When they took down her mother’s body from the rafter and buried her in Gulele Cemetery, Genet’s vivacious and lively self died and was buried with her. She now attends Empress Menen School and wears the same uniform as every other girl in attendance; her only adornment is a St. Bridget’s cross around her neck. Genet wants to blend in with the crowd.

On Saturday evenings, Marion’s new ritual is to visit Genet at school, just up the hill from the palace where General Mebratu and Zemui had taken hostages and accomplished their bloodless coup. She could have come home on weekends, but now Missing evokes bad memories for her, and she insists she is happy at Empress Menen. The strict Indian teachers are very good, and Genet works very hard now that she is away from other distractions.

Marion and Genet enter university together for their premedical coursework, and they enter medical school together the next year. Although Genet is out of her uniform, her demeanor is still “reserved and subdued.” Each time Marion visits her at the hostel where she lives, he prays this will be the day Genet will open the “locked door of her heart” and traces of the old Genet will appear. She always appreciates the food Hema and Almaz send, but the barrier remains. Marion still loves her but wishes he did not.

In 1974, Genet and Marion enter the Haile Selassie the First School of Medicine as part of the third class to be admitted. They are paired as dissection partners on a cadaver, which is a blessing for Genet. Any other partner would have been angry about her frequent absences and not doing her share of the work. Marion knows Genet is not being lazy and believes there is something else happening, though for once he has no idea what it is.

The teachers at the school are good; they come from many countries and have had extensive training. Only one of them is Indian: Dr. Ghosh. His official title is Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Surgery. Over the past twenty-eight years in Ethiopia, Ghosh has become a medical scholar, which none of the family had realized. Ghosh has published forty-one papers and written a textbook chapter. His initial work was done in sexually transmitted diseases, but he has become the world’s leading expert on relapsing fever because the louse-born variety of this disease is endemic to Ethiopia and no one has observed it as closely as he has.

Marion learned about the disease as a schoolboy when Ali, the man who owned the souk near Missing, brought his brother to the hospital. The brother had been living in the country; when he came to the city he was exposed to substandard living conditions (including crowded living quarters and unclean clothes that could not be washed often during the rainy season), scratched a louse into his blood system, and had no immunity to the resultant disease. Years later Ghosh shows Marion the correspondence he had with the New England Journal of Medicine about naming one component of diagnosis, Adam’s sign, for Missing’s compounder. The Journal insisted that it be omitted from the scholarly journal article, but Ghosh maintained his insistence that this was Adam’s discovery and that the world was certainly ready for something named after a humble Black man who discovered the phenomenon and deserved the credit. Ghosh won the argument and the paper was published, which led to his writing a chapter in the internal medicine textbook that serves as a Bible for senior medical students.

Hema proudly buys her husband two new pinstripe suits and a professorial tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. The bowtie is Ghosh’s idea, emblematic of his celebration of his profession, which he calls his “romantic and passionate pursuit.” Ghosh practices medicine in the same way he lives his life.