The Lowland

on.
    Her body, in spite of its years, was as stubbornly intact as the muddy green teapot, shaped vaguely like an Aladdin’s lamp, a wedge of cork in its lid, that she’d bought for a dollar at a yard sale in Rhode Island. It still kept her company during her hours of writing. It had survived her flight to California, wrapped up in a cardigan, and served her still.
    One day, pausing to look through one of the catalogues that cluttered her mailbox, she came across a picture of a small round wooden table meant for outdoors. It wasn’t essential, and yet she picked up the phone and placed the order, having meant for too long to replace the dirty glass-topped wicker table that had been on the patio for years, covered by a series of fading printed cloths.
    A week or so after she’d placed the order, a delivery truck stopped in front of her building. She expected a flat heavy box, a day spent poring over an instruction manual, with a bag of nuts and bolts that she would have to tighten herself. Instead the table was delivered to her fully assembled, carried off the truck and into her home by two men.
    She told them where to put it, signed a sheet of paper to acknowledge its arrival, tipped them, and sat down. She put her hands flat on the table and smelled the strong odor of the wood. Of teak.
    She put her face to the table’s surface, inhaling deeply, her cheek against the slats. It was the smell of the bedroom furniture she’d left behind in Tollygunge, the wardrobe and dressing table, the bed with slim posts on which she and Udayan had created Bela. Ordered from an American catalogue, delivered off a truck, it had come to her again.
    The aroma of the table wasn’t as powerful, as constant, as that of the other furniture had been. But now and then it rose up as she sat on the patio, enhanced perhaps by the sun’s warmth, or circulated by the Santa Ana winds. A concentrated peppery smell that reduced all distance, all time.
    What had Subhash told Bela, to keep her away? Nothing, probably. It was the just punishment for her crime. She understood now what it meant to walk away from her child. It had been her own act of killing. A connection she had severed, resulting in a death that applied only to the two of them. It was a crime worse than anything Udayan had committed.
    She had never written to Bela. Never dared reach out, to reassure her. What reassurance was hers to give? What she’d done could never be undone. Her silence, her absence, seemed decent in comparison.
    As for Subhash, he had done nothing wrong. He had let her go, never bothering her, never blaming her, at least to her face. She hoped he’d found some happiness. He deserved it, not she.
    Though their marriage had not been a solution, it had taken her away from Tollygunge. He had brought her to America and then, like an animal briefly observed, briefly caged, released her. He had protected her, he had attempted to love her. Every time she had to open a new jar of jam, she resorted to the trick he’d taught her, of banging the edge of the lid three or four times with a spoon, to break the seal.
    2.
    In the new millennium a path was completed, an easement of a rail spur that had once taken passengers from Kingston station to Narragansett Pier.
    The course was moderate, through forest cover, skirting a river, some smaller creeks. There were benches here and there to rest on if one was tired, and at longer intervals a sign, indicating his position on the trail, perhaps also indicating a native species of tree.
    On Sunday mornings, after breakfast, he drove to the wooden train station where he had first arrived as a student, where he went on occasion to greet Bela on the platform, when she visited. Many years ago there had been a fire, but in time the station was restored and a high-speed rail put in. He parked the car and began walking, alone, through the sheltered innards of the town. At times, even now, Subhash could not fathom the extremes of his life: coming from a city with so little space for humans to inhabit, arriving in a place where there was still so much of it to spare.
    He kept moving for at least an hour, sometimes a little more, for it was possible to travel six miles and back. It was the town he had lived in for more than half his life, to which he had been quietly faithful, and yet the new path altered his relationship to it, turning it foreign again. He walked past the backs of certain neighborhoods,