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.”