“Adela no longer works here. I begged her to stay. But she told me that she had to go away for a while.”

He should not hold out any hope. “Did she say when she would come back? Did she say where she was going?”

She looked at him with suspicion. “I asked her the same thing, Mr. . . . Singh.”

She had guessed the name without him giving it. He had underestimated her. Nothing in this town could be secret. “She is a nice girl,” Mrs. Belvidere said finally. “How did she become mixed up in a mess?”

“Yes, madam,” Ram said, hands still clasped behind his back. He did not want to answer her question. If he could just seem good enough, compliant enough, would he get more information? “I hope she is safe,” he said.

“Yesterday morning, some fellas from town were asking for her. I won’t say who they were. They said they had some business with her. I asked what kind of business would two grown men have with a Mexican girl like her? They just laughed.” Mrs. Belvidere’s voice might have a tremor, but she spoke clearly. “It didn’t sound none too nice. Well. She was a good girl, and I asked her to stay, but she said she didn’t think she’d be back.”

Her words beat upon him. He could not accept their finality. He turned to go.

“If you find her, tell her that I will miss her. She was a fine worker. Don’t know who I’ll replace her with,” the woman said.

“I will, madam,” he said.

DID PADMA STILL WAIT FOR HIM? After eleven years, he supposed she did. Waited for him as a wife waits for a husband. Because they were defined by each other, and there was truth in the definition. There was truth in the child that connected them. There was truth in the longing that he had felt as a young man. But there is the land of one’s birth, and the land of one’s work and action, and for some, they are not the same. He remembered the longing, but he did not feel it anymore. He knew, from her occasional letters, that she did not feel it either.

He could not go back now. How could he return when Adela was gone, when he sat in the debris of Karak’s ruined life after Clive’s destruction? But he knew: He could go back. He did not want to.

Sitting on Jivan’s porch, gazing beyond his cantaloupes to the turned-up lettuce field, Ram recognized what he had lost—a child, a wife, a home, a country. For her help in a desperate moment, for her courage in a world gone mad, Adela deserved his thanks, but it was more than that. He owed her something, yes, but it was more than that too.