Chapters (59)
Karak hesitated. “As long as they give us our money, I don’t care how they talk.”
Something in his tone made Ram turn to face him.
“Tell me—what has happened?” Ram said.
Karak hesitated again. “Rosa—” he said.
“Yes?”
“Yesterday. She moved out of the house with the children and left me alone.” He took a deep breath and rubbed his face. “What should I do now? She says I have not been a good husband to her. After I bought her all those things.” His expression was bitter, shocked. “She is crazy,” Karak said. But Ram did not agree.
THEY WERE BECOMING TRUCK FARMERS, like the Japanese. The lettuce crop was beautiful, if ever truck could be beautiful—lime green, fragile as a flower, traveling east in refrigerated carloads to early markets in Boston and New York and Philadelphia. The price was high. When Clive came to see them, he could not hide his pleasure. “You boys still bringin’ it in. Bringin’ it in!”
The day the money was wired to them, Karak came home late. He told Ram that he had gone to the Chinese store on the east side and purchased a gold ring. He visited Rosa that night at Alejandro and Esperanza’s home. He came back without her, but he was smiling.
RAM THOUGHT OFTEN of the old distinction that he had heard since childhood: there is a land of one’s birth, and there is a land of one’s work and action. Janma bhoomi and karma bhoomi. Separate places. The distinction was meant to explain the pain of being broken in two. As if using words to describe the separation made it natural. But it was not. He knew that now. He existed in two places at once. America, Punjab, Adela, Padma. These worlds would never merge. It was impossible. His son was almost nine years old now, and Ram did not know what he looked like. Ram’s uncle knew him better than he. The boy’s teachers, the neighbors, the vegetable vendor in the village market knew him better too.
That February, for the first time, he kept most of the profit from the harvest for himself. He did not know why. He could not hide from himself a resentment, a sense of disappointment . . . in what? In Padma? Because she had returned to her parents’ home? Because he now sent money to that home as well? Yet all the failure had been his; he could not decide to return. Or perhaps it was his fate, written on his forehead. He had been in the States for a third of his life. To divide the world into janma bhoomi and karma bhoomi explained nothing. He would be forever suspended between two lands, never whole.