The Lowland

try to speed up Gauri’s application. He wished them all the best.
    A few days later Subhash was gone. Again she was alone with her in-laws. Again they lived with her without speaking to her, already behaving as if she were not there.
    On the evening of her flight, Manash came to accompany her to the airport and see her off. She bent down before her in-laws and took the dust from their feet. They were waiting for her to go. She stepped through the swinging wooden doors of the courtyard, over the open drain, into a taxi that Manash had called from the corner.
    She left Tollygunge, where she had never felt welcome, where she had gone only for Udayan. The furniture that belonged to her, the teak bedroom set, would stand unused in the small square room with strong morning light, the room where they had unwittingly made their child.
    Her final glimpse of Calcutta was of the city late at night. They sped past the darkened campus where she had studied, the shuttered bookstalls, the families who slept shrouded during those hours on the streets. She left behind the deserted intersection below her grandparents’ flat.
    As they approached the airport, fog began to accumulate on VIP Road, turning impenetrable. The driver slowed down, then stopped, unable to continue. They seemed to be enveloped in the thick smoke of a raging fire, but there was no heat, only the damp, mist of condensation that trapped them.
    This was death, Gauri thought; this vapor, insubstantial but unyielding, drawing everything to a halt. She was certain this was what Udayan saw now, what he experienced.
    She began to panic, thinking she would never get out. Inch by inch they moved on, the driver pressing on his horn to avoid a collision, until finally the lights of the airport came into view. She hugged Manash and kissed him, saying she would miss him, only him, and then she gathered together her things and presented her documents and boarded the plane.
    No policeman or soldier stopped her. No one questioned her about Udayan. No one gave her trouble for having been his wife. The fog lifted, the plane was cleared for takeoff. No one prevented her from rising above the city, into a black sky without stars.
    The calendar on the kitchen wall showed a photograph of a rocky island, with space for a lighthouse and nothing more. She saw something called Ash Wednesday, followed by St. Patrick’s Day. The twentieth of March, what would have been Udayan’s twenty-seventh birthday, was officially the first day of spring.
    But the cold in Rhode Island was still severe in the mornings, the windowpanes like sheets of ice when she touched them, milky with frost.
    One Saturday, Subhash took her shopping. Music played in a large, brightly lit store. No one offered to help them, or seemed to care if they spent money or not. He bought her a coat, a pair of boots. Thick socks, a woolen scarf, a cap and gloves.
    But these things were not used. Apart from that one trip to the department store, she did not venture out. She stayed indoors, resting, reading the campus paper Subhash brought home with him each day, sometimes turning on the television to watch its insipid shows. Young women interviewing bachelors who wanted to date them. A husband and wife, pretending to bicker, then singing romantic songs.
    He suggested things she could do that were nearby: a movie at the campus film hall, a lecture by a famous anthropologist, an international craft fair at the student union. He mentioned the better newspapers one could read at the library, the miscellaneous items the bookstore sold. There were a few more Indians on campus than when he’d first arrived. Some women, wives of other graduate students, she might befriend. When you’re ready, he would say.
    Unlike Udayan’s, Subhash’s comings and goings were predictable. He came home every evening at the same time. On the occasions she called him at his lab, to say that they had run out of milk or butter, he picked up the phone. He had taught himself to cook dinner so she didn’t interfere. He would leave out the ingredients in the morning, icy packets from the freezer that slowly melted and revealed their contents during the course of the day.
    The cooking smells no longer bothered her as they did in Calcutta, but she said they did, because this provided an excuse to remain in the bedroom. For though she waited all day for Subhash to come back to the apartment, feeling anxious when he wasn’t