It can most reasonably be inferred that Askins com- pares the cost of losing Christmas trees to moths and storms to the cost of losing livestock to predators (lines 30–35) because she believes that: not have to bear. bear. to predators. stock to predators. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-57B-PRACTICE 3 3 21 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-57B 3 3 20. According to Askins, ranchers’ difficulties include their being affected by which of the following trends? lars to kill native predators on public lands number of cows and sheep that wolves would kill in a given area “wolf-free” environment wear fewer leather clothing items Passage III HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Indira Ganesan’s essay “Resisting My Family History,” which appeared in Glamour magazine (©1994 by The Condé Nast Publications Inc.). In June 1978, in suburban Nanuet, New York, home to a famous mall, I wore a sari [a garment worn by Indian and Pakistani women] to my high school graduation. The next day it was raining, and my family and I set off for India. Watch out for the cows, wrote my favorite English teacher, tongue-in-cheek, in my yearbook. I’d keep a wary eye out, I thought, packing a dozen cassettes on which I’d recorded my favorite music. My friends stood in the rain with a banner pro- claiming Goodbye, Indira! I was a heroine, a star for the moment. I was leaving the country. Though I’d been born there, I didn’t want to go to India. What I wanted was to knock on a Broadway pro- ducer’s door and say, “I’m brown, I’m talented, let me write you a play.” My parents, however, believed I needed to embrace my Indian past. I wanted only to escape it, as I wanted to escape anything that spoke to me of tradition or old-fashioned ideas. I was too cool for India. I remember the heat in Bombay’s airport, so thick it was sliceable; the crush of people who wanted to help after our car developed engine trouble on our way home; the glare of the outdoors; the cool dark of the interiors. My uncle’s family welcomed my mother and me into their home in Madras, a city on the south- eastern part of the subcontinent, famed for its music festivals and its beach. In Madras I enrolled in a Catholic women’s college. Nuns were the teachers, the English language was the norm. In high school I had edited an underground news- paper, bought my first copy of The Village Voice, read The New York Times regularly. I believed I was a femi- nist. In India I was unsure of my role. Above all, I was deeply worried that I’d be married off, that I’d be forced to become a housewife, horror of horrors, and would lose my freedom. What I discovered in India: people who looked like me. Girls who befriended me instantly. Girls who told me the truth at once. I was an American, and how everyone knew that—for they all did—escaped me. Wasn’t I as brown as they? Or was I giving off an American aura, wearing Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt, speaking hesitant Tamil? I attended a wedding. I watched some of the funeral preparations following the death of my great- uncle. I climbed 500 steps to reach a Jain temple where a priest gave me a blessing that translated roughly as “You will have seven years of good luck followed by seven years more of the same.” During a ten-day tour of famous temples, I saw a snake charmer in a parking lot and visited an entire city of priests and ascetics. They let us into a temple’s sanctum sanctorum, where we saw the God image in all its splendor. In India I had the unswerving consideration of my relatives, 25 of whom I met in my first six months. I remember our meals together, and the preparations: the pile of freshly shredded coconut—white, flaky, fragrant with milk; the way sweet dough for jellabies would be dropped in hot oil and bob up to perfection. In America I picked at pizza and baked ziti on the school lunch menu; in India I feasted. There were scores of delicious meals, piles of snacks in tins, water always available in an earthen vessel in the kitchen. And still I felt I was missing out on a superlative year in America, and I was determined to dislike India. I dragged my aunt to see a Woody Allen movie and felt it superior to Indian films, even though they managed to reduce me to tears. In all of this, I, the yanqui, was a source of amuse- ment to the family. They bent over backward to please me that year, and I finally admitted to enjoying myself. I can still recall the din of the streets as I rushed to col- lege in the mornings—bicycles, rickshaws, buses, pedestrians, bikes and yes, even a bull here and there. Now a teacher myself in San Diego, I have just come back from giving a class on “the travel essay.” One of my students suggested that the writer we were studying had formed her opinion of the country she was visiting before traveling there. In a sense, I thought, that is what I did with my year in India. I knew before going that I would like the temples and the food and the embrace of my relatives; I just didn’t think it was a place for me, a newly graduated high school senior who dreamed of travel. How wrong I was. It was my year abroad, a high-seas adventure from which I would draw for years to come. In India I took my dreams of becoming a someone and began to be a someone. A someone connected to a history, to a family, to a dis- tinct geography. A someone who had traveled after all.
