Ferries and tugboats chugged past, sails, a steamer bearing the wrong name and the flag of another country. Then he saw it, entering San Francisco bay like a dream—that was how Ram would remember it for years afterward. The fog parted and the ship appeared, the waves sweeping past the hull as if it were a sea beast, enormous. People were huddled on the deck, and—could it be?—a woman stood with a shawl gathered about her. She was next to a man, holding a black-haired child, but the child would not turn toward him. Perhaps she was too far away, but he thought he could see the shape of her shoulders, the curve of her face. It belonged to him; he was part of that curve, of that uneven way she stood.

“Padma!” he yelled. “Padma!” But the unceasing wind smothered his voice. The woman turned away. She could not have heard, not with the wind whipping against the ship, the water parting before it, the violent hum of the sea meeting the shore.

He watched as the ship churned past him, steam spouting from her funnels. She turned toward the land and sailed past an outcropping, beyond his view. He was suddenly filled with a great urgency. How long would it take for the officials to board the ship? For the doctors to examine passengers? How long for Padma and her brother to answer their foolish questions and prove they were literate, to pay that silly tax? Not long, or very long? Hours? Days? From his perch on the rock, he could see a ferry come to take the first-class passengers to shore. It did not matter how long it would take because, regardless, it would be too long. Was it possible for her foot to touch this shore? That she would be walking, alive, alongside him?

He returned to the pier in San Francisco, but she did not arrive that day. At nightfall he took a trolley to the old Ghadar headquarters. It was now called Yugantar Ashram, after the arrest and trial of the Indians and Germans and the murder of RamChandra Bharadwaj. Before Ram left for San Francisco, Karak had sent a telegram there on Ram’s behalf. When Ram knocked, a Bengali man allowed him inside. A Tamilian prepared his dinner plate. There were others there: three Punjabis and two Marathi who were students at the university.

Ram slept on the floor, barely listening to their political talk. In the morning he went to the docks and waited again. The ferry carried some passengers from Angel Island. Four Hindustanees were among them, but she was not. The men were not dressed poorly, but they were tired and disheveled.

“Have you met my brother-in-law, Shankar?” he asked them. “He is traveling with his sister, my wife.”

“There is a small boy with them?” a turbaned man said. He spoke like a rural man, a farmer.

“My son,” Ram said.

“They came with us on the journey,” one of the other men said, nodding his head.