An hour’s bus ride from New York brought me to Princeton. Unlike in Indian colleges where old students make it a point to be nasty to newcomers, I was immediately made welcome. A senior student had been deputed to familiarize me with the campus. He met me at the bus stop, took my suitcase from my hand and showed me to my room in the hostel where I was to stay. He showed me where the loos, the showers and the cafeteria were located, then brought me back to my room and told me where I could find him if I needed further help.

Before I unpacked, I recited the Gayatri mantra. I took a shower and changed my clothes. The student who had taken me round the campus took me with him to the cafeteria. There was a long queue of boys, girls and teachers waiting for their turn to be served. My guide pointed to several distinguished professors, two of them Nobel Laureates, who stood in line behind us. I was not familiar with the kind of food being served but I knew Americans were cow-eaters, and I could not tell beef from other kinds of meat. So I stuck to vegetables, mostly mashed potatoes, carrots and beans, which were all quite tasteless.

We shared our table with other students. Introductions were made. Since they found my name, Mohan Kumar, too much of a mouthful, from the very first evening they began to call me Mo. They assumed that since I had a full scholarship, I must be bright. After dinner a group of them including a couple of girls who were also newcomers were taken round the campus. What beautiful buildings! Some looked as ancient as the Cambridge and Oxford colleges that I had seen pictures of, others seemed to be made of steel and plate glass. There were tennis courts, baseball stadia and football grounds. And everywhere stood huge trees—oaks and beeches. The maple leaves had begun to turn a copper colour. I knew I was going to love the place.

I found Americans very easy to get on with. They were open, frank and aggressively friendly. They were without guile and only lied to avoid hurting people’s feelings. I soon discovered that as a nation Americans had more to them in inventiveness than any other people I had known. There was a six-storey building in Princeton, designed by a Japanese architect. When they found it was too close to the road, they simply raised the entire structure from its foundations and placed it in its new site without disturbing even the furniture and fittings. Near one of the students hostels there was a lot of vacant land. They thought it would look nicer if it was a forest. No problem. They excavated huge pits and planted half-grown pine and fir trees in them, and in a month they had their forest. A month later birds were nesting in the trees. Which other people could do such things?

Princeton offered a lot of courses. Since business management and computers were my main subjects, I was left with many options. I decided on international affairs and comparative religion as additional subjects. I was expected to attend these classes once a week. The rest of the time I could concentrate on my main subjects.

Within a few months of joining the university, I had made some good friends. As I have said, I had no great interest in sports, but my American friends were determined to reform me. They persuaded me to take up games. I gave in, and decided to try my hand at tennis. What followed the first game changed the course of my life.

After sweating it out on the tennis court, I went along with the boys to take a shower. I was shocked to see them strip naked and exchange obscenities about the sizes of their penises as they soaped themselves. I had never exposed myself to anyone before. Very reluctantly I took off my shorts, wrapped a towel around my waist and stood under a shower.

‘Hey ho! what are you hiding behind the towel?’ yelled one of the boys. ‘Or don’t you have anything there?’ Very gingerly I undid my towel and quickly positioned myself under the shower, hoping for some cover in the spray of water.

‘Holy Moses!’ cried the boy. ‘Look at this one. A real Hindu lingam.’

I became the centre of attention. Indeed my penis was thicker and larger than that of any other boy, white or black.

‘You measure this thing with a tape and send it to the Guiness Book of Records. The biggest doodah in the world,’ one fellow shouted.

‘Ever put that inside a pussy?’ asked another.

I knew what he meant but refused to answer what seemed to me a very vulgar question.

Soon my private endowment became public knowledge. ‘He’s got the biggest dong on the campus,’ they said behind my back. One evening a boy asked me the Hindi word for it.

‘Lund,’ I replied.

‘Sounds Swedish,’ he remarked.

‘Also Laura.’

‘Sounds like a girl’s name.’

I offered a third choice: ‘Lullah.’

‘That sounds better than prick or dong: prick makes it the size of a pin; dong something limp and hanging. Lullah is masculine and upright.’

From the boys tales about the size of my penis travelled to their girl friends. It was hardly the kind of thing I would have liked to be known for in the university. But it paid dividends. Girls were curious to see what their boy friends had seen.

By now I had started going out with girls. It was the done thing, though I felt a little self-conscious in the company of white girls. Then, by sheer luck, I ran into Jessica Browne. She was a sophomore, a year senior to me, and the best woman tennis player in the university. One afternoon after I had finished my game I watched her practicing with the coach on the neighbouring court. What a figure the girl had! Tall, slender and chocolate-brown. A big bosom, narrow hips, protruding buttocks and long athletic legs. She sprinted about the court like a panther. I was entranced and gaped at her open-mouthed. When she finished playing with the coach she came up to me and asked, ‘Like to knock up with me?’

‘I’m a novice; I started to play only a few days ago,’ I replied.

‘Nevermind,’ she said taking my hand and hauling me up on my feet, ‘I’ll teach you.’

I made a fool of myself. She stood in the middle of the court and gently patted the ball from side to side and made me run like a rabbit till I ran out of breath. ‘You play with me a few afternoons and you’ll pick up the game very fast. There’s nothing much to it,’ she assured me.

We introduced ourselves, and she promised to meet me at the courts every afternoon. I looked forward to the ten minutes of coaching she gave me every day. We became friends. Jessica became my regular date. Almost every evening after a session on the tennis court, followed by supper, we went for a stroll. We held hands at the pictures. When saying good night, we started with a peck on the cheeks, progressed to kissing on the lips, and then full blooded mouth kissing—she would roll her tongue in my mouth. She sensed that I lacked the confidence to go further and decided to take the initiative. She asked me to have a drink with her in her room. By now I had started drinking a glass or two of beer every now and again. I went to her room. She greeted me with a lusty French kiss. I got worked up. ‘Jessica, you have a beautiful figure, the best I have ever seen,’ I told her.

‘Want to see what I’m really like?’ she asked. And without waiting for an answer she slipped off her blouse and skirt. I had never seen a naked woman before. She certainly was beautiful in the African way: jet black fuzzy hair, lustrous eyes and protruding breasts with large black nipples. I was too shy to look below her waist.

‘Never seen a naked woman before?’ she asked sensing my embarrassment.

‘Never,’ I replied, ‘you are the first.’

‘Take them off,’ she ordered and strode up to me, her breasts bobbing. I obeyed and stripped myself naked.

‘Goodness gracious me!’ she chortled. ‘Where on earth did you buy that one? Black boys have bigger dicks than the whites but yours is bigger than any I’ve been. Are all Hindus as well endowed?’

‘I have no idea,’ I replied.

She clasped it in both her hands and asked, ‘Baby, you still a virgin?’

‘I’m a man!’ I protested. ‘Only girls are virgins.’

She laughed, ‘If you haven’t slept with a girl, son, you’re a virgin. We’ll soon take care of that.’

She took me to her bed, pulled me above her and directed my thing into her. I felt giddy and breathless with sheer joy as she took me in. She gasped with pleasure as I went right inside her. I could not control myself. This was my first time and I spent myself, moaning helplessly, almost as I entered her. I had never imagined sex could be so thrilling. But I wished it had lasted longer.

‘Nevermind,’ she consoled me. ‘The first time it is always like this. As we say, “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” But it’s not over yet.’

‘No,’ I breathed and dug my face between her breasts. It was not long before I felt my member stiffen and grow against her thigh. I fell on her greedily.

I was determined to do it again and again till it killed me. And so I did.

Boys were not allowed to stay in girls’ rooms after 9 p.m. The consequences of being caught after that hour could be serious. But neither of us cared about the consequences. We lay together all night. We made love four times before we dropped off. The next morning I walked out of her room carrying an armful of books to explain away my presence in the girls’ dorm. That was how I, Mohan Kumar, aged twenty, lost my virginity.

Those were blissful days. I could not have enough of Jessica; Jessica could not have enough of me. It was like a honeymoon without a wedding. After classes we went out together hand-in-hand for everyone to see that ours was a permanent relationship. On weekends we went to New York by bus and ate in Indian restaurants. On our way back we stopped at Trenton where her parents lived and spent a few hours with them. They were high school teachers and active in the movement for racial equality. They would have preferred Jessica having a black boy friend but were somewhat relieved to see that I was brown and not a white Caucasian.

I learnt a lot about America from Jessica when we went for walks in the woods. She showed me the cottage in which Einstein had lived. She told me the names of trees and birds: the bright red cardinal, different kinds of woodpeckers and squirrels. When we were drinking beer in a bar she told me about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the black Muslims; the Ku Klux Klan and the WASPs. She often got very worked up while talking of racial slights she had suffered. Once when she was out with a white boy, a gang of white hoodlums had shouted ‘nigger-lover’ and roughed up her companion; no one had come to their rescue. ‘Your best bet is to stick to a boy who is neither white nor black,’ I said to her, patting her hand. She was too angry with the world to respond.

Thus passed my first winter in America. Jessica and I trudged over paths covered with snow; when the snow thawed we saw the tiny green leaves burst on the bare branches of trees. We fed red and grey squirrels peanuts and saw snowdrops and daffodils bloom in campus lawns.

I thought my friendship with Jessica would hold as long as I was in the States. In fact, it did not last much beyond spring. No sooner had the first cherry and magnolia trees come into flower than our relationship soured. I noticed that Jessica got irritated with me over small things. Once when I invited her to come and watch me play a tennis match for freshmen, followed by a dinner dance for which I had bought two tickets, she flatly turned down my invitation. I was hurt. When I told her so, she snapped at me, ‘You Orientals are very possessive about your women. I’m not your property. I’m not your wife!’

We began to drift apart. After a few days we stopped dating. Then I saw her go out with another boy, hand-in-hand. I felt a stab of jealousy in my heart. Jealousy is something Americans disdain as a medieval emotion. You break up with one, you take up with another. Then another. There were plenty of girls around Princeton—big beautiful blondes with huge breasts almost bursting through their sweaters; petite Jewish girls with curly black hair and Oriental features; European girls and girls from Mexico and Latin America. Many were eager to date me. So I wrote Jessica off my list of dates and went on the rampage like a stud bull in a herd of cows on heat. I lost count of the girls I bedded the following spring and summer. Now even their names escape me. Only one remains because it was a most bizarre experience.