“My village was very remote so basically to get to the main road you had to walk about three miles through corn fields and then if you wanted to go to the district town you could then get a bus. And the people in my village complained that they hadn’t seen any district officers since the British left because it wasn’t a popular village. It wasn’t on the road. It was on the channel but it was a poor village and it had been kind of decimated during partition so what had happened was that the Sikhs had moved in, Muslims had moved out. There was only one person in the village who could speak English, who was a Hindu school teacher, who had been assigned there and none of them respected him, so I really had to defend kind of a mix of Hindi and Punjabi, but they loved my being there. They thought the British were back. They put me in the rest house that the British officer used to occupy on the edge of the village and being conservative I wore khaki suits just to go riding with the Sikhs. In the morning the Sikhs would bring a chair out, a table, and then people would meet with me same way they did with the British and so it was kind of interesting for me. Some people, I guess, were in families. This village, I think, was so poor that nobody would have had room for me anyway.

I really studied colonial history and I really liked Sikhs. Again I spent a year there after so I don’t think it was arrogant on my part so much as a perspective, which is what Gaudino reinforced. And we had really effective, you know, conversations and interactions. It’s thereafter that I thought, “Um, they really think they had a British officer back because this guy wore khakis; he had these conversations; he’d sit at the desk in the morning; people came go up and talk with him, etc.” But I felt it was more about interaction and particularly with the Sikhs, understanding the village. There was the head Sikh who would come out every morning and then I think with his son. I’d ride in the afternoon. It was, you know, very much an organized society.

Gaudino’s visits were just like those of the villagers. What he’d do is he’d sit out with me at this table. We’d have lunch and he would ask questions. Probably the difference for him from the others is that I learned if you take a t-shirt and soak it in water and put a quart bottle of beer in it and tie it to one of the rafters and let it swing all morning in the wind it gets really cold. He liked that. He enjoyed a cold beer in the village.

–Bill Loomis '71