When he turned back toward Jivan Singh’s home, Ram could see the household awakening. While he had been walking the fields, Karak had woken and bathed in the pond. He was standing near the house, looking in a mirror propped on a window ledge, wrapping a green dastar. As Ram approached, he turned and waved. Kishen bent over the stove near the porch. Jivan sat on a rock a few paces from the house, facing the sun’s glow. Karak had written to him that Jivan was a religious man, rising every day at 4:00 A.M. to bathe and say prayers. The rock on which he sat was unusually large, rounded in one section with a smaller mound in the other, and a skyward protrusion in the shape of the ear of a hare. Ram looked about. There was only dust and sand. The stone was the only one of its kind. Later he would learn it was called the jackrabbit rock.

“Oye!” Karak hailed him. “You are healthy again!” Ram had forgotten how pleasing his features were, the long, straight nose, the full lips. During the three weeks that they had lived together in the Hong Kong gurdwara, waiting for the SS Minnesota to ferry them to Seattle, he had noted how everyone—young and old, male and female—reacted to Karak. The Hindustanees considered him dark but handsome. In the public houses, the barmaids would often glance his way. Standing at full height, broad shouldered, he was not easily approachable, but friendly enough that they would want to approach. Sometimes he would disappear for an hour or so. Ram would stay in the drinking hall with the other lodgers from the gurdwara, drinking whiskey, waiting for him.

Ram bathed in the pond and put on fresh clothes. The Earth had turned fully toward the sun by then. His mind felt cleansed and light. He and Karak moved his cot back outside, near the others, and sat down to breakfast at the porch table. Amarjeet joined them, glancing shyly at Ram. His gregariousness from the wagon ride was gone. Leela was outside, collecting pebbles from the dirt, inspecting them, rubbing them with her finger and forming a careful pile just beyond the porch screen. “Good morning, little Leela,” Karak sang to her.

“Good. Chacha-ji,” she responded, nodding as if she agreed. She eyed Ram suspiciously. When Ram looked at her, she looked away; when Ram ignored her, she scrutinized him again.

“Don’t be afraid of Ram Chacha,” Karak said. “He only eats children taller than four feet, and you are not yet big enough.”

The girl looked again at Ram, then at Karak. “He won’t,” she said. “You won’t let him.”

Ram smiled.

“Leela!” Kishen Kaur said sharply.

Karak made a face at the girl that her mother couldn’t see.