Free Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich Page A

tight." "
Shubh rati,
" she'd correct: "Good night." Through the force of rapid acquisition, the press of so many words at once, actual structures of words were being changed.
    Â 
    THE ACADEMIC YEAR stumbled back into place. Classes resumed—empty exercises, for the most part. From time to time, scientists conduct investigations into what effect sleep has on language learning. In one study I read, test subjects were seated before a speech synthesizer that added distortion to the words it reeled off. After a while, everyone was able to make the words out anyway. The group was then divided and one half sent off for a good night's sleep. The others had to keep their eyes open all night. The next day, when the groups reconvened and listened to a second staticky round, the rested could still decipher words; the exhausted were no longer able. This showed the "sleepers retained the ability to generalize," the team leader told a science journal.
    This showed they'd only kept it up for one night, I'd have added. Had they gone longer, there would have been plenty more the deprivation group would not have retained. Running on two, three hours sleep a night, too blasted from nerves and diffuse fear to go under for long, I found that most new words might have been Mandarin for all I recognized them twenty minutes on.
    My brain could digest nothing ordinary, not "
high," "stand up," "I must be going.
" It blocked the list of animal comparisons we were given, though normally those would have made an impression for the differences in anthropomorphism they revealed. But each time I saw in my notes that "
cowlike
" here was a positive quality, implying life-giving, or that "
doglike
" carried the implication of "dirty, goes about the street snatching food," I was like Chauncey Gardner in
Being There
again, mildly surprised and, for one brief flash, curious.
    Not every word crumbled on impact. Neurons that fire together, wire together, neurologists say, meaning that repetition is how the new gets fixed in the brain. "Evidence suggests words first acquired when you're learning a second language are responded to much more quickly, perhaps because they've been repeatedly used," the British psycholinguist David Green says. There are Hindi words from those days I used so often, they're hardwired for all time: "
terrorism," "fanaticism," "safety," "exploitation," "war.
"
    "
There is a deep bitterness in the minds of the Indian people. If the Muslim world disappeared, no one would heave a sigh,
" Vidhu, the teacher with the planed face, said in a monotone. The previous week's theme in conversation had been village life. "
You cannot know what a Muslim is thinking. Muslims act as one.
"
    "
One side American exploitation is whose democracy's cloak come dressed in. One side fanaticism is. War is inevitable.
" In a homework assignment, I labored to unscramble a newspaper story that, once I had, made it clear that American capitalism was as pernicious as Islamic fundamentalism.
    Chuli:
"palm hollowed to collect water." I missed the gentle language from before, the one that fussed over when to drop the auxiliary verb. The Hindi I learned now was a Hindi of dark impulses and invasion. "We know how to say 'Terrorists killed the man.' We don't know the word for 'side table,'" Helaena said.
    I missed full language of any kind. During these months, I existed in half language. Early on, I'd made an effort to swear off English, and the results had been astonishing. In no time, my English had become lumbering. In the Cyber Planet café, I'd construct and discard the same e-mail again, frustrated by my lack of surety about anything. Was the man who sat on his haunches out in the driveway all night a servant or a marauder? Was Meena angry because I accidentally used the bathroom hand at dinner? It was as if the loss of cultural certainty I was experiencing was being reflected in my language. Was the way you said that in English "lively"?
    In Hindi, of course,