Our day suddenly morphed into a day that was much more than even the word “exciting” is able to describe. Like the coming of the rain, we were unprepared and unaware of what hit us. A basketball game, versus the Gurukul School 9th and 10th graders.
So here we are. Fourteen students from the US, all from different levels of skill and experience. We are thrown onto a court (dirt court, might I mention, with lines made out an unknown white and red goo) in a game. Oh, and one more detail. It had just started to rain. While we were trying to finagle lines for lay-ups and rebounds, after, of course, explaining what lay-ups and rebounds are, we started our team warmups. At this point, I had already lost my voice, but the game had only begun. Little did we know that our opponents had actually played basketball before, and we were also soon to discover that we should have reviewed certain rules. For instance, that you can’t stop and start dribbling whenever you want.
By the end of the game, we had tragically lost to these Gurukul students, much younger than ourselves, but our spirits were high. We were drenched from head to toe, with as much mud covering our faces as was on our feet. We were laughing and smiling, hoo-raa-ing and cheering. And to top it all off, coming in from the rain after our game, we indulged ourselves with a nice hot cup of chai.
This was, to say the least, an incredible experience and an extremely fun diversion from our regular Hindi lessons. The NSLI-Y American Basketball NBA Team became even closer as a unit and, once again, managed to get themselves out of conjugating verbs and trying to make sentences.
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