Another time, on the way back from meeting Chidi’s dealer, I passed the shop on University that sold Bollywood cassette tapes and georgette saris and Nepali prayer flags. Through the window I saw the owner in his full Indian dad attire—hoodless Hanes sweatshirt and white socks tugged halfway up his shins. He was still, taking in the passersby, his whole figure milky colored through the glass. His face did not warm when I stopped to reread, for the thousandth time, the yellow lettering. SHREE KRISHNA’S—BERKELEY. SINCE 1976. He simply held his arms behind his back and regarded me as though he had seen me a thousand times before, his expression as precise and calculating as my father’s as he readjusted the pharmacist coat in the mirror. The drugs were hot against my thigh. Are you making use of all you took? I raced home to suck the fresh, pure powder up my nose until my sinuses froze over with this so requited cold, as I did it again, again.

Led by the bumps, I met with my one welcome ghost, Isaac Snider. I was writing things down about him, things I intuited but could not yet prove. It was the first time I’d written like this, with something that felt like truth flowing through me so quickly my hands struggled to keep up. Cold academic work yielded none of this transcendence; the many baffling components of my life had never converged so clearly as they did when I wrote toward Isaac Snider. I let myself forget the professionalization of the study of the past, because my private project felt like a purer communion. Maybe I looked at him because it was easier than looking at myself. He, my Bombayan gold digger, and the story I spun of him, was just about the only thing that took my mind off the impending meeting.