The Lowland

campus. There was the possibility of a lab in Narragansett hiring him. Now that Bela was attending the university nursery school, now that life there had become familiar to him, it felt simpler to stay.
    It took him about an hour to return, driving past the mills and factories in Fall River, past Tiverton, crossing the series of bridges over the bay. He crossed to the mainland, then another ten minutes or so to the quiet leafy complex, behind a row of fraternities, where they lived. Each evening when he saw Bela, she seemed slightly altered—her bones and teeth more solid, her husky voice having turned more emphatic in the hours that he’d been away.
    She’d begun to write her name, to spread the butter on her toast. Her legs were growing long, though her belly was still rounded. Her back was soft with hair, an elegant line of it running along the length of her spine. There was a perfect loop of it at the center, like the whorls of her fingertips, or in the bark of a tree. Whenever he traced it, as he washed Bela in the soapy tub before bed, the hairs rearranged themselves, and the pattern dissolved.
    Though she’d learned to tie her laces she could not tell her left foot from her right. Other gestures of her infancy lingered—the way she reached out and opened and closed her fist when she wanted something. A glass of water, for example, that was out of reach.
    She was afraid of thunder, and even when there was none, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, calling out for him, or simply walking into the room he shared with Gauri and tucking herself beside him in bed. In the mornings, on the verge of waking, she would lie on her stomach, legs tucked in, crouched over like a little frog.
    Every night, at Bela’s insistence, he lay with her until she fell asleep. It was a reminder of their connection to each other, a connection at once false and true. And so night after night, after helping her brush her teeth and changing her into her pajamas, he switched off the light and lay beside her. Bela instructed him to turn and face her, to lock eyes with her so that their breath mingled. Look at me, Baba, she whispered, with an intensity, an innocence, that overwhelmed him. Sometimes she held his face in her hands.
    Do you love me?
    Yes, Bela.
    I love you more.
    More than what?
    I love you more than you love me.
    That’s impossible. That’s my job.
    But I love you more than anybody loves anybody.
    He wondered how such powerful emotions, such superlative devotion, could exist in such a small child. Patiently he waited until she lowered her eyelids and became still. Her body always twitching a little; this was the sign that deep sleep, within seconds, was near.
    Every night, though the same thing happened, it came as a shock. A few minutes ago Bela would have been leaping off the bed, her laughter filling up the room. But when she closed her eyes that cessation of activity felt as unsettling, as final, as death.
    Some nights he, too, fell asleep briefly beside Bela. Carefully he removed her hands from the collar of his shirt, and adjusted the blanket on top of her. Her head was thrust back on the pillow, in a combined posture of pride and surrender. He’d experienced such closeness with only one other person. With Udayan. Each night, extracting himself from her, for a moment his heart stopped, wondering what she would say, the day she learned the truth about him.
    On Saturdays he and Bela went to the supermarket; this was their time alone together outside the apartment, a time he looked forward to more than any other in the course of the week. She no longer fit into the seat at the front of the cart, and now she hung on to the back as he steered, hopping off to help him choose the apples, a box of cereal, a jar of jam.
    Faster, she would insist, and sometimes, if the aisle was empty, he obliged, sprinting forward, playing along. In this sense Udayan had marked her, leaving behind an exuberant replica of himself. And Subhash loved this about her; that there was such a liberal outpouring of who she was.
    Standing with him at the deli, she ate little cubes of cheese speared onto toothpicks, the spoons of potato salad set out on trays, pink wedges of ham. There was a cafeteria at the back of the supermarket, and here he treated her to a hot dog and a cup of punch, a plate of onion rings to share.
    One day, crossing the parking lot after they’d finished shopping, pushing the cart filled