The Lowland

small talk felt imbalanced, given that Bela had never brought a boyfriend home.
    She’d never sought his permission, when she was a teenager and still lived with him, to date. She had given him no trouble in that regard. The lack of it troubled him now.
    Even today part of him had hoped that she would surprise him, and appear with a companion at the airport. Someone to care for her, to share the unconventional life she led. I won’t be here forever, he’d once gone as far as to say, conveying the news of Richard’s death by phone. But Bela had only reproached him for being melodramatic.
    He had learned to set aside the responsibility he’d once believed would be his: to do his part to secure a daughter’s future by yoking it to another person’s. If he’d raised her in Calcutta it would have been reasonable for him to bring up the subject of her marriage. Here it was meddlesome, considered out-of-bounds. He had raised her in a place free from such stigmas. When he’d voiced his concerns one evening to Elise, she had advised him to say nothing, reminding him that so many people these days waited until their thirties to marry, even their forties.
    Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them.
    She missed New England. She always said so as he drove her back to the house. The expression on her face as she looked through the window of the car was one of unfiltered recognition. She asked him to pull over when she saw one of the trucks that appeared here and there in summer, that sold cups of frozen lemonade.
    At the house she opened up her bags, unwrapping fragrant plums and nectarines from sheets of tissue, arranging them in bowls.
    How long will you stay? he asked over dinner, over the lamb and rice he’d made. Two weeks this time?
    She had eaten two helpings. She put her fork down.
    It depends.
    On what? Is something the matter?
    She looked into his eyes. He saw nervousness in hers, combined with eagerness, and a certain resolve. He remembered how she would press her palms together when she was a little girl, bobbing up and down in waist-deep water when she was learning to swim. Pausing, deliberating, preparing for the effort, for the leap of faith it required.
    There’s something I need to tell you, Baba. Some news.
    His heart skipped a beat, then started racing. He understood it now. The reason for the smile that had been on her face when he saw her at the airport, the contentment that he’d sensed all evening, humming within her.
    But no, she had not met anyone. There was no special friend she wanted to introduce him to, to invite to the house.
    She took a deep breath, exhaled.
    I’m pregnant, she said.
    She was four months along. The father was not a part of her life, not aware of her condition. He was simply someone Bela had known, with whom she had been involved, perhaps for a year, perhaps merely for an evening. She did not say.
    She wanted to keep the child. She wanted to become a mother. She told him that she’d thought about it carefully, that she was ready.
    She said it was better that the father did not know. It was less complicated that way.
    Why?
    Because he’s not the kind of father I want for my child. She added after a moment, He’s nothing like you.
    I see.
    But he did not see. Who was this man who had turned his daughter into a mother? Who was unaware, undeserving, of paternity?
    He began gently. It’s not so easy, Bela, bringing up a child alone.
    You did it. Lots of people do.
    Ideally, a child has both parents in its life, he continued. A father as well as a mother.
    Does it bother you?
    What?
    That I’m not married?
    You have no fixed income, Bela. No stable home.
    I have this one.
    And you are welcome here, always. But you stay with me two weeks of the year. The rest of the time you are elsewhere.
    Unless.
    Unless?
    She wanted to come home again. She wanted to stay with him, to give birth in Rhode Island. She wanted to provide the same home for her child that he had provided for her. She wanted not to have to work for a while.
    Would that be all right with you?
    The coincidence coursed through him, numbing, bewildering. A pregnant woman, a fatherless child. Arriving in Rhode Island, needing him. It was a reenactment of