They say all clouds have a silver lining. Some have two. Arantxa is my favourite pupil at EFLU. Of course you shouldn’t have favourite pupils but I can make my excuse that the class is over. Even better I can honestly say that by the end of any good class all of the pupils have become your favourites: all of them have said or written something instructive. But Arantxa is my favourite pupil. What first struck me was not her beauty; this is a very beautiful class, but her appearance. Almost all the young women in my class wear much the same dress: salwar kameez or a Westernised equivalent and they all have a uniform hair style  – long black hair tied in a plait. Arantxa wears another uniform – combat fatigues with her hair cut in a bob. I was further intrigued when she opted, without any suggestion from me, to write her long essay on Eastwood’s use of adaptations. Adaptation is one of my obsessions so any student who gets there unprompted has my attention. But what really caught my soul was when she stood up at the beginning of a class in October and asked in hesitating fashion if I would come to a debate on sexual politics that was being organized on the campus. What was astonishing about the request was that it was clear that she genuinely wanted to know what I thought. For three decades and more university feminists have asked my opinion about one topic or another but I have never felt that there was any interest in my answer other than to add to an already long charge sheet. Now for a moment I was transported back to my youth when young feminists asked me what I thought because they wanted to know. Unfortunately our plane back from Rajasthan got in too late that night in October but now the accidents of visas and airline schedules means that I have a free evening.

Killing two birds with one stone is an obsession of mine and I suggest to Aranatxa that we spend an evening out in Hitech city. Hitech city is what Hyderabad has become famous for. Here is where the information revolution is taking place if you believe the hype. I haven’t visited it in all my time here and I ask Arantxa if you can check out our options. Arantxa proves an ace researcher and soon my inbox is full of suggestions. Arantxa is specially pleased to have found an Irish bar called, with stunning originality, The Shamrock. I explain, as gently as I can, that Irish bars are one of my pet aversions. My childhood was spent above an Irish pub when an Irish pub was a pub that served draught Guinness (otherwise unobtainable in London) and before it had gained all the nauseating connotations of the last thirty years. However, Arantxa was so intrigued at the idea of an Irish bar that I relented. Arantxa has armed herself with maps and with Ramesh at the wheel we set out on the long drive to hi-tech city. As we drive I broach the topic of the evening with my controversial statement in my first class that the boys should shift the tables into a circle. This had apparently suggested a sexist division. I warmly defend my position on the grounds that if you don’t tell the boys to do it they will just leave it to the girls, that in general boys are physically stronger than girls and I have in my latter years become a great believer in politeness. I also say that Flavia would agree with me. My views radically change the next day when Flavia tells me that she doesn’t agree with me at all.

By the time we are getting into the importance of politeness, we are in Hi-tech city. Ramesh clearly is in foreign territory and Arantxa’s directions just seem to lead us further and further into a wilderness of half finished skyscrapers with the names of Wall Street firms tacked onto their crumbling foundations. This is Alphaville 2011, city of lost credit. Finally we get out at the foot of a particularly deserted and unfinished skyscraper. “This is it” says Arantxa and bounds up the half finished staircase like a wild Matrika. I have little choice but to follow. Sure enough and most improbably on the third floor is an Irish pub.

“This is no country for old men, the young in one another’s arms” In fact this is India so not actually in one another’s arms, but you get the idea. However, on the bright side there is a really good bar with proper American seats and we are soon ensconced.  Arantxa, proud of her research, tells me they have Irish specialties on the menu. Listen, I tell my young companion there are no Irish specialities. The people were kept in such poverty that a potato and a sliver of pig was considered a feast.  My ancestors were denied culinary invention. “No, no, look at the menu.”  I do. Herewith some of the Irish specialties available in Hyderabad: Chicken Breasts with Apple Cherry Chutney, Cheese stuffed Herb Chicken and Pollo Panna e Funghi. The Irish pub has become a pure signifier but we have drinks in our hands, food on order and I give Arantxa my personal history of feminism.

In my early twenties almost all the women who I most liked and admired Flavia Lambert, Denise Riley, Laura Mulvey, Jocelyn Cornwell were deeply affected by feminism, Germaine Greer in the first instance and then a whole wave of other writers.  Above all this affected sexual relationships, this was generation of women who were going to sleep with who they wanted, how they wanted and when they wanted independently of male norms or expectations. It was indeed a revolution and both very exciting and very frightening to live through. It was not long however before this late moment in the sixties became an early moment of the seventies both politicized and academised. This was the moment of the debates between radical feminism and socialist feminism. Much in these debates was of great interest but it was entirely confined to the politically committed and academically employed. The final stage was the setting up of women’s studies programs in the late seventies and early eighties. As with the very comparable establishment of film studies at the same time, this securing of a marginal academic base led to the debates becoming less central in the academy. While valuable work is done, the very central questions have hardened into politically correct dogma – in particular there has been no significant intellectual engagement with biology. “Well said Arantxa, that’s very interesting but I don’t know enough to counter your argument”. I hadn’t been aware I was making an argument but Arantxa is very sharp so I added, “ It remains the case that women’s control of their reproduction and sexuality is perhaps the most important political demand, certainly on the economic front, in the world. The young women who so excited and frightened me were the very first generation in the history of the species that had access to secure contraception. If we take Aristotle’s biological claim that man is an animal who lives in cities, a zoon politikon, then we are a species only 8,000 years old and it could be argued that the production of female contraception is the most significant event in those 8,000 years. We are living through the aftermath of that, it will be several generations before its consequences are fully felt politically.

By this time I had had enough of lecturing and we turned to gossip. As a general rule I consider gossiping with students to be beneath contempt as it ignores the relations of power and transference between teacher and student. But I am no longer a teacher at EFLU and anyway I have something to gossip about. This is the first term I have spent on a university campus since I was 21. I have seen more of these students in Nissi’s Chapatti Heaven and Sagar’s shop than I have in the classroom. Most important of all Arantxa’s questions and comments are fuelled by such a burning intensity for knowledge that I feel I cannot refuse to answer them. She makes me think of Bunyan’s Valiant for Truth.

And now it is time for home. Ramesh is waiting for us and and I thought again how lucky I was to have come to EFLU and what an awfully big adventure it had all been. As I look at Ramesh’s Auto in which I have spent so many hours, I wonder whether Joyce would have described it as a “low backed car”.  And so we proceeded back to campus.  And the man in the low backed car drove on as behind him the old professor and the young student talked of sirens, enemies of man’s reason, sexuality, performance, Clint Eastwood, adaptation and all manner of things.