Hindi Conversation Partner

I met Lila mid-day yesterday.

I had responded to her post on CL for a Hindi conversation partner. She married her radiology resident husband last year and moved from Chicago to Long Island via Manhattan and needed to polish up her Hindi before embarking on a journey to India this Christmas to meet his extended family on the outskirts of Aurangabad.

In my desire to keep a firm hold on my Hindi, I thought it would be great for us to work together towards polishing the language of our people. She's Gujurati so her struggles were that of a native Italian learning Spanish--a fight to realize that the similarities in grammar don't extend to vocubulary.

We were supposed to meet at Cafe Cluny but felt it too fancy and walked over to a quaint coffee shop on Jane St. where she had the coconut lime sorbet and I enojoyed a mango cardommon sorbet.

She was impeccably dressed in grey, lightweight pants, a black, lace camisole carefully hidden under a sharp black vest with deep, faux-croc, purple heels and chandelier earrings. Her make-up was smoky for day with the kohl lining smudged at the edges of her large, almond eyes. Her grey-green colored contacts glinted as she gesticulated gracefully telling me her life story. She had that generic Gujurati bone structure: slight in height, light in weight, and the propensity for thickness in the middle.

I felt dowdy beside her in my careless white tee atop a black skirt lined in sweatpant material with a cursory ruffle to dress it up. Even Anthropologie flip flops on gold-painted toes felt uber casual. My thick rimmed, I'm-a-grad-student glasses perched high on my nose, void of earrrings or jewlery I easily doubled her in size but halved her in style. I don't often find myself drawing these superficial comparisions but something in the humid air made me realize that where I sweat buckets she doesn't so much as perspire. Ah the curse of my south-indian heritage. My people didn't crunch numbers but worked in the fields and filled their bellies with the rice that grows in the paddies.

She was my age. She worked in finance. She was married. She wanted children. She lived in Long Island. She missed her mid-western family and elements of her single life. She was unlike me in almost every way but our tangible Indian hue and desire to communicate in the tongue of our ancestors.