Anna had helped them to write a small raft of proposals, and it had indeed been a pleasure, as they did all the real work and very well too while she just added her expertise in grant writing, honed through some tens of thousands of grant evaluations. She definitely knew that world, how to sequence the information, what to emphasize, what language to use, what supporting documents, what arguments all of it. Every word and punctuation mark of a grant proposal she had a feel for, one way or the other. It had been a pleasure to apply that expertise to the Khembalis’ attempts.

Now she was pleased again to find that they had heard back from three of them, two positively. NSF had awarded them a quick temporary starter grant in the “Tropical Oceans, Global Atmosphere” effort; and the INDOEX countries had agreed informally to expand their Project Asian Brown Cloud (ABC) to include a big new monitoring facility on Khembalung, including researchers. This would cement a partnership with the START units already scattered all over South Asia. Altogether it meant funding streams for several years to come tens of millions of dollars all told, with infrastructure built, and relationships with neighboring countries established. Allies in the struggle.

“Oh that’s very nice,” Anna said, and hit the PRINT button. She cc’d the news to Charlie, sent congratulations to Drepung, and then got back to work on the spreadsheet.

After a while she remembered about the printouts, and went around the corner to the Department of Unfortunate Statistics to get the hard copies.

She found Frank inside, shaking his head over the latest.

“Have you seen this one?” he said, gesturing with his nose at a taped-up printout of yet another spreadsheet.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s the latest Gini figures, do you know those?”

“No?”

“They’re a measurement of income distribution in a population, so an index of the gap between rich and poor. Most industrialized democracies rate at between 2.5 and 3.5, that’s where we were in the 1950’s, see, but our numbers started to shoot up in the 1980’s, and now we’re worse than the worst third world countries. 4.0 or greater is considered to be very inequitable, and we’re at 5.2 and rising.”

Anna looked briefly at the graph, interested in the statistical method. A Lorenz curve, plotting the distance away from perfect equality’s straight line tilted at forty-five degrees.

“Interesting…So this is for annual incomes?”

“That’s right.”

“So if it were for capital holdings ”

“It would be worse, I should think. Sure.” Frank shook his head, disgusted. He had come back from San Diego in a permanently foul mood. No doubt anxious to finish and go home.

“Well,” Anna said, looking at her printout, “maybe the Khembalis aren’t so bad off after all.”

“How’s that?”

Anna showed him the pages. “They’ve gotten a couple grants. It’ll make them some good contacts.”

“Very nice, did you do this?” Frank took the pages.

“I just pointed them at things. They’re turning out to be good at following through. And I helped Drepung rewrite the grant proposals. You know how it is, after doing this job for a few years you do know how to write a grant proposal.”

“No lie. Nice job.” He handed the pages back to her. “Good to see someone doing something.”

Anna returned to her desk, glancing after him. He was definitely edgy these days. He had always been that way, of course, ever since the day he arrived. Dissatisfied, cynical, sharp-tongued; it was hard not to contrast him to the Khembalis. Here he was, about to go home to one of the best departments in one of the best universities in one of the nicest cities in the world’s richest country, and he was unhappy. Meanwhile the Khembalis were essentially multigenerational exiles, occupying a tidal sandbar in near poverty, and they were happy.

Or at least cheerful. She did not mean to downplay their situation, but these days she never saw that unhappy look that had so struck her the first time she had seen Drepung. No, they were cheerful, which was different than happy; a policy perhaps, rather than a feeling. But that only made it more admirable.

Well, everyone was different. She got back to the tedious grind of changing data. Then Drepung called, and they shared the pleasure of the good news about the grant proposals. They discussed the details, and then Drepung said, “We have you to thank for this, Anna. So thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but it wasn’t really me, it’s the Foundation and all the other organizations.”

“But you are the one who piloted us through the maze. We owe you big time.”

Anna laughed despite herself.

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s just that you sound like Charlie. You sound like you’ve been watching sports on TV.”

“I do like watching basketball, I must admit.”

“That’s fine. Just don’t start listening to that rap music okay? I don’t think I could handle that.”

“I won’t. You know me, I like Bollywood. Anyway, you must let us thank you somehow for this. We will have you to dinner.”

“That would be nice.”

“And maybe you can join us at the zoo when our tigers arrive. Recently a pair of Bengal tigers were rescued off Khembalung after a flood. The papers in India call them the Swimming Tigers, and they are coming for a stay at the National Zoo here. We will have a small ceremony when they arrive.”

“That would be great. The boys would love that. And also ” An idea had occurred to her.

“Yes?”

“Maybe you could come upstairs and visit us here, and give one of our lunchtime lectures. That would be a great way to return a favor. We could learn more about your situation, and, you know, your approach to science, or to life, or whatever. Something like that. Do you think Rudra would be interested?”

“I’m sure he would. It would be a great opportunity.”

“Well not exactly, it’s just a lunchtime series of talks that Aleesha runs, but I do think it would be interesting. We could use some of your attitude here, I think, and you could talk about these programs too, if you wanted.”

“I’ll talk to the rimpoche about it.”

“Okay good. I’ll put Aleesha in touch.”

After that Anna worked on the stats again, until she saw the time and realized it was her day to visit Nick’s class and help them with math hour. “Ah shit.” Throw together a bag of work stuff, shut down, heft the shoulder bag of chilled milk bottles, and off she went. Down into the Metro, working as she sat, then standing on the crowded Red Line, Shady Grove train; out and up and into a taxi, of all things, to get to Nick’s school on time.

She arrived just a little late, dumped her stuff, and settled down to work with the kids. Nick was in third grade now, but had been put in an advanced math group. In general the class did things in math that Anna found surprising for their age. She liked working with them; there were twenty-eight kids in the class, and Mrs. Wilkins, their teacher, was grateful for the help.

Anna wandered from group to group, helping with multipart problems that involved multiplication, division, and rounding off. When she came to Nick’s group she sat down on one of the tiny chairs next to him, and they elbowed each other playfully for room at the round low table. He loved it when she came to his class, which she had tried to do on a semiregular basis every year since he had started school.

“All right Nick quit that, show the gang here how you’re going to solve this problem.”

“Okay.” He furrowed his brow in a way she recognized inside the muscles of her own forehead. “Thirty-nine divided by two, that’s…nineteen and a half…round that up to twenty ”

“No, don’t round off in the middle of the process.”

“Mom, come on.”

“Hey, you shouldn’t.”

“Mom, you’re quibbling again!” Nick exclaimed.

The group cackled at this old joke.