Free Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich

translator, was asking when Alka had barked at her, "
Hindimein bolo":
Say that in Hindi. Turned out, we'd all been busted. At school I'd say "
Oh, yes
" when Vanita asked if I ever spoke English at home. Her tone had been so offhand, I never imagined the question was investigative. But Vanita was in charge of student-family relations, and she executed her duties with the utmost gravity. She'd been by on her motor scooter, not an hour before.
    Till then, I'd assumed Alka was shy. Now she became a Hindi commando. Returning home from a hard day at the mine, the poor Dads, in an attempt at conversation, were forced to ask four different ways if I believed in God.
Did I like Indian food? Were there arranged marriages in America? NO? Was I really forty-five? Why wasn't I married? Had I never been married?
The wives leaned forward, incredulous at the thought, while I lied and said no. But being divorced in India is suspiciously similar to being widowed, and widowhood here is a deeply reviled state. Widows must have done something so foul in a past life, the thinking goes, to have caused their husbands, their sole means of support, to die in this one. With sins that black, who's to say any overflow of bad karma won't go on a frenzied spin through the family? Given their radioactive pasts, widows can be stripped of all jewelry and cast out to beg. The social reckoning with divorcées follows the same line as with widows—they're both subject to a bad fate they brought on themselves. All around, better just to say "never married," which implied only "so ox-face ugly your parents could not buy you a husband" and not "past-life felon."
    Evenings, the Dads sprang pop quizzes. "
You ate what?
"Jain Dad i asked after dinner, and when I had trouble following, he answered:
    "
You ... ate ... daal.
" Lentils.
    "
I ate daal,
" I repeated.
    "
And ... also ... chaaval.
" Rice.
    "
And also chaaval.
"
    "
And what is this?
" No go. He was holding one of those thin wafers they always throw down first in Indian restaurants. No one ever orders them by name. "
And you ate papadum,
" he said when I shook my head. There were five children racing in and out of the house, batting a cricket ball in the drive, shouting over music videos. I marveled at his patience. But he was willing, and for once I was able.
    "
I ate daal and I ate rice and I ate papadum,
" I concluded, and everyone cried, "
You did!
"
    Afternoons, I'd make my way across the drive to the kitchen, where the wives were always amenable. The kitchen through the screen door would look beckoning, with Meena in her housecoat shelling peas on the floor and Alka by the sink chopping fennel. They'd look up when I entered; we'd have a companionable talk. Except I was a companion with one active verb tense, a language ed student tearing forward on one gear. The talk would rev, then I'd screech through an intersection, then we'd all fall quiet again. I hated the silences, reminders of how powerless I was, though had I only known, silent was exactly how I needed to be then.
    "If you take a child, six or seven, and put them in France, the child will go through a silent period," says Martha Young-Scholten, a professor of second language acquisition studies at Newcastle University in England. "They won't use the target language, then suddenly, after several months, they'll open their mouths and start speaking fluently, and everyone's amazed. Adults and teenagers often struggle against doing this. They think they have to try right away. But listening without speaking is important." Only months later did I find that the dread silences had allowed words to set.
    The Jains rallied, and soon in the manufactured infancy I'd entered, I was acquiring vocabulary at five, ten times the rate I had in my first. Words settled at the bottom of my brain in aggregate, they fermented, and not always to good end. "
Brash pati,
" I'd call to Alka, up on the balcony, where she waited nightly for me to come in: "Goon