KARAK’S APARTMENT WAS MORE GLUM than Ram remembered. Ram had taken him to the hospital only ten days before, but it was clear that Karak had not cared for his home since long before that. Cobwebs hung low at corners. Paint peeled from the far wall. A smell hovered near the refrigerator. Dust motes whipped through sunlight when Ram swept back the curtains.

The box was where Karak had told him it would be, tucked behind stale clothes in the bedroom closet, two feet by three feet of cardboard. Ram had possessed it once before, decades ago, when Karak had been at San Quentin. Crap, Karak had called it. The American slang sounded strange in his Punjabi accent. But Karak never let such things bother him. The box had been lighter then. Now Ram sat on Karak’s worn chair in his dim living room, sifting through the private documents, spreading them out on the dented coffee table and faded sofa, a pile for each period of his life. Karak said—Ram heard him clearly—that he spent too much time on neatness and organization, on planning, when what was needed was real work. In his mind, Ram answered him—he had not wanted the box, but now that he had accepted it, he had to be sure that he had everything. When Karak’s children entered tomorrow or the day after, surely they would not be as forgiving as Ram. Perhaps they would forbid Ram from coming again. They would not understand the squalor, the evidence of despair. Karak’s voice seemed to accept the explanation.

Ram did not like the emptiness. He was old, but he did not like the smell of age. Before him Karak’s life lay spread out on paper: the official discharge from the British Indian Army, the San Quentin release form, the AARP documentation. The strange coincidence of Karak’s chosen birthday, the same month and day as the killing, appearing again and again.

The date was a falsehood. When had anyone from their part of the world known the date they were born? Or if they did know, who had translated that date from a Punjabi calendar to the Julian one? The men from 1913 had been born “in the middle of the rains” or “during first harvest after the earth shook.” One didn’t state that to the immigration officers on Angel Island or in Seattle. Birthdates had been made up, had been approximated, so they could gain entrance into the country.