Passage West

by Rishi Reddi

  Perhaps Adela sensed it too; one afternoon, lying in the seamstress shop, their bodies half in sunlight, half in shade, she said, “Tell me about this—” She was pointing at the scar on his leg. It had been where the man in Hambelton had pounded on his shin, the oddly long wound that had kept him lying by the side of the road before he was able to stand and limp home.

  “It is nothing,” he said, “an injury from long ago.”

  She ran her tongue along the length of the scar, as if she knew it was not from long ago. As if she knew it was a wound that America had given him. The nerves skittered at her touch. The sensation ran up his leg and along his spine, sent a shiver into his skull. “I do not believe you,” she said, teasing.

  He sat up, suddenly enraged, and pulled on his clothes. “Stop. What you believe or not means nothing! I’ll kill you!” She pulled up the sheets to cover herself, her eyes wide in fright.

  He dressed quickly and walked out into the streets of Fredonia. He felt dizzy. Had he meant those words? He would kill her? At home he had whispered to Padma in their bed—“Die!” as a playful command against fate, as a way to ward off the tragic. No, he could not harm Adela, ever. He remembered the shock on her face, the quickening of her breath. After years, she had made him feel light again. He did not ever want her to die.

  It was early yet; people were still emerging from church. The day of the attack in Hambelton had been a Sunday too. People had gone to church then, had prayed too. He and Pala had seen them.

  Perhaps Adela knew that he had arrived in the Valley injured and desperate. Perhaps that information had been conveyed between Jivan and Karak, from Karak to Rosa to Adela. But he did not want her to know why.

  He promised himself he wouldn’t tell her. Surging clouds covered an angry sun. Silent lightning pierced the gray. He had seen this lightning before. It did not have to mean rain. Her bewildered face flashed in front of his eyes. He had walked more than a mile around the town’s simple streets and returned to the dressmaker’s shop. The Presbyterian church sat around the corner. He would not be noticed going back inside the shop. Could he tell without floundering? Could he say what happened?

  She was sitting on the blanket where they had made love, dressed now, leaning against an old sewing machine, her hands playing with its foot pedal, which rested on her lap. When he entered, her face was searching, expectant, but tender.

  The rain came. A torrent of water at first, then a gentle sprinkle. Was that why he told her, he wondered later? The rain drumming against the roof like a mother’s song? The room felt different when it did not need to protect against dust and wind and sky.

  Afterward there were crickets that covered the dirt paths and patios and wagons and motorcars, dark things that crawled out of the fertile earth. Then came the birds to devour them, dropping from the sky without warning. But before those unreal events had occurred, he had already told her, lying in the damp air of the fabric room.

  After he spoke he felt fundamentally changed. Now she knew something about him that no one else knew, that his wife could not have understood. What did Padma know of the Anglos here? Of the lumber mill? Of who he had become? He had been someone before that day in Hambelton, and he had been someone different after: ashamed, humiliated. This was the man that Adela knew, and that Padma did not.

  “You acted correctly,” Adela said, after he told her.

  “I did not save them,” Ram said.

  “You could not.” She held him to her. “You could not.”

  THE DAY THE WHITE MEN in Hambelton had come for them, Ram and Pala Singh and Pala’s cousin, Jodh Singh, had gone for a stroll; it was Sunday, a beautiful morning without work in early July. The previous day, the townfolk had celebrated Independence Day. The sunshine was brilliant but not too warm. The brine and tang of the ocean hung in the air. Although the streetcar was running, they walked their usual path into the town, past the canneries and the Chinese bunkhouses, past the other work-gang homes and the Japanese pool halls. The church bells rang as they entered the town; surreys and automobiles and a few teams were parked in front of the houses of worship.

  In the leisure and beauty of that morning, they wandered to that portion of Hambelton to which they never traveled: where the houses on the cliff overlooked the strait, the islands hovering like a dream in the distance. The homes were large, the parlors and bedrooms shaped by the same wood that he and Pala and Jodh cut and sawed. A motorcar stood beyond the wrought iron gate of every home. So this is where those ladies lived, they said to one another—although Jodh was always so quiet and mild, so removed from the work-gang pack that Ram often wondered whether he was listening. Here lived those ladies with peculiar hats and beige dresses who could be seen strolling leisurely in town, sometimes with nannies in attendance, pushing frilled buggies before them. They were women of wealth, married to the shippers and the mill owners. Their faces were too angular and unnaturally pale, so unlike his Padma’s skin, which knew the sun yet was lovely to touch, soft and full around the cheeks and nose. Ram sometimes doubted that they and Padma were the same creatures. His stomach turned when he thought of touching them in the way that he touched Padma. But he could not help thinking the thought.

  But Pala disagreed. Theirs was the desired complexion, Pala would say, that exotic paleness, as if one’s skin would smudge if caressed by an unclean hand. It was a pity that these women could never belong to them; he would so like to touch one, to see if they felt like the women at home. Pala was unmarried, and if Ram had been a little older, a little less obliged to be respectful, he would have asked him, joking, how much he knew of touching in that way. In those days, despite his marriage, despite the son he had not yet met, Ram had been an innocent. He did not think unmarried men knew the things that he knew. He glanced at Jodh, to see what he thought of Pala’s statement, but the man was gazing out to sea, his thin body turned away from them, slightly stooped. Jodh Singh’s eyes were always brimming with water, as if he had spent days inside a smoke-filled hut in the Punjabi winter; one never knew if he was crying or not.

  Jodh’s opinion did not matter anyway, for these ladies would never acknowledge them; they would look at them and look away. But they were not the only ones. Ram and Pala spoke about others who did that too: the workers at the telegraph office, the vegetable sellers at the market. Pala was bitter that people treated them in this way. White people were all the same, he said. Just like the English, the Americans used them for their own ends, treating them as they treated their horses, keeping them healthy enough to perform the needed labor, no more, no less.

  Ram did not agree. Hadn’t the English government provided the railroad that had carried him from Lyallpur to Calcutta? (Pala reminded him that Hindustani hands had built it.) Hadn’t Government dug the canals that irrigated crops all over western Punjab? (No, it was the Punjabis themselves, who strove to make their own land habitable.) Hadn’t Government forged the towns that settled around those canals? (No, Pala said. It was the villagers who courageously left ancestral homes and settled the wild barr. Didn’t Ram understand his own family?) “That is true,” Jodh said vaguely, and Ram did not know with whom Jodh was agreeing.

  But Ram would not give up. He felt strange among the white people; he did not like them, really, but he could not understand Pala’s anger. He reminded Pala that the clerk at the general store was always cordial, whether or not the store owner was present. The druggist had given them free bandages and castor oil more than once. Pala’s face grew expressionless and Ram stopped speaking. The moment when Pala’s anger would rise was always hard to recognize. Perhaps that was why Jodh was so often quiet.

  The morning passed during this familiar debate. When they returned to town, the churches had emptied and the people of Hambelton were strolling through their streets and gardens. Pala wanted to return home. He was the cook for this week and the day was already half-spent. Ram liked that Pala did not feel himself superior to his men; he cooked on the weekly rotation even though he was
the gang boss. So Jodh and Pala went home together and Ram decided to walk a little farther. Secretly, Ram wanted to see again the young woman who sold tickets in the kiosk at the cinema house. She was lovely in some way that his Padma was lovely, the shape of her face, the arch of her eyebrows, the fullness of her lips.

  He would feel guilty whenever he sought out the girl, for he was a married man, and she was of a different people, and he would not admit that she appealed to him. Sometimes, when he happened to see her by chance, he would feel ashamed, humiliated, as if he had failed at some huge endeavor. But as he saw the families gathered in the churchyards, the young men talking on the street corner, a woman picking up a toddling child, any small moment in an ordinary life, he felt more and more alone. He walked past the cinema kiosk and saw her there, just as he knew he would. He stood on a corner where she could not see him.

  Of course she was not one of those great ladies, with their strollers and fine clothes, the ones that Pala and he had talked about. She was modest. Her father might work on the fishing boats, or perhaps a sister served liquor in the Sporting District, and Ram fancied that she had decided on some humble but more respectable work. For this, he admired her even more. But she was still unapproachable, because Ram was a married man and from a different shore. He would never permit himself to greet her and that boundary afforded him a peculiar freedom. What would he say, anyway? His English then was poor, and he did not waste his earnings on going to the cinema. On his final pass before leaving, he thought she glanced at him and even granted him a half smile. From this he gained some small satisfaction and, in the late afternoon, turned toward K Street.

  He was not far from home when he noticed the two men. He approached the intersection with C Street, and they walked quickly toward him from behind, wielding two-by-fours brazenly propped over their shoulders. Later Ram would wonder if the wood had been sawed in his own mill, so that he had helped create the weapons used against him. He could not tell their intent until they were almost upon him, when he smelled the liquor on their clothes. His guilty mind made peculiar connections: These men were brothers of the cinema house girl. They knew he had spied on her from a distance. One man raised his arm, holding the piece of wood, and something (what was it?) told Ram to run, and he broke stride just as the arm and the wood came down. Ram saw the man’s face as he swung, cheeks bulging, teeth clenched, eyes large, a strange pleasure revealed—he was struck in the shoulder and he cried out, feeling his right arm go limp, and raised the other to shield his face. The second man hit Ram on the left side of his rib cage, unprotected and vulnerable. The pain from this blow overpowered the other, overpowered everything else, like the sun exploding behind closed eyes. He fell to the ground and was rolling and rolling and something struck the side of his head—was it the slab of wood? A stone on the road? One of the men cried out but Ram could understand only two words: Cheap labor! Cheap labor! Cheeeeaaaaaap! He knew they would hit him again. He wondered where the blow would land. Then he felt a shudder in the earth and heard the clatter of metal against metal. He raised his head as the trolley car rattled into the intersection.

  Summoning all his strength, holding the side that had erupted in pain, he rose, swaying, then leaped for the trolley’s step, his boot catching the hard edge. He threw his body forward into the car and landed on his right side, which hurt less than the other, but his foot still dangled over the pavement. One of the men grabbed it, running with the trolley, cursing. Ram kicked madly and the man fell back. The car was empty except for the conductor standing far in the rear.

  Ram shoved himself against the steps where he entered at the front, leaning against the doorway, hoping the conductor would not approach. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. Cheap labor, the man had yelled. There was also the girl. Why had he been attacked? Every movement hurt. A scarlet stain covered the front of Ram’s shirt. He wanted to know where it came from, it was damp and heavy and alarming, but he was afraid to look. There was a gash on his shin, and he did not know how he got it, but he could see the white bone under the skin. He thought he would faint, but somehow he willed himself to stay conscious.

  At the canneries, not far from K Street, the trolley slowed. Ram edged himself off the step and stumbled, falling by the side of the road. “Hey!” the conductor yelled as the car began to move again. “You there!” Ram half turned toward him, and he saw the conductor’s eyes grow wide, his mouth hang open. The car sped up and moved on. Ram was relieved. He wanted to make it home to the other Hindustanees, that was all. The smell from the canneries clogged his head. After a few steps, the nausea overcame him and he retched at the side of the road. He sat in the dirt as nightfall came. He shivered, although it wasn’t cold. His shin, his chest, erupted in pain whenever he tried to stand. No one passed. Finally he rose, vomited again, regained his balance and limped slowly toward K Street.

  At the house, Ram stumbled to the back, where he knew Pala would be hunched over the outdoor stove. A pot was on the fire, its contents bubbling and steaming, the scent of ginger and garlic in the air, but the yard was deserted. Ram collapsed on the bench near the back steps, lying on the side that did not pain him. He heard faint voices from the house. It was dusk. Most of the men would be home or just returning from the wrestling match held at the neighboring field. Then Pala emerged, walking briskly, holding another pot, followed by Jodh and Satish Singh Dillon, the other work-gang boss who lived next door. Seeing him lying on the bench, Pala’s expression changed from puzzlement to irritation to sudden realization. “Ram? Ram!” Pala put down the pot, contents splashing, and dropped to his knees at Ram’s side.

  “We were just walking with you, bhai,” Jodh Singh said uselessly. “What happened?” But Ram could not answer; he had used all his strength to get home.

  They brought him indoors, cradling him in a sheet with Jodh and Pala carrying him at his head and feet. Other men placed blankets on the floor of the pantry off the kitchen, and they settled him on top of them. The pantry was a closet without a door, near the back entrance, set in a corner of the house. During the day, light came in from the small window seven feet from the ground. It looked out over the side yard. The space was lined with shelves, mostly empty, but a few holding large tins of rice and lentils, and blankets that men did not use during the summer.

  All the men had come downstairs now, and they crowded around the door of the small space to see what had happened, their voices loud from the whiskey they had been drinking since early afternoon. Satish Singh kept most of them away while Pala lifted Ram’s shirt and asked for a bottle to wash the injuries. The whiskey stung his skin and made him cry out, and he wished that he could have been more courageous, but Pala spoke to him as a woman would and Ram felt comforted. Pala fetched one of his own shirts and held it to the wound on his chest. He asked Jodh to do the same for a gash on his arm, and the one on his shin. “Who was it?” Satish Singh asked, over and over, until Pala snapped, “Oye, bhai, can’t you see he is in pain?”

  Satish took in a breath and stopped talking, and Ram heard others call out from the kitchen.

  “Crazy people!”

  “Inform the police!”

  “They won’t do anything,” someone else said lightly, with a half laugh.

  “They will—”

  Pala rose and turned on the men in the kitchen. “What will those bloody police do? Tell me, what will they do?” The others were suddenly quiet. Pala resumed cleansing Ram’s wounds while Satish watched, expressionless.

  After a moment Pala called out, “If anyone is to be told, tell the doctor. Go and fetch him.”

  “I will,” said a young voice.

  Ram suddenly roused himself. “No!” he said. “No doctor.” If he wasted money that way, what would he send home to his family for this week? His eyes met Pala’s.

  “Hussein!” Pala called more gently to the boy—he was only fifteen, the youngest of their gang. “Go later—we can call the doctor after a day if needed. Let him rest for n
ow.”

  Ram lay back, mollified. “I would like my bag,” he told Pala. “Please.”

  Pala sent Hussein upstairs to fetch them. The carpetbag carried familiar things from a safe world, far away: Padma’s photograph, a packet of her letters, the small amulet a Muslim friend had tied on his arm the day he departed, to ward off danger. He reached his hand inside and touched them and a whimper escaped his lips.

  He closed his eyes. They had cried cheap labor, but the image of the girl at the cinema appeared to him, and the thought came again instantly—he had been beaten for watching her; in that moment he was sure of it, the guilt overpowering his rational mind. “Go and eat,” Satish said to the men gathered at the door. “Dinner is ready and there’s work tomorrow.”

  The men dispersed but Satish stayed, along with Pala and Jodh. Satish was holding a newspaper, a copy of the Hambelton Times. He had fought alongside the British cavalry; he was the only one of the men on K Street who could read and write in English.

  “This is what they were writing in the newspaper last week,” Satish said.

  “What—that Ram would be attacked?” Pala said. All the men knew that he and Satish did not get along well.

  Satish ignored his tone. “That some of the labor bosses did not want Hindus working here any longer. I don’t know which ones. Maybe that Swedish man, and those Norwegians.”

  “Why?” Ram whispered.

  “They say we are undercutting the pay for the locals.”

  “We are,” Pala said.

  “We’re not!” Satish said. “We are merely willing to accept what the company will pay us. What is wrong with that?”

  “We should be paid more.”

  “Then go and tell them,” Satish said. He was angry. He took a long breath. “The paper reports that the owners felt threatened by labor leaders who said that if the Hindus were not removed by the end of the week, they would drive them out themselves.”