It would, Ranjit was forced to agree—but not out loud, because he didn’t want to give Dr. Mendis the satisfaction. By the time he got out of the classroom, the one fellow student left in the hall was a Burgher girl, nice enough looking, some years older than himself. Ranjit was aware that she had been in the sociology class with him, but to him she had been simply another item in the lecture hall’s furnishings. He hadn’t had much to do in his life with Burghers, the name given to that small fraction of the Sri Lankan population who traced a significant part of their ancestry to one or another of the old European colonizers. Particularly with the female ones.
This particular female Burgher was talking on a cell phone, but closed it up as he approached. “Mr. Subramanian?” she said.
Ranjit stopped, in no mood for casual conversation. “Yes?” he barked.
She did not seem to take offense at his tone. “My name is Myra de Soyza. I heard what Dr. Mendis was saying to you. Are you going to do what he said and take an Incomplete?”
She was really annoying him. He said, “I hope not. Why should I?”
“Oh, you shouldn’t. All you need is a little study help. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but I’ve been getting straight A’s. I could tutor you, if you liked.”
That wasn’t anything Ranjit had expected to hear, and it immediately triggered his most suspicious reactions. He demanded, “Why do you want to do that?”
Whatever answer might have been true—perhaps simply that he was a good-looking young man—the one she gave was, “Because I don’t think Dr. Mendis is fair to you.” But she looked disappointed at his response, perhaps even offended. As she went on, her tone grew sharp. “If you don’t want help, just say it. But, you know, what Dr. Mendis calls sociology is just memorizing what it says in the books, and almost always only the parts that are about Sri Lanka. I could walk you through it in plenty of time for the final.”
For a moment Ranjit actually considered her offer. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ll be all right.” He gave her a nod to express enough gratitude to be polite, then turned and walked away.
But, although he left the woman behind him, he carried away with him what she had said.
There was wisdom in it. Who was this professor to tell him that he could not do well on the final exam? There were others besides a Sinhalese schoolteacher and a Burgher woman who knew Sri Lankan history. And there was one particular place, Ranjit was quite sure, where such knowledge was stored, and those in charge would be glad to share it with him.
Pass he did. Not with the “impossible” 80 percent on the final that Dr. Mendis had found so amusing, but with a 91 percent—one of the five highest marks for those taking the test that year. And what would Dr. Mendis say now?
Ranjit had been confident that the fact that his father wasn’t speaking to him did not mean he would refuse his son help. He’d been right. When he’d explained his need to Surash, the old monk who had taken his call, he’d got the response he had expected. “I must consult with the high priest about this,” Surash had said cautiously. “Please call me back in one hour.” But Ranjit had had no doubt of the answer, and had already filled his backpack with toothbrush, clean underwear, and everything else he would need for a stay in Trincomalee before he’d called back. “Yes, Ranjit,” the old monk had said. “Come as soon as you can. We will give you what you need.”
The only way for Ranjit to get to Trincomalee had been to hitchhike in a truck that smelled of the driver’s curry and its cargo of fragrant cinnamon bark. That had meant arriving at the temple well after midnight. His father had of course been long asleep, and the assistant priest on duty did not offer to disturb him. What the assistant priest was willing to do, however, was everything Ranjit asked for: give him a cell and a bed and three plain (but adequate) meals a day—and access to the temple’s archives.
The archives weren’t written on ancient parchment or animal skins, as Ranjit had feared; this was his father’s temple, right up to speed with all the modern necessities. When Ranjit woke that morning, there was a laptop on the table by his cot, and through it he had access to all the history of Sri Lanka, from the days of the tribal Veddas who were the island’s first inhabitants, to the present. There was much that his teacher had not touched on, but Ranjit had brought his textbook along—not to study, but to give him a guide to the parts of the nation’s past he could safely ignore. He had only five days before he had to go back to the university. But five days of total dedication to one subject was quite enough for a young man as bright and motivated as Ranjit Subramanian. (Nor was he interrupting himself by multitasking. Score one for the theory of the GSSM syndrome.) And he had learned a number of things that would not appear on the final exam, too. He had learned about the vast treasure of pearls and gold and ivory that the Portuguese had looted from his father’s temple, just before they tore it down. He learned that once, for fifty years, the Tamils had ruled all of the island—and that the general who had finally defeated the Tamil forces and “freed” his own people evidently was still held in respect by the modern Sinhalese—even by Gamini’s own family, because his own father, Dhatusena Bandara, was named after him.
Ranjit headed straight for Gamini’s room when the temple van dropped him at the university. He was grinning to himself as he knocked on Gamini’s door, thinking of how amusing it would be to tell him that.
That didn’t happen. Gamini wasn’t there.
When Ranjit roused the night porter, the man said sleepily that Mr. Bandara had left two days earlier. For his family’s house in Fort? No, not at all. For London, England, where Mr. Bandara was going to complete his studies.
When at last Ranjit got back to his own room, there was a waiting letter that Gamini had left for him, but all it said was what Ranjit already knew. Gamini’s flight to England had been moved up a few days. He would be on it. And he would miss Ranjit.
That was not Ranjit’s only disappointment. It was natural enough that the temple staff hadn’t disturbed his father when Ranjit had arrived so late. It was not quite as natural, perhaps, that his father had not chosen to disturb himself even enough to look in on his son once in any other of the five days he was living in the temple.
It was almost funny, Ranjit told himself as he turned out the light by his bed. His father had not forgiven him for his closeness to Gamini Bandara. But now Gamini was not close to him at all, not by nine thousand kilometers.
So he had lost the two dearest people in his life, and what was he to do with that life now?
There was one other significant event at that time. Neither Ranjit nor any other human being alive knew of it, however. It took place many light-years away, in the vicinity of a star that human astronomers knew only by its right ascension and declination numbers. One of those great expanding hemispheres of photons, perhaps the one from Eniwetok, perhaps from one of the Soviet monster bombs, finally reached the place where the photon pulses caused a major decision that meant bad news for the people of Earth. The pulses had alerted certain high-performance