Recalling how extraordinarily lovely and quaintly haunting she sounded when she sang this song I shared above, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” in our apartment in Baltimore, where I was doing my PhD in economics at Johns Hopkins.
The “she” was Dr. Julie Myers, then an MD student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the girlfriend of my roommate’s friend, Dr. Arun Thomas — an IIT-Madras alumnus doing his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Hopkins — who became our roommate for a brief while. Julie and Arun are now happily married, have two children, and live in Seattle.
The two of them were out-and-out devout Catholics: attending catechism, holding long conversations with priests, and so on. I remember Julie remarking to us once, “It is we women who civilize the men [when they fall in love with us].” (I do not recall how Arun took that.)
Arun could never figure me out and used to get thoroughly frustrated with my views and my outlook on life — as, I suspect, did most of my friends at Hopkins — and was more or less convinced I was a loony. But for the civilizing influence of Julie, I have no way of knowing how he might have been tempted to drill some sense into me.
To Arun’s credit, though, he was a fine guitarist, and he and another IITian, Kas (Kalyan Subramanian), a TamBrahm doing his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Hopkins, ended up singing “Temple of the King” in our apartment — a delightful performance.
Speaking of Kas, he was another one who was “concerned” about me. He had no girlfriend at the time, though he later told me he had been in some sort of relationship back at IIT, and he was already quite thoroughly “civilized” — being a TamBrahm, the weight of orthodoxy would have done the trick and snuffed out whatever was wild in him (with a little help, no doubt, from that earlier girlfriend). He took a more scholarly approach to drilling sense into me. He walked me to a café on St. Paul Street, where I lived, and told me, in great detail and in the engaging manner of the good raconteur he was, the fable of the ant and the grasshopper — how the grasshopper merely hopped about while the ant chugged away at it, and how, when winter came, the grasshopper suffered while the ant whistled under its breath. Needless to say, it all fell on deaf ears. My deaf ears.
Once, when I accused my actual roommate, “Sudha”kar Kadiyala, Kas’s classmate in Biomedical Engineering, of troubling rabbits in the laboratory where he experimented on them (something to do with their knee joints, since he was trying to come up with synthetic bone-graft materials), Kas immediately confessed his own unease with such experimentation (though I think he ate non-veg) and professed that after his PhD he would work on synthetic models rather than animal ones. To his credit, he has gone on to do exactly that — my last information on him being that he had his own startup working on a synthetic liver.
Talking of Sudha, I realized how small the world is when I realized the girl my med school classmate Dr. Bharat Misra started dating at his hospital in New York where he was doing his Internal Medicine residency, Dr. Sudha Bogineni, who herself was doing her residency in Radiology at the same hospital, was Sudha’s cousin. Of course, Sudha and I attended their wedding a few months later in New York, driven there by another med school classmate of mine Dr. Mahmood Ali Khan, who used to live in my lane in Hyderabad, in his red convertible sports car, who was doing his residency in psychiatry in Virgnia.
Then there was this thing which gave me a lot of mirth when my roommate announced to his classmate in Biomed Engg Allison Balogh, “Sam is planning to write a book”, Allison literally froze saying nervously something to the effect “Oh…” because clearly she was not sure what I might write about her in the book. Allison is now settled in Greece having married her boyfriend at Hopkins, a Greek bloke Anastasios who was Arun’s classmate in Chemical Engineering department. I still remember how Allison would complain exasperatedly that Anastasios when he was visiting Greece in the summer would literally not open his mouth on the phone when his mother was anywhere near him, which an American girl like her obviously could not understand.
One of the major, major “cultural shocks” I got in the US was when I attended a party at Anastasios apartment where he was staying with his roomies Arun and another Greek bloke who, too, was doing his MS in Chemical Engineering, and saw hanging over one of the doors a bunch of photographs in one of which both these Greek blokes were naked from the waist down with their male organ in full display in all its naked and taut glory, and all the women were just drinking wine and smiling and not uttering a word about such body parts. I thought, “Welcome to America”.
But towards the end of my stay at Hopkins, all my friends began saying they would “miss” me, and how I would figure in their conversations long after I was gone.
So in the end I realized I had not read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in vain, because I had managed to influence Kas with my constant sharing of my poetry with him — including a poem on one of Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts in which I took a dig at Sudha. Kas himself started writing poetry, and these lines of his are still in my memory: “I grabbed a fresh piece of underwear / And made my way downtown.” The poem was cute; I do not recall the rest of it.
Know Thyself 