"What's the problem, Angel." I asked, trying not to overreact. When women are in tears, it is best to remain as steady as possible.
"It wasn't my fault!" she said, sobbing so convulsively that I could barely make out what she was saying.
"What wasn't your fault?" I asked, noting to myself that I was getting better at these conversations.
"The missing pages. Professor Haggerty says that it is my fault that they are missing."
"What difference does it make whose fault it is, as long as they are found?"
"That's the problem. We can't find them and he says that it is my fault."
"Sit down, Angel. And tell me what happened."
"One of my responsibilities", she began, "is to back up the web server every Friday. We have twenty-four tapes that we rotate, so we always have backups of the last twenty-four weeks. The tapes are all numbered and each week we just take the next tape in sequence and overwrite it."
"Go on."
"The backup of the missing pages was about ten weeks ago, so those pages should have been on at last one of the backup tapes, depending on how long they were online before they disappeared. But the back up tapes got messed up and I can't find the missing pages."
"How did the tapes get messed up?"
"I keep the tapes in sequential order on a shelf in Professor Haggerty's office. Each week I take the tape on the right end, make a backup and place it on the left end. That way the tapes are always rotated in order. The oldest tape is always the one on the right and the newest is always the one on the left."
"Sounds like a pretty good system to me."
"But somebody rotated a block of a dozen or so tapes and I landed up copying over the backups from ten weeks ago. It didn't even occur to me to check the sequence numbers because the way I have the system set up I don't need to."
"So we don't have any backups of the missing pages?"
"No and Professor Haggerty says that it is my fault."
She started to cry again and I looked at her in puzzlement. It wasn't like Haggerty to cast blame. Even if he thought it was her fault, he shouldn't have said so. And I couldn't imagine Angel making a mistake like that. Something was very odd.
You had to know Angel in order to understand how ludicrous Frank's allegation was.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's, India was all the rage to American counterculture. Ravi Shankar and the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi were pop idols. Bleeding madras shirts and water buffalo sandals were the in thing to wear. In 1969, the Beatles visited India and started a flood of hip, young American tourists, shell shocked by the turmoil over the Vietnam War and looking for some deeper meaning in life. They believed that somehow, the Indians knew the secrets of life. In typical American fashion they believed that you could fly over there with a pocketful of travelers checks and learn those secrets.
Angel's mother, Sonia, was one of the hip young Indians who participated in the cultural exchange of the period. Coming from a very wealth family, she knew Ravi Shankar and had met the Beatles. She had been to America several times and had many hip American friends. After this period of intense Westernization she found it difficult to return to traditional Indian values.
Sonia, nicknamed Sonny, got involved with an American from Pittsburgh who was in India avoiding the draft. Anjali was born in 1974, the love child of these interracial hippies. In 1976 when President Carter offered amnesty for draft dodgers, Angel's father decided to come back to America and reconnect with his friends and family. He took with him several gifts, one of which was a boxed set containing an elegant English translation of the Vedas. At La Guardia airport, a dope-sniffing dog drew attention to the Vedas, which were found to contain three pounds of top quality hashish. Angel's father broke away and became a fugitive. Neither Angel nor her mother ever heard from him again.
Sonny turned from drugs to drink. For five years she wallowed in despair and depression, getting dangerously close to her thirtieth birthday. Finally, her family used to their money and influence to find her a new husband - a Bengali spice exporter named Chakravarthy.
Angel resented Sonny's sell out to the West and would occasionally refer to her as 'her burned out hippie mom'. Angel would also refer to Sonny by her first name using the tone of voice that parents save for errant children. In the rebellious way that children have, Angel became excessively traditional, adopting all of the values that her mother had rejected. At the same time, she resented her stepfather as an intruder. One day she would study Sanskrit poetry to antagonize her mother, the next day she would wear a tie-dyed t-shirt with no bra to aggravate her father. As her mother deteriorated she moved more toward traditional views. But the stamp of the West is not so easy to wash off and Angel found herself trapped between two cultures. Sort of an Indian version of Steppenwolf.
Growing up as the adolescent child of a depressed alcoholic, Angel was often responsible for her mother and became compulsively control oriented. I knew that she would never make a mistake as silly as overwriting the wrong tape. I also knew how deeply Frank's allegation had wounded her. I felt a deep sense of betrayal. For the first time since I had known Frank, I was angry with him.
"I don't think Professor Haggerty really meant that Angel." I said soothingly. "There is probably something else bothering him that he can't do anything about, so he took it out on you."
"Do you really think so?"
"I'm sure that's it."
She stopped crying and relaxed in her chair. She even managed to force a slight smile. I sat back wondering what was bothering Frank, completely unaware of how prophetic my reassurances were.