Winter travel special: Jerry Pinto sees life in the white and quiet world of Wellesley

Perhaps it is because I am jetlagged. But I remind myself I have theplas in my suitcase and sit in my warm room which has French windows that will allow me to watch the blizzard blow in. When I wake up, eight hours later, everything is white.
The world is white in a Wellesley winter. It is white with snow and it is white with white people living white lives. I walk through the town to the college and there is no one on the streets. I think back to my first stint in London in 1999, as a Chevening scholar, a sop for mid-career journalists organised by the British Council. I arrived in March and it was supposed to be spring. The wind sprang up from odd corners as I made my way to a friend’s house for dinner and made away with the tip of my nose. I could no longer feel it. But that didn’t worry me so much as the emptiness of the streets on a Sunday evening. I thought: trouble. When the streets are empty in my home city, it’s because there has been a riot or a pandemic. (In 1999, we hadn’t heard of the latter and had had our fill of the former.)

18th Century Artillery and Tents

I discovered why Wellesley is a ghost city for the pedestrian when I left early one morning. At 7 am or thereabouts, a cavalcade of cars sets out from homes across the town. The wage earners are going to work; the house spouse will wave from the
bay window.

The college campus is beautiful. I understand suddenly what Indian students are up against when they arrive in the US for their post-graduate degrees. This undergrad college has a library the size of St Xavier’s College in Mumbai with its own conservation lab. There is no limit to the number of books and films and tapes I can borrow. Wellesley has its own museum, the Davis and they have works ranging from a small Cezanne to a Louise Bourgeoise.

One night there is a cocktail party for Margaret Atwood who has come through. The professors stand about talking about the lack of funds.

I suggest: ‘Sell the Cezanne.’
There is a startled silence and then some hesitant laughter. Could this be, the white women are thinking, a sampling of
Indian humour?
They see I am serious.
“Isn’t that why you have a college? For the students? If you have an asset like a Cezanne, sell that, use the money to fund the teaching.”
They look away. He is not funny ha ha, he is funny peculiar, I can hear them thinking. But I mean it: I should sell that Cezanne like a shot if it meant a better education for…
For the very privileged? This is an expensive college in a country whose education system bankrupts its young. There are many Indians here, many Koreans, almost no Blacks and no Native Americans. Not in my semester, at any rate.
I wanted to say: Sell that Cezanne and fund some kids.

But I enjoyed my time at Wellesley. The centre was empty but for me and a mountaineer trapped in an office. We were two ghosts who haunted its halls. I worked for eight hours a day on my novel, the one that would become The Education of Yuri. They paid me to do this. I was given the gift of time, of solitude, of a warm cabin, of technical support.

When I walked through the campus designed by the same man who landscaped Central Park, New York, I could enjoy a host of young women acting winter: they stamped their shoes, they flicked snowflakes off their hair, they wrapped and unwrapped themselves with the care that we would give birthday gifts back home.

Elm Park in Fall

From time to time, I escaped to Boston on a bus service run by the college. There I saw that the Museum of Fine Arts would require me to make several visits and a ticket costing 20 dollars, a huge amount according to me, although they give you another visit free within a specified time period, knowing I suspect that few people will actually find the time for a second visit.

So I did the unimaginable and became a patron member. It cost only a 125 dollars for a year and I made 12 trips so I got my money’s worth. Ananda Coomaraswamy advised them on their Asia collections. Good work, AC!

I fed ducks on the lake, I crunched pine cones, I splurged on books at Brattle Street, I walked and walked and walked until my legs ached and I was sweating under my jacket and my layers. I wrote and wrote and despaired of ever writing anything worthwhile. I resisted the temptation to edit, pushing myself forward even as I felt the heaviness of the words I was writing.

One morning, I found myself playing antakshari with myself, sing-shouting the words into the silence of the street. It was time to go home.

Only I was flying to Norway next. To live in the house of Sigrid Undset. Winter happens in other countries.

Jerry Pinto is a writer who loves travel and hates visas