The Lowland (26 page)

One day Deepa invited Bela to accompany her to the market, and then to wander a bit through the narrow lanes of the neighborhood. They walked past small windows with vertical bars. Scraps of fabric, strung through wires, served as curtains. They walked past the ponds, rimmed with trash, choked with bright green leaves.

On the quiet walled streets, every few paces, people stopped them, asking Deepa to explain who Bela was, why she was there.

The granddaughter of the Mitra house.

The older brother’s girl?

Yes.

The mother came?

No.

Do you understand what we’re saying? Do you speak Bengali? a woman asked Bela. She peered at her. Her eyes were unkind, her stained teeth uneven.

A little.

Liking it here?

Bela had been eager to go out of the house that day, to accompany Deepa to the market, to explore the place she’d traveled so far to see. But now she wanted to return inside. Not liking, as they retraced their steps, the way some of the neighbors were pulling back their curtains to look at her.

In addition to the water that was boiled and cooled for her to drink, water was warmed every morning for her bath. Her grandmother said Bela would catch a cold otherwise, even though the weather was so hot. The warmed bathwater was combined with fresh water that traveled
at limited times of day through a thin rubber hose, released by a pump, filling a tank on the patio next to the kitchen.

Deepa took her to the patio, handing her a tin cup, telling her what to do. She was told to pour the warmed water, cooled to her liking with water from the hose, over her body, then lather herself with a bar of dark soap, then rinse. The running water was not to be wasted. It was collected in a bucket, and whatever was left was stored in the tank.

Bela had wanted to stand inside the tank, which was like a high-sided bathtub, but this was not permitted. And so she bathed in the open air instead of in the privacy of a bathroom, or even the protection of a tub, among the plates and pans that also needed washing. Supervised by Deepa, surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, regarded by crows.

You should have come later, not now, Deepa said, drying off Bela’s legs with a thin checkered towel. It was coarse, like a dishcloth.

Why?

That’s when Durga Pujo comes. Now it only rains.

I’m here for my birthday, Bela said.

Deepa said she was sixteen or seventeen. When Bela asked Deepa when her birthday was, she said she wasn’t sure.

You don’t know when you were born?

Basanta Kal.

When is that?

When the kokil starts singing.

But what day do you celebrate?

I never have.

In a patch of sunlight on the terrace, her grandmother rubbed Bela’s arms and legs and scalp with sweet-smelling oil from a glass bottle. Bela stood in her underpants, as if she were still a young child. Arms limp, legs parted.

Her grandmother combed out Bela’s hair, sometimes using her fingers when the knots were stubborn. She held it in her hands and examined it.

Your mother hasn’t taught you to keep it tied?

She shook her head.

There isn’t a rule about it at your school?

No.

You must keep it braided. At night, especially. Two on either side for now, one at the center when you are older.

Her mother had never told her this. Her mother wore her hair as short as a man’s.

Your father’s hair was the same. Never behaving in this weather. He never let me touch it. Even in the picture you can see what a mess it is.

In the room where her grandmother slept Bela ate her lunch. She was used to eating rice, but here the smell was pungent, the grains not as white. Sometimes she bit down on a tiny pebble that Deepa hadn’t picked out, the sound of it, crushing against her molars, seeming to explode in her ear.

There was no dining table. On the floor was a piece of embroidered fabric, like a large place mat, for her to sit on. Her grandmother squatted on the flats of her feet, her shoulders hunched, arms folded across her knees, observing her.

High on the wall hung the two photographs her father had sat in front of during the ceremony. The pictures of her dead grandfather and the teenaged boy her grandmother told her was her father, smiling, his face slightly tilted to one side. Bela had never seen a version of her father so young. He was young enough, in the picture, to be an older brother to her. She had never seen proof of him from the time before she was born.

Below these images, always slightly rustling in the fan’s breeze, was a sheaf of household receipts and ration slips, punctured and held in place by a nail. Over the impaled slips of paper the teenaged face of her father watched her eat her rice with a spoon, amused, whereas her grandfather, his tired gaze fixed before him, his eyebrows sparse, seemed not to notice that she was there.

Apart from the two photographs, the stack of receipts, there was nothing to look at on the walls. No books, no souvenirs from past journeys,
nothing to indicate how her grandmother liked to pass the time. For hours she sat on the terrace, her back to the rest of the house, staring through the grille.

Every day, at a certain point, Deepa took her grandmother down to the courtyard, where she snapped off the heads of a few of the flowers that grew there in pots, and along the vines that trailed up the wall, gathering them inside a little brass urn.

She left the house, accompanied by Deepa, walking past the ponds to the edge of the flooded lowland. She went to a certain spot, and stood, and after a few minutes she came back. When her grandmother returned to the courtyard, the urn that had held the flowers was empty.

What do you do there? Bela asked her one day.

Her grandmother was sitting in her folding chair, her hands curled inward, like fists that did not close, inspecting the ridged surface of her fingernails. Without looking up she said, I talk to your father for a bit.

My father is inside.

She looked up, her navy eyes widening. Is he?

He came home a little while ago.

Where?

He’s in our room, Dida.

What is he doing?

He’s lying down. He said he was tired after going to the American Express office.

Oh. Her grandmother looked away.

The light dimmed. It was going to rain again. Deepa hurried up to the roof, to remove the clothes from the line. Bela followed, wanting to help her.

Do you have rain like this in Rhode Island? Deepa asked.

It was too much to explain in Bengali. But a hurricane in Rhode Island was among her earliest memories. She didn’t remember the storm itself, only the preparation, the aftermath. She remembered the bathtub filled with water. The crowded supermarket, empty shelves. She’d helped her father crisscross masking tape on the windows, the traces remaining long after the tape was pulled away.

The following day she’d walked with her father to campus to see torn branches scattered on the quadrangle, streets green with leaves. They found a thick tree that had fallen, the tangled roots exposed.
They saw the drenched ground that had given way. The tree seemed more overwhelming when it lay on the ground. Its proportions frightening, once it no longer lived.

Her father had brought photographs to show her grandmother. Most of them were of the house where Bela and her parents now lived. They’d moved there two summers ago, the summer Bela turned ten. It was closer to the bay, not far from where her father had once studied at the oceanography school. It was convenient to the lab where her father went to work. But it was farther from the bigger campus where Bela had grown up, where her mother went now, two evenings a week, to teach a philosophy class.

Bela had been disappointed that though the house was hardly a mile from the sea, there was no view of the water through the windows. Only, every so often, when she was standing outside, a stray whiff of it, the concentration of salt discernable in the air.

There were pictures of the dining table, the fireplace, the view off the sundeck. All the things she knew. The large rocks forming a barrier with the property behind theirs, that Bela sometimes climbed. Pictures of the front of the house in autumn, when the leaves were red and gold, and pictures in winter, of bare branches coated with ice. A picture of Bela next to a tiny Japanese maple that her father had planted in spring.

She saw herself standing on the little crescent-shaped beach in Jamestown where they liked to go Sunday mornings, her father bringing donuts and coffee. It was where the two lobes of the island met, where he had taught her to swim, where she could see sheep grazing in a meadow as she floated in the water.

She watched her grandmother studying the pictures as if each one showed the same thing.

Where is Gauri?

She doesn’t like to pose for the camera, her father said. She’s been busy, teaching her first class. And she’s finishing her dissertation. She’s about to hand it in.

Her mother spent her days, even Saturdays and Sundays, in the spare bedroom that served as her study, working behind a closed door.
It was her office, her mother told her, and when she was in it Bela was to behave as if her mother were not home.

Bela didn’t mind. She was happy to have her mother at home instead of in Boston for part of the week. For three years her mother had gone to a university there, to take classes for her degree. Leaving early in the morning, not getting back until Bela was asleep.

But now, other than the evenings she taught her class, her mother almost never left the house. Hours would pass, the door not opening, her mother not emerging. Occasionally the sound of a cough, the creak of a chair, a book dropping to the floor.

Sometimes her mother asked if Bela could hear the typewriter at night, if the noise of it bothered her, and Bela said no, though she could hear it perfectly well. Sometimes Bela played a game with herself as she lay in bed, trying to anticipate when the silence would be disrupted again by the clattering of keys.

It was with her mother that she spent most of her time during the week, but there was no picture of Bela’s time alone with her. No evidence of Bela watching television in the afternoons, or working on a school project at the kitchen table, as her mother prepared dinner or read through a pile of exam booklets with a pen in her hand. No proof of them going to the big library at the university now and again, to drop borrowed books into bins.

There was nothing to document the trips to Boston she and her mother had made once in a while, during her school vacations. They’d taken the bus there together, then a trolley, to a campus in the middle of the city, sandwiched between the Charles River and a long busy road. No proof of the days Bela had spent trailing behind her mother through various buildings as her mother met with professors, or of the time Bela was taken to Quincy Market as a treat.

Here she is, Bela said as her grandmother came to the next picture.

Her mother appeared in it inadvertently. The picture was of Bela from several years ago, posing for the camera in their old apartment, with the linoleum floors. She was dressed up as Red Riding Hood for Halloween, holding a bowl heaped with candy to give away.

But there in the background was her mother, leaning slightly over the kitchen table, in the process of clearing the dinner plates, wearing slacks and a maroon tunic.

So stylish, Deepa said, looking over her grandmother’s shoulder.

Her grandmother handed the pictures to her father.

Keep them, Ma. I made them for you.

But her grandmother gave them back, loosening her grip so that a few of the pictures fell to the floor.

I’ve seen them already, she said.

For the past few years Bela had heard the word
dissertation
and not had any idea what it meant. Then one day, in their new house, her mother told her, I am writing a report. Like the ones you write for school, only longer. It might be a book one day.

The reality had disappointed Bela. She’d thought until then that it was some sort of secret, an experiment her mother was conducting while Bela slept, like the experiments her father monitored in the salt marshes. Where he took her sometimes to see the horseshoe crabs scuttling across the mud, disappearing into holes, releasing their eggs into the tide. Instead she realized that her mother, who spent her days sequestered in a room full of books, was only writing another one.

Sometimes, when she knew her mother was out, or when she was taking a shower, Bela stepped into the study to look around. A pair of her mother’s glasses sat discarded on the desk. The smeared lenses turned things indistinct when Bela raised them to her face.

Cups containing cold puddles of tea or coffee, some of them sprouting delicate patterns of mold, sat forgotten here and there on the shelves. She found crumpled sheets of paper in the wastebasket, covered with nothing but
p
’s and
q
’s. All the books had brown paper covers, with titles that her mother had rewritten on the spines so that she could identify them:
The Nature of Existence. Eclipse of Reason. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
.

Recently her mother had started referring to the dissertation as a manuscript. She spoke of it as she might speak of an infant, telling her father one night at dinner that she worried about the pages being blown out an open window, or being destroyed by a fire. She said it worried her, sometimes, to leave them unattended in the house.

One weekend, stopping at a yard sale, Bela and her father found a brown metal file cabinet among the odds and ends for sale. Her father
made sure the drawers opened and closed easily, then bought it. He carried it from the trunk of the car into her mother’s study, knocking on her door, surprising her with this gift.

They found her at her typewriter, holding her head the way she always did when she concentrated, staring up at them. Her elbows on the desk, the last two of her fingers pressed against her cheekbone, making a V, creating a partial triangle that framed her eye.

Her father handed her a tiny key that dangled like an earring from a hoop. I thought you could use this, he said.