The Lowland (31 page)

Because of her background she was given a special responsibility to oversee students who came from India. Once a year she invited them to dinner, catering biriyani and kebabs. The students tended to be wealthy, pleased to be in America, not intimidated by it. They’d been made in a different India. At ease, it seemed, anywhere in the world.

Certain former students sent her notes at the holidays, invited her to their weddings. She made time for them, because she came to have the time, because she saw to the needs of no one else.

Her output, apart from the teaching, was steady, esteemed by a handful of peers. She had published three books in her life: a feminist appraisal of Hegel, an analysis of interpretive methods in Horkheimer, and the book that had been based on her dissertation, that had grown out of a blundering essay she’d written for Professor Weiss:
The Epistemology of Expectation in Schopenhauer
.

She remembered the slow birth of the dissertation, behind a closed door in Rhode Island. Aware that the exigencies of her work were masking those of being a mother. She remembered fretting, as the years passed, as the process of the dissertation deepened, thinking that it would never be done, that perhaps she would fail at this objective, too. But Professor Weiss had called her after reading it, telling her he was proud of her.

She could have spoken to Professor Weiss in German now, having studied it for so long, then spending a year, her fortieth, as a visiting scholar at Heidelberg University. He was still alive. She’d heard that he’d moved to Florida for his retirement. He had helped Gauri get into the doctoral program in Boston, and then get her first teaching job, in California. He was the one to mention it to her, wanting to do her a favor, always keeping her in mind, not realizing that she would choose this job over the job of raising her child.

She’d not kept in touch with him. She imagined word had spread, and that people in Rhode Island, at the university, had learned of what she’d done. And she knew that Weiss, who had mentored her, who had believed in her, who had always asked after Bela, would have lost his respect for her.

Her ideology was isolated from practice, neutered by its long tenure in the academy. Long ago she’d wanted her work to be in deference to Udayan, but by now it was a betrayal of everything he had believed in. All the ways he had influenced and inspired her, shrewdly cultivated for her own intellectual gain.

A few times a year she attended conferences, held in various parts of the country, or in foreign ones. They were the only long-distance journeys she made. At times she enjoyed the brief change of scene, the
shift in routine. At times she enjoyed sharing the infrequent fruit of her solitary labor.

The embroidered turquoise shawl she liked to have on hand during flights was always folded up inside her carry-on bag. The one thing Subhash had given her that she’d kept. She had traveled back to the East Coast, though she’d avoided Providence, even Boston and New Haven. It felt too close. Too illicit, to cross that line.

Impractically, she’d remained a citizen of her birthplace. She was still a green-card holder, renewing her Indian passport when it expired. But she had never returned to India. It meant standing in separate lines when she traveled, it meant extra questions these days, fingerprints when she reentered the United States from abroad. But she was always welcomed back, ushered through.

For the sake of retirement, for the sake of simplifying the end of her life, she would need to become an American. In this way, too, Udayan would soon be betrayed.

In any case, California was her only home. Right away she had adapted to its climate, both comforting and strange, hot but seldom oppressive. Arid instead of damp, apart from the rich fog of certain afternoons.

Gratefully she embraced its lack of winter, its paucity of rainfall, its blistering desert winds. The only cold of the place was visual, on the mountaintops, the abbreviated patches of white that collected among their peaks.

She’d met other refugees from the East Coast who had fled for their own reasons, who had slipped from their former skins, not knowing what they would find but compelled to make the journey. Like Gauri, they had tethered themselves to California, never going back. There were enough of these people that it ceased to matter where she was originally from, or what had brought her here. Instead, at social gatherings, when required to make small talk, she was able to participate in that collective sense of discovery, of gratitude for the place.

Certain plants were familiar to her. Stunted banana trees with leaves that were rusty at their edges, bearing the piercing violet blossoms her mother-in-law had taught her to soak and chop and cook in Tollygunge. The bleached bark of eucalyptus. Shaggy date trees, sheathed with pointed scales.

Though she was close to another coast, the massive ocean on this side of the country kept to itself; it never felt as encroaching, as corrosive, as the harsh sea in Rhode Island that had stripped things down, that had always looked so turbulent to her and at the same time starved for color, for life. The new sense of scale, the vast distances between one place and another, had also been a revelation. The hundreds of miles of freeway one could drive.

She had explored little of it, and yet she felt protected by that impersonal ongoing space. The spiny growth, the hot air, the small concrete houses with red-tiled roofs—all of it had welcomed her. The people she encountered seemed less reserved, less censorious, offering a smile but then keeping out of her way. Telling her, in this land of bright light and sharp shadows, to begin again.

And yet she remained, in spite of her Western clothes, her Western academic interests, a woman who spoke English with a foreign accent, whose physical appearance and complexion were unchangeable and, against the backdrop of most of America, still unconventional. She continued to introduce herself by an unusual name, the first given by her parents, the last by the two brothers she had wed.

Her appearance and accent caused people to continue to ask her where she came from, and some to form certain assumptions. Once, invited to give a talk in San Diego, she’d been picked up by a driver the university had sent, so that she would be spared the effort of driving herself. She had greeted him at the door when he rang the bell. But the driver had not realized, when she told him good morning, that she was his passenger. He had mistaken her for the person paid to open another person’s door. Tell her, whenever she’s ready, he’d said.

In the beginning she’d retreated willingly into the pure and proper celibacy of widowhood that, because of Bela and Subhash, she was initially denied. She avoided situations where she might be introduced to someone, adopting the Western custom of wearing a wedding band during the day.

She turned down dinner invitations, offers to have lunch. She kept to herself at conferences, always retiring to her room, not caring if
people found her unfriendly. Given what she’d done to Subhash and Bela, it felt wrong to seek the companionship of anyone else.

Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.

When desire eventually began to push its way through, its pattern was arbitrary, casual. And given her life, the dinners she was expected to attend at the homes of colleagues, the conferences, opportunities were there.

Mainly they were fellow academics, but not always. There was the man whose name she’d forgotten, who’d built the bookshelves in her apartment. There was the idle husband of a musicologist at the American Academy in Berlin.

Sometimes she juggled lovers, and at other times, for extended periods, there was no one. She’d grown fond of some of these men, remaining friendly with them. But she’d never allowed herself to reach the point where they might complicate her life.

Only Lorna had unraveled her. She had knocked on Gauri’s door during her office hours one day, a stranger introducing herself, tilting her head against the doorframe. A tall woman in her late thirties, her center-parted hair in a small chignon. Nicely dressed, in fitted trousers, a white button-down shirt. So that at first Gauri thought she was another professor at the college, wandering in from some other department, with a question to ask.

But no, she was a graduate student at UCLA, she’d driven in and found Gauri, she’d read everything Gauri had written. She’d worked for years in advertising, living in New York, in London, in Tokyo, before quitting her job and going back to university. She was seeking an outside reader for her dissertation, a study of relational autonomy, holding a partial draft of it in her hand. She was willing to help Gauri with any research or grading in exchange for the privilege.

Please say yes.

Her beauty was sober, in its prime. A long neck, clear gray eyes, abbreviated brows. Earlobes so scant they seemed almost to be missing. Slightly visible pores on her face.

I heard your talk last month at Davis, Lorna said. I asked you a question.

I don’t remember.

You don’t remember the question?

I don’t remember your asking it.

Lorna reached into her satchel and pulled out a PowerBar.

It was about Althusser. I’m sorry, I haven’t had lunch. Do you mind?

Gauri shook her head. She watched as Lorna unwrapped and broke apart and chewed the PowerBar, explaining, between bites, the genesis of her project, the particular angle she wanted to pursue. Her hands seemed small for her height, the wrists delicate. She told Gauri she’d been working up the nerve to approach her for nearly a year.

Gauri felt disoriented in the little office that was so familiar to her. At once ambushed and flattered. How could she have forgotten such a face?

The topic interested her, and they set up a schedule, exchanging e-mails, meeting at restaurants and coffee shops. Lorna worked in fits and starts, distracting herself for days, then suddenly producing coherent chapters. She called Gauri when she felt stuck, whenever she doubted herself, whenever it was not going well.

Attraction motivated Gauri to pick up the phone, to allow the conversations to extend beyond a reasonable arc. Images of Lorna, fragments of their exchanges, began to distract her. When they met in person she began to dress with care. She had no recollection of crossing a line that drove her to desire a woman’s body. With Lorna she found herself already on the other side of it.

There were times, as they sat together at a table, scrutinizing a page of manuscript, that the sides of their hands, each holding a pen with which to mark the text, brushed together. Times their faces were close. There were times, as Lorna talked and Gauri listened, the two of them alone in a room, perhaps standing a few feet apart, that Gauri felt her balance faltering. She worried that she would not be able to
control the temptation to take one step closer, then another, until the moment the space between them was obliterated.

She acted on none of these impulses. Whatever had induced them, whatever continued to provoke them, she could not be certain whether Lorna thought of her in the same way.

One evening Lorna showed up at her office without calling first. She did this often enough. She’d just finished the final chapter, the pages tucked in a thick manilla envelope that she cradled in one arm.

The floor of the department was quiet, the students in their dorms, only the janitors and a few scattered professors were in the building at that hour.

Lorna handed the envelope to Gauri. She looked exhausted, exultant. For the first time she was dressed casually, in jeans, a T-shirt. She’d not bothered to put up her hair. She had been to a grocery store. Inside the tote bag she set on the desk were wrapped wedges of cheese, grapes, a box of crackers. Two paper cups, a bottle of wine.

What’s this?

I thought we might celebrate.

Here?

Gauri stood up from her desk and shut the door, locking it, knowing it should have remained open. When she turned around Lorna was facing her, looking at her, standing too close.

She took Gauri’s hand, putting it inside her T-shirt, on top of one of her breasts, beneath the pliant material of her bra. Gauri felt the nipple under the bra thickening, hardening, as her own were.

The softness of the kisses was new. The smell of her, the sculptural plainness of her body as the clothes were removed, as piles of papers were pushed aside to make room on the daybed behind the desk. The smoothness of her skin, the focused distribution of hair. The sensation of Lorna’s mouth on her groin.

She’d never had a lover younger than herself. Gauri had been forty-five, her body beginning to break down in small ways: molars that needed to be crowned, a permanently burst blood vessel that forked like scarlet lightning in the corner of her eye. Conscious of her growing imperfections, she had been preparing to retreat, not rush headlong, as she’d done.

Though Lorna wasn’t technically her student—at least, not at
the institution that employed her—it was still a breach of conduct. It would have been a scandal if anyone detected what was going on. Not just that evening in her office but various other times, sporadically but often enough, in either Gauri’s bed or Lorna’s, and in the room of a hotel they drove to one weekend, on the coast.

When the dissertation was complete Gauri sat at the defense, among the other readers on Lorna’s committee, posing questions. As if they had not spent those occasions, those evenings, together.

Then Lorna was offered a job in Toronto and moved away. There had never been any discussion of their encounters evolving into anything else. The liaison ended, without rancor but definitively. Yet Gauri was humiliated, for not taking it as lightly.