Summary

A few months after the rally, Subhash leaves Calcutta for the United States where he will study marine chemistry. He shares a house on Rhode Island with another student named Richard who was studying sociology and planning to be a professor one day. Richard opposes the Vietnam War, and is outwardly demonstrative of the fact, but Subhash is acutely aware that he is in the country as a visitor whose status can just as easily be revoked, so he avoids such demonstrations.

Subhash is the only Indian from Calcutta at the university as far as he knows although Narasimhan, an economics professor from Madras originated in Calcutta. At the oceanography campus, Subhash studies gasses dissolved in a sea solution, and isotopes that come from deep sediment.

Subhash watches the ceremony of a small wedding at the chapel on Rhode Island and is...