Saf Nahi Hai.

Language acquisition is a strange thing. How did I ever learn the difference between the words this, that, these, and those when learning to speak English when the Hindi equivalents, यह, वह, ये, and वे are a mind-boggling, daily torment to me?

I'll withhold the urge to tell you how I feel about prepositions.

I've been in class here for about two weeks. Prior to this program I had had one semester of Hindi which was last year when I was abroad in Hyderabad. I recall learning a lot and feeling pretty successful in the class; unfortunately, in the year between then and now I seem to have forgotten everything. It was for this reason that I felt it would be fine for me to start anew as a beginner Hindi student. It only took a few days for the language to start coming back to me, however. Suddenly I could remember random bits of vocabulary, various rules on verb conjugation, and even those damn prepositions. My beginner classes began to seem too slow. The issue then, was that most of the students in the intermediate class had had at least a year of Hindi study and unlike me, they remember all of the things they've been taught. I found myself in limbo straddling the boundary between beginner and intermediate and my professor suggested I give intermediate a try. "Challenge yourself," he said.

At the risk of brain aneurysm I took his suggestion and have been sitting in on the intermediate classes this week. While in beginner I was applauded for properly counting to ten, in intermediate I get eyes rolled at me for not having memorized the past-progressive tense second-person conjugation of the verb, होना, "to be." "Saf hai? Saf hai?" (clear? clear?) the teachers keep asking me after rattling off an hour-long lesson in rapid Hindi. "uhhh...kyaa?" I'm holding out on the hope that I will miraculously wake up fluent one of these mornings and waltz into class reciting prose from the Bhagavad Gita. Until that day, say a prayer from my brain's left hemisphere.
All wound-up with Hindi Grammar Anxiety, I decided to seek some spiritual cleansing today at a yoga ashram. One of my fellow students found a little yoga center down the street and told me about it and today after class I ventured there on my own. It looked strikingly like the yoga center at the University of Hyderabad where I did my rigorous five-days-a-week-at-6am yoga course last year. Hard floors, rickety ceiling fans, weird charts and paintings on the walls, and not a designer yoga mat or lululemon logo anywhere in sight.
When I entered the building I was beckoned into a dark office where a very old man and woman asked me questions about myself in broken English before finally showing me to the yoga room. There, I sat down on the wool blanket-covered floor as a few more students trickled in. The class ended up being a few middle-aged women, a very old man, myself, and a little girl who looked to be about 8 and thought the sight of me was hilarious. This is unlike my class in Hyderabad where I was one of the only women. Also unlike Hyderabad where I was taught by a large, hard-of-hearing old man (we called him "Old Man Yoga"), this teacher was a soft-spoken young woman.

In my experience, yoga in India bears only vague similarities to yoga in the USA, and this class was no exception. A few poses that the teacher wanted us to do were ones that my American teachers would tell you are sure ways to tear a roatator-cuff or hyperventilate. Regardless of the differences, I guess it was apparent that I know a bit about yoga. A few poses into class the teacher stopped, looked at me, and in a very surprised tone said, "You have practiced yoga very much before, no?" I told her, actually in the USA I am a yoga teacher too. A gasp from the room.

After class, the teacher called me over and asked me all kinds of questions about myself and about yoga in America. I told her about all of the time I have spent in India and she asked why my Hindi was so bad. Regardless of my obvious awkwardness and terrible Hindi skills she repeatedly insisted that I must come back to the ashram to teach a yoga class.

On my way out another old man appeared from the woodwork to call me into another dark little office to have me sign my name on some papers with questions like "are you unmarried?" and "What is your father's name?" After this, he sold me a monthly membership (I didn't ask for this, but I don't think he would have taken no for an answer). He stared at me intently through his inch-thick lenses as his younger counterpart pointed out that I hold my pen very strangely. Then the three of us sat silently for a long time waiting to see if there was anything else to be said. Finally, the bespectacled man told me very certainly that "Tomorrow you are came again at 5:30!"

Dare I?