The Lowland

been able to define herself in relation to her siblings, nor to see herself as a part of them. She had no memory of spending a moment, even in a house in such an isolated place, ever, alone with her mother or father. Always at the end of a queue, in the shadow of others, she believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own.
    Around men she’d felt invisible. She knew she was not the type they turned to look at on the street, or to notice across the room at a cousin’s wedding. She’d not been asked after and married off a few months later, as some of her sisters had been. She was a disappointment to herself, in this regard.
    Aside from her complexion, deep enough to be considered a flaw, perhaps there was nothing wrong with her. And yet, whenever she stopped to consider what made her appearance distinctive, she objected to it, thinking the shape of her face was too long, that her features were too severe. Wishing she could alter herself, believing that any other face would have been preferable.
    But Udayan regarded her as if no other woman in the city existed. Gauri never doubted, when they were together, that she had an effect on him. That it excited him to stand beside her, turning his face toward her, his gaze never wavering. He noticed the day she switched the parting in her hair, saying it suited her.
    One day, inside one of the books he’d given her, there was a note asking her to meet him at the cinema. A matinee showing—a hall close to Park Street.
    She was afraid to go, afraid not to. It was one thing to fall into conversations with him on the portico, or at the Coffee House, or to walk over to College Square to watch the swimmers in the pool. They had not yet strayed from that immediate neighborhood, where they were simply fellow students, where it was always reasonable for them to be.
    The afternoon of the film she hesitated, and she ended up being so late that she didn’t arrive until the interval, flustered, worried that he’d changed his mind or had given up on her, almost daring him to do this. But he had dared her, too, to show up.
    He was there, outside the theatre, smoking a cigarette, standing apart from the groups of people already discussing the first part of the film. The sun was beating down and he lifted his hand as she approached, angling his head toward her face, forming a little canopy over their heads. The gesture made her feel alone with him, sheltered in that great crowd. Distinct from the pedestrians, afloat on the city’s swell.
    She saw no sign of irritation or impatience in his expression when he spotted her. She saw only his pleasure in seeing her. As if he knew she would come; as if he knew, even, that she would deliberate, and be as ridiculously late as she was. When she asked what had happened in the film so far, he shook his head.
    I don’t know, he said, handing her the ticket. He’d been standing there all the while on the sidewalk, waiting for her. Waiting, until they were in the darkness of the theatre, to take her hand.
    2.
    In the second year of his Ph.D. Subhash lived on his own, now that Richard, who’d found a teaching job in Chicago, was gone.
    In the spring semester, for three weeks, Subhash boarded a research vessel with a group of students and professors. As the ship pulled away, the water cleaved a foaming trail that vanished even as it was being formed. The shoreline receded, resting calmly like a thin brown snake upon the water. He saw the earth’s mass shrinking, turning faint.
    Under the sun’s glare, as they picked up speed, he felt the wind’s motion on his face, the wild turbulence of the atmosphere. They docked first in Buzzards Bay. A barge had hit rocks off the coast of Falmouth two years before, running aground on a foggy night, spilling nearly two hundred thousand gallons of fuel oil. The wind had pushed it into Wild Harbor. The hydrocarbons had killed off the marsh grass. Fiddler crabs, unable to bury themselves, had frozen in place. They lowered nets for trawling fish and coffee cans for sampling the sediment. They learned that the contamination could persist indefinitely.
    They continued on to survey Georges Bank, where the phytoplankton was in bloom, the population of diatoms exploding in great swirls of peacock blue. But on cloudy days the ocean looked opaque, as dark as tar.
    He watched the life that circled the ship, gannets with creamy heads and black-and-white wings,