The Lowland

alongside fields where schoolchildren played sports, over a wooden footbridge. Past a bog filled with cattails, past a former textile mill.
    He preferred shade these days to the coastline. He’d been born and bred in Calcutta, and yet the sun in Rhode Island, bearing down through the depleted ozone, now felt stronger than the sun of his upbringing. Merciless against his skin, striking him, especially in summer, in a way he could no longer endure. His tawny skin never burned, but the sensation of sunlight overwhelmed him. He sometimes took it personally, the enduring blaze of that distant star.
    He passed a swamp at the start of his walks, where birds and animals came to nest, where red maple and cedar grew from mossy mounds. It was the largest wetland in southern New England. It had once been a glacial depression, and was still bordered by a moraine.
    According to signs he stopped to read, it had also once been the site of a battle. Growing curious, he turned on his computer one day at home, and began learning, on the Internet, details of an atrocity.
    On a small island in the middle of the swamp the local Narragansett tribe had built a fort. In a camp of wigwams, behind a palisade of sticks, they had housed themselves, believing their refuge was impregnable. But in the winter of 1675, when the marsh ground was frozen, and the trees were bare, the fort was attacked by colonial militia. Three hundred people were burned alive. Many who’d escaped died of disease and starvation.
    Somewhere, he read, there was a marker and a granite shaft that commemorated the battle. But Subhash got lost the day he set out through the swamp to find it. When he was younger he had loved nothing more than to wander like this, with Bela. He’d been compelled, back then, to follow crude directions, unmarked trails through woods, isolated with her, discovering blueberry bushes, secluded ponds in which to swim. But he had lost that confidence, that intrepid sense of direction. He felt only aware now that he was alone, that he was over sixty years old, and that he did not know where he stood.
    One Sunday, lost in his thoughts, he was surprised to see a helmeted man with a familiar face approaching on his bike, on the other side, coasting to a stop on the path.
    Jesus, Subhash. Didn’t I teach you to always keep your eyes on the road?
    Sitting astride a thin-framed ten-speed was Richard, his apartment mate from decades ago, shaking his head, smiling at him. What the hell are you still doing here?
    I never left.
    I thought you planned to go back to India after you finished. I didn’t even think to look you up.
    There was a bench nearby, and here they sat and talked. The hair under Richard’s helmet was no longer dark, a patch of it gone at the back, but what he had he still wore in a ponytail. He’d put on some weight, but Subhash recalled the handsome, wiry graduate student he’d first met, who’d reminded him in some ways of Udayan. A time before either of them had married, when they had lived with one another, and driven together to buy groceries, and shared their meals.
    Richard was married, a grandfather. After leaving Rhode Island he’d missed it, always intending someday to retire here. A year ago he and his wife, Claire, had sold their house in East Lansing and bought a cottage in Saunderstown, not far from Subhash.
    He’d founded a center for nonviolent studies at a university in the Midwest and still served as a member of its board, though he’d managed never to wear a tie a day in his life. He was full of sundry plans—another book he was in the middle of writing, a kitchen he was trying to remodel himself, a political blog he maintained. A trip to Southeast Asia, to Phnom Penh and Saigon, he was planning with Claire.
    Can you believe it? he said. After all that, I’m finally going to Vietnam.
    Sitting beside him, Subhash delivered the sparse details of his own life. A wife from whom he was estranged, a daughter who had grown up and moved away. A job at the same coastal research lab he’d been with nearly thirty years. Some consulting work on oil spills from time to time, or for the town’s Department of Public Works. He was without a family, just as he’d been when he’d known Richard. But he was alone in a different way.
    Still working full-time?
    For as long as they let me.
    Still driving my car?
    Not since Nixon resigned and the transmission died.
    I always