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certainly be able to make a new sun and a new moon shine in the sky of our great motherland, he said, his words ringing out for miles.
    In the papers there were photographs, taken from a distance, of those who gathered to hear Sanyal’s speech, to give the Red Salute. A battle cry declared, a generation transfixed. A piece of Calcutta standing still.
    It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of. A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind.
    Subhash knew that Udayan had been there. He hadn’t accompanied him to the rally, nor had Udayan asked him to come. In this sense they had already parted.
    6.
    A few months later Subhash also traveled to a village; this was the word the Americans used. An old-fashioned word, designating an early settlement, a humble place. And yet the village had once contained a civilization: a church, a courthouse, a tavern, a jail.
    The university had begun as an agricultural school. A land grant college still surrounded by greenhouses, orchards, fields of corn. On the outskirts were lush pastures of scientifically cultivated grass, routinely irrigated and fertilized and trimmed. Nicer than the grass that grew inside the walls of the Tolly Club.
    But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.
    The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back.
    And yet, certain physical aspects of Rhode Island—a state so small within the context of America that on some maps its landmass was indicated only by an arrow pointing to its location—corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta, within India. Mountains to the north, an ocean to the east, the majority of land to the south and west.
    Both places were close to sea level, with estuaries where fresh and salt water combined. As Tollygunge, in a previous era, had been flooded by the sea, all of Rhode Island, he learned, had once been covered with sheets of ice. The advance and retreat of glaciers, spreading and melting over New England, had shifted bedrock and soil, leaving great trails of debris. They had created marshes and the bay, dunes and moraines. They had shaped the current shore.
    He found a room in a white wooden house, close to the main road of the village, with black shutters flanking the windows. The shutters were decorative, never opening or closing as they did throughout the day in Calcutta, to keep rooms cool or dry, to block rain or let in a breeze or adjust the light.
    He lived at the top of the house, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with another Ph.D. student named Richard Grifalconi. At night he heard the precise ticking of an alarm clock at the side of his bed. And in the background, like an ongoing alarm itself, the shrill thrum of crickets. New birds woke him in the morning, small birds with delicate chirps that ruptured sleep nevertheless.
    Richard, a student of sociology, wrote editorials for the university newspaper. When he wasn’t working on his dissertation he decried, in terse paragraphs, the recent firing of a zoology professor who had spoken out against the use of napalm, or the decision to build a swimming pool instead of more dormitories on campus.
    He came from a Quaker family in Wisconsin. He wore his dark hair in a ponytail, and didn’t bother to trim his beard. He peered closely through wire-rimmed spectacles as he pecked out his editorials with two fingers at their kitchen table, a cigarette burning between his lips.
    He told Subhash he’d just turned thirty. For the sake of the next generation,