Passage West

by Rishi Reddi

  “Ishwar is not a boy.”

  “He is younger than me.”

  “Only by a season or two.” He waited for more, but she did not say the most obvious thing: Ishwar was not married. He would not leave anyone behind.

  His heart beat loudly inside his ears but he stayed quiet. If he said more, they would have to reveal what they both already knew: that some part of Ram wanted the adventure, desired to see that distant place. He would earn his uncle’s praise. His mother would no longer be reviled as a widow who had raised her son off a brother’s charity. Ram would pay off that childhood debt and return as a man, equal to his cousins. For Padma and himself, there would always be later. He would be back.

  He did not recognize the emotion he felt until he left the hut, walking under the violet sky by the canal waters. He was angry with her.

  Ram went to the temple, although he had already visited that morning, although the pujari had already put the Goddess to sleep and had retired himself. Then he walked a furlong more and entered the gurdwara. The langar was closed, the oven extinguished and the seating area deserted. The holy book had already been put away for the night.

  His father had been a member of the Khalsa, but Ram had been raised a Hindu. Years before, his father’s older brother had come to fetch him to his father’s village. That man had come too late, when Ram had already become a boy who loved his home. Perhaps the delay had been intentional; his father had three brothers, and already the lands that their father would apportion between them would be too small; none of the three tiny allotments could sustain a whole family. If Ram had gone to live with them, he would have had a right to that land. It would have been divided into four. But Ram refused to go. Whenever Ram came to the gurdwara he felt a spasm in his consciousness, a vast space—the absence of the father he never knew.

  He returned home after several hours, walking silently past the waterwheel where the women came every morning, past the shed where the oxen were kept. He did not want to disturb anyone. He did not want them to know that he had been out. When he entered the hut, he knew that Padma was still awake, although she lay on her side facing away from him. Her hip curved invitingly. He put his hand on her thigh. They made love without taking off their clothes, and then again, slowly, through tears that they both shed. Years later, when he thought of that night, he would tell himself that the tears had come only because of his innocence; he had been very young. Long after the rooster had crowed and members of the household made their way to the field for their morning ablutions, long after the moon disappeared behind the grove of trees, Ram and Padma were still asleep.

  They woke to bright sunlight streaming across their dirt floor. No one had disturbed them. Ram was grateful for this kindness. He and Ishwar would soon leave to catch the train to Lyallpur, then another that would take them to Calcutta.

  Padma went to the kitchen to help with the day’s meals, and they did not speak again. His cousins’ children stayed with him as he arranged his travel bag. They squatted on the ground and made lines in the dirt with their sticks and asked questions, chattering: What will you bring us, Ram Chacha? Will you bring a wagon that runs without horses? Will you bring a glass bubble containing the sun?

  Inside his travel case were the snacks and sweets the women had made, the western clothes—three shirts, two pairs of pants—that the tailor had sewn. His mother and aunt had each pawned some gold bangles; this money he folded carefully and wrapped in a cotton handkerchief that he kept in his shirt pocket. In the kitchen, his mother drew him aside, pulling close the curtains in the entry. Just for one moment, the other women could not enter. She was holding a small bowl of yogurt that she had sprinkled with sugar. She fed him herself, wishing him a sweet journey, an easy journey. She muttered a prayer under her breath, asking for the Lord’s protection.

  He and Ishwar went together to receive Ishwar’s father’s blessings. Chanda Lal waited for them in the house, sitting on his favorite cushion in the front room. Some of the women—Ram’s aunt, his grandmother, the wives of his cousins—watched as Ram and Ishwar each touched their forehead to the older man’s feet, and he rose and placed his hands on their shoulders. He spoke to them as if he loved them equally well, his son and his nephew.

  When Ram and Ishwar emerged, the afternoon brightness hurt Ram’s eyes. Three hundred villagers gathered around; he had known many of them as a child. Ishwar climbed on the bullock cart. Ram mounted the step and paused to find Padma in the crowd. She stood apart from the others; only Ram’s mother was near her, at her elbow. Her veil hung about her cheeks, partially hiding her face, and he could not read her expression. He turned away to climb onto the bullock cart.

  The oxen began to move and the village children ran beside them, shouting, their bare feet kicking up dust. Ishwar looked at Ram and grinned broadly. That grin was like a knife in Ram’s heart. Ishwar had spent the previous evening bragging to childhood friends about the train journey, the ocean voyage, the money he would make in the west. He was the youngest son, unfettered, setting off to embark on a life. He could be abroad and not be cracked in half. Their lives were completely different. It would be years before Ram understood that.

  WHEN RAM AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, the sun was already low in the sky. He had drunk too much; he could smell the whiskey on his skin and feel it in his head. The other cots were empty. There was no sign of Karak or Amarjeet. Ram felt unsettled.

  He rose and splashed water on his face. Across the field, he could see Jivan Singh in the animal shed. Ram smelled the comforting scent of horses as he approached.

  “Bhai-ji?” Ram said softly.

  “Sit, sit.” Jivan was toying with a harness, pulling the leather straight while it was hooked to a nail on the wall.

  Ram perched on the edge of the stool that stood nearby. He felt odd sitting while Jivan stood and worked. “I haven’t seen Karak Singh,” Ram said.

  “He left early to speak with the banker in town.”

  “He is unhappy with me,” Ram said lightly, wanting to say it but not wanting it to be important.

  “Is he?” Jivan glanced at him. “I am trying to fix this harness,” he said. “I may have to take it to town.”

  Ram did not answer. The man intimidated Ram, even though he did not dictate terms.

  “How do you like our valley?” Jivan asked. “Heat is just like home?”

  Ram agreed politely. “May I help you?” he asked, but Jivan waved him away. Ram found a twig on the ground, traced it in the dirt in front of him.

  “So you decided not to stay and join with Karak?”

  Ram was startled that Jivan knew. “That is what he told you?”

  “He told me that you had not yet decided. I took that to mean that you had said no.” He smiled, but was distracted by the harness, the leather, the ruler that he was using to measure.

  Ram smiled too. “Not yet. But I will.”

  “It is hard work. Right now, cotton is still experimental here. But together you could bring in a large crop next season.”

  “You are flattering me,” Ram said, then, clearing his throat, unsure of his boldness, he asked, “Bhai-ji? Why don’t you join?”

  “I know nothing about cotton. In Ludhiana, we do not grow it. But for you—it is different. You come from a canal colony. You know cotton. You know the desert. You know how to flood a field correctly.”

  Ram heard his own intake of breath. “Karak does not know about farming in a canal district?” Ram said.

  “Not at all. We use well water.” Jivan snorted. “We pray for rain.” He still was not looking at Ram. “In my first season, I did not irrigate correctly. The front ten acres had too much water and the back ten too little. I did not level the field properly. Twice I burned the soil, because I watered when the plant was not high enough to keep the moisture under the desert sun. What does Karak know of irrigation? He joined the army at sixteen years old. It’s true that I have been teaching him. But your knowledge of cotton, your knowledge of irrigation
”—Jivan’s eyes finally met his—“is very valuable.”

  “I have a wife,” Ram said.

  “I was in the same situation as you. But see what I accomplished here,” he said, without pride. “Kishen Kaur came to join me. That was good.”

  Ram felt a wave of perspiration. So many things possible and impossible at the same time. He had not expected this. “I have a home, bhai-ji. I want to go back.”

  HE HAD KNOWN PADMA since they were children. Not only when their families had shifted to the colony near the River Chenab after the British enticed them to move, but before that, in Jullundur District, where his uncle had five small patches of land near River Sutlej. His uncle and her father had served in the army together. They had been friends. At Vaisakhi and Diwali, when their villages would go to the riverbank to celebrate, the families would set up camp next to each other. Their mothers and the other women, the children from both families, sat together in that throng of people, while the men settled themselves apart. That was his earliest memory of Padma. She was a baby when he was a child. In the confusion and noise of the festival, he would fetch things to help her mother: fruit for the baby, or her sling, or rice mixed with buttermilk. He would make faces to stop her from crying. The boys were free to go from the women’s camp to the men’s circle. But Ram preferred his mother. Not that he didn’t play kabaddi at the edge of the water, or take part in the wrestling matches, or run in the footraces with Ishwar and his other cousins. He did those things too.

  One year it was different. When Padma was five she grew ill, and for a week burned with fever, so high that her mother thought she would die. They called the doctor from the town, twenty miles away, but he could do nothing. Her parents went every day to the temple to pray. Padma recovered from the fever, but after that, her right leg began to grow weak; for a while she could not even stand. But she was a determined child. She forced herself to rise, stand, hobble along, although the muscles of the leg could barely support her. She began to walk with a limp. It was weeks later that the full scope of the tragedy became apparent: the leg would not return to its former strength; she would always walk that way.

  Her father was a literate man, a follower of Ajit Singh. For the months that Padma lay weak and alert on her charpai, he taught her how to read and write. In her village, only three other girls and one woman had that knowledge. It came to her easily. Later, she wrote poetry, stories to entertain the younger children.

  During the festivals by the river, Ram would watch as she sat with the other girls. At first, she needed a crutch to walk. Later, she refused it; she refused even the slender cane her mother and aunts told her to use, forcing it upon her. She walked with only a limp, a peculiar rhythm to her gait, and in this way, she could join in with all the children.

  Other men had not wanted her. Although one’s eye was drawn to her form when she stood with a group of girls, although her face was round like the moon, her eyes as dark as a raven’s wings, her one defect led the villagers to believe there might be others: that she might not bear children. That she would bring misfortune upon her household. It was understandable that she would be given to Ram, and that Ram would accept her. Who else could he hope for when he had no father, when he had been raised on his uncle’s generosity in his mother’s village?

  His mother did not like the match. His uncle was happy to have this bond with his friend, even though he would not have formed it through one of his own sons. At the Vaisakhi festival after the marriage had been settled, when the families gathered by the riverside, Ram could not meet Padma’s gaze. He had things he wanted to say to her, but now he found himself incapable.

  It was not until their wedding night, when they sat together near the silent Persian wheel, that he had said, “Does it not disturb you that I have no father? That I do not know the people of my paternal village?”

  She looked puzzled. Then she hugged her knees close and spoke without looking at him. “When I was eight, at Diwali, I was playing marbles with Ishwar. Don’t you remember? When I won, Ishwar wanted to take the marbles from me. He was so angry. He called me ‘saali,’ and I began to cry. I went by myself to the tent and sat there and read quietly. He grabbed my book from me, like this.” She grabbed his hand and pulled, hard. The touch of her skin excited him. “But when you came, you took it from him. You scolded him and gave the book back to me.” She looked at him now. “Don’t you remember?” she asked again.

  “No,” he said, although he remembered it very well. It frightened him, the thought that she had remembered this small kindness for so long.

  “That is why I do not care that you have no father.” She leaned forward and kissed him. He had been relieved. It was their first kiss.

  For years afterward, he regretted that he had not confessed to remembering the fight with Ishwar and the stolen book. But he had not known what he felt about his marriage. Not because of Padma’s limp, but because his childhood was unfinished. Too many questions were left unanswered.

  HE DID NOT WANT to accept Karak’s offer. He did not even want to speak of it again. But that night after dinner, after the drinking, after Amarjeet fell asleep on his cot, when just he and Karak lay awake in the darkness, he could not help himself. “You have not made a fair allotment in your offer, Karak,” he said. It was his pride talking. He had never before called Karak by only his first name.

  For a long time there was no answer, and Ram thought he had fallen asleep. Then he heard Karak clear his throat. “What would be fair?”

  “One-third to Eggenberger, one-third to you, one-third to me.”

  “That is very bold of you.”

  Ram was quiet.

  “Has your status in life changed, bhai?” Karak said softly, with a chuckle.

  Ram swallowed. “No, but neither has my knowledge of how to grow cotton in the desert, when to water and when not, how to have three harvests from one planting.”

  He hoped he had not gone too far. Karak lay on his back, saying nothing. If he had known Karak well then, Ram would have realized that the man was seething, his mind racing through all the things that he had done for Ram over the past year and a half, the money lent for Ishwar’s medicine, the camaraderie on the ship, the iron kara gifted at the moment they parted, the hospitality at Jivan’s home. He would have known that Karak had not understood Ram at all; that Karak’s only concern was to not show weakness, or what others might think to be weakness.

  Ram felt his anger mount. “I will be going tomorrow. Back to Hambelton. I have been away for more than a week. They want me back.”

  He heard Karak’s cot squeak as he shifted position. Unexpectedly, Ram felt his heart sink. He was freshly humiliated. Now he realized what he did not know before: he had hoped that Karak Singh would beg him to stay.

  7

  WHEN RAM WOKE, THE SKY WAS BRIGHT AND IT WAS ALREADY WARM. Karak’s cot was empty. The night had brought strange dreams; he had walked—run—in woods like those surrounding Hambelton. An unfamiliar presence had wielded a hatchet. He had woken several times in a sweat, then felt clammy and cold in the summer night. Ram could still taste his terror on his tongue.

  With relief, he saw Jivan Singh at the edge of the field, inspecting a portion of land with another man. Ram quickly washed and walked across the field to join them. He was hungry, but it was important, urgent, that he speak with Jivan. Now that his mind was made up, he needed to act.

  As he approached, Jivan and the stranger turned toward him. He was an Anglo; despite the wide-brimmed hat, his cheeks were pink from the heat and sun. His hair was of that impossibly light shade, as if all natural color had been drained from it. Jivan said, in English, “Meet Clive Edgar, Mr. Eggenberger’s land agent.” He turned to Clive. “Ram is my cousin.”

  “You have more cousins than any man I know, Jivan,” the man said loudly, laughing at his own words, holding out his hand.

  Ram shook it, but addressed Jivan quickly, his heart beating inexplicably fast. He tried to keep his voice steady. “
Bhai-ji, I hope you will excuse me,” he said in Punjabi. “I am leaving suddenly. I must return to Hambelton.”

  If Jivan was surprised, he did not show it. “Something has happened?”

  Ram felt caught between protecting Karak’s dignity and telling the truth. He did not want to let Jivan know that Karak and he could not agree; that might seem petty. “I cannot keep—neglecting my duties. I have heard from people in Hambelton—my friend Pala Singh, who has been a great help to me—I must return.” The explanation sounded false, even to himself. The words hung in the air between them.

  Jivan glanced at the blond man. Clive had busied himself with inspecting the soil, not seeming to mind the conversation in Punjabi.

  “Has Karak done something?” Jivan asked gently. Ram was surprised at Jivan’s meaning. What did Jivan know of Karak that he did not?

  “No, bhai-ji,” Ram stuttered, shaking his head. He wondered where Karak was.

  Jivan peered at him. “Clive and I have been assessing the salt content in the soil. It is a problem here. Do you have it in Lyallpur?”

  “Bhai-ji,” Ram said, breathing deeply, shifting his weight from one leg to another.

  “Okay. Let it be.” Jivan nodded, closing his eyes. “Don’t let him dominate you, Ram.”

  Ram stood humbly, his arms in front of him, his left hand holding the right wrist, staring at the ground, unseeing. He was not saying goodbye to Jivan. He was requesting permission to leave.

  Jivan must have realized this too. “If you are taking a good decision, then I should not put obstacles in your way. At least let me accompany you to the depot. I will be finished with my work in just two hours.”

  “Bhai-ji, do not trouble yourself. The train leaves very soon. I will ask Amarjeet.”

  Jivan looked pained. Ram did not yet know the pride Jivan felt in helping new settlers to the Valley. He had given the Khan brothers their first season’s seed, lent them his Fresno scraper and mule. He had helped Harnam Singh raise his tent house and referred him to the loan officer at the Imperial Bank. Gugar Singh had stayed at the Eggenberger farm for three months before finding work in Holtville. Now Jivan put his hand on Ram’s shoulder. “You can return at any time,” he finally said. “What did I say when you first came? We are branches of the same tree.”