The Lowland

there, were patches of snow. She would remember the smooth pitch of the roads, the flat, squared-off shapes of the cars. And all the space between and around things—the cars traveling in two directions, the infrequent buildings. The barren but densely growing trees.
    He glanced at her. Is it what you expected?
    I didn’t know what to expect.
    Again the child was stirring and shifting. It was unaware of its new surroundings, and of the astonishing distance it had traveled. Gauri’s body remained its world. She wondered if the new environment would affect it in any way. If it could sense the cold.
    She felt as if she contained a ghost, as Udayan was. The child was a version of him, in that it was both present and absent. Both within her and remote. She regarded it with a sort of disbelief, just as she still did not really believe that Udayan was gone, missing now not only from Calcutta but from every other part of the earth she’d just flown across.
    As the plane was landing in Boston, she’d momentarily feared that their child would dissolve and abandon her. She’d feared that it would perceive, somehow, that the wrong father was waiting to receive them. That it would protest and stop forming.
    After entering Rhode Island she expected to see the ocean, but the highway merely continued. They approached a small city called Providence. She saw hilly streets, buildings close together, peaked rooftops, an ornate white dome. She knew that the word providence meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced.
    It was the middle of the day, the sun directly overhead. A bright blue sky, transparent clouds. A time of day lacking mystery, only an assertion of the day itself. As if the sky were not meant to darken, the day not meant to end.
    On the plane time had been irrelevant but also the only thing that mattered; it was time, not space, she’d been aware of traveling through. She’d sat among so many passengers, passive, awaiting their destinations. Most of them, like Gauri, waiting to be freed in an atmosphere not their own.
    For a few minutes Subhash turned on the car radio, listening to a man report local news, the weather forecast. She’d had an English education, she’d studied at Presidency, and yet she could barely understand the broadcast.
    Eventually she saw horses grazing, cows standing still. Homes with glass windows shut tight to block out the cold. Walls low enough to step over, forming boundaries, made of large and small stones.
    They reached a traffic light swaying on a wire. While they were stopped, he pointed left. She saw a wooden tower, rising like an internal staircase to a nonexistent building. Over the tops of pine trees, in the distance, at last, was a thin dark line. The sea.
    My campus is that way, he said.
    She looked at the flat gray road, with two ongoing stripes painted down the middle. This was the place where she could put things behind her. Where her child would be born, ignorant and safe.
    She thought Subhash would turn left, where he told her his campus was located. But when the light turned green, and he pushed the gearshift forward, they turned right.
    The apartment was on the ground floor, facing the front: a little grass, a pathway, then a strip of asphalt. On the other side of the asphalt was a row of matching apartment buildings, low and long and faced with bricks. The two of them were posed like barracks. At the end of the road was the lot where Subhash parked his car and took out the garbage. A smaller building in the lot was where one did the laundry.
    The main doors were almost always left open, held in place by large rocks. The locks on the apartment doors were flimsy, little buttons on knobs instead of padlocks and bolts. But she was in a place where no one was afraid to walk about, where drunken students stumbled laughing down a hill, back to their dormitories at all hours of the night. At the top of the hill was the campus police station. But there were no curfews or lockdowns. Students came and went and did as they pleased.
    The neighbors were other graduate student couples, a few families with young children. They seemed not to notice her. She heard only a door shutting, or the muffled ring of someone else’s telephone, or footsteps going up the stairs.
    Subhash gave her the bedroom and told her he would sleep on the sofa, which unfolded and became a bed. Through the closed door she listened to his morning routine. The