Fans of Sujata Massey will be pleased to know that she's finished her tenth Rei Shimura mystery. So what's she doing for a change of pace? What can I say? Sujata is a class act.

DIARY OF A B STUDENT By Sujata Massey

"What do you teach?" asks the friendly fellow behind the counter at the university coffee shop while I’m stirring honey into my latte.

"Nothing!" I answer brightly, wondering if my ten gray hairs are really that prominent. The truth is, I’m very far from being a professor, or even a lecturer at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota: I’m just a student enrolled in beginning-level Hindi. It’s a class that should be a snap for someone with my kind of experience (trilingual) and age (classified). But I’m finding that, for some reason, it’s not.

A few months ago, I finished the tenth book in my Rei Shimura mystery series, I thought I deserved a break. I decided that for the next few months, all I would do was read all the books in my TBR pile and study Hindi. With my rug rats finally both in all-day school, the time seemed ripe to chase my dreams. So with the click of a few keys, I registered online for a fifty minute class running Monday through Friday from Labor Day to Christmas.

Classes at the U of M are usually large, but in this section of Beginning Hindi, there are only twenty other students — almost all of them brilliant teenagers. Being young and Midwestern, I’m sure these kids would never feel that way about themselves, but I think that anyone who can memorize the 42 notoriously similar characters of the alphabet in under two weeks has a lot more upstairs than I do. The majority of grades on the first quiz were above 95. I struggled valiantly with the quiz – thought I had my @#$% more or less together, after I finished it – but earned an 83. I had the same identical result on the second quiz, making me wonder: is 83 my karma? And why does my teacher call it a B plus? At a younger age, I would have been thrilled to ride the crest of a grading break, but now I wonder if the kindly plus designation was a reflection of my teacher’s wish not to embarrass her elder.

I snap out of it, reminding myself that whatever happens in this class (which I elected to take pass-fail), I will still pleasantly surprise relatives in India by being able to speak more than English the next time I visit. Finally being able to negotiate with cab and rickshaw drivers will be great, too. But my next trip to India seems a million months away, and I’m finding it nearly impossible to keep up with the class.

You know, I have the best intentions to study! I carry my textbook to my kids’ soccer and swimming practices, and page through it late at night, when I’m trying to stay up to let out the puppy to potty. However, I usually close my eyes and drift off. My days aren’t geared for studying because I’m also in charge of a gift-wrap fundraiser at our elementary school, copy-editing that last novel, driving to five soccer games a week, and doing all the laundry and cooking. I used to exercise for an hour per day, but that hour vanished to the same place that my creative writing and the TBR pile did.

My two worlds, domestic and cerebral, collided last night. It was a quarter to six, and I was attempting to shoe-horn the children, the puppy, his crate, my daughter’s new Miley Cyrus CD, a blanket for sitting on at the soccer game, water bottles, my purse, and the Hindi textbook into my car. The last thing I recall was placing the textbook on the Infiniti’s roof, because my hands were full. Of course, the book never made it to the soccer field. I retraced my route the next morning on foot and by car, but the textbook was nowhere to be found.

Losing the book was the crowning moment to a bad week. It seemed to represent, in one moment, what a failure I was at college. My husband suggested that I not waste another moment mourning my lost, marked-up book, but get a new one. I dourly predicted the student bookstore wouldn’t have any left this late in the term, and I’d be forced to peek over a brilliant teenager’s shoulder for the rest of the course. But it turned out that the bookstore had two copies left, so I bought the used one and still had time to grab my beloved latte. When I arrived in Folwell Hall a few minutes late for class, it turned out that I hadn’t missed anything important. The class agenda was to watch a Hindi movie. Fun!

As I drove home from the university fifty minutes later, spontaneously detouring to a Nepali café to eat chickpeas and rice and study for Monday’s quiz, I remembered an incident from earlier in the week. I’d been walking to class when I spotted my father—who still works at the university--heading directly toward me, en route to his office in Pillsbury Hall. I started smiling and waving, but the absent-minded professor didn’t even recognize me until I was close enough to embrace him. Laughing about it later, my father said to me, "I kept wondering, who is this new student who is smiling at me?"

And maybe that’s what the ultimate lesson of this year will be: that by going back to school, I can momentarily shift shape, whether it’s as an alien student in my father’s world, or a mysterious new teacher to the coffee shop owner. I’m not a mom at that moment, though I will be later on that day. It’s a bit easier to understand that it is a gift to have many people in one’s life, and many things to do.

Sujata Massey is the author of, most recently, GIRL IN A BOX, and the SHIMURA TROUBLE, March 2008 from Severn House Publishers. She’s heartened to report that her grade on the Hindi midterm was 91: an A-minus.

Comments

[mary alice at mystery lovers bookshp]

Welcome friend.
You are brave and beautiful and I am impressed with your a-
Love from all at Mystery Lovers

[Kathy Reschini Sweeney]

How wonderful to see you here!!

I have been a huge fan of the Rei Shimura mysteries since a friend chose "The Salaryman's Wife" for our book group - wow - was that ten years ago already? Can't wait for "Trouble" in March.

Any chance we'll see you in Pittsburgh between classes and laundry and soccer games?

If you ever get a chance to meet Sujata - don't miss it. She's not only a terrific author, but a wonderful speaker.

I am so impressed that you are tackling another language! Unless you count Pittsburghese (and many people do) I still struggle with one!

[Kerry, The Martial Tart]

Hi, Sujata! What a lovely blog! Learning new languages at any age much older than 12 is hard enough; I can't imagine tackling something like Hindi (I love languages, but stuck with the nice, simple Romance languages, myself).

For what it's worth, I teach college myself and love, love, love, love, LOVE my returning adult students. Now, I don't see all that many brilliant teenagers (I do get some). But even they simply don't bring the same sense of wonder and joy to the learning endeavor that the non-traditional students do. Bottom line -- they're not as curious, not as excited about learning something new, and certainly not as appreciative of the opportunity.

Unfortunately, it's also often the case that the non-traditional students have a harder time demonstrating what they've learned on exams. And that really sucks, because I know that my working Moms are getting far more out of my classes, and working far harder to get it, than those kids are.

I envy you the chance to study something new, and can't wait to read my next Rei!

[Nancy Martin]

Sujata, how nice to see you here!

After giving up writing romance novels and before I found my footing in the mystery world, I decided to take some graduate courses in arts management, thinking I might get a job at a theater or a museum or some such. The first class I took---OMG! I opened the book and realized I actually needed to memorize stuff from the text! A lot of stuff! Reading the first chapters, I was nearly paralyzed because I could not make my brain function the way it did years ago when I was a real student. But gradually I managed to get those old cerebral pathways to cooperate. Good for you for making this effort! Maybe I should take that course in Italian after all . . .

Thanks so much for the brilliant guest blog!

[Harley]

Sujata, you are my hero!

I was at a cocktail party last night and a fellow mom confided to me, "I will never get those brain cells back, the ones I lost nursing the twins that first year" and I thought, "aha! THIS explains me." I breezed through Russian as a college freshman, and I was smoking pot half the time while I studied. Now? Nyet. I'm darned lucky to remember English.

[Elaine Viets]

Welcome, Sujata, and thanks for a lovely blog. I can't imagine tackling Hindi as a break from work.

[michele]

Hi Sujata! How wonderful to see you here. Like everybody else, I'm flat out impressed that you're tackling such a difficult language, but if anybody can master something crazy complicated, you can.

I agree the old brain cells don't work like they used to. Last week I judged a moot court on the Guantanamo detainee cases and I had to absorb a lot of complicated case law seven years after leaving the practice. I felt like I should pour oil into my brain to get the rust out. Where do the smarts go? Is it kids? Is it that we're multitasking too much, or that we've become too specialized in our tiny areas of expertise and forgotten how to learn? Honestly, it made me want to study more complicated stuff so I don't lose it altogether. We should all take your example to heart.

[Mary Storyteller]

I think it's harder to incorporate new material because our brains are already so full, and there are no new memory chips available for us. I do admire your tackling a new subject and returning to campus. I wonder if perhaps more verbal practice might help, and if you drilled vocab. with your children, they would be learning a few words also, and wouldn't that impress your family!
Good luck with the studies, and I'll be off now to find some of your books!

[Elaine Viets]

Sujata, it's difficult to believe you've written ten mysteries. It seems like just yesterday we were cheering you on for your Malice Domestic award.

[Karen Olson]

I'm always in awe of people who go back to school, since I was an average student and when I graduated college couldn't even imagine getting anything more than a B.A.

I do understand how it's nice not to be a "mom" sometimes, since that can completely take over our identities.

I, too, love your books and have read every one and anxiously await the new Rei adventure this spring!