Read Online Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich - Free Book Online
Authors: Katherine Russell Rich
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English, though most people in the throngs couldn't have read it. By now, most Westerners had fled.
On the third day, there were tiffs. The Whisperer complained about having to watch the CNN loop again. "I just don't want to prepare anymore," she said when we voted to postpone school a few days more. She'd spent the downtime studying verbs. "I just think it's unhealthy to stay in this. All my friends back home are starting to get over it, okay?"
All my friends, in e-mails, had the slow tone of witness. "It's four days after, and everything below 14th Street is still closed," one wrote. Hearing about this thing from so far away sharpened worry, the way when you can't see a loved one who's ill, your distress grows more acute. But when friends asked, "Shouldn't you come home?" I said I couldn't. My truculent, sweet-talk city, tricks of will exposed: I couldn't look. "But the attack was there," I answered. Or I explained how the decades here were rearranged, were like barriers. "In Udaipur, we're muffled from events. This town is in a time warp, though it's hard to say which time. When neighbors wave and ask, 'Who was that who walked you home?' I think the fifties. When rickshaws whiz by, looking like Model Ts from the back, it's the mutated Indian twenties. But when I go to the doctor and find myself next to a tribal woman with an enormous gold nose ring, or when I talk to a Rajput, a member of the aristocratic warrior casteâthe men have knife-straight backs and villainous handlebar mustachesâI can see the links to the Middle Ages so clearly, it's startling."
I was muffled, true, but not so swathed I couldn't perceive the shape the twenty-first century had taken here. Anti-Muslim sentiments were running high. Down by the Clock Tower, boxes scrawled with slogans denouncing Pakistan had been set on fire. In Bapu Bazaar, they'd burned Osama Bin Laden in effigy. George Bush afterward, too, though. Osama Bin Laden, I heard for a fact, had ordered all Americans abroad killed on sight. I heard that the year before, they'd caught a member of a terrorist Islamic organization living just outside of town, and this was a fact. The man who told me repeated the name of the group, something like "Ul-ka-da." The borders had closed, all flights to the States had been canceled. You couldn't get out now if you tried.
Worry gnawed holes in illusion. For a time after I moved back in with the Jains, I'd watch Alka as she went about her chores and wonder,
Would she harbor us if it came to that? Would she, they, remain kind?
"What if we can't leave?" I asked the other students on a weekend when we all went away to Kumbhalgarh, a mountain resort run by the maharana's nephew, Aditya. This was when we were all still speaking. We were slouched down then in Helaena's room, watching
Star Wars
as she got ready for Aditya to get off work. "What if we're stuck?" I said. "Where would we get money?"
"The institute," Helaena told her reflection in the mirror. She turned, freezing the mascara wand in an exclamation. "Or we'd go to the embassy. They'd fly us out." But the marine who answered at the embassy when I later called to register our presence didn't sound like he was gearing up for evacuation. He couldn't take down information then; could I call back? "Well, ma'am," he said when I asked what we should do till his schedule cleared. "I would not go into a dark alley. Don't wear a shirt that says Tennessee or anything. And just don't act like an ugly American."
"I always make a big deal out of things in my mind, then they always turn out all right," Harold said in a pointed singsong. On the screen behind him, Darth Vader was choking a guy using mental telepathy. Earlier, on the terrace, a waiter had been flipping through broadcasts on the television above the bar. Hindi, English, Urdu, he made the news stutter as the same image showed on every channel. Men in white robes, their faces contorted, were kicking at a burning straw man. Its grinning
On the third day, there were tiffs. The Whisperer complained about having to watch the CNN loop again. "I just don't want to prepare anymore," she said when we voted to postpone school a few days more. She'd spent the downtime studying verbs. "I just think it's unhealthy to stay in this. All my friends back home are starting to get over it, okay?"
All my friends, in e-mails, had the slow tone of witness. "It's four days after, and everything below 14th Street is still closed," one wrote. Hearing about this thing from so far away sharpened worry, the way when you can't see a loved one who's ill, your distress grows more acute. But when friends asked, "Shouldn't you come home?" I said I couldn't. My truculent, sweet-talk city, tricks of will exposed: I couldn't look. "But the attack was there," I answered. Or I explained how the decades here were rearranged, were like barriers. "In Udaipur, we're muffled from events. This town is in a time warp, though it's hard to say which time. When neighbors wave and ask, 'Who was that who walked you home?' I think the fifties. When rickshaws whiz by, looking like Model Ts from the back, it's the mutated Indian twenties. But when I go to the doctor and find myself next to a tribal woman with an enormous gold nose ring, or when I talk to a Rajput, a member of the aristocratic warrior casteâthe men have knife-straight backs and villainous handlebar mustachesâI can see the links to the Middle Ages so clearly, it's startling."
I was muffled, true, but not so swathed I couldn't perceive the shape the twenty-first century had taken here. Anti-Muslim sentiments were running high. Down by the Clock Tower, boxes scrawled with slogans denouncing Pakistan had been set on fire. In Bapu Bazaar, they'd burned Osama Bin Laden in effigy. George Bush afterward, too, though. Osama Bin Laden, I heard for a fact, had ordered all Americans abroad killed on sight. I heard that the year before, they'd caught a member of a terrorist Islamic organization living just outside of town, and this was a fact. The man who told me repeated the name of the group, something like "Ul-ka-da." The borders had closed, all flights to the States had been canceled. You couldn't get out now if you tried.
Worry gnawed holes in illusion. For a time after I moved back in with the Jains, I'd watch Alka as she went about her chores and wonder,
Would she harbor us if it came to that? Would she, they, remain kind?
"What if we can't leave?" I asked the other students on a weekend when we all went away to Kumbhalgarh, a mountain resort run by the maharana's nephew, Aditya. This was when we were all still speaking. We were slouched down then in Helaena's room, watching
Star Wars
as she got ready for Aditya to get off work. "What if we're stuck?" I said. "Where would we get money?"
"The institute," Helaena told her reflection in the mirror. She turned, freezing the mascara wand in an exclamation. "Or we'd go to the embassy. They'd fly us out." But the marine who answered at the embassy when I later called to register our presence didn't sound like he was gearing up for evacuation. He couldn't take down information then; could I call back? "Well, ma'am," he said when I asked what we should do till his schedule cleared. "I would not go into a dark alley. Don't wear a shirt that says Tennessee or anything. And just don't act like an ugly American."
"I always make a big deal out of things in my mind, then they always turn out all right," Harold said in a pointed singsong. On the screen behind him, Darth Vader was choking a guy using mental telepathy. Earlier, on the terrace, a waiter had been flipping through broadcasts on the television above the bar. Hindi, English, Urdu, he made the news stutter as the same image showed on every channel. Men in white robes, their faces contorted, were kicking at a burning straw man. Its grinning
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