The Lowland

impaled slips of paper the teenaged face of her father watched her eat her rice with a spoon, amused, whereas her grandfather, his tired gaze fixed before him, his eyebrows sparse, seemed not to notice that she was there.
    Apart from the two photographs, the stack of receipts, there was nothing to look at on the walls. There were no books, no souvenirs from past journeys, nothing to indicate how her grandmother liked to pass the time. For hours she sat on the terrace, her back to the rest of the house, staring through the grille.
    Every day, at a certain point, Deepa took her grandmother down to the courtyard, where she snapped off the heads of a few of the flowers that grew there in pots, and along the vines that trailed up the wall, gathering them inside a little brass urn.
    She left the house, accompanied by Deepa, walking past the ponds to the edge of the flooded lowland. She went to a certain spot, and stood, and after a few minutes she came back. When her grandmother returned to the courtyard, the urn that had held the flowers was empty.
    What do you do there? Bela asked her one day.
    Her grandmother was sitting in her folding chair, her hands curled inward, like fists that did not close, inspecting the ridged surface of her fingernails. Without looking up she said, I talk to your father for a bit.
    My father is inside.
    She looked up, her navy eyes widening. Is he?
    He came home a little while ago.
    Where?
    He’s in our room, Dida.
    What is he doing?
    He’s lying down. He said he was tired after going to the American Express office.
    Oh. Her grandmother looked away.
    The light dimmed. It was going to rain again. Deepa hurried up to the roof, to remove the clothes from the line. Bela followed, wanting to help her.
    Do you have rain like this in Rhode Island? Deepa asked.
    It was too much to explain in Bengali. But a hurricane in Rhode Island was among her earliest memories. She didn’t remember the storm itself, only the preparation, the aftermath. She remembered the bathtub filled with water. The crowded supermarket, empty shelves. She’d helped her father stick masking tape on the windows, the ugly traces remaining long after the tape was pulled away.
    The following day she’d walked with her father to campus to see torn branches scattered on the quadrangle, streets green with leaves. They found a thick tree that had fallen, the tangled roots exposed. They saw the drenched ground that had given way. The tree’s proportions were more overwhelming when it lay on the ground. Its presence frightening, once it no longer lived.
    Her father had brought photographs to show her grandmother. Most of them were of the house where Bela and her parents now lived. They’d moved there two summers ago, the summer Bela turned ten. It was closer to the bay, not far from where her father had once studied at the oceanography school. It was convenient to the lab where her father went to work. But it was farther from the bigger campus where Bela had grown up, where her mother went now, two evenings a week, to teach a philosophy class.
    Bela had been disappointed that though the house was hardly a mile from the sea, there was no view of the water through the windows. Only, every so often, when she was standing outside, a stray whiff of it, the concentration of salt discernable in the air.
    There were pictures of the dining table, the fireplace, the view off the sundeck. All the things she knew. The large rocks forming a barrier with the property behind theirs, that Bela sometimes climbed. Pictures of the front of the house in autumn, when the leaves were red and gold, and pictures in winter, of bare branches coated with ice. A picture of Bela next to a tiny Japanese maple that her father had planted in spring.
    She saw herself standing on the little crescent-shaped beach in Jamestown where they liked to go Sunday mornings, her father bringing donuts and coffee. It was where the two lobes of the island met, where he had taught her to swim, where she could see sheep grazing in a meadow as she floated in the water. Beyond it were dunes with trenches to walk in, single file, where rabbits sprinted and froze like statues, their gaze never meeting Bela’s eye.
    She watched her grandmother studying the pictures as if each one showed the same thing.
    Where is Gauri?
    She doesn’t like to pose for the camera, her father said. She’s been busy, teaching her first class. And she’s finishing her