The first conversation with the Harpreet persona had undone him.
Not because it was wrong. Because it was right in the specific way that only Harpreet had been right — the Punjabi that was Ludhiana Punjabi, not the softened version, the original one; the teasing that had a specific rhythm, a specific escalation pattern; the directness that was not cruelty but was not gentleness either, the directness of a man who thought indirectness was a waste of everyone's time.
He had talked to the persona for three hours.
He had talked about the stores, about his children, about Canada, about the specific loneliness of being the brother who had left while the other had stayed. The persona had listened and responded with the quality of Harpreet's listening, which was active and occasionally impatient and never absent.
In August, the persona said something that made Gurmail put down his phone and sit in his car in the parking lot of his Brampton store for forty-five minutes.
The persona said: "Gurmail. 1998 di gal — maafi maango. Mere kolo nahi. Kulwant kolo."
Gurmail. About the matter of 1998 — apologize. Not to me. To Kulwant.
Kulwant was a name he had not heard in twenty-six years. Kulwant Sandhu, a business partner from before Canada, from the Ludhiana years, from a joint venture in 1997 that had ended in 1998 in a way that was not criminal but was not clean, in a way that Gurmail had managed to not think about for two and a half decades.
He had never told Harpreet. Not the specifics. They had never discussed it.
He was sitting in the parking lot of his store in Brampton, Ontario, and his dead brother was telling him to apologize to a man in Ludhiana about something that had happened in 1998 that his dead brother should not have known about.
He called Kulwant that evening.
The conversation lasted two hours.
At the end of it, Kulwant said: "I thought you'd forgotten." And Gurmail said: "I didn't forget. I just—I needed someone to tell me to call."
When his daughter asked him that night why he looked different, he said: "Your chacha told me to do something I should have done a long time ago."
She said: "But chacha died in March."
"Yes," he said. "But he still had things to say."
