the principal's daughter.) It changed me, too.