The Lowland

They walked past small windows with vertical bars. Scraps of fabric, strung through wires, served as curtains. They walked past the ponds, rimmed with trash, choked with bright green leaves.
    On the quiet walled streets, every few paces, people stopped them, asking Deepa to explain who Bela was, why she was there.
    The granddaughter of the Mitra house.
    The older brother’s girl?
    Yes.
    The mother came?
    No.
    Do you understand what we’re saying? Do you speak Bengali? a woman asked Bela. She peered at her. Her eyes were unkind, her stained teeth uneven.
    A little.
    Liking it here?
    Bela had been eager to go out of the house that day, to accompany Deepa to the market, to explore the place she’d traveled so far to see. But now she wanted to return inside. Not liking, as they retraced their steps, the way some of the neighbors were pulling back their curtains to look at her.
    In addition to the water that was boiled and cooled for her to drink, water was warmed every morning for her bath. Her grandmother said she would catch a cold otherwise, even though it was so hot. The warmed bathwater was combined with fresh water that traveled at limited times of day through a thin rubber hose, released by a pump, filling a tank on the patio next to the kitchen.
    Deepa took her to the patio, handing her a tin cup, telling her what to do. She was told to pour the warmed water, cooled to her liking with water from the hose, over her body, then lather herself with a bar of dark soap, then rinse. The running water was not to be wasted. It was collected in a bucket, and whatever was left was stored in the tank.
    Bela had wanted to stand inside the tank, which was like a high-sided bathtub, but this was not permitted. And so she bathed in the open air instead of in the privacy of a bathroom, or even the protection of a tub, alongside the plates and pans that also needed washing. Supervised by Deepa, surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, regarded by crows.
    You should have come later, not now, Deepa said, drying off Bela’s legs with a thin checkered towel. It was coarse, like a dishcloth.
    Why?
    That’s when Durga Pujo comes. Now it only rains.
    I’m here for my birthday, Bela said.
    Deepa said she was sixteen or seventeen. When Bela asked Deepa when her birthday was, she said she wasn’t sure.
    You don’t know when you were born?
    Basanta Kal.
    When is that?
    When the kokil starts singing.
    But what day do you celebrate?
    I never have.
    In a patch of sunlight on the terrace, her grandmother rubbed Bela’s arms and legs and scalp with sweet-smelling oil from a glass bottle. Bela stood in her underpants, as if she were still a young child. Arms limp, legs parted.
    Her grandmother combed out Bela’s hair, sometimes using her fingers when the knots were stubborn. She held it in her hands and examined it.
    Your mother hasn’t taught you to keep it tied?
    She shook her head.
    There isn’t a rule about it at your school?
    No.
    You must keep it braided. At night, especially. Two on either side for now, one at the center when you are older.
    Her mother had never told her this. Her mother wore her hair as short as a man’s.
    Your father’s hair was the same. Never behaving in this weather. He never let me touch it. Even in the picture you can see what a mess it is.
    In the room where her grandmother slept Bela ate her lunch. She was used to eating rice, but here it had a particular scent, the grains not as white. Sometimes she bit down on a tiny pebble that Deepa hadn’t picked out, the sound of it, crushing against her molars, seeming to explode in her ear.
    There was no dining table. On the floor was a piece of embroidered fabric, like a large place mat, for her to sit on. Her grandmother squatted on the flats of her feet, her shoulders hunched, arms folded across her knees, observing her.
    High on the wall hung the two photographs her father had sat before during the ceremony. The pictures of her dead grandfather and the teenaged boy her grandmother told her was her father, smiling, his face slightly tilted to one side. Bela had never seen a version of her father so young. He was young enough, in the picture, to be an older brother to her. She had never seen proof of him from the time before she was born.
    Below these images, always slightly rustling in the fan’s breeze, was a sheaf of household receipts and ration slips, punctured and held in place by a nail. Over the