by Rishi Reddi
Dedication
To Nikku,
for whom all this might have mattered,
and
to Maya, and Jay, and Anji,
for whom perhaps it someday will.
Epigraph
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
—George Washington, letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 1790
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Cast of Characters
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Letters
Part Two
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Letters
Part Three
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Letters
Part Four
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Letters
Part Five
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Rishi Reddi
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRINTED IN SAN FRANCISCO CALL NEWSPAPER AUGUST 13, 1910
Cast of Characters
Ram Singh—native of Shahpur village, Jullundur District, Punjab, living in Chenab Canal Colony, Lyallpur; arrives in Fredonia in 1914 at age twenty-one
Padma—Ram’s wife, native of Jullundur District, Punjab, living in Chenab Canal Colony, Lyallpur
Santosh—Ram’s young son, living with Padma in Punjab
Ishwar Lal—Ram’s first cousin, living in Chenab Canal Colony, Lyallpur, Punjab
Karak Singh Gill—native of Tarkpur village, Ludhiana District, Punjab; former British Indian Army soldier; arrives in Fredonia in 1913 at age thirty
Jivan Singh Gill—native of Tarkpur village, Ludhiana District, Punjab; former British Indian Army soldier; arrives in Imperial Valley in 1905 at age forty-three
Amarjeet Singh Gill—Jivan’s nephew, native of Tarkpur village, Ludhiana District, Punjab; arrives in Imperial Valley in 1910 at age fourteen
Kishen Kaur—Jivan’s wife, native of Ludhiana District, Punjab; arrives in Imperial Valley in 1910 at age thirty-eight
Leela Kaur—Jivan and Kishen’s daughter, native of Fredonia, born 1911
Rosa María Fernandez Delgado—native of Saucillo, Chihuahua, Mexico; field worker; arrives in Imperial Valley in 1914 at age sixteen
Esperanza Fernandez Delgado de Felix—Rosa’s older sister, native of Saucillo, Chihuahua, Mexico; seamstress; arrives in Fredonia in 1910 at age twenty-seven
Alejandro Felix Moreno—Esperanza’s husband, native of Saucillo, Chihuahua, Mexico; foreman; arrives in Fredonia in 1910 at age thirty-five
Adela Rey Vasquez—first cousin of Rosa and Esperanza, native of Saucillo, Chihuahua, Mexico; arrives in Fredonia in 1918 at age thirty
Haruo (Harry) Moriyama—Amarjeet’s high school friend and neighbor, native of Fredonia
Tomoya (Tom) Moriyama—Haruo’s father, native of Satsuma, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
Hatsu Moriyama—Haruo’s mother, native of Satsuma, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
Masa and Yuki—Haruo’s sisters, natives of Satsuma, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
Clive Edgar—native of Kansas; land agent for hire; arrives in Imperial Valley in 1910 at age twenty-one
Stephen Eggenberger—Singhs’ absentee landlord, native of Lucerne, Switzerland; living in Los Angeles
Harnam Singh, Gugar Singh, Hukam Singh, Inder Singh—Sikh natives of Punjab, farmers in Imperial Valley
Malik Khan, Sikander Khan, Ahmed Khan—Muslim natives of Punjab, farmers in Imperial Valley
Sheriff Frank Fielding—native of Arizona; Imperial County sheriff
Deputy Elijah Hollins—native of Alabama; Imperial County sheriff’s deputy
Maurice Roubillard—native of Louisiana; cotton sharecropper of portion of Eggenberger’s land
Jake Smiley—native of Pittsburgh; owner of the cotton gin, cotton broker
Clarence Simms—Fredonia lawyer, well known for criminal defense
Jonathan Hitchcock—native of Atlanta, Georgia; wealthy vice president of Consolidated Fruit Co.
Pala Singh—Ram’s family friend; leader of Hindustani work gang in lumber mill in Hambelton, Washington
Jodh Singh—Ram’s fellow worker at the lumber mill in Hambelton
Part One
Know for certain
nothing endures.
One cherishes the shade
of the most regal tree, and
when it ages and dies
mourns what is lost.
All that is visible
passes away;
only the ignorant, unseeing,
cling to it.
—from the Sukhmani, Guru Granth Sahib
1
April 1974
YESTERDAY IN THE HOSPITAL, WHEN HE WAS STILL ALIVE, KARAK SINGH Gill had sat up in the bed and, with trembling fingers, placed the key to his apartment in Ram Singh’s hand. Ram protested; he did not want it. Karak thrust it toward him. “Keep the box,” he insisted, “of things only you and I know about.”
There was the occasional beep of the heart monitor, the bounce of light on the telemetry screen, the tang of urine and Dettol together; it could have been a hospital in Jullundur, but it was the Los Angeles sun that glared through the window. Occasionally a loudspeaker in the hall was heard calling for a doctor. But mostly, in Karak’s small room, it was the chants of the sacred paath that were heard, Ram rising to flip the cassette tape every forty-five minutes. When the evening nurse entered, a tear glistened in her eye. She was very young. As she took Karak’s temperature she was too cheerful, speaking loudly, smiling too broadly, and that was how Ram knew Karak had only a few hours left.
Ram asked if the sound of the prayer was too great, and Karak shook his head. They both knew—how could it be otherwise—that Ram had won. Karak had faded first. They both knew—this too was inevitable—that Ram found some satisfaction in this, but it did not matter. Women had loved Karak; he had always been dashing. Now that his fine eyes had melted into the hollows of his skull, Ram knew that he, Ram, had had the better life. He felt a twinge of regret.
His fingers closed around the key and he slipped it into his pocket. It was not easy to forget, it would never be forgotten, what had happened only fifty years ago. The mind does not know time. What had happened was ever present between them, made itself known in every meeting,
every conversation, every occurrence, as when Karak allowed a breath to escape him, neglected to draw another, and Ram stood, solemn and empty, in acceptance of this fact.
KARAK’S APARTMENT WAS MORE GLUM than Ram remembered. Ram had taken him to the hospital only ten days before, but it was clear that Karak had not cared for his home since long before that. Cobwebs hung low at corners. Paint peeled from the far wall. A smell hovered near the refrigerator. Dust motes whipped through sunlight when Ram swept back the curtains.
The box was where Karak had told him it would be, tucked behind stale clothes in the bedroom closet, two feet by three feet of cardboard. Ram had possessed it once before, decades ago, when Karak had been at San Quentin. Crap, Karak had called it. The American slang sounded strange in his Punjabi accent. But Karak never let such things bother him. The box had been lighter then. Now Ram sat on Karak’s worn chair in his dim living room, sifting through the private documents, spreading them out on the dented coffee table and faded sofa, a pile for each period of his life. Karak said—Ram heard him clearly—that he spent too much time on neatness and organization, on planning, when what was needed was real work. In his mind, Ram answered him—he had not wanted the box, but now that he had accepted it, he had to be sure that he had everything. When Karak’s children entered tomorrow or the day after, surely they would not be as forgiving as Ram. Perhaps they would forbid Ram from coming again. They would not understand the squalor, the evidence of despair. Karak’s voice seemed to accept the explanation.
Ram did not like the emptiness. He was old, but he did not like the smell of age. Before him Karak’s life lay spread out on paper: the official discharge from the British Indian Army, the San Quentin release form, the AARP documentation. The strange coincidence of Karak’s chosen birthday, the same month and day as the killing, appearing again and again.
The date was a falsehood. When had anyone from their part of the world known the date they were born? Or if they did know, who had translated that date from a Punjabi calendar to the Julian one? The men from 1913 had been born “in the middle of the rains” or “during first harvest after the earth shook.” One didn’t state that to the immigration officers on Angel Island or in Seattle. Birthdates had been made up, had been approximated, so they could gain entrance into the country.
He rubbed his eyes, weary. Last night he had called Karak’s daughter with the news. In response, she informed him there would be a Catholic wake and funeral and burial, all things that Karak had not wanted but now—being dead—was powerless to stop. She felt she was doing her father a service. He had committed a mortal sin and, as far as she knew, had not repented. It was a short conversation. “A cremation at the gurdwara might be better,” Ram had said, lightly, but he had not argued with the daughter. Why should he? If the situation had been reversed, if it were his body lying in the mortuary, Karak would not have argued for Ram, even if Ram had cared about such a thing. Which he did not.
It was bright outside, high noon in Los Angeles. The Santa Ana winds blew in from the east, late in the season, lifting particles of gritty desert soil and sweeping them to the sea. Ram pulled aside a curtain and stared. In the parking lot, a young couple walked a stroller to the neighboring building. The sun gleamed off the cars, shone stark against whitewashed walls. The woman was pushing, her skirt swept against shapely legs. When the man bent to lift the front wheels to the curb, the baby grabbed his hair. Suddenly, Karak’s apartment was unbearable. Ram reached for the kitchen telephone and called his son to pick him up. He threw the dead man’s papers back into the cardboard box. Karak’s voice was silent. Ram hoisted the container to his waist—it was heavier than he had imagined—and carried it outside to wait.
DAVE CAME FOR HIM in the station wagon with all three grandchildren. On the way home, they stopped at the grocery store. Ram walked behind his son as Dave pushed the cart through the produce section; the boys squabbled in the front while little Anika, Ram’s favorite, tagged along with Ram. Ahead of them, he saw his eldest grandson reaching up to the refrigerated shelves, touching three or four zucchini. He was chewing gum, one hand in his pocket. He tossed a zucchini into the cart, even though his father had wanted a cucumber. The boy, Ram realized, did not know the difference.
Ram grunted. Even at thirteen, it was clear, to Ram at least, the boy would be a failure. A lifetime spent tilling the soil, swaddling cantaloupe, shipping lettuce at just the right time, cajoling three harvests from a field of cotton—only to have his descendant come to this.
Several nights ago at the dinner table, chewing a mouthful of spinach, the boy had claimed it was stupid to farm, boring to be a farmer. Ram had not reacted. He had sold his last acre in the Imperial Valley a decade ago to move to Dave’s home in Los Angeles. He felt he had chopped off an arm and left it behind. The boy could not know that. Ram had not grown spinach but he had grown lettuce, peas and asparagus and carrots, thousands of bales of cotton; he had rotated through so many seasons of alfalfa. Ram had glared at his grandson. That had been the end of it, but the words still stung.
Now Ram inspected the zucchini and returned it to the cart, saying nothing. He wanted to leave, wander to a corner of the store without the others, but when he turned to go, a Chicano man stood before him, blocking the narrow passage between the shopping cart and the avocados.
“¿Perdón, señor, sabe usted dónde están los chiles?” the man asked softly. Ram’s stomach clenched.
“Why would I be knowing where the chilies are?” Ram snapped. “You saw my brown skin, so automatically I must be speaking Spanish too? And eating chilies? Chilies?” The man shrank back, and Ram stepped toward him, but he felt his son’s grip on his arm.
“What’s the matter with you, Pop?” Dave hissed. “Pretending you don’t speak Spanish.” A blond couple near the bananas had turned to look at them.
Ram snatched his arm away. “What a rude fellow,” he said, his voice quivering, his manner too dignified. He scowled at Dave. “You will find me at the checkout,” he announced, and walked slowly past the couple.
“What’s the matter with Bapu-ji?” little Anika asked her father.
“He seems to have forgotten who he was married to,” Dave said, then caught himself. His mother, even when alive, had never needed defending. “He is upset about Grandpa Karak,” he added. Dave looked up to see the blond couple, inspecting apples now, farther away. At a cocktail party tonight, or at dinner, they would tell their friends about the scene between the loco foreigners at the grocery store. The thought came to him suddenly and he knew he had arrived at the truth: It was an old shame his father had felt. A visitor from the past.
GRACE TORRES, KARAK’S ONLY DAUGHTER, telephoned the house that night, asking for Ram. “I have been making arrangements for the funeral,” she announced. “I have a favor to ask.” Ram had known her as Grace Singh, long ago when she and her brothers were toddlers, but that changed after her mother had remarried.
“What favor?” Ram said. His voice was calm and sounded like gravel.
Ram had been present when Grace had visited Karak in the hospital. She had seemed an interloper, anxiously watching one old man taking care of another. Even now, Ram felt he should make these arrangements, not she. But hadn’t he done enough for Karak over sixty years? He did not want to do more.
Besides, Grace had fulfilled her duty, convincing her older brother to make the copayment to the hospital, visiting when Karak had asked to see his children’s faces just once more before he died. Neither of her brothers had come with her. Now she would give her father a proper Catholic burial with a mass, even though nobody, most of all Karak, could want it.
“What favor?” Ram said again, because she had not responded.
“I would like you to give the eulogy,” she said.
Ram snorted. “Why?”
“People at the senior center have been calling since he passed. They want to come to the funeral. They want to speak. I can’t bear the thought of any of them . . . the falseness of
it. You were the only one who knew him . . . before.”
Ram sighed. “Catholics don’t allow eulogies,” he said.
She was silent. Ram felt he had scored something against her. He was an outsider, but an insider too. Had he not also been married to a Catholic? Had he not known Grace’s mother for years? They were not so distant after all.
“It would be at the vigil, Mr. Singh. The night before the mass.” There was pleading in her voice; both of them heard it.
“I will let you know tomorrow,” he said.
“The wake is tomorrow night,” Grace said.
“I will call you tomorrow,” he said again.
“Thank you.” Her voice was small.
KARAK’S BOX SAT IN THE CORNER of Ram’s bedroom. It cast a shadow on the far wall and another on the floor, which Ram could not explain by the position of his reading lamp. A gray-beige line on the carpet. A man, a whole man, is more than a sum of his deeds. Was he being unfair to Karak Singh?
Ram reached for the box and scooted it beside the armchair, delved to the bottom, where he had not reached this morning. Karak’s papers stared up at him, aged and yellow and brittle. There, he saw it—an envelope addressed to Karak in the Imperial Valley, with Ram’s return address of Hambelton, Washington—a letter that Ram himself had written more than six decades ago, his own script beckoning to him through the years.
He blinked. He could not imagine that Karak Singh would keep a letter of his. Karak had not been a sentimental man; this was yet another difference between them. Ram had saved many letters, some from Karak in the early days, many from his mother, even a few from his uncle. And from Padma, of course, before and after 1918. The letters told the story of his life. So many men he knew from those days did not know how to write; the country—the world—thought they did not have stories to tell.
Ram picked up the envelope. The paper was thicker than he expected, stiff and dark at the edges. For a moment, he thought he remembered writing it, sitting cross-legged in the corner where he stored his blanket in the cursed house in Hambelton. His fingers shook as he eased the letter out. The paper trembled on his palm.