Chapter 25
He did not fall in love with Priya. That was important to understand because people assumed he had, or would, given the nature of their friendship the easy familiarity, the shared hours, the way they knew each other's thinking well enough to finish each other's academic arguments.
What he felt for Priya was something more durable and less dramatic: a genuine recognition. She was one of the people he was most fully himself with. He didn't perform anything for Priya and she didn't perform anything for him and that, he had come to understand, was rarer and more valuable than he had once appreciated.
She was British-Indian, second generation, from a family in Birmingham that had been in England since the 1970s. She had grown up between two cultural expectations: the English world of school and peers, and the Indian world of family and community. She had made peace with the in-between-ness in a way that was similar to his own and she understood, without needing it explained, why he ran every morning and why he kept the photograph of his mother on the windowsill and why he wrote letters to Leroy by hand.
'It's about staying real,' she said once, when he was explaining the letters.
'Yes,' he said.
'Because things get abstract here. University makes things abstract. You read about the world and discuss it and theorise about it and sometimes you have to touch the actual thing.'
'Exactly,' he said. 'Leroy is the actual thing.'
She nodded as if this were obvious. It was obvious, to her.
In the second year they worked together on a research project for their Education module a study of attainment gaps and the ways in which teachers' assumptions about students shaped outcomes. They interviewed students and teachers and analysed data and wrote a paper that their supervisor described as publishable.
'We should publish it,' Priya said.
'We're twenty,' Marcus said.
'So? The research is good. Age is irrelevant.'
They submitted it to an undergraduate research journal. It was accepted with minor revisions. They revised it. It was published in the spring of their second year.
Marcus sent a copy to his mother. She read it and called him.
'I don't understand half the academic words,' she said. 'But I understand that you found something true and wrote it down. That's what it is, right?'
'That's exactly what it is,' he said.
'Then I'm proud,' she said. 'Like always.'