“My brother pretty much been marry,” Prem Singh told me one time, his face clouding over. “One time twelve hundred, one time fifteen hundred, dollar—my country rupee. All go.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate the disappearance of the marriage money into thin air. “Too much drink. Too much gambler.”
Evidence that the black sheep had never mended his ways was furnished abundantly in the repeated requests that came for money, which Prem Singh never refused.
“Mester,” he would usually ask me on the day succeeding the arrival of a letter from “China country,” “you two hundred dollar today bank take off, mice.” I had never been able to teach him the use of the possessive “mine”; it was invariably mice. “I send money China country. My brother.” Once or twice I remonstrated with him about this, to no purpose. After all, it was his own money: the two dollars a day which, with practically no outgo, added up month by month in the bank. A letter from India, which he told me came from one of his brother’s deserted wives, proved equally futile, though troubling him for several days. Its only ultimate result was to prejudice his young mind still further against womankind and the institution of marriage.
“Me? Not any been marry!” he assured me, his eyes flashing. “Never! All time too much trouble! No good.”
Yet he was engaged, one of those betrothals arranged in infancy by Hindu parents, binding till death. It hung over Prem Singh like a sword of Damocles, exiling him forever from his native land.
“This country pretty good,” he told me often. “Girl wait all time my country. Twenty year old now, I guess, maybe. I stay America! Pretty good. Not any go back!” He shook his head emphatically. “Maybe some time my brother come this country. Thass good!” His eyes gleamed at the pleasant vision.
It was this dream of a reunion with his beloved black sheep of a brother in the great and good land of America, far from the cloudy danger of marriage that overhung all India, that more than any other illumined his long days and lonely evenings on the California mesa. He kept aloof from the other Hindus, from the large camps where they congregated, twenty and thirty together, for the clearing work that in time was to transform mesa into orchard land. He preferred to remain alone, apart, as my man.