The Lowland

there, once he did, she avoided him. Afraid, now that they were married, of getting to know him, of their two lives combining, turning close.
    Eventually he would knock, saying her name to summon her to the table. It would all be ready: two plates, two glasses of water, two mounds of soft rice accompanied by whatever he had made.
    While they ate they watched Walter Cronkite at his desk, reporting the nightly news. It was always the news of America, of America’s concerns and activities. The bombs that they were dropping on Hanoi, the shuttle they were hoping to launch into space. Campaigns for the presidential election that would be held later in the year.
    She learned the names of the candidates: Muskie, McCloskey, McGovern. The two parties, Democratic and Republican. There was news of Richard Nixon, who had visited China the month before, shaking hands with Mao for the whole world to see. There was nothing about Calcutta. What had consumed the city, what had altered the course of her life and shattered it, was not reported here.
    One morning, setting down the book she was reading and turning her head to the window, she saw the sky, gray and lusterless. It was raining. It fell steadily, drearily. All day she stayed in, but for the first time she felt confined.
    In the afternoon, after the rain ended, she put on her winter coat over her sari, her boots, her hat and gloves. She walked along the damp sidewalk, up the hill, turning by the student union. She saw students going in and out, men in jeans and jackets, women in dark tights and short wool coats, smoking, speaking to one another.
    She crossed the quadrangle, past the lampposts with their rounded white bulbs on iron poles. It was milder than she expected, the gloves and hat unnecessary, the air fresh after the rain.
    On the other side of the campus she entered a little grocery store next to the post office. Among the sticks of butter and cartons of eggs she found something called cream cheese, which came in a silver wrapping, looking like a bar of soap. She bought it, thinking it might be chocolate, breaking the five-dollar bill Subhash had left for her and filling the deep pocket of her coat with the change.
    Inside the wrapper was something dense, cold, slightly sour. She broke it into pieces and ate it on its own, standing in the parking lot of the grocery. Not knowing it was intended to be spread on a cracker or bread, savoring the unexpected taste and texture of it in her mouth, licking the paper clean.
    She began to explore other parts of the campus, wandering in and out of various departmental buildings, grouped around the quadrangle: the school of pharmacy, foreign languages, political science and history. The buildings had names: Washburn, Roosevelt, Edwards. Anyone could walk in.
    She found classrooms and the offices of professors lining the halls. Bulletin boards announcing upcoming lectures and conferences, display cases with books that professors at the university had published. There was no guard preventing her, questioning her. No armed soldiers sitting on sandbags, as they had for months outside the main building at Presidency.
    The day Robert McNamara had visited Calcutta, a year after the Naxalbari uprising, communist protesters at the airport forced him to take a helicopter into the center of the city. They would not let his car pass. She’d been on her campus that day. As the helicopter was flying over College Street, students had hurled stones from the roof of one of the campus buildings. They had locked the vice-chancellor of Calcutta University into his office. She’d seen trams being burned.
    One day she found the philosophy department. She came upon a large lecture hall with rows of descending seats. The doors were still open as students continued filing in. She took a seat at the very back, high enough so that she was looking down at the top of the professor’s head. Close enough to the door so that she could slip out if she needed to. But after her long walk, feeling heavy, she was grateful to sit down.
    Peering at the syllabus of the student next to her, she saw that it was an undergraduate course, an introduction to ancient Western philosophy. Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle. Though most of the material was familiar, she sat for the full class period. She listened to a description of Plato’s doctrine of recollection, in which learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.
    The