The Lowland

went back to the nursery school to fetch Bela, a duty that was always hers, never Subhash’s. He had a postdoc in New Bedford, nearly fifty miles away. It was understood that he left the house at a certain hour, and returned at a certain hour, and that Gauri was responsible for Bela all the hours in between.
    She would find Bela sitting in her cubby, an enclosure that looked to Gauri like a tiny upright coffin. Her jacket on, waiting, lined up with her classmates. She did not rush into Gauri’s arms like some of the other children, seeking praise for the crinkled paintings they’d made, the leaves they’d gathered and glued onto sheets of paper. She walked over, her pace measured, asking what Gauri would make her for lunch, sometimes asking why Subhash hadn’t come. Reports of her activities at school, details that overflowed from the mouths of her classmates as soon as they saw their parents, were kept to herself.
    Together they returned to their apartment building. In the lobby Gauri unlocked the mailbox labeled Mitra that she and Subhash shared.
    In Calcutta the names were painted onto wooden boxes with the careful strokes of a fine brush. But here they were hastily scribbled, one or two of the scuffed metal doors left blank. She pulled out the bills, an issue of a scientific journal that Subhash subscribed to. Coupons from a grocery store.
    There was seldom anything addressed to her. Only an occasional letter from Manash. She resisted reading them, given what they reminded her of. Manash and Udayan, studying together in her grandparents’ flat, and Udayan and Gauri, getting to know one another as a result. A time she’d crushed between her fingertips, leaving no substance, only a protective residue on the skin.
    From Manash, also from international papers that came to the library, she received some news. At first she tried to picture what might be happening. But the pieces were too fragmentary. The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.
    Kanu Sanyal was alive but still in prison. Charu Majumdar had been arrested in his hideout, put into the lockup at Lal Bazar. He had died in police custody in Calcutta, the same summer Bela was born.
    So many of Udayan’s comrades were still being tortured in prisons. Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the current chief minister in Calcutta, was backed by Congress. He was refusing to hold enquiries on those who had died.
    News of the movement had by now attracted the attention of some prominent intellectuals in the West. Simone de Beauvoir and Noam Chomsky had sent a letter to Nehru’s daughter, demanding the prisoners’ release. But in the face of rising protest, against corruption, against failed government policies, Indira Gandhi had declared the Emergency. Censoring the press, so that what was happening was not being told.
    Even now, part of Gauri continued to expect some news from Udayan. For him to acknowledge Bela, and the family they might have been. At the very least to acknowledge that their lives, aware of him, unaware of him, had gone on.
    5.
    It had been two years since he’d written and defended his thesis, an analysis of eutrophication in the Narrow River. Nineteen seventy-six, the year of America’s bicentennial. Seven years since he’d first arrived.
    In almost five years he had not returned to Calcutta. Though his parents wrote now of wanting to meet Bela, Subhash told them that she was too young to make such a long journey, and that the pressures of his work were too great. He sent pictures from time to time, and he still sent his parents money, now that his father had retired. He sensed that they had softened, but he was not ready to face them again. In this matter, he and Gauri were allied.
    But his motivation was his own. He didn’t want to be around the only other people in the world who knew that he was not Bela’s father. They would remind him of his place, they would regard him as her uncle, they would never acknowledge that he was anything more.
    He was finishing up his postdoc in New Bedford. He’d been invited to participate in an environmental inventory. In the evenings, to earn some extra money, he taught a chemistry class at a community college in Providence.
    He’d considered moving to southern Massachusetts to be closer to his work. But his fellowship would end soon, and he’d already found a larger apartment in Rhode Island, one that was still walking distance from the main