It was still dark outside, and no one else was awake. Even the rooster was not stirring in the yard. He poured water from the olla and splashed it on his face. Rosa was unspoiled by the world. She would defer to him. When they had been riding together on the buckboard the previous week, she had leaned into him so that their shoulders had touched, so that her breast had brushed his arm. “It is so hot here,” she had said, as if it were unfamiliar to her, although she had always lived in the desert heat and cold. She had shyly, charmingly, over the past few days, made fun of his accent in Spanish; he could not roll his r’s properly, she said. Or, he spoke too slowly.

When they had reached the barrio, he got off the buckboard first, then took her hand to help her down. He had seen the Anglos doing this. He thought it sophisticated, a way of showing authority by not showing authority, of showing manhood by not showing manhood. She put a dainty shoe on the step. He slipped on the mud beside the wheel, and caught himself before he fell. He had been embarrassed, laughing. “You have a beautiful sunrise,” she had said quietly, in English. He was puzzled by this. It was not until he had left, egging the mare into a trot, that he realized that in Spanish, the word for “smile” sounded like the English word “sunrise.” Sonrisa. Rosa had been trying to impress him.

Now, in the lonely desert morning, he thought about his future and his past and the man that he had been in Manila and Hong Kong, when he’d worked for the white man in a country far from his home. He thought of the boy that he had been and about his father, who had also worn the British uniform. Even then, the British officers who commanded Indian troops would wear a dastar, in supposed solidarity. But were they not merely manipulating the Indians into compliance? Wasn’t it all a sham? He thought about Roubillard and the buttermilk. He pushed that thought away; the humiliation of the buttermilk threatened everything. He reminded himself: He knew the vice president of the bank. He was friendly with the sheriff. The buttermilk need not ruin him.

“Is your country so hot as this?” Rosa had asked that day in the wagon, when her breast had brushed against his arm. “Is it not unbearable with that great turban and your beard?”

Karak could have been angry, but he was not. “The turban gives dignity, Rosita,” he said. “It is a mark of honor and courage. I have worn it since I was a small boy.” Other men—Jivan—would have said the uncut hair was a divine gift.