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.