Second: There was this family that had begun showing up at the langar attached to the gurdwara that Laks had been attending. They’d been literally starving the first time they wandered in. They would probably go back to starving if they skipped a day. They were decidedly not from around here. They were refugees who had come down out of the Himalayas on the back of a truck. But they had originated much farther north than that. They did not speak Hindi or Punjabi. Nor did they look like the kinds of people who would. Nor were they Tibetan. The group consisted of a mother, a granny, and four kids ranging from about five to fifteen years of age. The fifteen-year-old, a boy named Ilham, spoke English. Laks had seen them across the room but not bothered them, since it seemed that not starving to death might be a higher priority as far as they were concerned. He inferred that the people of the gurdwara were horrified by their plight (whatever that might be) and that they were being looked after. But word had it they’d come down out of the mountains. And Ranjit’s strange remark had turned Laks’s thoughts in that direction. So he went over and struck up a conversation with Ilham.