The Lowland

wine in the evenings with dinner. A cup of chamomile tea. There were pills he could take, but he resisted this option. Already there was a pill to lower his cholesterol, another to raise his potassium, a daily aspirin to promote the passage of blood to his heart through his veins. He stored them in a plastic box with seven compartments, labeled with the days of the week, counting them out with his morning oatmeal.
    Again it was anxiety that kept him up, though not the same anxiety that used to rouse him from sleep after Gauri first left and he was alone with Bela in the house, asleep in the next room. Aware that she was suffering, aware that he was the only person in the world responsible for raising her.
    He remembered Bela as an infant, when the distinction between night and day did not exist for her: awake, asleep, awake, asleep, shallow alternating clusters of an hour or two. He’d read somewhere that at the start of life these concepts were reversed, that time within the womb was the inverse of time outside of it. He remembered learning, the first time he was at sea, about how whales and dolphins swam close to the surface of the water, how they emerged to draw air into their lungs, each breath a conscious act.
    He drew breath through his nostrils, hoping this essential function, as faithful as the beating of his heart, might release him for a few hours. His eyes were closed, but his mind was unblinking.
    It was like this now since the news of Richard’s death; a disproportionate awareness of being alive. He yearned for the deep and continuous sleep that refused to accommodate him. A release from the nightly torment that took place in his bed.
    When he was younger wakefulness would not have troubled him; he would have taken advantage of the extra hours to read an article, or step outside to look at the stars. At times even his body felt full of energy, and he wished it were daylight, so that he could get up and walk along the bike path. He would walk as far as the bench where he’d bumped into Richard two years ago, to sit and think.
    Instead, in his bed, he found himself traveling into the deeper past, sifting at random through the detritus of his boyhood. He revisited the years before he left his family. His father returning from the market every morning, the fish his mother would slice and salt and fry for breakfast, silver-skinned pieces spilling out of a burlap bag.
    He saw his mother hunched over the black sewing machine she used to operate with her feet, pumping a pedal up and down, unable to talk because of the pins she held between her lips. She sat before it in the evenings, hemming petticoats for her customers, stitching curtains for the house. Udayan would oil the machine for her, fix the motor from time to time. A bird in his yard in Rhode Island, its call a rapid stopping and starting, mimicked the sound of it.
    He saw his father teaching him and Udayan how to play chess, drawing the squares on a sheet of paper. He saw his brother hunching over, cross-legged on the floor, extending his index finger as he was finishing up a meal, to consume the final sauce that coated his plate.
    Udayan was everywhere. Walking with Subhash to school in the mornings, walking home in the afternoons. Studying in the evenings on the bed they’d shared. Books spread between them, memorizing so many things. Writing in a notebook, concentrating, his face just inches above the page. Lying beside him at night, listening to the jackals howling in the Tolly Club. Quick-footed, assured, controlling the ball in the field behind the lowland.
    These minor impressions had formed him. They had washed away long ago, only to reappear, reconstituted. They kept distracting him, like pieces of landscape viewed from a train. The landscape was familiar, but certain things always jolted him, as if seen for the first time.
    Until he left Calcutta, Subhash’s life was hardly capable of leaving a trace. He could have put everything belonging to him into a single grocery bag. When he was growing up in his parents’ house, what had been his? His toothbrush, the cigarettes he and Udayan used to smoke in secret, the cloth bag in which he carried his textbooks. A few articles of clothing. Until he went to America he had not had his own room. He had belonged to his parents and to Udayan, and they to him. That was all.
    Here he had been quietly successful, educating himself, finding engaging work, sending Bela to college. It