“Brave of you,” I said, which I meant, though it came out sardonically.
And then I saw him—being led from a maroon sedan parked too close to the tent: an older man, leaning on someone. He had grown smaller. Those intervening years had rubbed away some of his stature, along with the sense I once had of him as standing cosmically outside of time. People parted, seeing only what was visible—an old man being helped to his table.
“Manu!” I shouted. “Best of luck with the blue wave, buddy, but I have to go—”
By the time I reached my table, the son had deposited his father and gone off to the snaking buffet line.
“Ramesh Uncle,” I said, taking my seat next to him.
“Hallo, hallo,” he said, fiddling with the collar of his black button-down. It was poorly tucked into his slacks. He was marvelously underdressed.
“Do you remember me?”
“Very good to see you,” he said, sticking a hand out to shake mine. The knuckles were like ancient tree roots, bumped and ribbed and holding him to the earth.
“We used to talk at the public library, ten—eleven—years ago.”
He blew his nose in a dark gray handkerchief.
“My name’s Neil,” I tried. “You used to tell me all these great historical stories.”
“A very good subject, history,” Ramesh Uncle said, his eyes locking on me. Did any part of his consciousness recognize me?
“I’m studying, well—I sort of study history,” I said. “What I mean to say is that I got into the whole racket in part because of you.”
The other Chakraborty returned. He was all elbows, slight and dark, with handsome white hair. He spoke in the easy Americanized accent my parents had also settled into over the past five or six years.
“Shondeep.” We shook hands. “Cousin of the sister-in-law of the groom.”
“I’m Neil. Brother of the bride. I’ve met your father before.”
Ramesh Uncle’s treelike hands got to work on a mound of white rice and dal makhani.
“We used to hang out, like, over ten years ago, actually,” I said. “At the public library.”
Shondeep’s eyes effervesced. “That was you!”
“He talked about me?”
“Relentlessly! He went on and on about the young man keeping him company in his ‘studies,’ and he was so lonely that summer, my kids had no interest—Baba, do you remember Neil? You two were such good friends!”
Ramesh Uncle looked up from his food. “Quite a long time,” he pronounced.
Indian weddings are memory dungeons. You wander through them and everyone is throwing some version of your past self at you: I saw you when you were sho-sho-shmall . . . sho-sho shweet . . . Remember when you and Prachi did your Radha-Krishna dances and you wanted to be Radha, wore Prachi’s skirt and all? . . . And now, the one person whose memories I hoped would bubble up had, it seemed, no access to them.
“Where did you—where did he go, that summer?” I said. “He just disappeared in July.”
Shondeep thought a moment. “Oh, yes, his brother, my kaka, passed away back in Calcutta, so we left suddenly. He wasn’t so old. But that air, over there . . .”
The woman next to him tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said to me. They began to chat.
Was this just what time did to a person? Would Anjali Auntie look at me soon with those same cloudy, roving eyes? These days, she was prone to long spells of what she called “dreary mind.” She still seemed herself, at least for now—a blessing I privately attributed to that mysterious yellow light flashing above the Yuba River. I wondered, though, if she woke up every morning preparing to do battle with her own memory. If she had to fight daily to hold on to the past, both the precious and the painful parts.
“Ramesh Uncle,” I said. “Do you remember the Bombayan gold digger?”
Ramesh Uncle lowered his dal-encrusted hand from his mouth. “My god, such a tale!”
“You remember?”
“You may find it absurd, young fellow”—I won’t, I nearly said—“but some stories do not leave you alone.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Still, sometimes, it’s quite difficult to reach the past. Almost as though we do not have the right address.” I considered telling Ramesh Uncle that our Bombayan gold digger had likely died months or a year after the beating we’d read about. That no one had known his name at the time of his death. That we were perhaps the only two people who’d sought him. Or that maybe two people looking for you in the past was something, a humble, belated mourning.