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The taxi deposited me in front of Comstock Place, where the Blake Fellows were housed.

Named after a nineteenth-century ‘racist nutjob’, as someone called him, Comstock Place was designed by an architect who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at the School of Architecture at Taliesin. Set back from the other structures on campus, and surrounded by a well-kept lawn with trees here and there, the building was designed to look like a stapler, the lower floor separated from the upper by a retreating stretch of space, glass-walled on all sides. In keeping with the principles of organic architecture, the building was constructed to look like it was rising from the ground, its upper and lower levels mimicking the open mouth of a creature emerging from a hole after years in hibernation. The open space between both floors was occasionally used for student events.

The day I arrived, there was a student in a blazing red WB College sweater standing in that open space, looking straight at the walkway as if she was expecting someone. Seeing her there, I thought the stapler was in fact a dragon, its red tongue about to project fire.

My Comstockian room was on the upper level, on the left side of a hallway with six single-room apartments, three on each side. It took me several minutes to make the move from door to room. I was intimidated by what I saw, what my American benefactors had placed at my disposal: a bed so large it could hold ten sumo wrestlers; a desk so finely designed I swore to avoid it lest I tainted its purity; a clean wooden floor that I thought was better admired than walked on.

Looking at the slice of luxury before me, I felt a symbolic response was expected of me. Perhaps prostrate myself for a second or two? Or kneel and knee-walk from door to desk?

I pulled myself together and ventured in.

The smell of cleaning detergent was in the air, a lemony scent that was more soothing than any harsh floor and toilet bowl cleaners I had known.

I sat at my new desk for a few minutes, looking out the window, where the stature of John Comstock was visible to the far right of the main entrance. I’d seen him earlier, when the taxi dropped me off, and I’d stood for a quick minute or two taking in the statue of the man after whom my place of abode was named. The sculptor had reproduced what must have been Comstock’s robust cheeks, his jaws propped by full sideburns. Sighting him again from a new height, he seemed diminished and alone, his bulky frame leaning a little backwards as if a small wind would tip him over.

On the far left of Comstock was the building I would later learn was the Humanities building, a muscular three-storey townhouse in the Second Empire style, its brick walls bright against the world of trees and lawns surrounding it.

The Humanities Hall, or St Pierre’s House, was left to the college in the will of its original owner, the French-American chocolate tycoon, J.K. de St Pierre, whose late nineteenth-century purchase of a small chocolate company in Dorchester made him one of the wealthiest men on the eastern seaboard. I knew the building was there. It was listed on the college Wiki page. I also knew that the Harry Putnam Library, famous for owning the unpublished manuscript of Dreiser’s Brother Kerry, was situated behind the humanities building.

As I was looking, drawn into my near mythical surroundings, I saw an empty bench between Comstock and the humanities building, and I felt an overwhelming urge to go outside and sit there.

I imagined more days ahead on that bench, me sitting at noon or early dusk, watching students going about their business, taking in the filtered air of my green surroundings, eavesdropping on two lovers standing nearby or listening to the sound of laughter arising from a group of students picnicking somewhere on campus; I imagined myself taking notes there, filling pages and pages with work and ideas for future work.

I kept my eyes on the bench, which now seemed to radiate an invitation.

I resolved to go out later and perhaps, after making my debut bench-sitting in America, stroll around St Pierre, towards Putnam, and on to the William Blake Art Museum, situated to the left of the Library. I thought this would be my first ramble in the New World, an experience I’d long imagined.

Just then, as if on cue, a bulky man appeared, riding on a motorised lawnmower.

He approached and circled Comstock as if performing some ancient ritual, and then wheeled away, ploughing on towards St Pierre, where he dismounted his mechanised donkey and hand-pulled a weed lodged too close to the edge of the building.

Following this act, which he executed with the practised care of a seasoned gardener, he sat on a ledge to retie his bootstraps.

This pastoral gesture, in this bucolic landscape tucked away in a bustling modern city, contrasted so much with the world I knew. I felt a slight headache picturing both worlds side by side.

I left the window and sat on the bed.

I kicked off my shoes and in no time the whole room reeked of my sweaty feet, a familiar smell that reminded me of who and what I was.

The holes in my socks were still there.

The smell of camphor on my old corduroy blazer, originally owned by my grandfather, was still strong, as if I’d just retrieved it from the box where it had lain buried for years.

I undressed and walked into the bathroom, to register the ritual of a first shower in the United States.

I looked at myself in the wide mirror.

I studied the ring of hair around my dark nipples.

I looked into my own eyes and searched them as though they had a message for me.

Just as I turned and stepped into the shower, I heard the blast of a horn, or something that sounded like one. It was so loud it penetrated the walls of the building, rumbling into the bathroom as if to rouse me for battle.

In my memoir-in-progress, I describe that sound as something out of a war from antiquity, ‘the rattling cry of ten Celtic carnyces approaching a Roman garrison’.

What it was, when I ran back to the window to see, was in fact a trombone, wielded by a young man who looked like he could be a younger J.J. Johnson, standing alone in front of Comstock, blowing away as though he was paying tribute to the man in stone. But it wasn’t the type of sound you made to honour someone, it was more of a call to arms, a series of sustained and piercing notes. For a second I thought it was the prelude to an open air performance, some American reproduction of a battle against the ‘Indians’ or the British.

Then they began to appear from all directions, chanting, ‘Comstock must come down,’ carrying placards, pressing towards the site where the call was still ringing out, only this time the player was mimicking the approaching chant. Soon they were standing in various positions around the statue, all in red, mostly young women, clearly students of William Blake.

I saw in that crowd all shades of hair colour – brown, black, blonde, pink, blue – and faces and complexions whose origins I could not place. I was witnessing, for the first time, a range of diversity that I’d never known, that staggered the imagination. It was one thing to know of this diversity and another thing to see it in person. I struggled to make sense of this motley collection of people united by their mission to take down the nineteenth-century ‘sexist and racist’. It was simultaneously beautiful and dizzying.

A small group was busy doing something to the statue. Soon it was clear: they had fashioned a noose out of bras and panties and hosiery and tied it around his neck.

I shuddered at this sight, and felt as if the noose was on my own neck.

I staggered back into my room, my heart beating.

I could still hear them outside. And I knew in my heart that there was something to celebrate in what they were doing – a sign of change, a transition from a world where one could launder one’s image after years of private or public atrocities, a tradition with a much longer history than Comstock, that was still ongoing, of which the protest was a healthy warning.

I was thinking of slave owners in the Caribbean and the Americas, violent imperialists in Africa and Asia, who plundered and maimed in their domains but used their wealth to court the polite society of Europe, investing in culture, immortalising themselves.

I knew this history, but I was physically and psychically feeling something different, a mixture of dread and embarrassment, as if I had stumbled on a scene that was not meant for me, that I was not prepared to see or conditioned to comprehend.

Later that evening, around 7 p.m., when the protesters had dispersed, leaving in their wake a statue of Comstock propped up on all sides by placards, piles of underwear, the noose around his neck, I heard excited voices coming down the hallway. I knew they were the other William Blake fellows who shared the same floor with me.

They paused midway, just outside my room, and carried on their conversation, clearly about Comstock and his legacy.

The thought of stepping outside to introduce myself was cancelled by the fear that I wouldn’t have anything to contribute. And judging from how they flowed together, it appeared they had figured out a way to bond. They had arrived before me, two days earlier, and I imagined they had established their lines of connection.

A voice that I would later recognise as Sara Chakraborty’s said something about Comstock’s ‘violent policies’ that had done ‘systemic harm to the female body for more than a century’. She spoke in rapid and fully formed academic sentences that blended what she knew about Comstock with ‘a broader awareness of the resurgence of hetero-epistemic violence in our entwined worlds of culture and academia’, footnoting her observations with a few remarks about ‘this exciting new wave of radical leftist resistance’ against ‘the spectre of right-wing fascistic implosions’.

I tried to follow her words but didn’t know how to plug into ‘the notion of protest as ontological’. I also got the impression that I ought to be aligned somewhere left of the ‘prevailing mood of the politico-sphere’, and needed to be more ‘radical’ and ‘engaged’.

I searched through my lifetime of books and every shred of experience that had defined me and I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything that was authentically Left or radical, Right or unradical. Perhaps there was a fountain out there where I could be baptised and emerge more Left of Right or Right of Left, ‘conscious’ of my ‘subject position’.

My idea of an American radical protest was ossified and romantic, involving pictures of people in long hair smoking marijuana, playing drums and banjos, and baring their breasts, reciting poems, dropping acid and reeking of concocted lotions and whatnots. But the protesters I saw might as well have been business executives, clear-eyed with state-of-the-art digital equipment.

As I processed the whole scene, I felt like a man trapped between two extremes: the moral obligation to jump in and support the anti-Comstockians, and the equally moral obligation to stand back and try to understand the bigger picture.

What bigger picture? I wasn’t sure. I lacked clarity. I was paranoid. I felt alienated by their language of engagement, by the things they knew that I did not, the world and ‘worlds’ they ‘explored’, and by the ‘intellectual itineraries that made the present moment possible’. I felt diminished, listening to Sara and the rest.

The surrealist short story I had planned to draft that night, a piece inspired by the empty bench outside, in which I imagined myself as an invisible black breast that ventriloquises the sexual fantasies of a nineteenth-century ex-slave roaming the streets of Boston, about the same time as Comstock’s reprehensible policies, was now shattered and replaced by a new consciousness of the world of twenty-first-century American protest.

I still mourn the death of that unwritten piece, which I carefully titled ‘The Boob, or the Silent Consciousness of a Black Victorian Tit’.

That night, still jet-lagged and exhausted from what I had witnessed, I ventured outside. The campus was as bright as day, flooded with blinding lights.

I sat on that same bench.

Someone – one of the protesters perhaps – had left a reusable Starbucks cup. It was the first real Starbucks cup I had encountered at close range, in person.

I picked it up. There was still coffee inside. I smelled it and inhaled deeply.

I tasted it. Its coffeeness was there, but there was something else.

I took another sip, and filed this experience somewhere in my memory. My first cup of coffee in the New World.