*excerpt from the print edition of NER 46.2

Subramanyam Vedam, forty-year resident of the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, didn’t cause my dreams, which have recurred in the same general pattern for longer than I have known him. I am either on my way in a silent car to be deposited at the jail, or I’m already in jumpsuit orange. The lights are fluorescent. The air is cold, the clothing thin. Everything is silent, as if it’s very early in the morning or snow is falling. My right hand contains the plastic barcode that will beep me out to the visiting area if I’m seeing family or back into the deeper recesses, where the lights turn dark and the dreams turn dim.

I’m either pretrial or sentenced, either convicted of something serious or just serving a series of weekends. In some versions, I am factually guilty. My shame, bottomless, cannot be cast aside or washed away, even once the sentence is over. But the dreams where I’m innocent are orders more terrifying. A scream rises up from my throat—I didn’t do it, you have to believe me—but no sound emerges, because I have no voice. In those moments that blend and stretch and feel as real as my fingers, I am not a lawyer, not a law professor, not a father or husband. I am Subu Vedam.

I awaken, relieved to be in my home once more. Subu, however, for forty years and counting, has yet to wake from the nightmare.

In 1983, Subramanyam Vedam was convicted for the murder of a young white man and small-time drug dealer and user named Tom Kinser. Kinser was shot in the head after disappearing on a wintry Sunday, December 14, 1980, near State College, Pennsylvania. The weapon and type of bullet that caused Kinser’s fatal wound have never been precisely established, but beyond question is this: Kinser got a call from his friend Subu Vedam around ten that morning looking for a ride to nearby Lewistown to buy acid. Kinser obliged, and set off in his family’s VW bus, borrowed from his father. Tom picked up Subu around noon in a neighborhood near Tussey Mountain, and they drove thirty-five minutes south to Lewistown. Subu said that Kinser had dropped him off back in downtown State College on the edge of campus afterwards. Kinser’s friends and family in State College never saw him again. After a protracted search, the police, a year and a half later, named Vedam their single suspect.

Subu’s case—and conviction for murder—was deceptive in its simplicity. Everyone agreed that Kinser got the call from Subu, also a small-time drug dealer. No one disputed that Tom agreed to give Subu a ride, as they were friends. No argument that the odyssey began at Tom’s home in Lion’s Gate apartments in State College, a sprawling, red-brick complex of threadbare carpet and paper doors that stands to this day as a den of graduate students and low-wage workers. No real dispute that Tom picked up Subu around noon at Harris Acres, a development in the shadow of the extended ridge of Tussey Mountain. No disagreement that they traversed the long, sloping Highway 322, which cut Lewistown neatly in two, or that Lewistown was an appropriate place to buy drugs, a town long past its zenith as a transportation and industrial hub that was now ground zero for all types of illicit activity. No dispute that they were both the children of Penn State faculty, though Tom was white and Subu Indian.

It’s the way back to State College where the convergence between the Commonwealth and Subu Vedam abruptly ends. There was so little actual, corroborable information that no one could truly say what happened. The Commonwealth argued that Subu shot Kinser in the woods right at the base of Tussey Mountain. Subu denied it, but couldn’t provide much in the way of details. He didn’t know what Tom did or where he went after he dropped off Subu. But everyone agreed on one point: Subu was the last known person to see Tom Kinser alive.

Subu has always maintained his innocence. It didn’t matter. He was convicted, and when that conviction was reversed, convicted again, in 1988.

I recall, during the eighties, family members of mine whispering about the Indian kid in Pennsylvania convicted of murder, the Indian community being small, and the Tamil Brahmin community, to which Subu and I both belong, even smaller. Subu was the kid who’d gone down the wrong path, mixing with the wrong crowd, making for the most powerful cautionary tale of them all. Subu’s father was an academic, a physics professor and materials scientist at Penn State, who would have blended seamlessly with my parents’ friends in North Carolina, who were all vegetarian and spoke Brahminical Tamil with its idiosyncratic conjugations and vocabulary. Mrs. Vedam, as she was known in the community, always wore a sari, a thick bindi, and a thali wrapped around her neck, just like my mother. Subu, just like me, was invested with the sacred thread. Their faded color photos from the seventies and eighties could have graced any number of our peeling albums. But it was also easy to set it aside—central Pennsylvania was a world away from North Carolina. And who wanted to believe that life in middle-class suburbs, as uneven as it sometimes was for educated immigrants, could be taken away so abruptly and so easily? We all knew it could. From the hard experience of life in India, my parents knew that pure chance often led to ruin. They passed that kernel, epigenetically, to me. No wonder my nightmares of being in jail, cause unknown, started in childhood.

In 2017, on the heels of Trump’s surprise election win, I moved, with my own young Indian-American family, to the unlikeliest place I could have imagined for us—State College, Subu’s home from all those years ago. My wife had been recruited to Penn State’s History Department, and I’d been offered a position at the law school. State College was no longer just a name on a map, known by its irritating nom de plume Happy Valley, no longer just a hill town with vibrant, fall colors that turned dreamlike on crisp, clear autumn days.

On the eve of our move, my uncle, who had been an engineering professor at the University of Nebraska, reminded me, in his hoarse, ataxia-slurred voice, that State College was where the Vedams lived. There was a pause as I wondered where I had heard that name. “Their son was convicted of murder,” my uncle continued, guessing my confusion. And something clicked into place, the memory from so long ago and so dreaded that my parents dared not speak about it—the Tamil Brahmin boy convicted of the most serious crime in the code.

There was a message for me somewhere, and I could hear it in my uncle’s resigned voice, battered by disease and the tail end of his academic career, where politics shifted in his department and bequeathed to him a windowless office in his final years at Nebraska. Maybe you can do something about it, he seemed to say, more through the look in his eye and in his flat pronouncement that Dr. Vedam had been a professor at Penn State than in anything specifically articulated. He spoke as if he had met Dr. Vedam or known of him in professional contexts, but he shook his head when I asked him about it. They’d been in different fields, with different colleagues and different conferences. I gathered it was ultimately kinship; both Indian, Tamil, and Brahmin, working in those predominantly white, somewhat conservative universities during that time. My uncle, like my parents, worried about “corrupting influences” and knew how thin the line was between our world and the Vedams’ . . .

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