The Lowland

betrayed.
    In any case, California was her only home. Right away she had adapted to its climate, both comforting and strange, hot but seldom oppressive. Arid instead of damp, apart from the rich fog of certain afternoons.
    Gratefully she embraced its lack of winter, its paucity of rainfall, its blistering desert winds. The only cold of the place was visual, on the mountaintops, the abbreviated patches of white that collected among their peaks.
    She’d met other refugees from the East Coast who had fled for their own reasons, who had slipped from their former skins, not knowing what they would find but compelled to make the journey. Like Gauri, they had tethered themselves to California, never going back. There were enough of these people that it ceased to matter where she was originally from, or what had brought her here. Instead, at social gatherings, when required to make small talk, she was able to participate in that collective sense of discovery, of gratitude for the place.
    Certain plants were familiar to her. Stunted banana trees with leaves that were rusty at their edges, bearing the piercing violet blossoms her mother-in-law had taught her to soak and chop and cook in Tollygunge. The bleached bark of eucalyptus. Shaggy date trees, sheathed with pointed scales.
    Though she was close to another coast, the massive ocean on this side of the country kept to itself; it never felt as encroaching, as corrosive, as the harsh sea in Rhode Island that had stripped things down, that had always looked so turbulent to her and at the same time starved for color, for life. The new sense of scale, the vast distances between one place and another, had also been a revelation. The hundreds of miles of freeway one could drive.
    She had explored little of it, and yet she felt protected by all that impersonal ongoing space. The spiny growth, the hot air, the small concrete houses with red-tiled roofs—all of it had welcomed her. The people she encountered seemed less reserved, less censorious, offering a smile but then keeping out of her way. Telling her, in this land of bright light and sharp shadows, to begin again.
    And yet she remained, in spite of her Western clothes, her Western academic interests, a woman who spoke English with a foreign accent, whose physical appearance and complexion were unchangeable and, against the backdrop of most of America, still unconventional. She continued to introduce herself by an unusual name, the first given by her parents, the last by the two brothers she had wed.
    Her appearance and accent caused people to continue to ask her where she came from, and some to form certain assumptions. Once, invited to give a talk in San Diego, she’d been picked up by a driver the university had sent, so that she would be spared the effort of driving herself. She had greeted him at the door when he rang the bell. But the driver had not realized, when she told him good morning, that she was his passenger. He had mistaken her for the person paid to open another person’s door. Tell her, whenever she’s ready, he’d said.
    In the beginning she’d retreated willingly into the pure and proper celibacy of widowhood that, because of Bela and Subhash, she was initially denied. She avoided situations where she might be introduced to someone, adopting the Western custom of wearing a wedding band during the day.
    She turned down dinner invitations, offers to have lunch. She kept to herself at conferences, always retiring to her room, not caring if people found her unfriendly. Given what she’d done to Subhash and Bela, it felt wrong to seek the companionship of anyone else.
    Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.
    When desire eventually began to push its way through, its pattern was unpredictable, casual. And given her life, the dinners she was expected to attend at the homes of colleagues, the occasional conferences, opportunities were there.
    Mainly they were fellow