They had argued on the last night that they had spent together, during the peace of day’s end, when the hut’s cool walls released their mud scent and he stretched his bare legs on the charpai. This time of day, this small space, was their haven from the searching eyes of his family. Padma stood with her back to him, lighting the oil wick before the small collection of deities, the flame reflecting off their metal frames. Goddess Durga fixed him with the sacred gaze, questioning, and he felt a spasm of anxiety, a shadow of conscience. But then it passed.

“It is not right that Chacha-ji is sending you away.” Her head was bent, her hand was by her cheek, and he wondered if she was smoothing away a tear. “My mind is disturbed about it.” Her voice was always beautiful to him, dark and deep, almost like a man’s.

He did not answer for a moment. She had never been so bold before. She spoke as if she believed that he did not want to go. He had said months ago—when Chacha-ji had decided to send him and Ishwar together, when twenty acres east of the canal were mortgaged to buy their passage—that he did not want to leave, but he suspected that she always knew the truth. It had been a dishonest game between them: Ram acting as if he wanted to stay, Padma silently berating his uncle for sending him.

He wanted to go, he did not want to go; both were true. She still stood with her back to him, although the flame was lit. He could see her shape through the kurta: the square shoulders, the small waist. He suddenly remembered their wedding night, when she had laughed with him as they sat by the waterwheel. His longing felt like a blade in his belly, a wound.

“I will come back,” he said. He was standing now, because the statement required it.

“Will you?” she said. He was surprised by her bitterness.

“Ishwar and I will come back. We will make enough money to buy more land in Shahpur. Nothing can replace the village where our ancestors lived. Isn’t it true, Padma?”

“By your going, we can move back there in two years or three. If you stayed, maybe it would take five years, or six, even seven. What does it matter? I would rather have you stay here in the canal colony with me than return to the village sooner.”

This was true. Lyallpur was not like the districts to the east, where famine raged on and off. The British would not let Lyallpur fail, not when they had invested so much in the canals, not when the gins were always busy there, and the cotton was being carted out by wagon and boat. The family did not really need him to go, did they?