Interviews with the Author
“What a second language does to the brain”
— A podcast conversation.
“What Goes Up”
—Podcast of a story the author told at The Moth.
A Q&A with the Author
Let’s begin with, why Hindi? What made you decide you wanted to learn Hindi?
You know, it’s funny: the book took me eight years to write and in that time, my studying Hindi went from being a kind of odd thing to do to being not that uncommon. The main reason was the US government boosted funding for what are now called “critical needs” languages—Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, among others. Nowadays, I run into a lot of college students and people in their twenties who are learning Hindi. The junior year abroad has switched from Paris to Jaipur.
In my case, I took a lesson after a fast trip to India for The New York Times. I was doing it on a lark, really, but I fell in love with all the found poetry that always exists for a short time when you’re learning a new language. Everything seems lyrical, until you’ve said the phrases a bunch of times, and then they’re ordinary, same as for everyone else. But for a time, it’s like you’re speaking in poetry. I loved that in Hindi, night didn’t fall, it spreads, that when you sunbathe, you eat the sun. That the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same: kal, from Kali, the goddess of death and destruction. There’s a philosophy embedded in there—it’s only when you’re in today, aaj, that you’re here; if you’re in yesterday or tomorrow, you’re in blackness. Though there’s another way of looking at it: As Salman Rushdie said, “No people whose word for yesterday is the same as tomorrow can be said to have a firm grasp of time.”
At what point did you decide to go all the way—to go over to India and learn Hindi?
Really, it was when I realized that I could—that this was probably going to be the only time in my life that I could take a year off and do something like that. I had, around that time, been getting a personal jump on the recession—I’d recently lost a job, I was watching the business I’d been in and loved, magazines, begin to crumble. My world had been turned upside down. Compounding that was the fact that in the decade before, I’d gotten smacked around twice by breast cancer. I barely recognized my own life anymore. Or the way that I put it in the book was, “I no longer had the language to describe my own life, so I decided to borrow someone else’s.”
I wasn’t tied down to a job and I wasn’t just then in a relationship, and it began to dawn on me that kind of freedom could be an opportunity. So when I heard about a Hindi study program in Rajasthan, I decided to just hold my breath and leap.
Did you go over knowing you were going to write a book?
I did have an idea I was going to. I’ve always loved immersion journalism, where the writer plunges into an experience for months and reports back—books like Ted Conover’s wonderful Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. I wanted to do something similar to what Enrenreich or Ehrenreich did, make myself a test case in a particular world. The book I ended up writing does that, but it’s also hugely different than how thought it would be when I was heading over.
How so?
On my way over, I was imagining this refined, scholarly year. Actually, I dunno what I was thinking exactly—I had this half formed idea that I’d be lounging around on pillows discussing eternal truths in Hindi with gurus or something. I was, though, overlooking the fact that I still didn’t have a handle on how to say “Please pass the salt.” More to the point, I didn’t have a clue that the year would insist on turning itself into a whooping Bollywood movie every half hour. It became difficult to write an erudite tome when one of the students was making death threats to another student in his Hindi journal. One of the teachers was plotting to murder another teacher. A naked photo scandal, rampaging princes from Jodhpur dressed in jodhpur pants running around, Michael Jackson impersonators traipsing through—that year would not calm down. But too, there was a serious and ultimately terrifying aspect to it.
You write about getting assaulted several times.
I was punched to the ground a couple of times, yes, as sectarian tensions in my town began to build but really, that was the least of it. What happened was, on the fifth day of classes, the World Trade Centers were attacked. All Westerners promptly fled, except for our small group and a few expats. With the Westerners cleared out, the town reverted to its medieval Indian roots. It was like being cast back in time, except for one detail: the anti-Muslim sentiments that flared up after 9/11 began to swell. Then they spilled over.
In Gujarat, right?
To a lesser extent, also in Rajasthan, but yes, definitely, in the state of Gujarat, not far away. A terrible slaughter happened there. Nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed, in unthinkable and grisly ways. There’s a lot of evidence the state government was behind all this, that they planted false stories in the papers about Muslims killing Hindus to incite old hatreds. It was almost viral, the way the rumors spread.
You write a lot about that, about how language is catching, literally, in a corporeal sense.
Yeah, the book does keeping returning to that, to memes and the way we catch language—quite literally, some linguists now think. I couldn’t believe how, after a certain point, Hindi just kind of seeped in—I knew words and couldn’t say how. Or how, as it did, my perceptions of the world changed. I write a lot about that too: how a second language changes you. The experience I had in India with language was so profoundly transformative that when I got back, I spent several years investigating neurolinguistics to try and find explanations for what I went through. The book, in a way, is a double immersion, because it also plunges you into the science of language, a field that’s really pretty fascinating. There was one study I found, for instance, that talked about how when absolute rank beginner French students had been taking lessons for eight weeks, they were shown a list of words. Some of these were French and some were made up. When asked to say which were which on paper, they got about 50 percent right. They guessed. No big deal, totally expected, except for this part—the linguist conducting the test had wired them up to a brain scanning machine and the scanner was showing that their brains knew the answers. They were flailing around and their brains were getting it right. It makes you wonder: what else do we know that we’re not aware of?
Learning a second language really does alter you. You’re agreed to take in a whole other world in. When you do, your old world can’t be the same.
How are you different?
When I came back, I remember, I was so changed that the first afternoon, I sat there stiff backed on the sofa in my living room, completely intimidated by my own apartment. It looked like someone so much smarter and more sophisticated than I was had decorated it. I was almost worried that person was going to come in and find me and order me to leave.
The experience of going into a far language strips you down, and in the long run, when you emerge out of that tunnel, find yourself back home, an extraordinary thing will have occured: a stronger core self has formed. You become who you should have been, or at least that’s what I found. But the process, which is profound, can be terribly disorienting.
In India, nothing about me translated. Because I got so deep into the langauge, I could tell how much I didn’t compute over there. Women were veiled and living behind closed gates. They didn’t work. They were grandmothers by 45. And here I was, divorced--that made no sense; with a career—a what?; a home owner in some misty distant land—you own a home and you are not married? But who gave this thing to you? It was even strange that I was speaking Hindi. My teacher said, “The first time I saw a Westerner speaking Hindi, it was like seeing a chicken barking,” and I was a barking chicken. The only thing I found would translate about me was goodness. I was teaching in a deaf school and people could see the goodness in that. They’d say, “See? We think Americans are bad, but they’re not all. Some of them help deaf boys..” It was alien for me, coming from New York, to be praised for goodness. That quality ended up getting amplified and since I’ve returned, I find it still is.
The last thing I ever thought would occur when I took that first Hindi lesson was that I’d end up kinder, sweeter, and calmer. But heck, anything can happen when you take a leap of faith. And I’m glad that’s what did.
Click here to listen to another interview.
© Katherine Russell Rich 2009
