The Lowland

construction. End to end, he was told, the wires of all the suspended cables would span just over eight thousand miles. It was the distance between America and India; the distance that now separated him from his family.
    He saw the small, squared-off lighthouse, with three windows, like three buttons on the placket of a shirt, that stood at Dutch Island’s tip. There was a wooden pier that ended with a covered hut, where boats were moored, jutting out at one end of the beach. A few sailboats were out, specks of white against the navy sea.
    There are times I think I have discovered the most beautiful place on earth, he said.
    He didn’t belong, but perhaps it didn’t matter. He wanted to tell her that he had been waiting all his life to find Rhode Island. That it was here, in this minute but majestic corner of the world, that he could breathe.
    Her name was Holly. The boy, Joshua, was nine, and his summer vacation had just begun. The dog’s name was Chester. They lived in Matunuck, close to one of the salt ponds. They came to the campus beach every so often to walk the dog. They’d gotten to know it because a woman who was looking after Joshua, on the days Holly worked as a nurse at a small hospital in East Greenwich, lived nearby.
    She didn’t mention what her husband did. But Joshua had referred to him in the course of the afternoon, asking Holly if his father was going to take him fishing that weekend. Subhash supposed he worked at an office at that time of day.
    The next time he noticed Holly’s car parked in the lot he ventured out to say hello. She seemed pleased to see him, waving from a distance, Chester bounding ahead of her, Joshua trailing behind.
    They began walking together, loosely, as they talked, up and down the short beach. Seaweed was strewn everywhere, rockweed with air bladders like textured orange grapes, lonely scraps of sea lettuce, tangled nests of rusty kelp caught in the waves. A jellyfish had drifted up from the Caribbean, spread like a flattened chrysanthemum on the hard sand.
    When he asked her about her background, she said she had been born in Massachusetts, that her family was French Canadian, that she had lived in Rhode Island most of her life. She’d studied nursing at the university. She asked about his studies there, and he explained that after his course work there was a comprehensive exam to study for, then an original piece of research to conduct, a dissertation to submit.
    How long will all that take?
    Another three years. Maybe more.
    Holly knew all about the seabirds. She told him how to distinguish buffleheads and pintails, gulls and terns. She pointed to the sandpipers sprinting to the water’s edge and back. When he described the heron he’d seen his first autumn in Rhode Island, she told him it had been a juvenile great blue without its plumes.
    Going to her car to fetch binoculars, she showed him how to magnify a group of mergansers, beating their wings in a steadfast direction over the bay.
    Do you know what the baby plovers do?
    No.
    They group themselves in the sky because the adults keep calling to each other. They fly all the way from Nova Scotia to Brazil, resting only occasionally on the waves.
    They sleep on the sea?
    They navigate the world better than we can. As if compasses were built into their brains.
    She was curious about birds in India, and so he described those that she would not have seen. Mynas that nested in the walls of buildings, kokils that cried throughout the city at the start of spring. Spotted owlets hooting at twilight in Tollygunge, tearing apart geckoes and mice.
    And you? she asked. Will you return to Calcutta when you finish?
    If I can find work there.
    For she was right; it was assumed, by his family, by himself, that his life here was temporary.
    What do you miss about it?
    It’s where I was made.
    He told her he had parents, a brother who was slightly younger. He told her he had a sister-in-law now, a woman he had yet to meet.
    Where do your brother and his wife live, now that they’re married?
    With my parents.
    He explained that daughters joined their in-laws after they married, and sons stayed at home. That generations didn’t separate as they did here.
    He knew that it was impossible for Holly, probably for any American woman, to imagine his life. But she considered what he’d described.
    It sounds better, in a way.
    One afternoon Holly spread a bedcover, unpacking cheese