Ram had been present when Grace had visited Karak in the hospital. She had seemed an interloper, anxiously watching one old man taking care of another. Even now, Ram felt he should make these arrangements, not she. But hadn’t he done enough for Karak over sixty years? He did not want to do more.

Besides, Grace had fulfilled her duty, convincing her older brother to make the copayment to the hospital, visiting when Karak had asked to see his children’s faces just once more before he died. Neither of her brothers had come with her. Now she would give her father a proper Catholic burial with a mass, even though nobody, most of all Karak, could want it.

“What favor?” Ram said again, because she had not responded.

“I would like you to give the eulogy,” she said.

Ram snorted. “Why?”

“People at the senior center have been calling since he passed. They want to come to the funeral. They want to speak. I can’t bear the thought of any of them . . . the falseness of it. You were the only one who knew him . . . before.”

Ram sighed. “Catholics don’t allow eulogies,” he said.

She was silent. Ram felt he had scored something against her. He was an outsider, but an insider too. Had he not also been married to a Catholic? Had he not known Grace’s mother for years? They were not so distant after all.

“It would be at the vigil, Mr. Singh. The night before the mass.” There was pleading in her voice; both of them heard it.

“I will let you know tomorrow,” he said.

“The wake is tomorrow night,” Grace said.

“I will call you tomorrow,” he said again.

“Thank you.” Her voice was small.

KARAK’S BOX SAT IN THE CORNER of Ram’s bedroom. It cast a shadow on the far wall and another on the floor, which Ram could not explain by the position of his reading lamp. A gray-beige line on the carpet. A man, a whole man, is more than a sum of his deeds. Was he being unfair to Karak Singh?

Ram reached for the box and scooted it beside the armchair, delved to the bottom, where he had not reached this morning. Karak’s papers stared up at him, aged and yellow and brittle. There, he saw it—an envelope addressed to Karak in the Imperial Valley, with Ram’s return address of Hambelton, Washington—a letter that Ram himself had written more than six decades ago, his own script beckoning to him through the years.