The Lowland

that he’d lost his mind, that perhaps he’d suffered a stroke. She kneeled in front of him on the sofa, gripping him by the shoulders, inches from his face.
    Stop saying that, she said. He sat, passive, in her clutches, and yet he felt as if he were striking her. He was aware of the brute force of the truth, worse than any physical blow. At the same time he had never felt more pathetic, more frail.
    She shouted at him, asking why he’d never told her, pushing him angrily against the sofa. Then she started to cry. She behaved just as he felt—as if he had suddenly died in front of her.
    She started shaking him, willing him to come back to life, as if he were just a shell now, as if the person she’d known were gone.
    As the night wore on and the information settled over her, she asked a few questions about the circumstances of Udayan’s death. She asked a bit about the movement, of which she was ignorant, and was now curious; this was all.
    Was he guilty of anything?
    Certain things. Your mother never told me the full story.
    Well, what did she tell you?
    He told her the truth, that Udayan had plotted violent acts, that he had assembled explosives. But he added that after all these years it remained uncertain, the extent of what he had done.
    Did he know about me? Did he know I was going to be born?
    No.
    She sat across from him, listening. Somewhere in the house, he told her, there were a few letters he’d saved, that Udayan had sent to him. Letters that referred to Gauri as his wife.
    He offered to read them to Bela, but she shook her head. Her face was implacable. Now that he’d come back to life, he was a stranger to her.
    He was unaware of the conversation reaching any conclusion, only of his growing exhausted. He covered one of his eyes with his hand because of the strain, the impossibility of keeping it open. All the sleepless nights, ever since Richard’s death, were crushing him, and he excused himself, unable to stay awake, going up to his bed.
    When he woke in the morning she was already gone. Part of him knew she would be, that the only way to keep her in the house after what he’d told her would be to tie her to it. Still, he rushed into her bedroom and saw that though the bed had been slept in, and remade, the bags she’d brought with her were not there.
    Downstairs on the kitchen counter, among the bowls filled with fruit, the phone book was still open, turned to the page that listed the taxi company that served the town.
    The fact of her fatherhood had changed. Two instead of one. Just as she was now in pregnancy, intertwined with a being she could not see or know.
    This unknown person maturing inside her was the only being with whom Bela felt any connection as she traveled away from Rhode Island to calm herself, to take in what she’d been told. It was the only part of her that felt faithful, familiar. As she stared out the window of a Peter Pan bus at the scenery of her childhood, she recognized nothing.
    She’d been lied to all her life. But the lie refused to accommodate the truth. Her father remained her father, even as he’d told her he wasn’t. As he’d told her that Udayan was.
    She could not blame her father for not telling her until now. Her own child might blame her, someday, for a similar reason.
    Here was an explanation for why her mother had gone. Why, when Bela looked back, she remembered spending time with either one parent or the other, but so seldom with both at the same time.
    Here was the source of the anxiety that had always been in her, of being unable to bring pleasure to her mother. Of feeling unique among children, being a child who was incapable of this.
    Around Bela her mother had never pretended. She had transmitted an unhappiness that was steady, an ambient signal that was fixed. It was transmitted without words. And yet Bela was aware of it, as one is aware of a mountain. Immovable, insurmountable.
    Now there was a third parent, pointed out to her like a new star her father would teach her to identify in the night sky. Something that had been there all along, contributing a unique point of light. That was dead but newly alive to her. That had both made her and made no difference.
    She remembered vaguely the portrait in Tollygunge, on the wall above a stack of receipts. A smiling face, a dirty frame of pale wood. A young man her grandmother referred to as her father, until her father told her it was a portrait