After the village I think we went to Calcutta. That is my favorite place in India because it’s like India to the third power where you have this urban center – it doesn’t work at all. We met with these people, these urban planners who go in and there were two Communist factions fighting it out with each other, one backed by the Russians and one by the Chinese, so there were bombs going off all over. Oh, yes, literally, and gunshots and all that stuff. And again, my roommate and I were relatively conservative and we used to go to this great Chinese restaurant. It only stayed open because — remember China was Mao — because it was over a temple and the Russian Communists didn’t want to attack it because of the temple so we could eat up there but Miller was kind of a crazy guy. I remember one time he came out and he said, you know, “I’m just going to stand here and let these demonstrators go right by me, the Russian faction.” So he stood out in the street. I said, “O.K. I’ll be over here to call the U.S. Embassy if we need them” and they parted and went right around him.

At the time the Embassy told us that if you’re in a taxi and hit somebody, because you’re white and viewed as American, just jump out the door and run as fast as you can because the taxi is going to be turned over and burned and all that. So we had these meetings at like the USIA, the library and stuff, and you could hear the bombs going off. But at the same time if you liked India, for all the reasons I described before, the intensity of Calcutta at that time was incredible, including the heat. I mean we’d go to the [air-conditioned] Pan Am office and just stand there looking at their schedules so we could be out of the heat for a while. It was 110 degrees. We’d just wander in for a little while. You know, 110 degrees, 100% humidity. Anyway, Calcutta remains my favorite city in India because of the intensity.

Bill Loomis '71