Karak turned to look at him. “It will, Ram.” He grinned. Ram did not know if he was joking. They planted in long rows, the furrows stretching to meet at an invisible point in the distance. Ram took pride in their neatness. The first time they irrigated, they stood together near the supply ditch as the zanjero opened the headgate. The water swept in. The scent of the soil as it dampened made Ram’s mouth water. Near them, a scorpion sidled under a rock. Farther away, a gopher scrambled into his hole. Karak put his arm around Ram’s shoulders. “It is done, bhai,” he said.

“There is still more to do, Karak Singh,” Ram said jovially.

The plants grew. Ram wrote to Padma about the acres under his care, how he had shaken hands with the vice president of the bank. When the green shoots broke through the loam, he showed Karak how to use the cultivator. He boasted to Padma of teaching Karak to clear the weeds so the roots would go deep. White flowers appeared and disappeared. Ram wrote to Padma of learning to speak English, and even Spanish too. The bolls came forth, plump and beautiful, and burst open, revealing the fresh white substance underneath. He told Karak they should pick early; if they let the cotton sit for too long, they would not get a third harvest off the plants.

When Ram held the first fibers in his hand, he felt he held a part of himself, but it was not the cotton of his boyhood. That cotton had come into being through the people who had lived before him for thousands of years on Punjabi soil; they had selected what seeds to plant, they had played with pollen and stamen and pistil to make what had not existed before. That cotton was the offspring of that soil and the people who lived on it, bound together.

The cotton he held now was new, like the settlements of the Imperial Valley itself. It had come from the experimental station in Arizona. It bore the name of people who were of this land—the Pima who worked for the American government to create it. It was new like the American people, built upon the backs of the original dwellers.

When the cotton plants were waist high, the banker Jasper Davis came to look at the field. Ram could not understand their quick English talk to know if Karak had given him credit for his work. He was surprised that it mattered to him.