The Lowland

knew.
    They want you out of this house, Gauri. They don’t want to take care of you. They want their grandchild to themselves.
    After she had absorbed this, he said the only things he could think of, the most obvious of facts: that in America no one knew about the movement, no one would bother her. She could go on with her studies. It would be an opportunity to begin again.
    Because she said nothing to interrupt him, he went on, explaining that the child needed a father. In America it could be raised without the burden of what had happened.
    He told her he knew she still loved Udayan. He told her not to think about what people might say, how his parents would react. If she went with him to America, he promised her, it would all cease to matter.
    She’d recognized most of the people in the photographs. They were all Udayan’s comrades, party members from the neighborhood. She remembered some of them from a meeting she’d gone to once, before it got too dangerous. She’d recognized Chandra, a woman who worked at the tailor shop, and also the man from the stationer’s. She’d pretended not to.
    Among the names the investigator had gone over, there was only one that Udayan had never mentioned. Only one, truthfully, she did not know. Nirmal Dey. And yet something told her she was not in ignorance of this man.
    You don’t have to do this, she said to Subhash the following morning.
    It’s not only for you.
    He wouldn’t have wanted this.
    I understand.
    I’m not talking about our getting married.
    What, then?
    In the end he didn’t want a family. He told me the day before he died. And yet—
    She stopped herself.
    What?
    He once told me, because he got married before you, that he wanted you to be the first to have a child.

IV
    1.
    He was there, standing behind a rope at the airport, waiting for her. Her brother-in-law, her husband. The second man she had married in two years.
    The same height, a similar build. Counterparts, companions, though she’d never seen them together. Subhash was a milder version. Compared to Udayan’s, his face was like the slightly flawed impression the man at Immigration had just stamped into her passport, indicating her arrival, stamped over a second time for emphasis.
    He was wearing corduroy pants, a checkered shirt, a zippered jacket, athletic shoes. The eyes that greeted her were kind but weak; the weakness, she feared, that had led him to marry her, and to do her the favor he’d done.
    Here he was, to receive her, to accompany her from now on. Nothing about him had changed; at the end of her voyage, there was nothing to greet her but the reality of the decision she’d made.
    But she saw him registering the obvious change in her. Five months pregnant now, her face and hips fuller, her waist thick, the child’s presence obvious beneath the turquoise shawl he’d given her, draped around her for warmth.
    She entered his car and sat beside him, to his right, her two suitcases stacked in their canvas slipcovers on the backseat. She waited while he started the engine and let it run for a bit. He unpeeled a banana and poured himself some tea from a flask. She put her lips to the other side of the cap when he offered, swallowing a hot tasteless liquid, like wet wood.
    How do you feel?
    Tired.
    Again the voice, also Udayan’s. Almost the exact pitch and manner of speaking. This was the deepest and most startling proof of their fraternity. For a moment she allowed this isolated aspect of Udayan, preserved and replicated in Subhash’s throat, to travel back to her.
    How are my parents?
    The same.
    The heat’s arrived in Calcutta?
    More or less.
    And the situation generally?
    Some would say better. Others worse.
    This was Boston, he told her. Rhode Island was south of here. They emerged from a tunnel that went below a river, passing by a harbor, and then the city fell away. He drove more quickly than she was used to, more consistently than cars could travel on Calcutta streets. The continuous movement sickened her. She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.
    Along the side of the road were gray- and white-skinned trees that looked incapable of ever producing leaf or fruit. Their branches were copious but thin, dense networks she could see through. On some trees, a few leaves still clung. She wondered why they had not fallen like the others.
    Among the trees, here and