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.