Passage West

by Rishi Reddi

  In the dimness, he checked for his things. His blanket had been laid on top of the cot. His bag was tucked away near the phonograph. He looked inside. He found the photo of Padma, the amulet his grandmother had given him, his billfold with $5.50. He dug further. The packet of letters was there too. He had memorized almost everything that Padma had written to him; but still, if he had lost the letters themselves, he would have mourned. Her skin had touched each one. Her own fingers had held the pen. Only a week after he left, she had written with her own hand, My esteemed husband—my world, today I realized the good news that you will be a father. Now you must hurry home before your son is named on his first birthday. No one else can be allowed to whisper his name in his ear. He had received that letter, and its news, two long months after she wrote it.

  Ram held his head in his hands. He could not focus his mind. He had a mosaic of memories of the last three days; there had been no time or order, no day or evening. Every few hours he had stumbled to the outhouse. Sometimes he had woken to the sound of Leela’s squeals outside, or the braying of a mule, or his mother’s voice, but he could not resist the tyranny of sleep. Once Amarjeet touched his shoulder to ask if he wanted to eat, but he did not know whether it was lunch or supper. Once Padma sat with him, the jewel in her nose gleaming against dark skin, liquid eyes filled with worry. Her chunni was draped around her nakedness; she held a baby to her breast. Once he woke in the darkness and saw Karak leaning over him, staring, speaking words Ram barely heard, head and shoulders silhouetted by a nearby lamp. A coyote had howled. What had Karak wanted? The truth about his injuries? The events of the past year?

  Ram had been aware of a vague idea: he would ask Karak to lend him money for passage home. But something blocked Ram from telling Karak everything. How would he borrow money from Karak when he could not reveal his recent shame, why he wanted to return? It was a problem he would solve after he healed; it had been easier to sleep.

  Ram stepped outside through the porch door. The dawn was coming. The air was hot and dry. He walked toward the moon and saw a small pond, the ditch that fed it, a fence on which hung large clay urns. Jivan’s house was modest, made of wooden boards. In the corner between the porch’s screen door and the house wall sat a small stove, a sturdy bench, a stack of crates. A green-yellow field of alfalfa reached to a pink sky, a distant mountain. Ram closed his eyes. The morning air refreshed him. He walked for a while in the fields, stepping on the bare dirt between the rows. How familiar it felt, these lines of young plants, the desert dust, the crusty earth underfoot. How different from the forests of Hambelton in the north.

  When he turned back toward Jivan Singh’s home, Ram could see the household awakening. While he had been walking the fields, Karak had woken and bathed in the pond. He was standing near the house, looking in a mirror propped on a window ledge, wrapping a green dastar. As Ram approached, he turned and waved. Kishen bent over the stove near the porch. Jivan sat on a rock a few paces from the house, facing the sun’s glow. Karak had written to him that Jivan was a religious man, rising every day at 4:00 A.M. to bathe and say prayers. The rock on which he sat was unusually large, rounded in one section with a smaller mound in the other, and a skyward protrusion in the shape of the ear of a hare. Ram looked about. There was only dust and sand. The stone was the only one of its kind. Later he would learn it was called the jackrabbit rock.

  “Oye!” Karak hailed him. “You are healthy again!” Ram had forgotten how pleasing his features were, the long, straight nose, the full lips. During the three weeks that they had lived together in the Hong Kong gurdwara, waiting for the SS Minnesota to ferry them to Seattle, he had noted how everyone—young and old, male and female—reacted to Karak. The Hindustanees considered him dark but handsome. In the public houses, the barmaids would often glance his way. Standing at full height, broad shouldered, he was not easily approachable, but friendly enough that they would want to approach. Sometimes he would disappear for an hour or so. Ram would stay in the drinking hall with the other lodgers from the gurdwara, drinking whiskey, waiting for him.

  Ram bathed in the pond and put on fresh clothes. The Earth had turned fully toward the sun by then. His mind felt cleansed and light. He and Karak moved his cot back outside, near the others, and sat down to breakfast at the porch table. Amarjeet joined them, glancing shyly at Ram. His gregariousness from the wagon ride was gone. Leela was outside, collecting pebbles from the dirt, inspecting them, rubbing them with her finger and forming a careful pile just beyond the porch screen. “Good morning, little Leela,” Karak sang to her.

  “Good. Chacha-ji,” she responded, nodding as if she agreed. She eyed Ram suspiciously. When Ram looked at her, she looked away; when Ram ignored her, she scrutinized him again.

  “Don’t be afraid of Ram Chacha,” Karak said. “He only eats children taller than four feet, and you are not yet big enough.”

  The girl looked again at Ram, then at Karak. “He won’t,” she said. “You won’t let him.”

  Ram smiled.

  “Leela!” Kishen Kaur said sharply.

  Karak made a face at the girl that her mother couldn’t see.

  Kishen scooped breakfast onto the men’s plates: eggs mixed with peppers and onion, rotis dripping with ghee. She nodded slightly at Ram, her chunni draped over her hair. She still had the energy of youth, luminous eyes and gleaming hair with only a few strands of gray. She was perhaps ten years younger than her husband. Ram was sure Jivan did not allow her to work in the fields; her hands had no calluses and her skin was unweathered. Her slender fingers spun the rotis on the pan until they bubbled and rose and she hurried them, soft and warm, onto the plates. She walked from porch to stove, picked up the child, listened to the men talk, straightened the chunni when it fell from her braid. She was quiet, less animated than his Padma, but she was free and sure in a way that disturbed Ram.

  For a few moments, the men ate in silence. Amarjeet scooped the eggs with a fork with the manners of an American. The thought gripped Ram: the boy was strange.

  “Bhabhi-ji, Jivan Singh is still saying prayers?” Karak asked. His manner was respectful, but Ram could tell—Jivan Singh’s wife did not matter much in Karak’s estimation of the world.

  “He woke late today,” Kishen said, without looking at him.

  “The egg is good, eh, Ram?” Karak asked.

  “Perfect,” Ram said. But an egg was not a complicated item to prepare. Why pay such attention?

  “Bhabhi-ji must be trying to impress our visitor.” Karak grinned again, looking at Ram, inviting him to join in his casual teasing, just as he had on the steamship. In that way, he would form a circle about them, separate from the others.

  Kishen turned away, dignified.

  Perhaps she was too free, Ram thought, or perhaps she did not like Karak. He pitied her. How could she be happy in this place, far from everything and everyone she knew, with no other Punjabi women with whom to pass the time?

  HE DID NOT SEE Jivan and Amarjeet again until the late afternoon, when he spotted them standing at the far corner of a field, bent over their shovels. The rays of a dying sun reached across the crusted soil. Gold shimmered off the angles of their clothing, their bronzed hands and necks, off the surfaces of their tools. Jivan greeted him as he approached. “You have recovered,” he said, smiling.

  “I can help you,” Ram offered, reaching for a shovel that was lodged in the dirt. He had spent most of the day resting. Karak had gone to meet a banker in town. Ram had helped Kishen bring buckets of water from the pond to a washtub. He had moved slowly and it had not been too painful.

  “You have planted?” Ram asked.

  “No. Only allowed the water in to make the weeds grow, so we can remove them later.”

  They were lifting silt from the bottom of the ditch to the side, so that the water could flow freely. He had done that chore himself, routinely and often, at his uncle’s farm. But when he bent to lift the weight of the dirt, the pain flared in his chest.


  “Why are you working with your wounds?” Jivan said, taking the shovel from him. He plucked a kerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. “It is a constant fight with the silt, and we never win. It is like a punishment.” He turned to his nephew. “We have done enough for one day. What do you say, Jeetu?”

  “These were to be resting days, Chacha-ji,” the boy said. “We are working too hard.”

  Ram would not have spoken to his own uncle in that way. He had been too timid, and his uncle too cross. But Jivan did not seem to mind. He gathered up the shovels that lay on the bank.

  “Bhai-ji, look,” Amarjeet said to Ram, his tone respectful now. The sudden change made Ram uneasy; he glanced at Jivan. From the pocket of his dungarees, Amarjeet brought out an object. “I found it just this morning.” He held up a stone the size of his thumb, embedded with tiny lines splayed like a fan. “See here.” He pointed. “A fish’s bones. It lived when everything here was under the ocean.” He spoke as if he were responsible for it. He gave it to Ram. The stone lay smooth and cool in Ram’s hand. “Very old. Ancient,” Amarjeet said. In his face was an expression close to hope.

  Ram rubbed his finger over the surface, impressed. Amarjeet still had the cheeks of a boy, plump and new, eyes outlined by needlessly thick lashes. “We are not far in age, Amarjeet. It is true I am married, but if agreeable to your uncle, call me Ram.”

  A shade of pink rose from Amarjeet’s neck to his cheeks. He glanced at Jivan. His uncle nodded curtly.

  Ram held out the stone.

  “You can keep it,” Amarjeet said. “From time to time we find them here.”

  THAT NIGHT, the men sat outdoors under an arc of stars that pressed down on them, imposing and fearsome and unbounded, the flat land stretching to an unreachable distance. They were contemplative and content, laughter lifting from their circle into desert space, velvet sky. From inside the home, Jivan’s phonograph was playing: a soprano voice serenaded them in Hindi. They were surrounded by a dim halo of lamplight. Karak opened a fresh bottle of whiskey that he had bought in Mexicali. They drank a toast to Ram’s recovery, then to his arrival.

  “It is good you have come,” Jivan said.

  Embarrassed, Ram mumbled a question about Jivan’s life before he had moved to the Valley, and Jivan told him he had been a risaldar-major in the British Indian cavalry. He had performed well, been awarded medals, given the honor of leading his mounted unit down London streets for the queen’s Diamond Jubilee. “When we passed her, riding in our formation—you see—I am sure that she looked directly at me. I saw her turn her head,” Jivan said. There, from other men who had served all over the world, he had first heard of Canada, of Oregon, of California. “I knew that I wanted to come after my posting was finished. Afterwards I fought for the queen in Shandong Province. In 1902 I went home to Punjab, then came to Oregon and laid rail. When the Colorado River flooded, I came to the Valley to find work and met Mr. Eggenberger. That is his house there, although he lives in Los Angeles now.” Jivan indicated the larger house on the other side of the field. “Few years later, 1910, I brought Kishen Kaur and Amarjeet. Leela was born the next year.”

  “At first I didn’t want to come with him,” Amarjeet said. “But it was a good decision my father took.” His uncle nodded at him. “A good decision,” the boy repeated, and Ram wondered if that was what he truly thought.

  Ram felt daunted. How easily Jivan Singh spoke of faraway places, the peoples of the world, navigating the Earth. Ram had not known that, like Karak, this man had traveled the planet on British ships. Ram’s dead father had fought for the British too—a true soldier, and a religious man, a Khalsa Sikh. Ram had not known him at all.

  “You have done much, bhai-ji,” Ram said to Jivan, and felt Karak’s gaze on him. Perhaps he envied Jivan’s attention. Or perhaps Karak was amused.

  Jivan waved away Ram’s comment. “What else can we do? We must live.”

  Karak refilled their glasses.

  “A few years ago, it was not easy to be in Oregon or Washington,” Jivan said. “How did you feel there now?”

  The vague allusion to the lumber mill chilled Ram, made his heart beat faster. He pushed away his sense of alarm and forced himself to speak. “The locals do not like us. Among our people, there is a great feeling against the British. The Ghadar Party—have you heard of it?” As soon as he said it, Ram regretted the words. He did not know what Jivan would think.

  But Jivan did not seem bothered. “The British are not fair to us, but how would Indians govern if suddenly the British are overthrown? And if war comes now in Europe and we fight well for the English king, he will give us self-rule and dominion status—like Australia, like Canada.”

  “We are not white men, bhai-ji,” Karak said. “We will not get dominion status.”

  “See how they treat the Komagata Maru in Vancouver Harbor,” Amarjeet said, looking at Ram, as if Ram had not heard of the ship. “It is full of Indians—British citizens. Isn’t it our right to travel from any part of the empire to another? Those passengers started on British soil in Hong Kong and are going to British Canada, but they won’t let them land.”

  “Of course they will be allowed to land,” Jivan said.

  “Chacha-ji, that is not how the Canadians think,” Amarjeet said.

  “Perhaps not. But it is the law.”

  What did the law have to do with it? Ram thought. The attackers in Hambelton had not cared about the law. Karak’s eyes met his.

  “People are not concerned with the law,” Karak said, as if reading Ram’s thoughts.

  “Hambelton—that town where you are working—is not far from Vancouver,” Jivan said. “They must talk about it there.”

  “We heard that all passengers passed medical inspection when the doctors boarded the ship in Vancouver Harbor,” Ram said.

  “So you know all about it?” Amarjeet said.

  “For days we heard. It seems the Vancouver waterfront was lined with the local Hindustanees, immigration officers, Anglo politicians, and the whites who do not want the Komagata Maru to land. It had become like a circus.”

  “Ghadar Party says that if the Hindustanees are not allowed off the ship and into Canada, we should all go back to India with guns and fight the British for refusing to support us,” Amarjeet said.

  “Ghadar was saying that even from the first meeting in Astoria,” Ram said.

  “You were there, Ram-ji?” Amarjeet asked, eyes wide.

  “It is not that I believe wholeheartedly in them.” Ram glanced at Jivan. “But I was there. All the Hindustanees in the area attended. Not only Astoria and Portland, even Hambelton and Bellingham too, even from Vancouver. I met Har Dayal, the leader then. He was arrested in April. I met RamChandra too, the current leader,” Ram spoke slowly. He felt Amarjeet’s admiration riding in a wave toward him. Suddenly Amarjeet jumped up from his seat and ran inside the house.

  “Scoundrels,” Jivan said. “At least the leader of the people on Komagata Maru, Gurdit Singh, is somewhat an honorable man.”

  “Do you think Har Dayal is a scoundrel, bhai-ji?” Ram asked.

  “Why else would he escape to Berlin?”

  Amarjeet returned, holding open a newspaper, reading aloud, shouting the words as he walked: “‘Desh Pain Dhakke, Bahar Mile Dhoi Naa. Sada Pardessian Da Des Koi Naa! Humiliated at home with no solace abroad. For us foreigners there is no refuge anywhere!’” His face flushed with excitement. “See here, Ram—” Amarjeet said.

  “I have seen it,” Ram interrupted. “I know the paper—”

  WANTED: ENTHUSIASTIC AND HEROIC SOLDIERS FOR ORGANIZING GHADAR IN HINDUSTAN

  REMUNERATION: Death

  REWARD: Martyrdom

  PENSION: Freedom

  FIELD OF WORK: Hindustan

  Freedom fighters should make their appearance at the U.S. Ghadar Headquarters in San Francisco, CA.

  “Ghadar means revolution, Jeetu,” Jivan said to his nephew. “There will be no revolution anytime soon.” He
waved his hand dismissively. “Amarjeet wants to join them,” he explained to Ram.

  “They are heroes, Chacha-ji,” Amarjeet said.

  Karak chuckled lightly.

  “They are not heroes,” Jivan said. “They are foolish. They will have no followers in India itself.”

  Karak sucked his teeth, unperturbed, smiling. “We must stop speaking ill of the British! Our Ram is from the Canal Colonies. Who dug the river canals there for the village farmers? The British did.”

  Ram shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The discussion had grown too heavy. A few moments before, they had been telling riddles. Jivan Singh had asked, “What is a black shawl embroidered with gold?” and Ram had answered, “the night sky.” He had been enjoying himself. What did the Ghadar have to do with his life, his Padma, his new son? “Ghadar is very extreme,” Ram said.

  Jivan glanced at him with appreciation. “Even Ram-ji agrees, Amarjeet,” Jivan said. “If I let you join them, your father would cross the ocean and put a sword to my neck. I have a responsibility to him.” Then he added, “And to you.”

  The boy knit his eyebrows. “What do you say, Chacha-ji?” Amarjeet asked Karak softly.

  “I say I want to grow very, very, very rich, not to play at politics.”

  “Please!” Amarjeet said.

  Karak sighed. “My real feeling is that we should no longer be loyal to the British Raj. We must lay the axe at the root of the British tree, not the branches.”

  “You were a soldier once,” Jivan said. “You served them too.”

  “I was only a halfhearted soldier, bhai-ji,” Karak said.

  Ram could not decipher the expression that flashed across Jivan’s face. Jivan stood suddenly, moved to the bottle of whiskey. “Why don’t you go with the Ghadar then?” he said lightly.

  “Because your nephew doesn’t care one damn about farming, bhai-ji!” Karak said. “I must stay and take care of him as if he were my wife.”

  Jivan snorted. The tension gave way. Amarjeet, looking surprised, joined in the laughter too. “Between the three of you,” Jivan said, “at least Ram has some sense!”