AC_1965_Web

173 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K T R E I C H L E R went to Antioch). Sylvia took Indian philosophy with me at MCC and lived with me for most of the year at the ladies’ hostel in Guindy, a town two miles from the college campus (where the boys were), a mile from the train but only a stone’s throw from the infamous Guindy racetrack where men sat against the outer wall masturbating as we girls walked to and from the train. Before I left, Eva Manoff, my Antioch hall advisor, had given me a thick blank journal inscribed “For Paula to write in during her trip to India.” I filled up that one and have filled many more in the 50-plus years since then. To write this piece for the Class of ’65 yearbook, I dug out and read that first India journal, still in good shape after 52 years. Apart from the maddening passages of self-analysis and philosophizing, it’s a lively chronicle. Here’s the entry for July 17, 1962: As I sit here in the hostel enmeshed in white clouds of mosquito netting, listening to the cockroaches smack into the white-washed walls and the bat droppings patter onto our shelves, I realize India will take a lot of getting used to: bats and lizards and ants and bandycoots and rats and crows and frogs and squirrels and flies and mos- quitoes and mice—and snakes, which I cannot even bear to think about. Gradually I got used to the heat, the dinner table conversations about diseases and intimate bodily functions, and even the wildlife.One night I was alone in our room and got up to pee; as I squatted down over the porcelain hole in the floor I heard “eep eep” squeaking under- neath me. I jumped away, then saw it was a baby bat struggling to get out of the toilet.Without thinking I emptied the water can to sluice him (or her) away. But soon I heard “eep eep”; wet and bedraggled, he again was trying to get out but his little paws kept slipping on the porce- lain. This time I offered him a coat hanger to cling to and placed him gently on our balcony to fly away. Snakes were different. I never saw a cobra except in the bazaars, but just hearing them mentioned made me want to faint. Sylvia and I took rid- ing lessons on Sundays that usually ended with a pleasant jog through the Raj Bhavan, a lush adjacent es- tate. Right after the monsoon, we were told to ride in the open. The cobras, it seemed, take refuge in the trees during the rains and only come down when it’s dry again. As we rode along we could hear their soft plopping onto the grass. Meanwhile, my Indian philoso- phy plan wasn’t quite working out: the legendary head of the depart- ment was teachingWestern philoso- phy that year, so I took his year-long seminar in Hegel (Hegel on his death- bed: “In my lifetime only one man understood me and he misunder- stood me”). Indian philosophy was taught by the legend’s replacement (hand-picked, I’m sure, to underline his own irreplaceability) who spoke what the Indian students called“tele- graphic English” (as in “Buddhism have many sides”). I also took semi- nars onToynbee’s Study of History and on Warren Hastings, the controver- sial 18th century Governor-General of India. Sylvia and I tried to take Tamil but the instructor was so ner- vous by the proximity of young la- dies that he simply vanished.Which brings me to the boy-girl situation. During the first term, Sylvia and I were invited to join a group of grad- uate students in zoology and their teacher to collect insects and but- terflies in the tropical and subtrop- ical rainforests of South India. The trip was beautiful beyond belief, I wrote in my journal, and the trop- ical rainforest was thick and trans- lucent, like walking inside a gigan- tic cosmic green grape.There were many displays of social interaction to ponder.The trip was educational in part because it was coeducational, and that’s a bit rare. Sylvia and I very consciously kept from flirting at all with the boys, but our ease with them was obvious. When we got into the hills,we were the only ones who had packed warm clothing so we offered to loan out our extra pa- jamas, sweatshirts, and sweaters.The boys readily helped themselves,with many thanks, but the girls refused and were clearly upset by the shar- ing out. Sylvia and I never did fully understand what was going on—an- other India Rashomon experience. More clearly explained to us was another strange development.A., an older male student, was a nebbishy rather slow guy who was more or less ignored by the rest of the group. But on the tour we were to spend a night at his reportedly grand fam- ily home, and as we drew closer A’s manner changed: he became talk- ative, assertive, he preened, he strut- ted, he carried no luggage, and he pulled his shirt open to reveal the sacred thread across his chest mark- ing him as a Brahmin (the highest caste).Well,“grand” did not even be- gin to describe the vast family estate nor the house with its luxurious car- pets, marble baths, and myriad ser- vants—all of which he was slated to inherit when his father died.We girls were immediately shunted to a separate wing, and no chatting with boys was allowed. And, we learned, because A. was the oldest son, not even a mention of his name was permitted.The next day, after an as- tounding multi-course South Indian dinner, a bus arrived to take us to our next destination.When the bus ran out of gas on a ridge of rocky crags, we all got out and observed that A. was gradually reverting to his nebbishy identity.The rest of us took photos and gossiped about the ex- perience at A’s estate. Back in Madras, the monsoon came and was glorious. Each year it devastates the people who live on the river and along the coast but it’s what keeps the country alive. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z