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.

As the realization came to him, he shrank away from the field, from Jivan’s home, from the letters and newspapers and dust and sand. He knew where she would be. Long ago, sitting together on the back porch of Jivan’s home, she had told him herself. The place that was her haven. For the first time, he knew what he wanted. He knew where he belonged.

He slept and rose early. There were few things he needed. He carried them in one bag, rolled inside his blanket, just as he had when he rode the train into the Valley. He said goodbye to Jivan Singh and Kishen Kaur. He blessed Leela. She was crying, even though he had not said that he was crossing the boundary, had not explained that, after reaching the other side, he might not be able to cross back. She was fourteen now and felt deeply things that adults had long ago lost the capacity to feel.

Amarjeet drove him east on the road to Yuma and beyond. They stopped at Andrade; he would cross at the checkpoint at Los Algodones. The younger man embraced him, and Ram took his bag and blanket and walked. The officer at the border patrol shed waved him through. The earth was crusted with alkaline. A hot breeze blew from the west, carrying dust from the dunes. He turned to look at Amarjeet, who raised his arm to hail him, a small figure across the expanse of the boundary.