The Lowland

its contact with the pathway. She looked and saw blood beading across it, highlighting the etched lines of her palm.
    Someone rushed over, asking if she was all right. She was able to stand, to take a few steps. The greater pain was in her wrist. Her head was spinning, and there was a throbbing on one side.
    A university ambulance took her to the hospital. The wrist was badly sprained, and because the pain in her head had not subsided, because it had spread to the other side also, she would need to get some scans, some tests.
    She was given forms to fill out and asked to name her next of kin. All her life, on such forms, having no other choice, she’d put Subhash’s name. But there had never been an emergency, never a need to contact him.
    Weakly she formed the letters with her left hand. The address in Rhode Island, and the phone number she still remembered. She used to dial it sometimes when the receiver was still on its hook, when thinking of Bela. When she was appalled by her transgression, overtaken by regret.
    She had not been a patient in a hospital since Bela was born. Even now the memory was intact. A rainy evening in summer. Twenty-four years old. A typed bracelet around her wrist. Everyone congratulating Subhash when it was over, flowers coming from his department at the university.
    Again she was given a bracelet, entered into the hospital’s system. She gave them the information they needed about her medical history, the insurance card. There was no one to help her this time. She was dependent on the nurses, the doctors, when they came.
    A few X-rays were taken, a CT scan. Her right hand was bound up, placed in a sling, just as Udayan’s had been after his accident. They told her she was a bit dehydrated. They put fluids into her veins.
    She was kept there until evening. The scans showed no bleeding on the brain. She went home with nothing more than a prescription for painkillers and a referral to a physical therapist. She had to call a colleague, for she was told that she would be unable to drive for a few weeks, unable to negotiate the simple town, with its short grassy blocks, where she had lived for so many years.
    The colleague, Edwin, drove her to the pharmacy to pick up her prescriptions. He invited her to stay with him and his wife for a few days, offering her their guest room, saying it would be no trouble. But Gauri told him there was no need. She returned to her own home, sat at the desk in her office, pulled out a pair of scissors, and managed to clip away the typed bracelet around her wrist.
    She switched on the computer and lit the burner on the stove in the kitchen to make tea. She struggled to remove the tea bag from its wrapper, to raise the boiling kettle over the cup. Everything done slowly, everything feeling clumsy in the hand she was not accustomed to using.
    The refrigerator was empty, the carton of milk nearly finished. Only then did she remember that she’d intended to buy groceries as she was walking to her car, when she’d fallen. She would have to call Edwin later, and ask him if he minded picking up a few things.
    It was eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. She had no classes to teach, no plans for the evening. She poured herself a glass of water, spilling some of it on the counter. Somehow she managed to open the bottle of pills. She left the cap off, so that she would not have to do it again.
    Not wanting to burden anyone, but unable to manage alone, she went away, a weekend’s journey that had nothing to do with work. With one hand she packed a small suitcase. She left her laptop at home. She called a car service and checked into a hotel that some of her colleagues liked, in a desert town. A place where she could walk in the mountains and soak her body in a spring, where she would not have to cook for a few days.
    On the roof of the hotel, at the pool surrounded by steep hills, she observed an elderly, wealthy-looking Indian couple taking care of a little boy on their own. They were trying to teach the boy not to fear the water, showing him how little plastic figures floated, the grandfather swimming a few strokes to demonstrate. The husband and wife lightly quarreled, in Hindi, about how much sunscreen to put on the child, whether or not his head should be protected by a hat.
    The husband was nearly bald but still vigorous. What hair was left wreathed the lower portion of his head. The wife seemed younger, her hair still dark, her toenails