The Lowland

professor was dressed casually, in a sweater and jeans. He smoked cigarettes as he lectured. He had a thick brown moustache, long hair like many of the male students. He had not bothered to call the roll.
    Students around her were also smoking, or knitting. A few had their eyes closed. There was a couple at the back, with their legs pressed together, the boy’s arm draped around the girl’s waist, stroking the material of her sweater. But Gauri found herself paying attention. Eventually, wanting to take notes, she searched in her bag for a sheet of paper and a pen. Finding no paper, she wrote her notes in the margins of the campus newspaper she’d been carrying around. Later, on a pad she found in the apartment, she copied over what she’d written.
    Surreptitiously, twice a week, she began attending the class. She wrote down the titles of the texts on the reading list and went to the library, borrowing Subhash’s card to check out a few books.
    She’d intended to remain anonymous, to go unnoticed. But one day while she was immersed in the lecture, her hand shot up. The professor was speaking about Aristotle’s rules of formal logic, about the syllogisms used to distinguish a valid thought from an invalid one.
    What about dialectical reasoning? One that acknowledged change and contradiction, as opposed to an established reality? Did Aristotle allow for that?
    He did. But no one paid much attention to those concepts until Hegel, the professor said.
    He’d replied as if Gauri were any legitimate member of the class. And spontaneously he altered the course of the lecture, building on her question, accommodating the point she’d made.
    She made a little routine of it, following the wave of students after the class let out to eat her lunch at the cafeteria of the student union, ordering French fries at the grill, bread and butter and tea, sometimes treating herself to a dish of ice cream.
    At one end of the cafeteria, presiding over the space, a giant clock was built into the brick wall. There were no numbers, no second hand, just pieces of metal superimposed onto the surface, the giant hour and minute hands joining and separating throughout the day.
    She kept to herself. She was Subhash’s wife instead of Udayan’s. Even in Rhode Island, even on the campus where no one knew her, she was prepared for someone to question her, to condemn her for what she’d done.
    Still, she liked spending time in the company of people who ignored but surrounded her. Who went to the terrace to unwind and talk and smoke in the sun, or who gathered indoors, in the lounges and game rooms, watching television, or playing pool. It was almost like being in a city again.
    The lounge of the women’s bathroom was an oasis: a vast private space carpeted in white, with mirrored columns, and sofas to sit on, even to lie down on, with standing ashtrays in between. It was like a waiting room in a train station, or the reception area of a hotel, larger and more accommodating than the apartment where she and Subhash lived. Here she sometimes sat, resting, leafing through the campus newspaper, observing the American women who came to touch up their lipstick or lean over to draw a brush through their hair.
    The paper was dedicated sometimes to special issues, on the subjects of what it meant to be a black person in America, or a woman, or a homosexual. Long articles focused on forms of exploitation, individual identities. She wondered if Udayan would have scorned them for being self-indulgent. For being concerned less with changing the lives of others than with asserting and improving their own.
    When’s your baby due? a student sitting beside her in the lounge, smoking a cigarette, asked her one day.
    A few more months.
    You’re in my ancient philosophy class, right?
    She nodded.
    I should have dropped it. The stuff’s over my head.
    The student seemed so at ease, wearing long silver earrings, a gauzy blouse, a skirt that stopped at her knees. Her body was unencumbered by the yards of silk material that Gauri wrapped and pleated and tucked every morning into a petticoat. These were the saris she’d worn since she stopped wearing frocks, at fifteen. What she’d worn while married to Udayan, and what she continued to wear now.
    I like your outfit, the girl said, getting up to go.
    Thank you.
    But watching the girl walk away, Gauri felt ungainly. She began to want to look like the other