Tully walks into the cool of the barn from the summer sun of Imperial Valley. Southern California. Hundred-degree heat. The top of peach trees burnt brown. A lover had pressed his face to the earth, and scorched her mildly. This is where he comes to in the late afternoons when it is too hot to stay on the stepladder, prunes in hand, claws of metal snapping foliage, to gather breath, to eat his lunch of rotis, dal and lassi.

The three cows he keeps eye him steadily and mow in low voices. He touches their white faces. That secret coolness of skin. With such tactile responses he satisfies his hunger to touch something living other than his own face in front of a mirror every morning. He must get a dog he keeps telling himself. But after abandoning the stray bitch he had kept in that season of sawmills in Oregon, even through two hard winters when they had to ration coal for heat as well as cooking, feeding it warm rotis off his own plate, he can’t bring himself to act on this wish.

As he moves further into the barn – someone watching from the door would see a man claimed by the dark put out by hay, by the odor of manure, by something within himself – he senses that someone had just been in there, no less that an hour before. A distinct ghost of human scent, his nose rattle-snake alert, as if listening to the approach of rain. He looks for the key concealed above the rafters to unlock the deepest sanctum of the barn, the room where he stores sacks of seed, of fertilizer. And steps into symbols of struggle, a scattering of grain, the unmistakable odor of semen, now a white stain on the spread of grain sacks.

He steps out thinking of that person would have known of the exact location where he hid the key, a slender piece of patchy rust wedged into a gap in the wood. Outside his hundred acres of peach orchard, a patch quilt of brown and green, perhaps still holding these two, whoever it was who has passed through. It must have been two of the Mexican iterant farm workers from the group that he was forced to hire in the previous season of abundant harvest and family death.

War came again to the world. Old men at the gurudwara, many of who had seen action previously at various outposts of the empire kept discussing it often, their minds seemingly inflamed in the winter of 1941 by their memories of fire. Tully’s uncles, both Uttam and Dhir, however left the room, or if they were outside sitting on the front steps, they went inside, whenever talk turned to war, which was often. They had done their fighting and were now done with what they called the white man’s foolishness and greed. Death and the glorification of it, in the name of civilization and freedom held no more appeal to them. They knew perfectly well what both the barbarian and the conquistador were capable of, given sword, given gunpowder, given gas. However this was not the case with Ricardo.

Ricardo Fernandez, was his wife’s younger brother and only sibling, and since the death of her parents, a son she did not have, had a point to prove. What was it? That he is as good as any other man or boy? That he was indisputably American, as any other, seeking retribution from the Kurat and the Jap, after Pearl Harbour? Tully had been the witness to furious arguments and shouting matches, in Spanish, between Rosa and Ricardo. Rosa kept insisting that Ricardo leave California and go across the border Mexico, to their ancestral village in Guadalajara till the war is over, that he is more than a brother to her, that he needn’t die for a country which is not really his, and which will not fully accept him as its own.

But Ricardo refused to tear up the papers drafting him, asking him to report and sign up for the US Army. So Ricardo, the bright young boy just out of high school with an easy smile, a body that seemed to dance even when standing, and a pitching arm that took his school through the baseball league, had packed his bags. And one February morning Tully drove him down to the rail station at Stockton. As he was shaking Ricardo’s schoolboy hand, and asking him to write to his sister every week, Dhir, Tully’s old uncle who lived close by in town, and who watched Ricardo closely through a boyhood now interrupted by war walked down the platform, his long beard white drift in the morning breeze. And he placed a curved dagger, one of the signs of Khasla, in Ricardo’s outstretched hand.

Tully recognized this dagger. Dhir had carried it through slaughter in Shanghai’s Boxer Rebellion and then through the trenches of World War –I. Much later it found blood of an Irishman up in Bellingham who had beaten Uttam, Dhir’s brother, for no cause other than that he was dirty hindoo. The police never found his body. And after this exchange of arms the old man turned and left. He had no time for goodbyes.

Rosa had earlier refused to come to the station with him and Ricardo. She will have years to mourn this passage even though she doesn’t know this yet. She too gave Ricardo a talisman, her staff to stand still a world that had never stopped shaking under her feet, her mother’s cross, silver and turquoise. So this is how a departure came to be, a curved dagger in the palm, a crucified Christ next to the heart, and a man in the middle passage waving to another, with still turbulent and hopeful blood, passing beyond the bend.