I watched that Crayola yellow house that night and all summer, not knowing entirely what I was looking for, but aware that it deserved my attention.
* * *
? ? ?
My vigils over the Dayals’ were interrupted by library trips, where I was stuck researching the upcoming debate topic. A bunch of high schoolers would spend the year discussing the fossil fuel crisis, something that felt distant, even invented, from my perspective amid Atlanta’s gas-guzzler-crammed highways, where all seemed quiet, the apocalypse staved off in the comfort of concrete suburban stasis.
My parents had feared debate at first, because of the tournaments that took students out of town on weekends. Surely my mother imagined nonsense playing out beneath the noses of the chaperones in Howard Johnson hotels. But they relented when talk at Indian parties centered on the clarity of purpose that debate offered—you have one job, and it is not to tell the truth about the fossil fuel crisis. It is simply to win. Debate gave children ambition, the Indian parties concluded. Ambition: the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents. Ambition: the point of that summer, for me, was to acquire some.
I’d set up in a light-filled corner of the Hammond Creek Public Library in the mornings, at a table with a view of a slippery pine-needled slope leading to a ravine. There I took direction from Wendi Zhao. She was rumored to be among Harvard’s top choices for debate recruits the next year and did not need a partner so much as a “tool” （as the debate kids said）—someone to do as she demanded amid the high heat of a tournament’s elimination rounds. She had reduced female teammates to tears too many times, so the coaches decided she’d pair best with a guy.
I was uninterested in the policy papers Wendi forced me to read. Stuff about planning for a distant future. Solar wind capture. Hydrogen fuel. I found myself wandering the library, seeking higher-order material, in hopes of becoming the kind of competitor who opted for a philosophical approach over a wonky one. We called the former kritik debaters, or K-debaters, and their ranks were populated by enviably nonchalant potheads from alternative private schools, some of whom would grow into Harvard humanities professors. I spent my days aspirationally tunneling into the work of Slavoj ?i?ek and Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, sneaking these texts under the table until one day when Wendi approached silently—she had assassin’s footsteps—and caught me.
“What’s that got to do with alternative energy?”
I jumped as she slammed her palm down on Being and Time. “I was reading online,” I stuttered. “I—I was reading about how sometimes policy making is the wrong thing to do because we have to, like, address the philosophy? Erm, ontology. Ontology. Behind the policy?”
She scowled. “I don’t trust the abstract. Read this shit on carbon taxes.”
It was during those library days that I encountered the imported grandfather. He was a huge guy, perhaps six feet, over two hundred pounds. He hulked in the corner over his books, reading with uncanny stillness, twitching only to turn a page, taking no notes. Sometimes he’d lean toward a closed hardback and press an elephant-flappy ear to the cover as though the pages had some secret to whisper. He was always there before I arrived around ten, remaining in his reading posture when I departed at one or two.
The day after Wendi pried Being and Time from my hands, the man whispered, with a shimmer in his eye, “I rather think she likes you.”
“Weird way of showing it.” I drummed my fingers on my laptop.
It began, then—the Neil-and-adult script. I told him, somewhat monosyllabically, about the debate team, Okefenokee, math classes, my sister.
“This debate business,” he said after I had explained the basics, “it’s fun for you? You enjoy the rush of testing ideas?”
I frowned. “I guess?”
“I have put words in your mouth. What is it you like about it?”
I sighed. I was thinking about my father’s face when he picked me up from the novice state tournament, how his expression had been vacant when he pulled up to the curb but then suddenly animated at the sight of my trophy—a gold-colored figure opining atop a wooden block, one hand lifted, unspooling some brilliant oration. “That is yours?” he’d said, and the whole way home, our normal car silence had been somehow warmer than usual, like the feeling of pressing fresh-from-the-dryer laundry against your skin.
“Winning,” I said. “That part is nice.”
He pointed at the book that I’d tugged back down from the shelf after Wendi confiscated it, and spoke in an accent more British than Indian. “I have always wanted to visit Mr. Heidegger’s home in the Black Forest. It would certainly be something.”