The glass was gray with dust. In the ancestral home in Karaikudi, Lalitha found a framed photograph leaning against the wall. She rubbed the glass with her teal cotton dupatta until rows of young men in white Oxford shirts emerged into focus. She found him at once. He was nineteen, with big almond-shaped eyes and a face that made her smile. He resembled her older child. The caption read: BSc. Botany, St. Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli, 1962. 
 
The frame felt like evidence: Appa had lived a whole life before she became part of his. 
 
"Where did this come from?" she asked. Her mother shrugged. "He treasured his education and photographs. He hung it on this wall." 
 
Lalitha photographed the picture with her phone. Her flight back to California was in two weeks. She knew where she had to go. Dementia had taken her father slowly, over ten years, and it took his stories first. He died the previous winter. Lalitha felt she had lost him twice, once when his memory faded and again when he did. He had been a wonderful storyteller. She remembered his Madurai classroom stories, where a stub of white chalk would tumble and front-row students would race to pick it up. But he never spoke of his college years in Trichy, and she never asked. Who were his friends? Where did he sit in lecture hall? What did he eat? 
 
In 2012, her father asked Lalitha to take him back to Trichy. She had a newborn, a promotion under review, a calendar full of kids' classes. "Not now, Appa," she said. "Next time." 
 
The truth was that she was afraid—of watching their roles blur, of becoming his parent while he became her child, of seeing him look at her like a stranger. She let her duties as a mother carry the blame. 
 
Lalitha had grown up in California from age five and had never ridden an Indian public bus. Today she climbed onto one, sat at the window seat on the side meant for women, with her backpack on her lap. The bus lurched. Jasmine from women's hair mingled with sweat, and the conductor's whistle cut through the horns. Boys crowded the bus, scrolling on cellphones and clinging to handrails as it turned sharply. 
 
She didn't know if her father had ever ridden a bus like this. But she wondered: could this have been his route? Elbows, rails, Botany books against his chest? 
The cell phones were new. The hope on their faces was as old as the road. She got down. 
 
At St. Joseph's, the guard held up a hand. "Where is your name badge, madam?" Lalitha held out her phone with the photograph. 
 
"My late father graduated here in 1962." The guard studied the screen, then stepped aside. "You have one hour, madam." 
 
Students laughed under a Gulmohar tree ablaze with red blossoms. Lalitha wasn't a visitor. She was looking for one place, and she wanted to find it herself, the way Appa would have, by walking. Then she turned a corner, and there were the steps.  
 
Two grand rows, faded gray, worn smooth by generations of feet. She pulled up the photograph and studied it again. The angle of the steps. The edge of the cement floor. The wall behind them. She walked slowly until she found the exact spot where the nineteen-year-old version of her father had stood. Then she stepped onto it. 
 
She imagined the young man in the photograph, his future unwritten. Then she took a selfie in the same spot. 
 
"Were you excited, Appa? Proud? What dreams did you have? Did you know you would become a professor?" The breeze touched her cheeks. That was all the answer she got. 
 
The botany lab was locked. A lab assistant in a Madras plaid shirt was rattling his keys on the way to lunch.  "My father studied here," Lailtha said. "Please. Ten minutes." Selvam unlocked the door. The room was cool, smelling of formalin and teak. Black lab tables stood in rows, with glass jars labeled in careful Latin and stacked on walls. Lalitha ran her palm over the benches. Where did Appa sit? 
 
"Old herbarium sheets are in that cabinet," Selvam said. "From the sixties."  Lalitha pulled the drawers open one by one. Pressed flowers. Leaves brittle as paper. In the last drawer lay a book with a single flattened cauliflower flower. The label read: 
 
Brassica oleracea var. botrytis
 
N. Ramanathan
 
Feb. 1961 
 
She knew that handwriting all too well. "Cruciferous family," Appa's voice resonated in her mind when she was a teenager in California, holding a cauliflower up like a trophy. "Very good for you." 
 
She wondered how much of that young professor she had never really known. 
 
"May I photograph it?" 
 
"The college keeps them, madam," Selvam said. "But photographing is free." She laughed through tears, hands shaking on the phone. As Selvam locked the lab, he paused. "Dr. Krishnamoorthy taught here back then," he said. "He lives in Raja Colony. Ninety years old. His memory is going. But ask him." 
 
Lalitha looked again at the herbarium sheet. The photograph now felt less like a record and more like a clue. 
 
That afternoon, Selvam took her to a botany class. Lalitha stood before the freshmen, aware that she had never been one of them. 
 
"My father graduated with a bachelor's degree in Botany here in 1962," she told them. "I came here looking for his memories. I don't know what I'll find, but I wanted to walk where he once walked." 
 
"Was he always interested in plants?" a student asked. Lalitha smiled. "I don't know. That's why I'm here." She studied the students: cellphones, Levi's jeans, Nike backpacks, name tags, Adidas sneakers. A time capsule of American brands.  She stripped away the brands. What remained were young people with hopes. In those faces, she saw Appa—not one boy, but all of them. 
 
In the courtyard stood a stone plaque: I am a Josephite. 
 
She had never studied here. But she pressed her palm to it and thought: My father did. 
 
The next evening, Lalitha and her uncle sat in a small house in Raja Colony over murukku and cardamom chai. 
Dr. Krishnamoorthy was frail, with salt-and-pepper wispy hair. His daughter hovered nearby. Lalitha showed him the photograph of the 1962 graduating Botany class. His eyes cleared. Then she showed him the herbarium sheet. 
His expression changed. 
 
"Ramanathan," he said. "The boy who walked in the rain for that cauliflower flower." Lalitha stared at him.  "The cauliflower flower?" He nodded slowly. "Yes. He walked all the way to collect it. Came back soaked."  A faint smile crossed his face. "Studious. Most creative in the class." 
 
Something inside Lalitha shifted. Until then, she had reconstructed her father's surroundings. Now she glimpsed the young man himself. "I wrote him a recommendation letter for a lectureship at Madurai Thiagarajar College. Nine hundred and seventy rupees salary, I believe." His daughter touched Lalitha's arm. "His memory is fleeting sometimes," she said softly. Lalitha knew what a fading memory could take away. "Please," she urged Dr. Krishnamoorthy. "Tell me Ramanathan's story.", and listened. 
 
As Lalitha left, his daughter placed a thamboolam in her hands: kumkum and a photograph of Lakshmi. That night, at her uncle's house, Lalitha thought about what she had heard. "Studious. Most creative in the class."  She looked at the photograph on her phone. When she first saw it, she had seen a handsome boy. Now she saw a serious student, a scientist, a boy who walked in the rain for a flower, whose professor believed in him. 
 
She would never find his favorite bench or learn all his college stories. And that was almost okay. Appa had not always been Appa. Before he was her father, he was a young student with his whole future ahead of him, full of dreams, long before she existed.   
 
Eight months after he passed away, she finally met him as a college student. She had never been a student here. But somehow, she was a Josephite now.