Then he turned back to the American Revolution and I blinked vaguely, wondering how this peculiar old man knew all about Heidegger.
I found out over the next few weeks that Ramesh Uncle, a retired professor, had been imported unceremoniously from his prior life in West Bengal to suburban America. “Calcutta is a place alive with the past,” he said one morning when we bumped into each other at the water fountain, near the children’s section—away from Wendi’s probing gaze. “You cannot walk outside without running into ghosts.” He could not live in Hammond Creek, in America, without knowing its history, so he was absorbing American history like a second language.
“So, were you a history professor?” I asked, taking my sip of water and brushing my lips on my sweatshirt sleeve.
“In a way.” He grinned. “I am a physicist. Which makes me a philosopher of time.”
Wendi, on the other side of the library, would have had little tolerance for this exchange. I pressed on the water fountain a few times to watch it spurt. “What’s that mean?”
“There is a little philosophy that was once considered heretical,” he said, folding his arms and leaning against the corkboard that advertised, in primary colors, toddlers’ story time each afternoon at four. “It is, however, the sort of thing a Calcuttan knows to be true.” He paused, as though to gauge whether or not I was following. I nodded. “Eternalism,” he pronounced. “The idea, see, is that the past and present and future are all equally real. Perhaps even coexisting.”
“How old are you?” I suddenly asked, then flushed. There was something mesmerizing about the way Ramesh Uncle spoke of history, as though he’d witnessed it firsthand.
“I am one of those trees with so many age rings round its middle that you cannot really tell anymore. Come,” he said. “We must both get back to our books, mustn’t we?”
Each morning, I’d wait for Wendi to retreat into her work, and then I’d turn to Ramesh Uncle to be briefed on his day’s pursuits. He wound through a self-made syllabus on America—on where we’d been, and where we seemed to be going. W. E. B. DuBois and Walt Whitman and the Wobblies; Thoreau and Twain and Tippecanoe.
“Are you writing something?” I asked after a while, as I’d been wondering what reading a bunch of books about America would add up to.
“Why should I write something? There are so many good books already to read.”
“So, what do you, you know, want to do with . . .”
“The books?”
“Yeah.”
“I would say I would like to read them, and then think about them, and maybe come back and read them again some more, later. Would that be an acceptable plan?” A smile was always inching across his face when he said stuff like that, as though he was inviting a challenge.
Soon, Ramesh Uncle began to take on more specialized pursuits. One afternoon, as I helped him carry a few fat volumes from the nonfiction section to his desk, he told me he was now looking into the early histories of Indians in America.
“Uncle,” I whispered, depositing the books with a clunk, “I think you’re supposed to say Native Americans.”
“No, no, Indians like us.”
“How much history could there be?” I said. I’d thought we were new here—hence all the unsettledness, all the angst, all the striving.
We sat down in our glass-window corner. Nearby, Wendi Zhao worked in a study carrel, surely blasting G-Unit in her noise-canceling headphones.
Ramesh Uncle smoothed his short-sleeved collared shirt as though he had been awaiting this question a long time. “Very much,” he said. “You just see.”
June rolled on. I hated math, I saw few friends, Wendi whacked me upside the head. And Ramesh Uncle ordered books from afar. The Hammond Creek library plugged into the college and university loan systems, making that little stretch of table where we sat gorgeously expansive, containing much more than our cramped lives. While other kids were splashing in the pool, shooting hoops, making out, I was listening to this old man tell stories in throaty whispers of Swami Vivekananda, showing up in Chicago to lecture Americans on Hinduism at the World’s Fair, and of Bhagat Singh Thind, who went to the Supreme Court in 1923 to sue for the right to be considered “white.” I learned, too, that Indians weren’t allowed to enter the United States for decades. He even showed me, once, a 1912 clipping from an Atlanta newspaper. It mentioned the Hindoos who had come to town, peddling exotic fabrics, trinkets, and jewels—dark as the Negroes, yet somehow different in complexion and mannerisms.