Passage West

by Rishi Reddi

  “The British cleared it before we arrived, bhai-ji,” Ram said modestly, smiling, then looked up to see the older man’s face: hazel eyes, a still gaze, the indigo cloth of his dastar cast against a dusty sky. His beard was flecked with gray, twisted and neatly tucked. For a fleeting moment, Ram felt ashamed of his clipped hair, his Hindu childhood. Karak had written about Jivan Singh: Almost every Punjabi in the Valley deferred to him. He had found them work, loaned mules and implements, given seed for free. Ram did not know that the man would be so dignified, taller than most other men in this desert settlement, whether Anglo or Hindustani or something else.

  Ram put his palms together and whispered, “Sat Sri Akal, bhai-ji.” After all, his father had been Sikh, and he was among his own people, no matter how they prayed. Jivan Singh grasped both Ram’s hands in his own. “So happy you have come. Karak has told us much about you. You are like family to us; we are from branches of the same tree.” His Punjabi was familiar; only a word or two different from the language of Ram’s Jullundur home. Ram felt a surge of longing. He looked away out of respect, stared at the torn leather at the tip of his boot. It was an old phrase, used by old people. Only a year ago Ram would have smiled at it, but now, after the train journey, after the pain in his side, after Hambelton, the words made his throat constrict with emotion.

  “My brother’s son, Amarjeet Singh.” Jivan indicated the younger man, wearing a white shirt and dungarees, dark eyes and fair skin set against a cream dastar. Karak had written about him too. Amarjeet’s father had sent him to live with Jivan Singh when he was fourteen. Karak had known him as a small boy, had taught him how to wrestle. Although he had completed high school in Fredonia, he seemed a boy still, barely meeting Ram’s gaze, broad shoulders awkwardly hunched. He reached for Ram’s bag and blanket and Ram allowed him to take them. That was when the ground shifted again, and Ram felt his legs give way as the earth loomed up to meet him.

  HE WOKE ON A COT inside a darkened shack, gazing at a roof of split cedar shakes, sunlight glimmering through cracks. For a moment, in his weakness, he thought Padma lay beside him, and he felt whole. Then the canvas shades swayed and yielded to the wind and he realized where he was. In a corner stood a table with a few bottles, beakers, trays, and a microscope. Near it, Amarjeet sat in a wooden chair, reading a newspaper. Their eyes met. Amarjeet slapped the paper on his lap and called, “Doc Paulson! Doc Paulson!” his voice exploding inside Ram’s head. The boy spoke like an American. “He’s awake! He’s awaaaake!”

  “Stop!” Ram said in Punjabi, more crossly than he meant. Amarjeet stared at him. Ram tried to smile. His cheeks felt stiff. So did his arm where Pala Singh had wrapped it in Hambelton. When he looked, he saw that it had been freshly bandaged. The wound on his shin was bandaged too, with dark blood seeping through. He was shirtless. They had examined him, he was sure of it, unclothed him and noted all his injuries while he was unconscious. They would know everything. They would sense that he was a coward.

  A curtain drew back and Karak entered the room, followed by Jivan Singh and an Anglo, whose presence filled the space, although he was shorter than Jivan. In the darkness, Ram could barely see them. Amarjeet raised a shade and sunlight flooded the room. “Ah, our patient is awake,” the Anglo said, too full of cheer. He wore spectacles; their fragility set against his coarse features.

  “This is Doc Paulson,” Karak said.

  “Why am I here?” Ram whispered in Punjabi.

  Karak told him that they’d carried him down the street to the doctor’s clinic, that the doctor had cleaned his wounds and stitched the cuts in his arm and chest. They saw the gash on his shin, but could do nothing about that. He had been resting for hours in Amarjeet’s company while Karak and Jivan finished some business in town.

  Ram saw the doctor glance back and forth as they spoke, tolerant of their Punjabi, seemingly unaffected.

  Karak did not ask the question—how did these injuries happen—and Ram did not answer it. He saw Jivan observing him silently.

  “How many days since you were hurt?” the doctor asked.

  Karak translated, but Ram understood the question well enough.

  “Pain is less,” Ram whispered, wrapping his tongue around the English words. There were questions he did not want to answer, for which he could feel only shame. Jivan Singh and the doctor exchanged a glance.

  “It’s the local anesthetic,” the doctor said. “It will wear off. It may hurt more in coming days.”

  Karak translated this too.

  Doc Paulson stepped forward. “May I ask how you came to be injured?” Later, when Ram knew the Valley more, he would learn the man was a friend of the sheriff’s, helping him keep the peace, warning him if visitors had seen trouble, as if it were his duty to know and report.

  Ram closed his eyes, shook his head in the slightest motion.

  “He doesn’t understand me,” Doc Paulson said.

  “Do you want to tell?” Jivan Singh said to Ram in Punjabi.

  Ram felt a surge of gratitude. He looked down, inspected the cloth of his bedsheet. “I was struck by a carriage in Los Angeles, before I boarded the train.” He felt Karak’s intake of breath. Ram gazed at Jivan Singh.

  “Shall I tell him that?” Jivan asked. Ram nodded yes. Jivan Singh translated Ram’s answer into English. Ram had feared missing his train, Jivan added, so did not wait to see a doctor in the city.

  Doc Paulson nodded, but he looked at Ram for a moment too long.

  “We brought a lunch for him, Doc,” Jivan said quickly.

  The doctor allowed that Ram could eat it there before they left, and they should take their time, because it was still too hot to hurry.

  “Thank you,” Jivan said. They shook hands. Jivan smiled at him, and the doctor smiled back.

  “What will be the cost for this?” Ram asked Karak after the Anglo left, but Jivan interjected, “I’ve known the doctor for eight years. He’s grazed his cattle on our field.” Ram was surprised by the generosity. He had been surprised by the handshake too.

  The Punjabis propped Ram up with pillows. Amarjeet brought out a brass tiffin, its handle inscribed with the letters BOMBAY BRASS AND IRON WORKS, and unlatched its clasp. Inside were chole, paneer, lime pickle, and roti. The aroma of cumin and cilantro made Ram’s stomach clench. “My wife is a good cook,” Jivan said. “Even her simple meals are delicious.” Ram tore the roti and ate in large bites, gulping water, while the others stood by his bed.

  But the question lingered.

  “How did this happen to you, bhai?” Karak asked.

  “Did no one help after the carriage hit?” Amarjeet asked, looking at Karak.

  Karak smiled a ghost of a smile, exchanged a glance with Jivan.

  The boy was too old to be this naive, Ram thought. “It happened, brother,” Ram said. “What more can be said?”

  They did not ask again. Ram took that as a sign of respect between men. He felt a burden lifting. He had been a coward, but his injuries had not been trivial; he had needed a doctor’s help. There was vindication in that.

  THE LAND THAT JIVAN SINGH FARMED was nine miles away, forty-five minutes on horseback, less than two hours with a wagon and rested team of mules. Dusk came quickly. The air grew cool and the breeze more insistent. The Imperial Valley was empty, made of only chalk and space, so different from the lumber mill and Hambelton’s dark, lush woods, with their sharp tang of wet soil. Sitting up in the hay in the wagon’s bed, Ram felt unable to focus his mind. He dreaded the openness, the vast darkness that fell upon them from all sides. Night announced itself in the strange chirping that came from the sand, in a creature’s distant howl.

  “There are jackals?” Ram asked.

  “Coyotes,” Amarjeet said. After the meal, he had grown less shy. While Jivan and Karak shared the driver’s seat in front, he sat across from Ram, leaning back in the wagon bed, talking, asking Ram questions that Ram did not always answer.

  Looking up at the dark sky, Amarjeet pointed to t
he darker outline of Mount Signal looming from Mexican soil. He knew the Valley almost as well as Ram knew Shahpur. He named the farmers who had homesteaded the land they passed. He told Ram of a great flood that had overtaken the desert towns several years before, of how men had held back the river, how Jivan Singh—his chacha-ji, he said proudly—had been one of them. He spoke as if his uncle were not present. “Chacha-ji cannot homestead any territory because he is an alien, but he says it does not matter.”

  Ram had propped himself up at the angle at which the pain was tolerable. The wagon’s sturdy frame, the musk of the mules, the strength of their backs, their muffled footsteps on the sandy loam, all these comforted him, and slowly, he allowed himself to forget desperation. The desert was unknowable, but in this tiny wagon the four of them formed something familiar—he did not know how to name it. The dust-wind had grown gentle. The half-moon sailed white and brilliant beside them. Padma was under this same moon. She perhaps had looked up that same night, showing it to their son, teaching him the word “chanda.” He wondered whether the boy had begun to speak. Despite Amarjeet’s tales, he drifted in and out of a pleasant sleep.

  At a random swath of land, in a break between fields of waist-high alfalfa, the wagon turned west and stopped in front of a small building—a house that faded into the darkness. A figure stood in the doorway, holding a lantern. The light shone in a circle around her, showing off her Punjabi dress, the delicate chunni lying about her neck and shoulders. Jivan put down the reins and clambered down from the wagon. “She is my wife, Kishen Kaur,” Jivan said, without looking at her. “At home, it would not be proper to introduce you. But here, it would be improper if I did not.”

  The woman drew the chunni around her hair and lowered her eyes. Ram felt a surge of warmth. He had not seen a woman from his part of the earth for so long. Kishen Kaur offered him lime juice with sugar and he drank until satisfied.

  “It was a long ride, Kishen-ji.” Jivan’s voice was soft. “Some food would be appreciated.”

  A small girl ran from the back, tottered past the woman, and made a circle around Amarjeet. “Veer-ji! Veer-ji!” she cried. Amarjeet picked her up and swung her against the dark sky. She screamed with delight.

  “Come, Leela, say hello to Ram Uncle,” Jivan said.

  Ram edged into the circle of light. But the girl turned her head away and held close to Amarjeet, refusing to look again. The adults laughed. They were filled with a sense of goodwill and health. Ram had not realized what he had been traveling toward: a family that lived in the desert, a home.

  4

  July 1914

  KARAK AND RAM AND AMARJEET SLEPT ON COTS IN THE BREEZY COMFORT of the outdoors, fifteen yards south of the wooden battenboard structure that was Jivan and Kishen’s home. Their cots sat on sandy loam that belonged to a man born in Switzerland, living now in Los Angeles. Karak thought himself a practical man, a hardworking man who wanted only to grow rich, but he cared about land.

  To own land was honorable, to farm it even more so. At night before sleeping he would gaze out at the fields that stretched to the desert and the outline of the Chocolate Mountains beyond. Karak knew that before the land had belonged to the man from Switzerland, before it belonged even to the United States government or the Republic of California or the United Mexican States or the king of Spain, it had been home to the Quechan and the Kumeyaay, to the Ivilyuqaletem and the Xawi┼┼ kwñchawaay, and they knew the land the way a lover knows a beloved’s body, like one possessed, like one who owns, but even more so.

  The injustice of their loss did not bother Karak much. He knew about the loss of land firsthand; during his boyhood in Ludhiana his father had surrendered his last five acres to Hindu moneylenders. By coincidence, the day before they were exiled from that soil, Karak had fed green corn to the ox, without a thought as to whether the animal would bloat. His father had been distressed, rageful. He had tied Karak to the post where the goat was kept and thrashed him with a stick. He thrashed him as if the lost land had been his fault.

  Only later did Karak learn that the moneylenders had called in the loan. When Karak’s family left the following morning, with their belongings piled on their bullock cart, the back of his shirt was still red with blood. He watched his father sitting on the driver’s stoop, his hands on the reins, his face expressionless. Then his father turned back, taking one last look. The land had once been owned by Karak’s great-grandfather. But no, injustice did not bother him too much. Injustice was the way of the world; what mattered was what one could accomplish between its cracks and fissures; happiness could still be found, money could still be made, comfort could still be enjoyed.

  His father was guilty of other beatings, other omissions. When Karak came to the Imperial Valley, he knew that Jivan knew about them; they shared the same great-grandfather, after all, and word spread easily in a village, and between villages too—between brothers and cousins and their wives.

  The army had saved Karak. The British-imposed hierarchy, its predictability, its gestures toward fair play and justice, the military’s defined world all had been safer than his home. One of his younger brothers had joined the army too, another had died during the famine; the older had stayed in the village and cared for their mother after their father had jumped into River Sutlej. Karak spent years in Hong Kong, wearing the uniform of the British without wasting his allegiance on them, seeing the world, learning its ways, enjoying himself. He spent years working in Manila.

  When he left the Philippines, Karak still had not married. No duties tugged at him. He arrived in California released from his father’s cruelty, from the military’s grasp, fingering $124 in his pocket, and he thought himself a new man. He did not need America, Americans, to tell him he was free. The land his father had lost was available here, all around him. He did not know how to farm with irrigation in the desert; he had forgotten how to farm with the rains in the Ludhiana countryside, but that did not matter. In everything, chardi kala, fearlessness, optimism.

  On the morning after Ram’s arrival, in the crisp and fragile dawn, lying on his cot near Ram’s, Karak wondered how to present the matter to him. His plans pressed in until he could think of nothing else, not the latest return on the cantaloupe, not the letter from his older brother, telling of the failure of the wheat crop. He rose and saw that the boy was still asleep. Ram was an innocent; Karak did not know how he had been hurt, and he felt the boy could be easily bullied. Yet Karak enjoyed his company. He enjoyed how much the boy enjoyed him.

  Now Ram was curled up on his side on the cot, like a child. Karak nudged him, not gently, on his thigh.

  “Let him be,” Jivan said. He had been standing near the porch, and his tone was sharp. Karak had not seen him. Karak held up his hand in acceptance.

  Amarjeet brought food that Kishen had prepared, but Ram did not wake. His breathing was shallow and he slept without moving. The sun’s first ray gained the mountain ridge. The heat bore down on them. No breeze swept across the miles of flat land. The men moved Ram’s cot into the front room of the house, closed the screen door so he was near the open air but in shade. They refilled the fan with kerosene and covered its blades with wet cloth. Kishen picked up Leela and instructed her to stay away.

  Late in the morning, Sheriff Frank Fielding trotted his bay gelding up the roadway and greeted Jivan near the house. Karak was making a repair to the chicken coop and came out to join them.

  “Heard about your visitor,” he heard the sheriff say. Jivan glanced at Karak. The sheriff dismounted, held his horse’s reins. He was a tall man with a large belly, solid. But he moved with grace.

  They took him to see Ram, and he peered through the front door screen. Ram’s face was turned toward them, unlined and peaceful; his eyes were closed. His left hand clasped the folded blanket that lay under his head.

  “He won’t make trouble, Sheriff,” Jivan said. “He’s calm boy. Honest boy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My cousin,” Jivan
said. “A village-mate. I’ve known him for much time—many years. Also, his father and grandfather I knew. Good family.”

  Their eyes met. “Aren’t you his cousin too?” the sheriff asked, turning to Karak.

  “Our family is big,” Karak said. Karak liked the sheriff. He was a fair man. He knew Jivan liked him too.

  Jivan offered him some water, pouring it from the olla that hung near Ram’s cot. The sheriff drank. “I’m putting him in your care—Jivan, Karak. He’s your responsibility.”

  “Don’t worry,” Karak said. “Nothing to worry.”

  5

  July 1914

  RAM WOKE IN THE EARLY MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY. IN THE GRAY LIGHT before dawn, he could almost see everything: he was sitting on a cot placed in a small room with a table, a few wooden chairs, lamps, and a cabinet. A phonograph stood in the corner. A curtain hung at the threshold to another room, where, he assumed, Jivan and Kishen and Leela slept. He stood up and stepped through another doorway to a large porch surrounded by a screen. Beyond the mesh, he saw something slither through the sand. Jivan’s house was small, only two rooms and the porch. Already he wished he were outside.

  Past the sand and the slithering creature, a brittle field lay fallow and waiting. He could see another structure on the far side, a larger home than Jivan’s, a string of small trees along a roadway. He was glad to find his boots near the cot and he slipped them on.