I am writing after taking a big decision. I will stay in the Imperial Valley and farm cotton, which the Americans value as we do. It is a place much like our land in the colony outside Lyallpur. It is a desert that, through canal irrigation, has been made into fertile soil. Just as in our Canal Colonies, there is everything that a village could need: market, general store, school, banks, hospital with doctor, courthouse, inns. All of this has been built in just ten years.

But because it is America, the colony is even more advanced than ours. Here, they have even an electric generator. Think on it, Padma—our old villages in Punjab have existed for fourteen to fifteen generations, perhaps even since Time’s beginning, and we do not have electricity, but this Fredonia colony does. Government, or maybe an industrialist, built the generator along with the settlement itself. Yesterday I was in the town as the sun was setting, and I saw the gleam of electric current shining through so many windows at once. The current is so different from the light of kerosene lamps that it seems a ghost has visited each home and place of work, lighting up the interior with its glow. And it does not cause one’s eyes do not burn; one’s breathing is clear . . . Like a fairy land . . . Padma-ji, can you imagine?

I must tell you that I hesitate about my decision. To make my uncertainty worse, last night I had a dream that I was living in a village that was not familiar to me, but it was also very familiar, as if the bricks of its buildings were made of the substance of my bones, as if its fields and roads were made of my muscles and sinews. Then came a movement in the ground, as if this village were not stable, as if its foundation were not built on the earth, as if what I stood upon would move and shift. I woke up and, despite the threat of snakes and scorpions, walked in bare feet to the canal from where the water enters the cantaloupe field. My heart was beating too fast. I stood there for a while in the darkness—long enough that the moon changed its position in the sky. Only then could I return and lie down on my cot. I thought of you and imagined our son and it calmed me.