The Lowland

paper cups, a bottle of wine.
    What’s this?
    I thought we might celebrate.
    Here?
    Gauri stood up from her desk and shut the door, locking it, knowing it should have remained open. When she turned around Lorna was facing her, looking at her, standing too close.
    She took Gauri’s hand, putting it inside her T-shirt, on top of one of her breasts, beneath the pliant material of her bra. Gauri felt the nipple under the bra thickening, hardening, as her own were.
    The softness of the kisses was new. The smell of her, the sculptural plainness of her body as the clothes were removed, as piles of papers were pushed aside to make room on the daybed behind the desk. The smoothness of her skin, the focused distribution of hair. The sensation of Lorna’s mouth on her groin.
    She’d never had a lover younger than herself. Gauri had been forty-five, her body beginning to break down in small ways: molars that needed to be crowned, a permanently burst blood vessel forked like scarlet lightning in the corner of her eye. Conscious of her growing imperfections, she had been preparing to retreat, not rush headlong, as she’d done.
    Though Lorna wasn’t technically her student—at least, not at the institution that employed her—it was still a breach of conduct. It would have been a scandal if anyone detected what was going on. Not just that evening in her office but various other times, sporadically but often enough, in either Gauri’s bed or Lorna’s, and in the room of a hotel they drove to one weekend, on the coast.
    When the dissertation was complete Gauri sat at the defense, among the other readers on Lorna’s committee, posing questions. As if they had not spent those occasions, those evenings, together.
    Then Lorna was offered a job in Toronto and moved away. There had never been any discussion of their encounters evolving into anything else. The liaison ended, without rancor but definitively. Yet Gauri was humiliated, for not taking it as lightly.
    Somehow she and Lorna had remained on friendly terms, making time for a coffee if they happened to run into one another at a conference. Gauri saw how the relationship had shifted: how she had reverted from lover to colleague, nothing more.
    It was not unlike the way her role had changed at so many other points in the past. From wife to widow, from sister-in-law to wife, from mother to childless woman. With the exception of losing Udayan, she had actively chosen to take these steps.
    She had married Subhash, she had abandoned Bela. She had generated alternative versions of herself, she had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life only to strip it bare, only to be alone in the end.
    Now even Lorna was over a decade ago, long enough to break away from the stem of her existence. Receding, drifting, alongside the other disparate elements of her past.
    Her life had pared down to its solitary components, its self-reliant code. Her uniform of black slacks and tunics, the books and the laptop computer she needed to do her job. The car she used to get from one place to another.
    Her hair was still cut short, a monkish style with a middle part. She wore oval glasses on a chain around her neck. There was a bluish tinge now to the skin below her eyes. Her voice raspy from years of lecturing. Her skin drier after absorbing this stronger, southern sun.
    Her work habits were no longer nocturnal; on her own, she followed ancient patterns and cues, in bed by ten, upright at dawn. She allowed herself few frivolities. A group of plants she cultivated in pots on her patio, as the courtyard in Tollygunge had been. Jasmine that opened up in the evenings, flame-colored hibiscus, creamy gardenia with glossy leaves.
    On the patio, beneath the wooden trellis overhead, terra-cotta tiles underfoot, she liked to sit after a long day in her study, to drink a cup of tea and sort through her bills, to feel the afternoon light on her face. To look over a sheaf of printed pages she was working on, and sometimes to eat dinner.
    In her car, when she tired of public radio, she listened to a biography or some other commercially published book she’d meant but never made time to read. But even these she borrowed from the library.
    Beyond these elements she did not tend to indulge herself. Her existence all these years, after Udayan, without Bela or Subhash, remained indulgence enough. Udayan’s life had been taken in an instant. But hers had gone