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.”

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.”