2034: A Novel of the Next World War

CODA The Horizon

Finally, he was home. The trip to Bandar Abbas had been the first of any kind Major General Qassem Farshad had made in the past year since his promotion and subsequent retirement. He dropped his bags by the front door, went straight to the bedroom, and stripped out of his uniform. He’d forgotten how much he hated wearing it. Or, put another way, he had forgotten how much he’d come to enjoy not wearing it. He thought over the difference between the two as he showered and changed into the polyester tracksuit that had become his new uniform around the house. While he tied on his sneakers, he reminded himself that he didn’t harbor any real grudges against Bagheri and the others in the high command. He simply wanted to embrace this new life.

On the return flight from Bandar Abbas, he had worked on his memoir, as he did most every morning, and now he was looking forward to his customary walk around his property and to settling back into the comfort of his routine. When the invitation to Bandar Abbas had arrived some weeks before, Farshad had initially refused it. Ever since the Victory of the Strait, as the high command had anointed his last battle, his country had heaped honor after honor on his shoulders, from his second awarding of the Order of the Fath to a mention by the Supreme Leader in a nationally televised address to the Parliament. Had such recognition arisen from another battle, one where the difference between victory and defeat hadn’t come down to which direction the wind was blowing, perhaps Farshad would have felt otherwise about accepting the invitation.

Now, finally home, he first thought to unpack but then decided he would do it that night. He would instead have a long walk, to stretch his legs. He went to the kitchen and prepared himself his usual simple lunch: a boiled egg, a piece of bread, some olives. He placed the meal in a paper sack and set out across his property. Trees canopied his route. The first autumn colors already touched the rims of their leaves, and in the early afternoon the cool air hinted at the passing of the seasons. Late-blooming wildflowers lined his path as he headed along dirt-packed trails toward the ribbon of stream bisecting his property.

Farshad could hardly believe it had been more than a year since those Russian paratroopers had been blown out to sea. He couldn’t quite decide whether a great deal of time had passed or not very much at all. When he thought of the specifics of the battle in the strait, it felt like not very much. When he thought of how much the world had changed since then, it seemed as though far more than a year had passed. Farshad now understood himself as a small actor in a far broader war, one that had resulted in a profound global realignment.

When Farshad was bracing for a Russian attack against his island fortifications, he had no inkling that the Indians had intervened on the side of peace by sinking a Chinese carrier and destroying an American fighter squadron. Tragically, a single pilot from that squadron managed to slip both the Indian interceptors and Chinese air defenses, dropping his payload on Shanghai. These many months later the city remained a charred, radioactive wasteland. The death toll had exceeded thirty million. After each of the nuclear attacks international markets plummeted. Crops failed. Infectious diseases spread. Radiation poisoning promised to contaminate generations. The devastation exceeded Farshad’s capacity for comprehension. Though he’d spent his entire adult life at war, not even he could grasp such losses.

Compared to the trilateral conflict between the Americans, Chinese, and Indians, his country’s contest with the Russians felt in retrospect like little more than an intramural squabble. In Parliament and among the high command, there had been some question as to whether the captured Russian prisoners qualified as “prisoners of war,” seeing as the two nations were not in a state of formal hostilities. In Tehran, zealots within the government had threatened to classify the Russians as “bandits” and execute them accordingly. However, when as part of the New Delhi Peace Accords negotiated by the Indians, the United Nations announced its reorganization, the Supreme Leader astutely leveraged clemency for the imprisoned Russians as a way to secure a permanent Iranian seat on the Security Council, which the Indians had already insisted on relocating from New York City to Mumbai as a precondition of delivering a direly needed multiyear aid package to the United States.

Out on his walk, Farshad arrived at the stream on his property. He stepped onto the footbridge, leaned against its balustrade, and gazed into the clear glacial melt that passed below. His thoughts turned from the last year to the last few days, to his trip to Bandar Abbas and the final, albeit somewhat absurd, honor that the Navy had bestowed on him: the dedication of a vessel in his name.

Admittedly, Farshad had been quite flattered at first. Although he was technically retired as an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, the Navy had taken him in when his career was in tatters, and now, bedecked with his newfound glory, they proved keen to claim Farshad as their own. He pictured the sleek prow of a frigate or cruiser with his name emblazoned on its side. He could envision the teeth of its magnificent anchor, and its decks bristling with rockets, missiles, guns, and a crew that kept the ship, and thus his name, gleaming as it crossed horizon after horizon.

Several weeks passed while arrangements were made for Farshad’s travel to Bandar Abbas. Then the Navy forwarded along the specifications of the vessel that would bear his name.

Not a frigate.

Not a cruiser.

Not even a puny yet swift corvette.

A photograph of the undedicated vessel accompanied the announcement; the shape of its hull was like a wooden shoe, wide in the front, narrow in the back, functional but not something anyone would wish to be seen in. The decision had been made to dedicate a newly laid Delvar-class logistics ship in his honor.

Standing on the footbridge over the stream, Farshad leaned forward and considered his reflection as he thought of the many photographs that had been taken of him over these past few days. When he’d arrived in Bandar Abbas, the Navy had scheduled an ambitious itinerary. After dedicating the ship, he accompanied it out to sea for its maiden voyage, which took them to the now heavily garrisoned islands in the Strait of Hormuz where he’d fought his famous battle. As a surprise — and a signal that Iran would lead the nations of the world in the process of reconciliation — there was a guest visitor aboard: Commander Vasily Kolchak. Kolchak, it turned out, had been part of the Russian invasion fleet a year before.

The two were scheduled to sail through the Strait of Hormuz together — allies turned adversaries, then allies again. He was pleased to see Kolchak, who had also been promoted since their last encounter. The dedication ceremony was on the whole a pleasant affair, except when the seas rose late that afternoon. The pitch and roll of the little, flat-hulled logistics ship that bore Farshad’s name soon proved too much for him. He spent the final hours of the maiden voyage locked in the latrine, retching, while his old friend Kolchak stood vigil outside the door, doing Farshad one last favor. He made certain nobody witnessed the greatest naval hero in a generation bent over on all fours debilitated by seasickness.

As Farshad rested on the footbridge, recalling these past few days, he felt reassured to know that in all likelihood he would never again see a body of water larger than the little stream that babbled pleasantly below his feet. He continued on his walk. The leaf-filtered sun fell along the path and on Farshad’s upturned and smiling face. It felt good to have the steady earth beneath him. He breathed deeply and quickened his pace. Soon he was at the far end of his property, near the elm where he was in the habit of taking his lunch.

He sat with his back against the trunk. On his lap, he spread out his meal: the egg, the bread, the olives. Since his bout of seasickness, his appetite hadn’t quite returned. He only nibbled at his food. He thought of Kolchak. When the two had a quiet moment on the ship that bore Farshad’s name, the Russian had asked him what he would do now that he was retired. Farshad didn’t mention his memoirs — that would’ve been too presumptuous. Instead, he talked about this land, his walks, a quiet life in the countryside. Kolchak had laughed uproariously. When Farshad asked what was so funny, Kolchak said that he never took Farshad as one for the quiet life. He had expected Farshad to try his hand at politics, or business; to use his notoriety to vault toward the topmost rungs of power.

Farshad finished his lunch. He wondered what his old mentor Soleimani would think of his decision to strive for a quieter life. It was, after all, Soleimani who had wished a soldier’s death for his young protégé, as opposed to the withering away he himself had feared and so narrowly avoided. How many times and on how many battlefields had Farshad cheated death? Too many to count. But as he thought of this, he began to wonder whether he’d cheated death or if it was death who had cheated him, never granting the end that Soleimani had wished for Farshad. Still, sitting beneath the elm at the edge of his property, Farshad couldn’t quite bring himself to wish that he’d died on a battlefield. Didn’t a soldier deserve the fruits of his labor? It seemed fitting that at the end of his days a soldier would become an intimate with peace. One might argue that the highest achievement for a soldier wasn’t to die on the battlefield, but rather to pass away quietly in a peace of his own creation.

A few morsels of his meal remained. Farshad flattened the paper sack in front of him on the grass, placing a piece of egg, a crust of bread, and two olives in a neat arrangement.

He waited. Waiting as he’d done nearly every day since his return home the year before. He dozed off. When he awoke, the afternoon sun held just above the treetops. The shadows had lengthened. Now he saw what he’d been watching for. Standing in the open grass was the single squirrel, the white-tailed one whose partner had bit Farshad long ago.

He placed the crust in his hand, offering it to her.

She wouldn’t come. Yet she wouldn’t run away either.

On many an afternoon, the two of them had sat fixed in a similar impasse. It always ended when Farshad walked off and the squirrel safely ate what he left behind on the paper sack. But Farshad wouldn’t quit. Eventually, he would convince her to trust him enough to eat again from his open palm. What would Kolchak, Bagheri, Soleimani, or even his father think if they could see him now, reduced to this, an old man coaxing this helpless creature toward him.

But Farshad no longer cared.

“I’m not giving up,” he whispered to the squirrel. “Come closer, my friend. Don’t you believe even an old man can change?”

New home. New city. The loss of her father. The overworked guidance counselor at their local middle school had told the girl’s mother that the first year would be the hardest. Yet the second year was proving harder still. When they’d left their home in Beijing for the countryside, her mother had said it would only be for a few days. The girl had repeatedly asked to speak to her father on the phone, and her mother had tried to call but couldn’t reach him. According to her mother, he had been doing important work for their government. She was old enough to understand that there had been a war on, that this was the reason they’d had to leave the capital. However, she wasn’t quite old enough to understand her father’s role. That understanding would come later, after Shanghai, when she and her mother were recalled to Beijing.

She remembered the old man who’d come to their apartment. Several of his large attendants in dark suits had waited outside the door. The old man carried himself like a well-dressed peasant. When her mother told her to go to her room so they could speak, the old man insisted that the girl stay. He cupped her cheek in his hand and said, “You look very much like your father. I see his intelligence in your eyes.” The old man went on to tell them that their home wasn’t their home anymore. That her father — intelligent as he was — had had bad luck, he’d made some mistakes, and he wouldn’t be returning. Her mother would cry later, at night, when she thought her daughter couldn’t hear her. But she didn’t betray a single emotion in front of the old man, who suggested they go live in the United States. “This will help things,” he said. And then he asked if there was anywhere in particular that they would like to go.

“Newport,” her mother answered. That’s where they’d been happiest.

And so they went. Her mother explained to her that they were lucky. Her father had gotten himself into trouble and they might have found themselves in prison, or worse. Except the government needed someone to blame for what had happened in Shanghai. They would blame her father. They would tout his disloyalty. They would accuse him of having conspired with the Americans. The proof of this would be his family’s abrupt departure to the United States. Her mother told her these things so that she would know that they weren’t true. “This new life,” her mother had said, “is what your father left us. We have become his second chance.”

Her mother, the wife of an admiral and a diplomat, now worked fourteen-hour days cleaning rooms at two separate chain hotels. The girl had offered to help, to also get a job, but her mother placed limits on her own humiliation, and seeing her daughter’s education sacrificed to menial labor would have breached those limits. Instead, the girl attended school full-time. In solidarity with her mother, she helped keep the studio apartment they shared impeccably clean.

Her mother never settled for menial labor. When she wasn’t working, she was searching for a better job. On several occasions, she reached out to the local Chinese community, those immigrants who’d arrived on American shores within the last one or two generations, her presumed allies who now owned small businesses: restaurants, dry cleaners, even car dealerships sprouting up around Route 138. Although America was a place where people came to make a new life, for both mother and daughter their old lives followed them. The Chinese community had to contend with the suspicions of other Americans, many of whom assumed their complicity in the recent devastation. Unfair as that assumption was, such assumptions in times of war were an American tradition — from Germans, to Japanese, to Muslims, and now Chinese. Helping the wife and daughter of a deceased Chinese admiral would only heighten suspicions against anyone foolish enough to assume the undertaking. The community of Chinese immigrants rejected the girl and her mother.

So her mother continued with her menial labor. One day a week she had off from work, but it didn’t always fall on a weekend, so it was the rare occasion when mother and daughter could spend a free day together. When they had their day, they always chose to do the same thing. They would take the bus to Goat Island, rent a dinghy from the marina, let out full sail, and head north, tucking beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge up toward the Naval War College, the same route they’d taken years before, with Lin Bao.

They never spoke his name around the house, fearful of who might still be listening. Out here, however, on the open water, who could hear them? They were beyond reach and free to say what they pleased. Which was why it was on the water, shortly after they passed beneath the bridge and two years after they’d first arrived, that her mother admitted she’d finally stopped looking for a different job. “Nothing better is coming,” she conceded to her daughter. “We must accept this…. Your father would expect us to be strong enough to accept it.”

“No one here trusts us, not even our own people. We’ll never be Americans,” the girl said bitterly. She sat slumped next to her mother, the two of them side by side in the stern of the dinghy. Her mother held the tiller; she didn’t look at her daughter, but at the horizon, trying to keep them on course.

“You don’t understand,” her mother eventually said. “We are from nowhere and have nothing. We have come here to be from somewhere and to have something. That is what makes us American.”

The two sat silently for a time.

A spray of water came over the bow as they crossed the wake of a much larger ship, the uncaring wave almost swamping their small dinghy.

When they arrived off the coast of the Naval War College, they drew in the sail, lifted the tiller, and dropped their small anchor. Their dinghy bobbed in the gentle swells. The two of them, mother and daughter, didn’t speak. They watched the shore, the familiar pathways, the office where he had once worked, the life they’d once had and, perhaps, would someday have again.

The ranch house was built in the center of her one-hundred-acre plot. The renovation had taken three years and most of her savings, but Sarah Hunt was starting to feel as though it was home. The house itself wasn’t much, a single floor with exposed timbers and rafters. She still didn’t have anything to hang on the walls and wondered if she ever would. Most of her photos she kept in storage. On a few occasions since retiring, after one sleepless, sweat-soaked night or another, she would go out to the shed in the back of the house and consider burning the single box that contained the photographs.

But it hadn’t come to that, at least not yet.

After Shanghai, the dreams got worse. Or not necessarily worse, but more frequent. Night after night she would be standing on the dock with the seemingly infinite parade of ships offloading their cargo of ghosts, while she searched for her father. She never found him, not once. Yet she remained unconvinced that her searching in the dreams was futile. For a long time, she hoped that when she finished her new home, the dreams might stop. And if they never stopped, she at least hoped to find something or someone recognizable in them. That hadn’t yet proven the case.

She had gone on and off medication to no effect.

She had spoken to therapists who only seemed to want to bury her beneath the weight of her own words, so she’d stopped talking to them. Each day, she walked the perimeter of her property, though it made her bad leg ache. Eight miles from her nearest neighbor, her plot of high desert brought her a modicum of peace. Despite the dreams, out here she could at least sleep. After the strike on Shanghai, she’d gone nearly a week with no sleep at all, her nerves so frayed that Hendrickson had to fly out to the Enterprise and relieve her of command himself, in the midst of the ceasefire negotiations being brokered by New Delhi. He had been gentle with her then, and he had remained gentle with her in the three years since. Predictably, he’d stayed in the Navy, pinning on a third star in his ascent to its highest ranks. A reward — and a deserved one — for the role he’d played in brokering the peace.

On his visits, which had become less frequent, he always assured her that there was nothing she could’ve done to prevent Shanghai. She hadn’t been the one to issue the launch order. Once the nine Hornets had departed the Enterprise there was nothing she could have done. If anything, the one Hornet getting to its target might have proven crucial to ending the war. During the ceasefire negotiations that followed, it had been essential for hawks like Wisecarver to make the face-saving claim that they had avenged the attacks against Galveston and San Diego. Without that claim, Hendrickson felt certain no ceasefire agreement would have been signed.

“This wasn’t your fault,” he would say.

“Then whose fault was it?” she would ask.

“Not yours,” and they would leave it at that. For the first year and into the second, Hendrickson would offer to help her in the ways he thought she needed help. “Why don’t you come stay with us for a bit?” or, “I’m worried about you out here on your own.” He thought it might be good for her to get back on the water again. Healing was the word he’d used. Hunt had reminded him that it was no accident she’d bought property in New Mexico, a landlocked state.

In the third year, on one of his now-rare visits, the two had decided to take a stroll around her property before dinner. During a lull in their conversation, she finally asked, “Will you help me with something?”

“Anything,” he answered.

“I’m thinking about adopting.”

“Adopting what?” he replied, as if he were hoping she might say a cat or a dog.

They continued to walk in silence, until, eventually, Hendrickson muttered, “Whosoever destroys one life has destroyed the world entire, and whosoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world….”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Isn’t that why you want to adopt?”

“I never thought I’d hear you quote scripture.”

Hendrickson shrugged. “I heard Trent Wisecarver say it once. Though I don’t think he believed it. Do you?”

They had come to a portion of her fence that needed mending. Instead of answering, Hunt bent down and cradled one of the heavy joists in her arms. She lifted with all her strength, exhaling sharply as she jammed its end into an upright. It would hold, at least temporarily, until she could make a permanent fix. She did this again with the joist’s other end. Then she wiped her dirty hands on the front of her jeans. “I’ve already started the adoption process,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m not asking for your opinion. I’m only asking for your help. They require letters of reference. You’re a war hero; one from you might mean something.”

Hendrickson didn’t answer. They finished their walk, had their dinner, and the next morning he left. A week passed, a month, and then several more. She fixed the fence on her property. She remodeled the ranch house, turning her study into a nursery. Her application for adoption continued its slow, bureaucratic progress. She provided bank statements. She submitted herself to interviews, to home visits. She knew the odds were stacked against her. She was a single woman and over fifty years old — or “of an advanced age,” as phrased by the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department. But none of this would disqualify her. What would disqualify her, she feared, was what had happened on the open ocean three years before. Would her government entrust her to nurture a single life after entrusting her to end so many? She didn’t know.

Then, quite by surprise, a sealed letter arrived in the mail. She didn’t need to open it. Hunt understood what Hendrickson had done for her. She forwarded along this letter to the adoption authority. The process continued. Step by step she moved through it, transforming herself into a prospective mother and transforming her isolated ranch into a suitable home. The social worker assigned to her case, a no-nonsense official who seemed impervious to chitchat and who wore a modest gold crucifix outside her turtleneck, reminded Hunt of Commander Jane Morris, which reminded her of the John Paul Jones. Hunt was so haunted by the resemblance that on the home visit she’d chosen to sit alone in her living room as opposed to walking through the house with the social worker, a breach of manners that likely didn’t work to her advantage. When the social worker finished her hour-long inspection, she exited the nursery and commented, “You’d never know you’d been in the Navy walking around this house. You don’t have a single photo out.”

Hunt hadn’t had a response, or at least not one she felt prepared to give.

Before she left, the social worker told Hunt she would receive a phone call in the coming days as to her eligibility to become an adoptive parent. In the days that followed, Hunt hardly slept. Her dreams returned with a ferocity she hadn’t known since immediately after Shanghai.

The ships unload their cargo….

Panicked, she searches for her father, knowing she’ll never find him….

On and on the dream spirals, only increasing in intensity. Until, one morning, in the midst of her dream she is released from her familiar terror by a sound….

Her phone was ringing.

The bedroom hadn’t changed in two decades. Posters of fighter jets, from the Corsair to the Phantom to the Hornet. A Super Bowl victory poster from 2017, the year Tom Brady became the GOAT. Varsity trophies littered the desk, a football player rushing, a batter hitting, their shoulders blanketed by a thickening layer of dust. History books were piled beside the trophies, including a dog-eared paperback of Baa Baa Black Sheep, an autobiography by Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. In the center of the desk was a letter first opened four years before, the envelope yellowing with age at its corners. It had come back from the Enterprise with the rest of his personal effects. His father kept it there. When missing him became too much, his father would sit vigil at the desk and reread the letter.

The old man finished reading. He gazed out the window, to the fields they used to play in. It was late autumn. The leaves were collected in great piles. He carefully refolded the letter and placed it in its envelope. He sat alone in the chair as the afternoon moved toward darkness. Occasionally, in the distance, he could hear the dull sound of a plane as it passed invisibly overhead.

Sandeep Chowdhury had a flight to catch. His taxi to the airport would arrive in a few minutes. The night before, he’d packed meticulously. This would be his first trip back to the United States since he’d left Washington as part of the peace delegation five years before. He brought an assortment of clothing, including a suit he would wear to formal meetings, but mostly he packed items to wear in the camps around Galveston and San Diego, which were filled with the internally displaced who had yet to resettle. It was strange for Chowdhury to wonder whether or not he should bring extra soap or toothpaste to an American city, where once you could buy anything. But no longer. At least that was what the security officer at UN headquarters in Mumbai had said.

Truth be told, Chowdhury’s distancing from America started when he’d resettled his mother and daughter in New Delhi. His mother, who had now reconciled with her aging brother, was reluctant to leave him. And if his mother was reluctant to leave her brother, Chowdhury couldn’t leave his mother — particularly in light of Ashni’s attachment to her grandmother. The girl had already been through so much with the loss of her own mother. This tally of familial obligations led Chowdhury to resign from the administration and stay on in what his uncle insisted on calling “your home country.” Once Chowdhury had made that decision, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that his expertise was in high demand. After the New Delhi Peace Accords, both the political world and business world opened up to him in a way he could never have anticipated. Not only had he served in the highest levels of the US executive branch; he was an India expert (or simply Indian, if the offending party hadn’t read his CV). International lobbyists, think tanks, venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds — they aggressively courted him with board seats, stock options, and prestigious titles such as “Senior Distinguished Fellow” as they vied for his expertise as part of a general clamor to understand India’s ascendance as an economic and political juggernaut.

For Chowdhury, this meant that he’d had no reason to go back to America. However, packing for this trip, that word, back, came to mind again. Although success after success had come to him since resettling in New Delhi, a certain bitterness remained in how he had left home. How often had he replayed the events of five years before in his mind, wondering if a different set of decisions might have led to a different set of outcomes. He thought of Wisecarver too, whose obstruction of the Indian defense attaché had eventually come to light, a scandal that cost the administration its next election, so that even had Chowdhury stayed on he would’ve soon been out of the job. But none of that had ever alleviated the deeper wound, which wasn’t the loss of life, as tragic as it had been, but rather the sacrifice of America itself, the idea of it.

Chowdhury had packed one suitcase and a carry-on, a daypack he could take when he traveled into the camps. His office at the UN High Commission for Refugees had also advised he bring a sleeping bag. Depending on road conditions and available accommodations, the chance existed that his delegation might need to stay one or two nights in the wretched camps, a detail that Chowdhury kept from his mother, who wouldn’t have approved. Cyclical outbreaks of typhus, measles, and even smallpox often sprouted from the unbilged latrines and rows of plastic tenting. These diseases had ravaged communities far and wide, only heightening the cost of the war. Their own hometown of Washington, D.C., had lost nearly fifty thousand residents to a vaccine-resistant strain of rubeola two years before. Chowdhury had wanted to return then to help, but his mother had convinced him not only to remain in New Delhi but to submit his application for Indian citizenship. Which he reluctantly did. “You need to accept that this might be your home,” she had said. Still, he couldn’t quite believe that the America he remembered, the America that Kennedy and Reagan had both called “the city upon a hill,” might vanish.

Except America was an idea. And ideas very seldom vanish.

Whenever he despaired, he reminded himself of this.

With his bags set by the front door, he stepped into his study, which had once been his uncle’s study, the very room where he’d learned of the attacks on Galveston and San Diego. At the corner of the desk sat a photograph of his great-great-grandfather, Lance Naik Imran Sandeep Patel of the Rajputana Rifles. This wasn’t the photo from the Delhi Gymkhana that his uncle had shown him years before, but a photograph from later on in his great-great-grandfather’s life, after his career in the army, once he’d made a modest fortune selling arms during Partition to the newly formed Indian government. Although the forty years between photographs had obscured the resemblance of the young and old versions of the same man, the gaze was unmistakable. It was unrequited, hungry for more — to do more, achieve more, to make a better, safer, more secure, more dignified life. It was, in Chowdhury’s estimation, a distinctly American gaze, though the man had never set foot in America.

When he considered his great-great-grandfather, and considered Reagan and Kennedy — who felt like grandfathers of another sort — and their shared vision of “the city upon a hill,” he felt assured by the notion that America, as an idea, did not depend upon any particular set of borders to endure. In fact, on this UN-sponsored humanitarian trip, he would be doing his part to restore American ideals to its very shores.

Outside, his taxi pulled up. Chowdhury messaged the driver to wait a minute. Another idea rang discordantly in his mind, an idea from another of America’s forefathers. These were words spoken by a young Abraham Lincoln two decades before the calamity that became the American Civil War. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, Lincoln had said, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years…. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

A nation of freemen.

Chowdhury counted himself among that nation, no matter where it might exist, in Washington, New Delhi, or elsewhere. And so he would travel back to America, hopeful that the spirit of that nation had yet to abandon the place. He had one last item to pack. Opening his desk drawer, he reached for his two passports: Indian and American, different shades of the same blue.

His hand hovered indecisively over them both. He had a flight to catch. Time was growing short. The taxi began to blare its horn. He stood, the seconds bleeding away. For the life of him, he couldn’t decide which to choose.