Free Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey, Ellen R. Sasahara, Felicity Don

father did not return. Mukand became one of the best students in Jandiala. It did not occur to him to misbehave. Rebellion was unnecessary; it was good behavior that would unburden his mother and bring his father home. In the 1930s in India, the schools were British, yet his notebooks were made of native paper and emblazoned with the seal of Haria Singh and Brothers. In his notebook, Mukand wrote the common English proverbs he was learning to memorize. He wrote:
    A burnt child fears fire.
    A constant quest is never welcome.
    As you sow you shall reap.
    A single sinner sinks the boat.
    Only nine years old, he was not quite able to grasp the moral complexity, or so he thought, modestly. “I just like them,” he told himself, and he would sit at the dinner table, and recite them to his mother, with the hint of Mrs. Gaitskill’s accent.
    â€œA burnt child fears fire,” he would say, and he knew of fire and would think of a small child in a newsboy cap and tweed pants running from forests of flame.
    â€œA single sinner sinks the boat,” he announced gravely, though he did not know what a sinner was yet, only that a boat would soon bring him to his father, and so he must never be a sinner, he must never sink the boat. He earned high grades in math, his head covered with a turban, bent over the notebook, learning long division scrupulously. He earned the highest marks and dreamed of going to university in the city where his father was, the city named after the British queen where good men on horses wearing red uniforms rode past stone buildings covered in ivy.
    He learned new sentences:
    I was not aware of this danger.
    It is a result of your carelessness
    The judge sentenced the culprit to two years.
    And though he was very thin and solemn, with high cheekbones and narrow, wary eyes, he enjoyed singing, sometimes secretly, when he walked by the fields of cotton and sugar cane. He liked the patriotic fighting songs.
    His father wrote him that “the rivers are just like two bands; it’s very rare when they can meet again, but we will as the rarest river does.”
    He would smile when he went to the films with his mother. Outdoors, in the theater with no roof, they would watch the singing and the dancing, and he would go home, and write the songs down in his notebook. It was not that he knew he was leaving India, only he knew if he ever did, he wanted to have these notebooks in case he forgot the songs and phrases he loved as a child.
    Mukand saw photographs: his father wore three-piece suits now, the vest buttoned under the blazer, the pants creased, the tie of silk. He and his father seemed alike, thin and tall, with their shoulders slightly sloping in, and their brown eyes kind and wary.
    The Pallan store was popular, but his father did not want him to work there because he preferred his son to study so he would earn good grades and be accepted by a university in Canada. Of his father, Mukand would describe him succinctly: “He was a very gentle man.”
    He finally went to Canada in 1947. He was twenty now, and he wore three-piece suits just like his father, suits of scratchy brown wool, with narrow pants and fitted vests and a blazer with buttons of tortoiseshell.
    For the rest of his life, he would remember the journey as one remembers falling in love. It was a kind of soaring he’d never felt before. He first left Bombay in an old army boat and sailed for San Francisco. The boat was very nice, he believed, a Marine Adder, owned by President Lines. The journey was costly and revealed previously unknown hierarchies. His third-class ticket cost three hundred dollars. His sister was in second class—a five hundred dollar fare. They slept in bunk beds, his brother above him, with the small slit of a window showing the endless blue.
    In first class, there were diplomats and businesspeople.
    What captivated him were the students. There were hundreds of them, leaving Bombay, going to