The Lowland (29 page)

She said that she had already spoken to Bela about it and that Bela had not objected. She told him that Bela needed a form of help he could not provide. It was as if a bone had broken in her body, the counselor explained. It was not simply a matter of time before it mended, nor was it possible for him to set it right.

Again he thought of Gauri. Though he’d tried to help her he’d failed. He was terrified now that Bela would shut down permanently, and that she would reject him in the same way.

And so he wrote out a check in the psychologist’s name, Dr. Emily Grant, and placed it in an envelope, as he might another bill. The bills were typed on small sheets of paper, mailed to him at the end of the month. The dates of the individual sessions, separated by commas, were written in by hand. He threw out the bills after he paid them. In the ledger of his checkbook, he hated writing Dr. Grant’s name.

Bela attended the appointments alone. He wondered what she said to Dr. Grant, if she told a stranger the things she no longer told him. He wondered whether or not the woman was kind.

He remembered first learning that Udayan had married Gauri, and feeling replaced by her. He felt replaced now, a second time.

It had been impossible, the one occasion he’d seen Dr. Grant in person, to get a sense of her. A door opened, and he stood up to shake a woman’s hand. She was younger than he expected, short, with a mop of unruly brown hair. A pale steady face, sheer black tights, plump calves, flat leather shoes. Like a teenager dressed up in her mother’s clothes, the jacket a little too big for her, a little long, though through the open door of her office he saw the progression of framed degrees on her wall. How could a woman with such a confused appearance help Bela?

Dr. Grant had expressed no interest in him. She’d locked eyes with him for an instant, a firm but impenetrable look. She’d ushered Bela through the door to her office, then shut it in his face.

That look, knowing, withholding, unnerved him. She was like any other intelligent doctor, examining the patient and already knowing the underlying disease. In the course of their sessions, had she intuited the secret he kept from Bela? Did she know that he was not her real father? That he lied to her about this, day after day?

He was never invited into the room. For some months he received no indication of Bela’s progress. Sitting in the waiting area, with a view of the door Bela and Dr. Grant were on the other side of, made him feel worse. He used the hour to buy groceries for the week. He timed the appointments, and waited for her in the parking lot, in the car. When it was over she sat beside him, shutting the door.

How did it go today, Bela?

Fine.

It’s still a help to you?

She shrugged.

Would you like to go to a restaurant for dinner?

I’m not hungry.

She was deflecting him, as Gauri would. Her mind elsewhere, her face turned away. Punishing him, because Gauri was not there to be punished.

Would you like to write her a letter? Try to speak to her on the phone?

She shook her head. It was lowered, her brow furrowed. Her shoulders were hunched, pressed toward one another, as tears fell.

Standing in her doorway at night, watching her as she slept, he remembered the young girl she’d been. On the beach with her when she was six or seven. The beach nearly empty, his favorite hour. The descending sun pours a shaft of light over the water, wider at the horizon, tapering toward land.

Bela’s limbs are pink, glowing. She never seems as alive as when he brings her here, her solitary body bravely poised against the sea’s immensity.

He is teaching her to identify things, they are playing a game: one point for a mussel shell, two for scallop, three for crab. The plovers, darting single-mindedly from the dunes toward the waves, get five. The first one to call out gets the point.

She trails at a distance behind him, stopping every few paces to finger something on the ground. Over rocky sections she treads carefully. She is humming a little tune, a section of her hair tucked behind one ear. They call to one another, revising the score.

He stops to wait for her, but she has a sudden burst of energy, passing him. On and on she sprints, unobstructed, kicking up her heels at the water’s edge. Dark hair to her chin, rearranged by the wind, obscuring her face. Just when he thinks she will have the energy to run forever, to escape his sight, she pauses. Turning back, breathing hard, her hand on her hip, making sure he is there.

• • •

The following year, slowly, a release from what had happened. A new clarity in her eyes, a calmness in her face. She turned outward, toward others. She carried herself differently, the wind no longer opposing her but at her back, thrusting her into the world.

Instead of always being at home she was never there now. By eighth grade the phone was ringing throughout the evening, different people, male and female, wanting to talk to her. Behind a closed door, for hours at a time, she conversed with her peers.

Her grades improved, her appetite returned. She no longer set down her fork after two bites saying that she was full. She’d joined the marching band, learning to play patriotic songs on the clarinet, fitting together the parts of the instrument after dinner and practicing scales.

On Veterans Day he stood on a sidewalk in the center of town and watched her filing past. Dressed in uniform, bearing the autumn chill, focused on the sheet music hooked around her neck. Another day, emptying the dustbin in the bathroom, he saw the discarded wrapper from a sanitary pad and realized she’d begun menstruating. She had mentioned nothing to him. She had bought the supplies, kept them hidden, maturing on her own.

In high school she joined the nature studies club, assisting the biology teacher in the tagging of turtles and the dissection of birds, going to beaches to clean up nesting grounds. She went to Maine to study harbor seals, and to Cape May for the monarch butterflies. She began to occupy herself with other pursuits he could not object to: going from door to door with another student, seeking signatures for petitions to recycle bottles, or to raise the minimum wage.

When she received her learner’s permit she began driving to local restaurants, collecting discarded food and contributing it to shelters. In summers she got jobs that kept her out of doors, watering plants at a nursery or assisting at children’s camps. She was uncovetous, uninterested in buying things.

The summer after she graduated from high school she didn’t travel with him when news came from Deepa, saying his mother had suffered a stroke. She told him she wanted to stay in Rhode Island, to
spend time with the friends from whom she’d soon be separated. He arranged for her to stay with one of them. And though he didn’t like the idea of being so far away from Bela for a few weeks, in a way it was a relief, not to have to take her back to Tollygunge again.

It was unclear to Subhash, the degree to which his mother recognized him. She spoke to him in fragments, sometimes as if he were Udayan, or as if they were boys. She told him not to muddy his shoes in the lowland, not to stay out late playing games.

He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality. The coordination of her legs was gone, so there was no longer the need to place a chain across the stairwell. She was bound to the terrace, on the top floor of the house, for good.

He understood that perhaps he no longer existed in his mother’s mind, that she’d already let go of him. He’d defied her by marrying Gauri; for years he’d avoided her, leading his life in a place she’d never seen. And yet, as a child, he’d spent so many hours sitting by her side.

But now the distance between them was not merely physical, or even emotional. It was intractable. It triggered a delayed burst of responsibility in Subhash. An attempt, once it no longer mattered, to be present. Every year for the following three years he traveled back to Calcutta in winter, to see her. He sat beside her, reading newspapers, drinking tea with her. Feeling as cut off as Bela must have felt, from Gauri.

He stayed in Tollygunge as if he were a young boy again, never straying farther than the mosque at the corner. Only walking through the enclave now and again, always stopping at Udayan’s memorial, then turning back. The rest of the city, alive, importunate, held no meaning for him. It was simply a passageway from the airport and back. He had walked away from Calcutta just as Gauri had walked away from Bela. And by now he had neglected it for too long.

In the course of his last visit his mother had needed to be hospitalized. Her heart was too weak, she’d needed oxygen. He’d spent all day at her side, arriving early each morning at the hospital to hold her hand. The end was coming, and the doctors told him his visit had been well timed. But the attack happened late at night.

Bijoli did not die in Tollygunge, in the house to which she’d clung. And though Subhash had returned to be close to her, from so far, he’d arrived, that final morning at the hospital, too late. She’d died on her own, in a room with strangers, denying him the opportunity to watch her pass.

For college Bela chose a small liberal arts school in the Midwest. He drove her there, crossing Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, occasionally letting her take the wheel. He met her roommate, her roommate’s mother and father, and then he left her there. The college had an alternative curriculum, without exams or letter grades. The atypical method suited her. According to the lengthy evaluation letters her professors wrote at the end of the year, she did well. She majored in environmental science. For her senior thesis she studied the adverse effects of pesticide runoff in a local river.

But graduate school, which he hoped would be the next step, was of no interest to her. She told him she did not want to spend her life inside a university, researching things. She had learned enough from books and labs. She didn’t want to cut herself off that way.

She said this to him not without some disdain. It was the closest she came to rejecting how both he and Gauri lived. And he remembered Udayan, suddenly turning cold to his education, just as Bela had.

She talked at times about the Peace Corps, wanting to travel to other parts of the world. He wondered if she would join, if maybe she would want to go back to India. She was twenty-one, old enough to make such decisions. Instead, after graduating, she moved not terribly far away from him, to Western Massachusetts, where she got a job on a farm.

He thought at first it was in a research capacity that she was there, to test the soil or help cultivate a new crop breed. But no, she was there to work as an agricultural apprentice, in the field. Putting in irrigation lines, weeding and harvesting, cleaning out animal pens. Packing crates to sell vegetables, weighing them for customers on the side of the road.

When she came home on weekends he saw that the shape and texture of her hands were being altered by the demands of her labor. He noticed calluses on her palms, dirt beneath her nails. Her skin smelled of soil. The back of her neck and her shoulders, her face, turned a deeper brown.

She wore denim coveralls, heavy soiled boots, a cotton kerchief tied over her hair. She woke at four in the morning. A man’s undershirt with the sleeves pushed up to her shoulders, dark strips of leather knotted around her wrist in place of bangles.

Each time there was something new to take in. A tattoo that was like an open cuff above her ankle. A bleached section of her hair. A silver hoop in her nose.

It became her life: a series of jobs on farms across the country, some close by, others far. Washington State, Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri. Rural towns he had to look up on a map, towns where she said sometimes there were no stoplights for miles. She traveled for the growing season or the breeding season, to plant peach trees or maintain beehives, to raise chickens or goats.

She told him she lived in close quarters, often not paid in wages but simply by the food and shelter that were provided. She’d lived with groups who pooled their income. She’d lived for a few months in Montana, in a tent. She found odd jobs when she needed to, spraying orchards, doing landscape work. She lived without insurance, without heed for her future. Without a fixed address.

Sometimes she sent him a postcard to tell him where she’d gone, or sent a cardboard box containing softening bunches of broccoli, or some pears wrapped in newspaper. Dried red chilies, fashioned into a wreath. He wondered if her work ever took her to California, where Gauri still lived, or if this was a place she avoided.

He’d had no contact with Gauri. Only a post office box to which, for the first few years, he’d directed their tax returns, until they started filing separately. Apart from this official correspondence he had not sought her out.

On either side of the enormous country they lived apart, Bela roaming between them. They had not bothered to obtain a divorce. Gauri had not asked for one, and Subhash had not cared. Staying married was better than having to negotiate with her again. It appalled
him that she had never contacted Bela, never sent a note. That her heart could be so cold. At the same time he was grateful that the break was clean.

Now and again, at a dinner he attended at the home of an American colleague, or one of the local Indian families with whom he kept cordial ties, there would be someone, a widow or a woman who’d never married. Once or twice he’d called these women, or they would call him, inviting him to attend a classical music concert in Providence, or a play.

Though he had little interest in such entertainments, he’d gone; on a handful of occasions, craving company, he had spent a few nights in a woman’s bed. But he had no interest in a relationship. He was in his fifties, it was too late to start another family. He had overstepped with Gauri. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to take that step again.

The only company he longed for was Bela’s. But she was skittish, and he could never be certain of when he would see her again. She tended to return in the summer, taking off a week or two around the time of her birthday, to visit the beaches and swim in the sea, in the place where he’d raised her. Now and then she came during Christmas. Once or twice, promising to be there, then telling him something had come up at the last minute, she did not show up in the end.