The Lowland

gone by fall.
    No one rents them, when they’re empty?
    Sometimes students do, because they’re cheap. In spring I was the only one out here.
    Holly’s cottage was tiny: a kitchen and a sitting area at the front, a bathroom and two bedrooms at the back, the ceilings low. Even the home he’d grown up in had felt more spacious. She’d opened the door without inserting a key.
    The radio was on, reporting the weather as they walked through the door. Showers that evening would be heavy at times. Chester greeted them with his barking, wagging his tail and pressing his body against their legs.
    Did you forget to shut it off? he asked her, as she turned down the radio’s volume.
    I keep it on. I hate coming back to a quiet house.
    He remembered the shortwave radio that he and Udayan had put together, drawing information from all over the world to another isolated place. He realized that in some sense Holly was more alone than he was. Her isolation, without a husband, without neighbors around her, seemed severe.
    The roof of the cottage was as thin as a membrane, the pelting sound of the rain like an avalanche of gravel. Sand was everywhere, between the cushions of the sofa, on the floor, on the round carpet in front of the fireplace where Chester liked to sit.
    Hastily she swept it out, just as the dust was swept out twice a day in Calcutta, then shut the windows that had been left open. The mantel above the fireplace was piled with stones and shells, pieces of driftwood; there seemed to be little else decorating the house.
    He looked out the window, seeing the ocean covered with storm clouds, the dark sand at the water’s edge.
    Why bother going to the campus beach, when you have this?
    It’s a change of scene. I love arriving at the bottom of that hill.
    She busied herself in the kitchen. She was turning on the oven, filling the sink with water, soaking lettuce leaves.
    Will you get a fire started?
    He went to the fireplace and looked at it. There were logs to one side, a set of iron tools. Some ashes within. He removed the screen. He noticed a box of matches on top of the mantel and slid it open.
    Let me show you, she said, already next to him before he needed to turn around and ask.
    She opened a vent that was inside, then arranged the logs and the thinner sticks. Handing him one of the tools, she told him to nudge them together after the flame was lit. He sat monitoring the fire, but she had lit it perfectly. There was nothing to do other than allow it to warm his face and hands as Holly prepared the meal.
    He wondered if this was where she had lived with Joshua’s father, and if this was the home he had left her in. Something told him no. There were only Holly’s things, and Joshua’s. Their two raincoats and summer jackets hanging on pegs by the door, their pairs of boots and sandals lined up beneath.
    Do you mind checking the window over Joshua’s bed? I think I left it open.
    The boy’s room was like a ship’s cabin, constricted and low. He saw the bed beneath the window, covered with a plaid quilt, the pillow damp with rain.
    On the floor, below a bookcase, was a partially completed jigsaw puzzle of horses grazing in a meadow, looking like a frame to a missing image. He crouched down and put a hand into the box, sifting through seemingly identical pieces that were nevertheless distinct.
    When he stood up he noticed a snapshot lying on Joshua’s chest of drawers. Right away Subhash knew it was Joshua’s father, Holly’s husband. A man in shorts, barefoot, on a beach somewhere, holding a smaller version of Joshua on top of his shoulders.
    Holly called him to dinner. They ate pieces of chicken cooked in mushrooms and wine, served with bread warmed in the oven instead of with rice. The taste was complex, flavorful but without heat of any kind.
    He pulled out the bay leaf she’d put in. These grow on a tree behind my family’s home, he said. Only they’re twice the size.
    Will you bring some back for me, when you go to visit them?
    He told her he would, but it felt unreal, in her company, that he would ever be back in Tollygunge, with his family. Even more unreal that Holly would still care to spend time with him when he returned.
    She told him she’d lived in the cottage since last September. Joshua’s father had offered to move out of the old place they’d shared, off Ministerial Road, but she didn’t want to be there. The