VIV Moments

Hometown

New York City

Joie de VIVre

Spending time in India. My book, Dreaming in Hindi, is about a year I spent living there, learning to speak the language and having all kinds of off-road adventures.

VIV Moment

There was a moment in my life when I realized how much language affects the way we think. This was a few months after I got to India, where I’d gone to learn to speak Hindi. Before I left, I’d known that there was no verb “to own” in any of the Indian languages, that things could only be “ke pas” — in your direction, but it wasn’t till I’d been there for a while that I saw what a difference a small shift in expression made.

The first time I had to buy something, I walked into the store and asked the owner in Hindi, “Are shoes in your direction?” They were indeed, and after some negotiations, a pair was then in my direction. The whole exchange seemed delicate, courtly. It took a while before the philosophy embedded in the phrase — material things are never truly ours — began to sink in though.

But there came a time, a few months on, when I looked around the room in the Indian house where I’d moved — a room that before would have seemed uncluttered — and suddenly felt ashamed at having so much stuff crammed in there. The other rooms in the house were all so spare and beautiful. Worse, the maid kept returning my trash to me. I’d try to discard a bum pen and it would land back on the desk. “Madame, you can refill it for three rupees,” the maid finally explained. She’d use my trash — discarded newspapers, crinkled wrappings — to line my shelves: a practical consideration but a nightmare look to a Westerner, until I thought about it. In a place where you’re not invested in your stuff, you don’t express yourself through decorating. All the same, I snuck it out.

I vowed that once I got back, I’d keep my rooms spare and beautiful, but I didn’t. Language shapes the way we think and now that I’m back in English, my things are once again possessions — I own them. Alas, they’re no longer transitory.

Photo credit: Adrian Kinloch

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