The Leaving of Things by Jay Antani

circulated gently by ceiling fans, filled with the scratching of pens and the rustle of turning pages. As he spoke, I scribbled a few notes, a peppering of facts I thought he might quiz us on, but I was stunned by the fury of note-taking going on around me. Everyone was hunched low over their notebooks and taking down, it seemed, every word that came out of Sridharan’s mouth. The student in front of me filled up several pages quickly, pausing now and then to replenish his pen by dipping it into his inkwell. And his penmanship never flagged; it was always florid and impressive.
    I glanced toward the front of the hall and a couple of rows over, to the girl who had walked in with Pradeep. There she was in profile, her black hair tied into a ponytail dropping to her upper back. She held a pen poised over an open notebook, but, unlike the rest of the students, she hadn’t whipped herself into a spasm of scribbling. She just stared serenely ahead, eyes on the chalkboard, listening but only incidentally, and seemed even bored. Then I remembered her from the day I’d come to college to register. She’d worn her hair loose that day, when she’d driven by in the white Maruti.
    The moment the lecture wrapped up and Sridharan was tucking away his precious notes, I saw the girl get up and glide out along with a friend. She stopped only once, to say goodbye to Pradeep, and was gone, her friend at her heels.
    I checked my schedule and noticed my next lecture didn’t start for another hour. Racking my brains for ways tokill time, I found myself wandering around aimlessly. But then it occurred to me that I was inviting curious stares and attention, and I’d better start moving more intently, act like I knew where I was going, had somewhere to be.
    From the first floor verandah, I looked out onto the quad. For the most part, the men and women seemed willfully segregated here. The quieter females kept to their groups, and the gregarious males to theirs. They mingled somewhat outside lecture halls or in the bower that formed the quad’s center or in the canteen on the opposite side of the quad, from which came the clink of soda bottles and waves of laughter. Students crossed the quad on paths bordered by patches of scant grass, shrubs of lilies and roses.
    I was relieved to find the college library and eagerly took sanctuary there. The library was cool and quiet, as shady as the lecture halls. I made for the corner, where various newspapers were laid out on a pair of extra-wide reading stands pushed against each other. I scanned the papers—three across on each one, with a bunch more on scrolls hung up on a rack nearby.
New York Times
?
Herald Tribune
? Not here. Not one newspaper from west of Ahmedabad. I saw newspapers in Hindi, Gujarati, and a half-dozen other Indian languages. I did find
The Times of India
, in English. I began reading the English and, as I did, I could feel my brain relax, welcoming the words like old friends.
    I heard a rustling next to me: someone turning the pages of a newspaper. I turned to the reader. It was that jet-eyed, mahogany-dark student with the fancy pen from my lecture. He glanced in my direction, a smile on his face, and returned to the paper.
    “What language is that?” I asked, noticing the paper’s doodle-like script.
    “This is Tamil. From Tamil Nadu. Far south.” His accent was typically Indian but not Gujarati. The t’s and u’s were more pronounced, and the words declarative, as if he had polished each syllable, speaking no more, no less than he intended.
    “Are you also an English Major?”
    “Hm.” He shifted his feet to face me. “English. You are also?”
    I nodded. “You were practically writing a book in that class. Does everyone take so many notes?”
    “It is the only way to prepare for the essays, no? The exam essays.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been to an Indian college before.”
    “Where you are from? London?”
    “States.” I explained about