in love

1996. so this part is difficult to write. i fell in love with a guy. i called him A in an earlier installment of this story. he was an international student from India, a sophomore, who helped to organize all the welcoming activities for the 1996 incoming freshmen.
A. had that rare spark of organizational brilliance that made everyone want to follow his lead. he, for example, was the guy, who, as we were all standing out on the athletic fields during the bucket brigade challenge, said, why don't we dance The Macarena? and we did. a computer science student, he could dance and sing and loved theatricals of any kind. when he saw that I had a guitar in my dorm room, he instantly wanted me to play it.
"I'm not very good," I said, by which I meant that I played the guitar as a hobby and was not to be judged on the professional scale. I could play well enough a few Russian songs, and I wanted to play for him the Russian songs that meant the world to me, but first I wanted to establish the premises under which I would play the guitar for him: he had to get ready to be charmed.
"There's a good English expression, practice makes perfect," he said, handing me the guitar. From anyone else, I would have found that kind of response insufferable. Not only was he feeding me a platitude, but he was also refusing to understand me on my terms. He was refusing to say, "I'm sure I will enjoy whatever you play because it's you who's playing it."
I probably banged out a three-chord Vyssotsky song and passed the guitar to him. It turned out that not only did he play beautifully, he could also tune the guitar (which I struggled with). He was a little rusty, and nevertheless picked his way into a moving rendition of Stairway to Heaven. That sealed the deal. I wanted him. "Why don't you borrow the guitar?" I offered.
"Don't you want it? If you want to get better at it, you should really play every day."
"Take it," I said. "You're so good, and I love to hear you play it."
it turned out that he could really use it. there was some kind of party he was invited to or that he was organizing, and he couldn't invite me, because it was mostly for Indian kids, and anyway he invited me to a cricket match later, but warned me that I wouldn't understand anything, and i didn't. what i did understand was that he was brilliant at sports, too.
as a seventeen-year old I fell in love easily and constantly, but i fell in love particularly strongly with people who sent me mixed signals. A. seemed to enjoy my admiration, and he would on occasion invite me to parties and cricket matches and rub my shoulders and pat me on the knee. and then he would try to have a conversation with me about how he wasn't ready for a serious relationship and how in America there was such thing as casual dating and have I heard about it?
i knew the word from the English class and translated it to myself as roughly "seeing somebody you're in love with for a good long while with the purpose of finding out whether you two truly love each other and should get married." my heart overflowed with love and I said, yes, I've heard of dating.

Indian-Soviet friendship

in 1996, the vast majority of the international students at RIT came from the Indian subcontinent. there were some kids from China, Malaysia, Brazil, Turkey, but most people I met right away were from India. Also, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.
the heyday of the Indian-Soviet friendship had long passed, and I had not met a single Indian person in St. Petersburg growing up, but I did inherit the slogan of that era. "Hindi Russi bhai-bhai," I said to the Hindi speakers, without actually knowing what this means. to my Sri Lankan friend, I must've surely mentioned Prosper Mérimée's novella Colomba that, despite the similarity of its title to the capital city of Sri Lanka, Colombo, is actually set in Corsica. I had been a voracious but not an attentive reader.
luckily, my Indian brothers saw that I was even more confused than they were about finding myself in Rochester, and so for a while took me under their wing. I was invited to join them for meals at the student cafeteria, where Indian kids sat around a long table and discussed the inedible American food, the upcoming winter and how to survive it, the importance of separating lights from darks when doing the laundry, sneaking into Canada without a Canadian visa, etc. for my sake, and for the sake of the other international students who occasionally joined, the Indians stuck to English for a while. eventually, the conversation switched to Hindi, and I was left to ponder all I'd heard so far.
most of my new friends described themselves as being "homesick," and asked me if I were, too. they could not eat, they had trouble sleeping, they missed their mothers, they struggled in their classes where their instructors frequently refused to understand their brand of English. I, on the other hand, couldn't stop eating. having spent much of my childhood growing food, standing in lines for food, cooking food, i was beyond thrilled at finding myself at an all-you-can-eat buffet three times a day. before Rochester, I couldn't have imagined such thing existed. I couldn't get enough of whatever was being served. people didn't understand my English either, but i wasn't complaining. it was a foreign language to me that I had to learn from scratch. my friends had grown up speaking English and now had to conform to the slight but significant differences in usage.
soon enough my friends started to figure out life in America. they found places to buy spices and learned to cook. they treated me to vegetarian dishes that turned each pore of my body into a tear duct (i'd had no experience whatsoever with hot spices). they found the one movie theatre near RIT that once every couple of weeks had showings of Bollywood movies. they joined the Indian student groups and started playing cricket. I went to a couple of Bollywood movies and cricket matches, and then stopped -- but that's another story.
one of my best friends from that era was a kid from Sri Lanka. N. was a few years older, and his thoughtful questions about my parents and friends at home helped to guide me through what I didn't know how to recognize as homesickness and a form of depression. though eventually I figured out that Sri Lanka wasn't Corsica, and that it wasn't India either, I refused to listen when N. tried to describe his background to me. his family was Buddhist, and, armed with the vague second-hand knowledge of scientific Marxism, I insisted that all religion was a complete and total superstition, and so he should stop believing anything and start eating meat. we maintained an uneasy friendship by going out to watch sci fi movies and talking only about hypothetical faraway worlds and planets.