The Lowland

appeal to Gauri. He spent his time off with Bela, driving with her here and there for the day. He couldn’t imagine the three of them exploring a new place together, or renting a cottage with another family, as some of his colleagues did.
    He’d hoped that by now Gauri would be ready to have a child with him, and to give Bela a companion. He’d gone so far as to suggest it one day, saying he did not want to deny Bela a sibling. He believed it would correct the imbalance, if they were four instead of three. That it would close up the distance.
    She told him she would think about it in another year or two; that she was not yet thirty, that there was still time to have a child.
    And so he continued hoping, though every month, in the medicine cabinet, was a new packet of birth-control pills.
    At times he feared that his one act of rebellion, marrying her, had already failed. He’d expected more resistance from her then, not now. He wondered sometimes if she regretted it. If the decision had been made in error, in haste.
    She’s Udayan’s wife, she’ll never love you, his mother had told him, attempting to dissuade him. At the time he’d stood up to her, convinced it could be otherwise, and that he could make Gauri happy. He’d been determined to prove his mother wrong.
    In order to marry Gauri he’d compromised his ties to his parents, perhaps permanently, he did not know. But he was a father now. He could no longer imagine a life in which he had not taken that step.
    6.
    Play with me, Bela would ask.
    If Subhash was not there she sought out Gauri’s companionship, instructing her to sit on the floor in Bela’s room. She wanted her to move pieces along a board, or help to dress and undress her dolls, tugging the clothes on and off their unyielding plastic limbs. She spread dozens of identical cards facedown, a memory game in which they were supposed to locate matching pairs.
    At times Gauri capitulated, holding on to a book she was reading, stealing glances at it while they played. She played, but it was never enough.
    You’re not paying attention, Bela protested, when Gauri’s mind strayed.
    She sat on the carpet, conscious of Bela’s reproach. She knew that a sibling might relieve her of the responsibility to entertain Bela this way. She knew that this was partly what motivated people to have more than one child.
    She did not tell Subhash, when he brought it up with her, what she already knew; that though she had become a wife a second time, becoming a mother again was the one thing in her life she was determined to prevent from happening.
    She slept with him because it had become more of an effort not to. She wanted to terminate the expectation she’d begun to sense from him. Also to extinguish Udayan’s ghost. To smother what haunted her.
    Nothing in their lovemaking had reminded her of Udayan, so that, in the end, the fact that they had been brothers was not so strange. There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise eluded her.
    His body was a different body, more hesitant but also more attentive. In time she came to respond to it, even to crave it, as she had craved odd combinations of food when she was pregnant. With Subhash she learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.
    She’d seen signs in the student union advertising babysitters, services provided by students and professors’ wives. She began writing down some names and phone numbers.
    She asked Subhash if they could hire somebody, to give her time to take a survey of German philosophy that met twice a week. Though Bela was five now, in kindergarten, she still attended school for only half the day. Gauri said that this was a reasonable solution, given that Subhash was busy, given that they knew no one else who could help.
    He told her no. Not for the money it would cost but on principle, not wanting to pay a stranger to care for Bela.
    It’s common here, she said.
    You’re home with her, Gauri.
    Though he had encouraged her to visit the library in her spare time, to attend lectures now and again, she realized that he didn’t consider this her work. Though he’d told her, when he asked her to marry him, that she could go on with her studies