I met
Peter in
college. He was a
senior while I was a
freshman. Peter was a
small guy with
East Indian coloring (and heritage). Peter had
bright brown eyes and a 24 / 7
thousand-watt grin. He was just always happy to see
everyone, and everyone
remembers his smile.
Peter was studying
Hinduism, which I often talked to him about. He would
sing the lessons in
Sanskrit for me, and I would just
sit and listen. It was
fucking beautiful. He promised to
teach me one someday, though I doubt I would have been
any good at it. He used to tell me about his
master in India, where he visited for
training and
study every summer, and how his
master's son was coming next year to visit the
school with Peter. I remember, I was so
amazed when Peter
graciously asked me if I would be willing to meet his master's son, because he wanted the
guy to know "the
best side of American women". That was the
sort of thing Peter said.
But
Peter wasn't the
conformist type, I can tell you that. When I got to the
school, there were still
pictures and articles circulating about Peter's
latest protest. He'd
posed naked on the
quad for a full day, on a
pedastal no less, to express his
opinion that the school should
allow a
nude art exhibit to show in our
Great Hall. He won, too.
The last time I saw
Peter was when he asked me to
meet his master's son. That was about two days before the
end of my freshman year, and Peter was all excited. Not only was he
graduating (he was coming back for
postgraduate work), but he was
on his way to India to be present at the wedding of his
master's son. I guess the wedding of the son of a
Hindu Master is a big deal and Peter was ecstatic to have been
invited. I did
give him a hug, and even a
kiss on the cheek even though I didn't know him that well. It was
impossible not to love Peter. EVERYBODY loved
Peter, and Peter seemed to have no problem loving everybody back. In fact, he
told me he loved me before he left, and I had only known him a
few months. He was like that.
Of course, I didn't find out until the
beginning of the
next year of school, when Peter was
markedly absent, what had happened. We all found out over the course of a week or so that Peter had
died in India. He was
purifying himself in preparation for his master's son's
wedding by
bathing in the sacred
Ganges River when he was
swept away by an
unseen current in full view of over 200 people. No-one had been able to
reach him, and his
body was never
recovered.
For being only in his 20's, Peter left behind a
shitload of people
crying. I remember, the
whole school was
insane with grief for like, a month. I didn't cry too much, because I knew damn well that he didn't want me to. I wrote him a
short epithet, though, and it went like this:
"Peter's in heaven, laughing like hell."