Forty or fifty men stood gathered in the moonlight. How could there be so many? A man wearing a dastar rolled on the ground, whimpering, holding his arm. Another lay near him, unmoving. Fear gripped Ram again, and he could not breathe. Who was that man? Was he dead? Behind him stood the other Hindustanees. The two groups stood facing each other. His countrymen were outnumbered almost four to one.

He heard a loud crack and an explosion, and heard it again. His mind made sense of it: a gun had been fired. A man yelled, “March! Walk!” Now he understood—they were driving the Hindustanees out of town. Ram’s head began to swim. His legs gave way and he sank, slowly, to the floor.

IN THE MORNING, the house was empty. He woke to birdsong, sunlight. Had the events of the evening really happened? Looking out again through the window, then slowly opening the back door, he saw no sign of his companions or the locals. Benches and chairs had been toppled. Cooking dishes were strewn everywhere. Shards of glass lay over the dirt, glistening. There was a dark brown stain, still moist, on the dirt and grass where the fallen men had lain. He felt a chill in his gut. Later, in Jivan Singh’s home, he would read in the Ghadar paper that the man on the ground had been Uday Singh. That he had died in a hospital in another town, ten miles south of Hambelton, two days after the attack. Ram had not known him well; he had arrived only a week before.

A smell of urine hung in the air, of men in terror.

So much had gone wrong for him: his father’s death before he was born, his mother’s lowly place in her brother’s home, his own status in that house, among the children his uncle truly loved. Who would he have been if his father had lived, and had loved him in that way? If he had not been sent off to America? It was clear now: he was only meant to be the victim of men’s malice, to suffer; his adventure abroad was always destined to end like this. An ocean separated him from all that he knew, and he was stranded here, among strangers who took pleasure in savagery.