WITHIN WEEKS, many Hindustani men took their blankets and left for Texas, for Arizona, where the land laws had not yet been passed. Some returned to the lumber mills in Washington and Oregon. Others found work laying track for the Southern Pacific in the few places where track had not yet been laid. A few, like Jivan and Karak and Ram, stayed on. Now, on Sundays, the park was sparsely populated. The grower-shipper corporations bought up the land that the Hindustanees had leased from their absent landlords. The companies hired Filipinos and Japanese to supervise and Mexicans to harvest. The Hindustanees with Mexican wives remained, the ones with children and dreams of children, the ones who had wished for a home as soon as they left their old unsatisfactory one. When they met each other in the streets, they recognized in each other’s eyes the challenge that they had accepted. They were to be “strange” so that the Anglos could be normal, they were to be dirty so that the Anglos could be clean, they were to know their place so that the Anglos could be sure of theirs. If their sons and daughters sat in the same classrooms as the Anglo children, they were to consider themselves fortunate, so that the Anglos could feel generous.

They used to drink with their white land agents and neighbors, they used to gift credit at the clothing store for the wives of their bankers and lawyers, they used to buy candy for these men’s children, but now the Hindus stayed on the east side, shopping in Japantown and hiring farmhands from the Negro settlement. Times had changed.

IN THE FABRIC ROOM, Adela looked at him intently, as if she knew that something was wrong. She kissed him softly and he immediately loathed himself. What was he doing in this town, among strangers, with a woman who was not his own, so far from everything that he knew and loved? Suddenly he could not stand the textiles, the scent, the dust motes floating in the sunlight.

“Shall we walk?” he asked.

He could see she was puzzled. It was not often that they stepped into the open together. But truly, who would care? Perhaps the men in the barrio, but they did not matter to him. The Hindustanees in the park? Their gossip did not matter either.

Just walking with her in the open air made him feel a stranger. She belonged here; she was of this desert land and he was not. They were both of no consequence, but now, with the new laws, he was less than she. Everywhere they went, he sensed it. He was no one; he did not exist, coming to California had meant his death.

He stopped walking to face her. “I will go now, Adela,” he said, not knowing clearly his own meaning.

She looked confused. “What is it?” she said.

How could he tell her? How could she understand?