The injustice of their loss did not bother Karak much. He knew about the loss of land firsthand; during his boyhood in Ludhiana his father had surrendered his last five acres to Hindu moneylenders. By coincidence, the day before they were exiled from that soil, Karak had fed green corn to the ox, without a thought as to whether the animal would bloat. His father had been distressed, rageful. He had tied Karak to the post where the goat was kept and thrashed him with a stick. He thrashed him as if the lost land had been his fault.

Only later did Karak learn that the moneylenders had called in the loan. When Karak’s family left the following morning, with their belongings piled on their bullock cart, the back of his shirt was still red with blood. He watched his father sitting on the driver’s stoop, his hands on the reins, his face expressionless. Then his father turned back, taking one last look. The land had once been owned by Karak’s great-grandfather. But no, injustice did not bother him too much. Injustice was the way of the world; what mattered was what one could accomplish between its cracks and fissures; happiness could still be found, money could still be made, comfort could still be enjoyed.

His father was guilty of other beatings, other omissions. When Karak came to the Imperial Valley, he knew that Jivan knew about them; they shared the same great-grandfather, after all, and word spread easily in a village, and between villages too—between brothers and cousins and their wives.

The army had saved Karak. The British-imposed hierarchy, its predictability, its gestures toward fair play and justice, the military’s defined world all had been safer than his home. One of his younger brothers had joined the army too, another had died during the famine; the older had stayed in the village and cared for their mother after their father had jumped into River Sutlej. Karak spent years in Hong Kong, wearing the uniform of the British without wasting his allegiance on them, seeing the world, learning its ways, enjoying himself. He spent years working in Manila.

When he left the Philippines, Karak still had not married. No duties tugged at him. He arrived in California released from his father’s cruelty, from the military’s grasp, fingering $124 in his pocket, and he thought himself a new man. He did not need America, Americans, to tell him he was free. The land his father had lost was available here, all around him. He did not know how to farm with irrigation in the desert; he had forgotten how to farm with the rains in the Ludhiana countryside, but that did not matter. In everything, chardi kala, fearlessness, optimism.