In the halls of cedar, pine and maple, the first thwacks of iron into wood, into sap, a dent into the felling season, still in late fall embryo. The men have been at work since before daybreak; sweat pouring off their fingers and onto the blades of their Swede saws eating woodchip. Occasionally one of them would begin to hum a song in a language they spoke to among themselves, now the language of the night, the language of bunkhouse, of bonfires. Bulla ki jana – Bulla doesn’t know who is, a song of spiritual abandonment, now also, quite aptly, a song for exile.

The boy looks up at the men a few stumps away, one of whom is now humming, catches the hummer’s eye and gets a grin back. His more taciturn partner keeps his nose to the saw, a man of silence and attention. Both are kin, kinder, and in a place like this where such affections might be burdening to the individual, even quite kind to him after sorts.

Did they feel obliged to be kind because he was to one a loved sister’s son, and to the other a grand nephew? Or more simply because he was their only link into the future, so bright in their mind’s eye that they couldn’t gaze at it anymore? Or because it was they who hatched the plan to fudge the age of the orphan, who was under their care and brought him here with them, across the black water? But the boy had learnt to carry his own weight. It was right around his age, when the older men signed up as foot soldiers to fight a Queen’s war, their lithe and strong bodies providing cannon fodder, the lance into the heart of China, the wills to put down another heathen rebellion. Boxers the officers called them.

But now both of them were done with war, damn the Queen and the devil. The boy will not have to crawl through mud, will not have to learn how to cut a man’s throat after identifying him as friend or foe by the way he laced his shoes. He will be a rich man when he returns to Lahore in a few years. They have promised themselves that. They earn ten times here what they did farming their combined few acres, yes the work is dangerous, but then they had both seen danger, had met the devil face to face. And the taciturn one is also approaching artistry in shearing branches off the trunk, as the jovial one was already an artist in the wrestling arena.

This is what the boy saw: the man instinctively, an instinct born out of great watchfulness, knew how to pull a falling tree in exactly the required direction, felling it in such a way that the first branch supported the trunk so it didn’t sag, and thus was easy to trim. And all the subsequent trunks cut in such a fashion that they fell on the top of one another crisscross - lumber as thread, wood as a weave. And then the branches when trimmed fell neatly into one or two bonfires without having to be hauled away and burnt separately.

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