Book Excerpt: The many unlooked-for advantages of speaking Bangla and Sanskrit
Deccan ChronicleIn August of 1963, when I was twenty two, just one year past my graduation from Radcliffe College, I landed in what was then called Calcutta on my first trip to India. Eventually I left Shantiniketan to live in Calcutta, where I stayed in the home of Edward Cameron Dimock and his wife Lorraine and five children. There is one story about Ed Dimock that he told me, during the Chicago years, long after we had both left Calcutta, a story that I’ve always loved and that tells a great deal about the sort of man he was, though he always used to tell it as a parable about the importance of learning foreign languages well. It seems that on one of their trips to India, at the end of the long series of flights from Chicago to Calcutta, the Dimocks finally made their way to the Swinhoe Street house in the middle of the night.
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