Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich Read Free Book Online Page A

of them there were—they always appeared in either fives or tens—and trying to keep up when they talked at once. Over dinner, they'd ask questions simultaneously or in round robin.
JAIN 1:
How much did you pay for the radio?
ME :
Five hundred rupees? No, I think it was six.
JAIN 1 (to the kitchen at large):
She is telling us she paid five hundred rupees for the radio.
JAIN 2 TO JAIN 1:
Five hundred?
JAIN 1: Haan.
She is telling us five hundred.
JAIN 3 TO JAIN 1:
Five hundred? I think she is telling us six.
JAIN 4: Haan.
Six.
JAIN 5:
She is saying six. No. Maybe she is saying five hundred sixty rupees.
(To me)
Are you telling us six hundred rupees?
ME :
I think that's what I paid: six.
JAIN 5: Haan.
She is saying six.
JAIN 1:
Six hundred rupees? She paid too much.
JAINS 2, 3, 4, 5: Haan, haan, haan.
She paid too much.
    The dinners I'd attended had been women and children only. The men ate separately, or they came home late, sometimes not at all. I saw the men so infrequently at first, in fact, I thought they had the same first name.
    "I'm living with two brothers called Raj in the state of Rajasthan," I gleefully wrote a friend, then learned they were actually Rajesh and Rajkumar. "Kingly" and "Prince," which, since Kingly was younger than Prince, led to further confusion. I tried appearance mnemonics, Jerry Lewis Raj and his younger brother Art Carney Raj, before settling on Jain Dad 1 and 2, their religion being easier to pronounce than their last name.
    The Jains were a joint family, a typical Indian arrangement wherein several nuclear clusters join together to form one sprawling household. With the help of the girls, I diagrammed them on Post-its. The family took up three squares, two more with identifying notes. Jain Dad 1 and wife Alka, bedroom upstairs; one boy, two girls. "Rajkumar: straight arrow"; "Alka: self-possessed, face like heart." Jain Dad 2, married to Meena, room off the kitchen; one boy, one girl. "Meena: rolls her hips when she walks, spirited," by which I meant tart.
    Meena's marriage, Alka's too, was arranged. "There are no love marriages here anymore," one of the girls explained, in a tone that let me know they were a poor idea, that's why. Meena's husband, Rajesh, was goofy and gangly and wore cherry red shorts. He was making a lot of snorting fun of my cultural exchange attempts, according to a fellow student who'd moved in upstairs. I kind of got that.
    "You bought a mobile?" he asked one afternoon, sliding the phone from my hand as I stood in the driveway trying for a connection. "How much did you pay?" he said. "You don't know? You don't—
hey!
" he shouted into the kitchen. "
Hey! You have to hear this.
" Although Swami-ji had put them under orders not to, the Jain Dads, Jain kids, too, often broke into English with me. Relieved, I'd answer in kind. Only the women, married out of educations, were sticking to the student-immersion plan, only because they had to.
    "Hey," he yelled. "She doesn't know how much she paid for her mobile!" The wives rolled out from behind the screen-door, stopped. "
Haaan,
" they said, tilting toward me like sea branches. "
Nahiiiin?
" They tilted back. Just then, the other student emerged and supplied the figure. Four thousand rupees, one month's rent, and the damn thing didn't even work.
    Generally, though, the men were otherwise engaged, at the marble mine they either owned or worked for. "
You are naukers?
" I'd asked, trying for "workers." No no no, they said hastily. "Servants" I saw when I looked it up. "Upper management" would have been a safe bet, for their house was a testimony to the fortunes of marble, charting the family's rise.
    One half, the first half built, was modest with scuffed floors and a few tiny bedrooms. Then ten, fifteen years back, the family had clearly lucked out, for the newer half was a Sector Eleven fantasy: gray-veined marble floors, zebra-striped marble baseboards, a serpentine marble staircase that spiraled above a sitting