sangeeta comes to vizag

My room in the ‘ladies hostel’ in Vizag is small, but has space enough for two narrow twin beds. Every other room of this size has two, or even three girls living in it. I have warded off the attempts by the landlady of this off-campus dorm housing to install a roommate in my room with the promise that my friend Sangeeta would be coming to Vizag and would stay there with me. I finally make good on that promise. We travel back from Hyderabad together, after my restful week there, and the very morning we arrive, begin working with the professor on Sanskrit.

She will be here for six weeks. This is very good news for me. The work I’ve done on my own here has been enough to sustain me, but Sangeeta’s company makes all aspects of life here that much richer. We each sit in the room while the other reads with our teacher, working on our own translation of following the other’s reading as time allows. We grapple together with the challenges of life here – getting our laundry dry in this monsoon weather, keeping the mosquitoes away and managing to stay healthy on hostel food. At the end of each day, days that are long and full of our Sanskrit texts, we hold ‘story hour,’ trading tales from our respective texts.