Pratidinam

Or, "Every day".

I realize I haven't yet written much about school, even though it takes up most of my time (and *definitely* most of my energy) on most of my days. So because it's early in the week and I have yet to realize the vast amount of grammar and vocabulary (not to mention sung verses) which I must memorize by nine o' clock on Friday morning for the weekly exam -- and because I'm too excited about the election to buckle down on my homework quite yet -- I'm going to share what it was like to go to school today:

After pushing the snooze button a few times, I got out of bed at 7:15am and padded to the kitchen, where I grabbed the big cappuccino mug before either of my roommates could get to it. Filled it with illustrious Nescafe, and inhaled. I took my second mug back to my room, where I worked on understanding the short story that we had been assigned for our "Modern Literature" class coming up today. Often -- too often, perhaps -- one comes across words and sentences in Sanskrit literature that make one think "surely this doesn't actually MEAN what the dictionary says it does" or "there must be some contextual definition that I'm missing" or "I'm definitely breaking up the sandhi [what ties Sanskrit words together] incorrectly." And all too often, those words or sentences mean *exactly* what you thought they did.

Exhibit A: Last year's selection from the Mahabharata featured one character calling his enemy an "impotent sesame seed."

Exhibit B: Today's short story contained a paragraph about how the narrator's father would go to the temple every day after lunch and sit in the middle of the floor surrounded by villagers, singing songs while smoking a hookah.

Exhibit C: We're currently reading a Puranic story in which an old Brahmin man, afflicted by leprosy because of some serious evils committed in a past life, insists on visiting a local prostitute. His wife -- whose saintly devotion the story is supposed to encourage -- carries him there on her shoulders. On the way, however, he kicks a sage who, having been falsely accused of robbery, is sitting in the gallows. What's more, the "dvijottamah" ("the best of the twice-born," an epithet my teacher claims is used without a trace of irony) kicks the sage with his left foot. Obviously the sage curses him. The devoted wife protects him. The gods-- powerless compared to the faithful wife -- get involved. Stay tuned.

At eight, I walked down to the corner where my friend J, who is taking Marathi at the same institute, picked me up in a rickshaw. We drove out, first through the city, then through the slums, to Deccan College campus. My two teachers and my two classmates arrived with many a "suprabhatam, katham asi?" (good morning, how are you?) exchanged. We started our first class: reading the Puranic story cited above. No English is spoken in class; instead of each student translating a few lines into English, each student is expected to give a Sanskrit "anvaya" (a rearrangement of the words in the sentence into their proper syntactic order) and then a Sanskrit paraphrase that shows he or she knows the meaning of the lines at hand.

Two hours later, we break for tea. Often teatime is held completely in Sanskrit; today we talked in English about corrupt landlords and the older ages at which Indians are getting married these days.

Then it's time for grammar class. Often we spend grammar class drilling Sanskrit's infinite noun declension paradigms. This week, however, we've started studying numbers -- something most foreign language students learn a few weeks into their first years. It's one of the things I've always loved about Sanskrit, actually: the fact that I could say "Upon hearing the words of his beloved son Rama, King Dasaratha, whose soul was great, collapsed from his affliction upon the surface of the earth as if he were a tree that had been cut down" before I could count to ten.

But after completing a worksheet on numbers, we spent the rest of class time talking about astrology. It's no small thing, here.

Then we settled into "Modern Literature," the words of which--being written without sandhi and usually with good syntax--we only had to paraphrase.

We finish every school day reciting the shlokas (verses) and stotra (devotional verses) we're required to memorize each week. This week brings a super-long stotra written by Shankaracharya in praise of Bhairava, Shiva in his wrathful form. It's composed in iambic Something. On a wild guess, I wonder if it's called an "astakam" ("making eight") because there are eight triplets in each "paada" ("quarter of a verse", or literally, "foot"). [**Correction: this is NOT why it is called "astakam." Bad, bad Nell.**]

Then we walk over to the Marathi classrooms, where J and A are finishing classes with their two teachers. We all sit on the ground and eat delicious homemade Indian food with our hands from a tiffin. After lazing around for a bit, laughing and washing our dishes together, we split up into autorickshaws and head into our afternoons.

And now I'm here.

Go Obama!