They cursed the mill boss who paid them $2.00 per day, while paying the Negros $2.10, while paying the Italians $2.75. They spoke in Punjabi and it did not matter who overheard them from the road. Most had fought in the British army. They were accustomed to living under a soft shadow of danger. They were used to making the unfamiliar into the familiar. The whiskey was flowing. Pala’s cooking was good. What mattered was the money; the well-worn route to the Western Union booth behind the post office, the dollars they wired to Patiala or Hoshiarpur or Lahore that would transform a mud hut into a brick cottage, or pay for a sister’s wedding, or release a peasant father’s mortgage from an urban moneylender. They measured their lives $2.00 at a time. Despite the letters that assured them that they were missed, loved even—these men with dreams and secrets and childhoods and wives and mothers for whom they yearned—they could not avoid that accounting, their value at home and abroad: $2.00 a day. They did not question it.

They sent Hussein inside to fetch another bottle from the kitchen. Ram heard the boy’s footsteps approach, the sound of the open and shut cupboard. If Ram breathed lightly and lay on the side that did not pain him, folding an extra blanket between his legs, it did not hurt so much. Perhaps he might report at the mill in the morning. Jodh bent toward him to offer a tumbler of water, and Ram drank. He offered Ram roti and chicken and Ram refused. He was tired. Sleep came again quickly.

THEY ARRIVED AFTER MIDNIGHT. He woke to pounding on the front door, deep thuds that overwhelmed his ears and shuddered through his fragile chest, the screeches of torn wood. They must have used axes, or small logs retrieved from the river. He heard yells, shattered glass, the toppling of the shelf that stood by the stairs. Jodh’s chair stood vacant, staring back at him like an omen. When he realized he was alone, panic overtook him. He knew that they could not see him from the front of the house. That he could escape out the back door if none of them were outside. Except that he could not move. His limbs were frozen.

He heard their boots on the stairs and he was thankful. But the shame came in a wave, overwhelming him. He should go up after them; he should help Pala. Gurbinder Singh used to keep a pistol near the mantel on the first floor, but he had left for San Francisco in June, taking the gun with him.