Over the weekend, we travelled to Stowe, Vermont to meet with my PhD advisor and mentor, Prof. Daniel Regan, who after University of Pittsburgh, moved a few jobs before settling down in Vermont 20 years ago.

It just didn’t feel like we were meeting after 30 years, picking up conversation as if it were just mid-sentence. It was good to see him, mentally and physically fit, not only picking us up and dropping us off at the train station, but driving us around the place.

Dan has been a Southeast Asianist (of Yale pedigree), with fluent Malay, and someone who had introduced me to the works of Clifford Geertz and James Scott, and gave us classroom readings of non-Western scholars, decades before the decolonisation frenzy.

His recent book on Malay intellectuals was something he has been putting off for a while, and now he is on to a personal memoir of his life, including his Peace Corps years in Southeast Asia. Vermont is beautiful and the ‘pilgrimage’ to Ben and Jerry’s icecream for some old, classic flavours made it all worthwhile.! am glad to have met his son, Jonah, and delighted that Saranya got to meet Dan. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday than a day spent with Dan.