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complications…”
    No, he was killed.
    In my head, I was adamant.
    â€œWhy do you say so, Nehemiah?”
    I stayed silent.
    He asked me again.
    Much as I wanted to confide in him, at the time I couldn’t bring myself to explain.

    If art is preservation, it is also confession.
    Few lectures stay with me from my university days—a class on DH Lawrence’s language of synesthesia, Woolf’s complex layering of time, Ismat Chughtai’s seething denouncement of the world—and those that do were mostly delivered by Doctor Mahesar. A professor of petite yet rotund build and razor-sharp articulation. His tutorial room was atop the college building, on the open, flat roof, overlooking the lawns andtrees, where in the evening, squawking parrots came to roost. In the summer, it was unbearable, a compact, vicious furnace, with only the rare, welcome visitation of a breeze.
    One morning, we discussed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
    We watched beads of sweat form on Doctor Mahesar’s forehead, and stream gently down the contours of his face. Before him, bent over our Annotated T. S. Eliot, we similarly perspired—the smell of sweat, pungent as a sliced onion, hung in the air. Last year, under identical sweltering conditions, Doctor Mahesar had thrown his text on the table. “I give up.” He said he couldn’t teach “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” without crumbling under the weight of irony.
    Naturally, he was everyone’s favorite professor.
    That day, everyone in the room hoped for a similar tirade, seeing there was mention of fog and cool winter evenings, but no such shenanigans took place.
    â€œHow does the poem begin?” he asked, holding the text up to us like a mirror.
    There was a mumble of voices— Let us go then, you and I… when the evening is spread out against the sky…
    â€œThat is incorrect.”
    Small circles of confusion spun around the room. Finally, a girl in the front row spoke up, “It begins with an epigraph.”
    â€œThank you, Ameya. Yes, it begins with an epigraph.”
    â€œYou mean the part we can’t understand,” said someone from the back.
    â€œYes, Noel. The part in Italian, which, if you’ve heard of it, is a Neo-Latin Romance language spoken mainly in Europe.”
    The class sniggered.
    â€œ S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse, a persona che mai tornasse al mondo … Now, I’m sure there’s someone here who can recite it for us word for word in translation.”
    There was deep and resolute silence.
    The professor spoke the lines softly.
    â€œIf I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker… But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed. So you see, the poem begins with the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead… and you.”
    He placed the book on the table and mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief.
    â€œWhy do you think this is poised as a confession?” The class stared back, blank as the blackboard behind him. “Because that’s the psychology of secrets,” he explained. “People have a primitive or compelling need to divulge their emotional experiences to others. Confessions can be written as letters, notes, diaries, or in this case, an entire poem…”
    For a long time I couldn’t tell Nicholas about who’d killed Lenny.
    I felt it was the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead and me.

    It may have been a coincidence, as these things usually are, but after the talk in the conference hall, I frequently noticed Nicholas around campus. It wasn’t all too difficult to spot him, since he was one of few Caucasians around, although admittedly Delhi University had seen its fair share of white folk, most of