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away?” I persisted.
    When she understood I was not going to stop until I had an answer, she said, “They don’t know anything about it.”
    I tried not to look surprised. “I see,” I said, as I let this sink in. “Well, I guess you can look upon it as a kind of elopement then? But the distance is so great between here and …” I hesitated again.
    â€œNow it’s an elopement . Not an adventure any more, but an elopement,” she said. “Why do you insist on dramatizing it?” She smiled. I knew her well enough to realize that beneath her offhand dismissal lay a fierce reluctance to say anything further about Tej, about going away with him, about leaving everything here—family, country, years of study, all kinds of human investments that had nothing to do with money or time.
    â€œIf it’s not an elopement,” I said, “then what will it be?”
    I don’t think she heard my question. And it is always here that I stop (as she did, to look out the plate glass window) and try to go on with what happened next. I shall try to conjure it up once more. She’s looking out the window. I follow her gaze out toward the fog-wrapped city across the Bay, with the streets of Berkeley spilling away down the hills onto the waterfront, the day sunny this side, the Campanile striking the hour, unreal blue sky, theatrical clouds.
    It’s almost fall, and I know without seeing it that Faculty Glade it still all green grass, minus the pink-and-white daisies now, and that Strawberry Creek still cuts its way, as it has to, through the verdure. The air is chilly outside, but not cold, and I know without feeling it that a smart breeze is whipping the foliage of the eucalyptus trees down by the Forestry Building. Somewhere outside Sather Gate undergraduates are waiting to meet friends between classes or stopping to read the posters, sharing space on the steps of Wheeler Hall with the Great Danes from the fraternity houses, or just sitting in the sun.
    None of these everyday sights could be the cause of Helen’s sudden and complete attention. Whom or what had she seen outside? Under the force of her concentration, all else hung suspended. When I turned around again, she was already standing up, gathering her things, slinging the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, ready to go. For an instant, I had the irrational notion that she had been appropriated, taken over, possessed, so that, although the young woman in front of me looked like Helen, she was really somebody else. The illusion passed as quickly as it came.
    â€œWhat will it be?” I asked again.
    â€œNothing. I don’t know,” she said. “In any case, you’re dead wrong, like everybody else.” She got up. “I’ve got to go now,” she said, and hurried away.
    It might have been her final goodbye, but it wasn’t. It doesn’t seem to me that she has ever really taken her leave, even after years of my not hearing from her. I have one of her letters in front of me. It’s one I picked up from the pile just now, and it happens to be one I got from her early on. It’s dated June 26, 1950.
    â€œDear Carol,” it says, in the timeless voice that memory confers on the writers of old letters rediscovered, “Here I am …”

Summer

2
    â€œâ€¦ halfway around the world from Berkeley, in a Punjab village called Majra, sitting in our garden with a glass of cooled buttermilk in one hand and the New Yorker in the other. Can you picture it? It arrived only three weeks late (the magazine, not the buttermilk). The bearer is our village postmaster, a youth with a B.A. and a black umbrella who doubles as a postman and comes on a bicycle from Ladopur, the town two miles away, to deliver it. For news we depend on a battery radio. Yesterday, North Korea invaded the South. American troops are to be sent! It all seems to be happening so far away, although