So I've been in India a solid five months now, but I just now seem to be getting the hang of things.

I told Amitava Kumar (of Vassar fame - he was my English major adviser) last week at the Jaipur Literature Festival (it was surreal to see him there) that I loved living in Jaipur, and I thought it was just gonna be one of those things you say to people to move the conversation along, you know, a blatant lie, but I learned as it came out of my mouth that it was true.

I understood 40% of the last movie (3 Idiots [SO GOOD]) I went to see.

I'm understanding a lot more of what the teachers try to say to me, even if I don't understand every word.

Our maid-cook, Sumin, is consistently challenging me with newer and more complicated topics of conversation, and while I don't understand every word, I'm understanding her *and responding successfully*.

I'm reading Devanagari MUCH more rapidly now. Like unless it's a combination of letters I rarely ever see together, I can read it steadily aloud. (Though I do need to pay attention when I think I know words, cause, you know, skimming in a language you don't know makes you sound stupid in class.)

My writing is moving more towards spelling mistakes and postposition confusion between को (to) and से (with, by, from, whole lot of other things). There is also the occasional "whoops" usage (forgetting to use the subjunctive with हो सकता है [it's possible], confusing word order when it comes to भी [too]), but it's much much better than it was.

And my best moment yet, and the most random, and the prompt for this post, was a conversation I was having with an autorickshaw-wala. I was speaking to him rapidly, mostly because mistakes can be glossed over when you speak quickly, which helps. He asked me why I told him to go through the neighborhood next to ours in order to get to ours. I told him that either way we went, it would be out of the way, because I pretty much lived in a straight line from where we were. And I had no idea what language I said it in. For a brief, beautiful five seconds, I spoke and thought in Hindi, which was of course the language my brain had chosen. And at the end of the ride, it legitimately sounded like he was praising my Hindi, instead of giving it lip-service like most folks do.

Holy crap. I think I'm actually learning this language. Another catch-up post later, probably tomorrow.