“Do you know me?” the man asked Jivan in Spanish. He was clean-shaven. He spoke politely.

“You are familiar,” Jivan said.

“I came with some others to pick cantaloupe last March. My name is Alejandro,” the man said. “I have my own people now. I see that your cantaloupe is ready. I remember, you paid us so well.”

Neither mentioned Ángel Cruz’s death; it did not seem proper.

“How many of you?” Jivan asked.

“Eight. We can finish your work in three days.”

“We have more in the back.”

“Sí.” The Mexican man nodded.

“My cousin’s cotton crop is a few miles away. Can you help afterwards with that?”

“Sí,” he said again.

“Come tomorrow. We will start in the early morning.”

The man left, smiling.

Jivan turned to Ram and Amarjeet and Kishen, sitting quietly at the table. “We are saved,” he announced.

THEY CAME THE SAME WAY they had before, six men and two women on foot, with a mule carrying their burlap sacks. The fair-skinned girl was there too. On the morning before they began work, Ram saw her standing in the field with the others, against the backdrop of the dawn. But she was not talking to them, even though she stood in their midst, huddled against the morning chill; she was looking at something behind the packing shed. She glanced again and again in that direction. It was only when Ram stepped outside that he saw what it was: Karak, loading crates onto the wagon, his bright green dastar tied neat and smart, his shirtsleeves rolled up tight past his elbows, already perspiring in the early morning.

Ram told himself he did not care. She was a strange creature, this fair-skinned woman—human but foreign, still.

The days were glorious and sunny with a chill in the air by sunset. The third day, following their break for lunch, the Mexican girl approached them. They were sitting in the breezeway finishing their meal and she held up the olla from their camp. The vessel had fallen from its rope and the water had spilled—the last they had filtered from the settling pond. The men would awaken soon from their rest, and there would be no water for them. Would the jefes kindly have any that the workers could drink? She had addressed herself to Jivan, but it was Karak who rose and said, in Spanish, that he would help.

He brought three extra ollas that Kishen always hung in the back, one at a time, walking slowly. They talked while he carried them, his arms embracing the vessel, leaning toward her, from the Hindu farmhouse to the Mexican camp, back and forth. Months later, the Mexican girl and the Hindus would laugh together about this.

15

March 1916

THIS IS WHAT THE ANGLOS AND THE HINDUS AND THE OTHERS THOUGHT they knew about the Mexicans in the Valley: they were dirty, lazy, primitive; they were of mañana persuasion. They treated their women like chattel. They did not know how to negotiate an agreement regarding land and property. How could their country know anything but chaos and war between brutal strongmen, even though they called it by the noble name of revolution?