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to a place where there were no historical records. I’d sought a memory in a land where the campaign to vanquish memory had been waged for over six decades. Before retreating from Russia in 1943, the Nazis had torched all their records, then dug up their victims’ bodies and burned them as well to destroy the evidence. For the next half-century, the Soviets had carried on that campaign, blotting out even the memory of those erasures. When the Soviet empire disintegrated, Belarus had been cast adrift, like that piece of colored cardboard missing from Marina’s globe where her country should be. Now its leader clutched the helm of state with a rusty iron fist and protected the secrets of two dead empires. My journey to wrest a memory from the shadows had led me to this land where nobody remembered.

To conjure my grandmother into memory required something unshifting—a place, an image, a solid fact, yet the site of her murder had also been banished, buried beneath mountains of trash, then further obscured by the official blue stamp on the city map. My father, too, had rejected the past, even cast off his name, renaming himself after the shape-shifter of Greek mythology. To Proteus, memory had also become the enemy.

As we returned to the road and headed back toward Minsk, I watched the stork though the car’s rear window until it was out of sight. I pictured my grandmother, Berta, as she may have looked as a young woman—her eyes maybe green, like mine. Maybe full of hope. But all I know of her story is that it concluded somewhere beneath those mountains of relics, layer upon layer of relics, flung away to rot or to burn or to blow, feather-light, in the wind.

Carolyn Kraus is a professor of Journalism and Screen Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her essays have appeared in Partisan Review, The Antioch Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She has written as “Our Far-Flung Correspondent” for The New Yorker, and as an op-ed contributor to The New York Times. This story won the Grand Prize Gold Award in the Fifth Annual Solas Awards (www.BestTravelWriting.com).

MATTHEW CROMPTON

Camel College

The school of life is open to all.

BY THE TIME I MET AJIT, THE CAMEL DRIVER, I’D ALREADY written India off.

I’d tried meditation and yoga, then yoga and hashish. I’d read voraciously—Aurobindo and the Bhagavad Gita, Salman Rushdie and Shantaram. I’d stayed in ashrams and hiked through ruins, haggled in markets and took freezing dips in the Ganges, seeking an experience of this country that everyone assured me was one of the most beautiful and amazing places on earth. But in early 2008, after months of traveling the subcontinent, the truth was that I hated India.

This should hardly be surprising. India was sickness, noise, pollution, and death. It was barbarism, poverty, and touts, cow shit and garbage, people pissing in the streets. Others were always quick with advice, but the more of it I got, the more it seemed like fortune cookie wisdom, false bits of other people’s knowledge, that I could no more use than I could wear their shoes or eyeglasses. So it is ironic that when I finally came to make peace with India—to understand it—I owed it all to an unassuming man in pink plastic shower slippers.

That was Ajit. Stick thin, in his mid-thirties, he had the slight frame of a man who grows up poor in a poor country. A black dhoti wrapped around his legs in the cold clear desert morning, and bare feet sheathed in those pink plastic slippers like a little girl would wear to the beach, the teeth in his dark, sun-baked face were stained yellow-brown with the tar of beedis, which he chainsmoked continuously.

“Anyeong haseo!” he called out to the Koreans as they arrived by jeep from the desert outpost of Jaisalmer; “Shalom!” he said to the Israelis, gritty and ashen-faced in the early morning sun after a late night of partying; “Welcome, welcome!” It was mid-January in the Great Thar Desert, out in the far western margins of Rajasthan, the very edge of India, the rope of one stubborn animal in Ajit’s nonsmoking hand