The Lowland

swim up to Bela, to hold on to her.
    Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end.
    She no longer searched for signs of him. The fleeting awareness that he might be in a room, looking over her shoulder as she worked at her desk, was no longer a comfort. Certain days it was possible not to think of him, to remember him. No aspect of him had traveled to America. Apart from Bela, he’d refused to join her here.
    The women in the philosophy department were secretaries. The professor, and the other students in her class, were men. It was a small group, seven people including the professor. Quickly they grew to know one another by name. They liked to argue about antipositivism, about praxis. About immanence and the absolute. They never solicited Gauri’s opinion, but as she began to contribute to the discussion they listened, surprised that she knew enough, at times, to prove them wrong.
    Her professor, Otto Weiss, was a short man with a thick accent, a slow manner of speaking, wire spectacles, rust-colored curls on his head. He dressed more formally than the other professors. Always with polished leather shoes, a jacket, a little pin securing his tie. He’d been in the Warsaw Ghetto, put into one of the camps when he was three.
    I have no memory of it, he told the class, speaking briefly of this experience, after one of the students asked him when he had left Europe. As if to say, Do not pity me, though the rest of his family had perished before the camp was liberated; though there was an identification number on his lower arm, the tattoo concealed beneath his clothing.
    He was less than a decade older than Gauri but seemed of another sensibility, another generation. He had lived in England before coming to the United States. He’d done his doctorate at Chicago. He would never return to Germany, he said. Reading the attendance list on the first day of class, he had called out her name without hesitation. She had not had to correct his pronunciation, to tolerate the way most Americans uttered her married name.
    He referred to no notes when he lectured. Though he guided them carefully through the texts he’d assigned, he seemed more interested in what the students had to say, taking a few notes on blank sheets of white paper as they spoke. He’d read the Upanishads, talked about their influence on Schopenhauer. She felt a kinship with this man. She wanted to please him, to salute him somehow.
    At the end of the semester, after writing a comparison of Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s concepts of circular time, she was asked to come to his office after class. She’d worked on the essay for weeks, writing it out by hand, then typing up the fair copy on Subhash’s typewriter, at the kitchen table. Surrounded by the appliances, the cord of the fluorescent fixture overhead. The task had kept her awake until dawn.
    She saw crowded notations in the margins, slanting comments that virtually formed a frame.
    This is ambitious material. One might say audacious.
    She did not know how to respond.
    Do you think you have succeeded?
    Still she did not know what to say.
    I asked for an essay of ten pages. You have written close to forty. And yet you have still failed utterly to prove your point.
    I’m sorry.
    Don’t apologize. I am always grateful to have an intellectual in the room. Such a grasp of Hegel I have not encountered among my students here.
    He scanned certain portions of the essay, a finger trailing below the words. It needs revising, he said.
    I can prepare it for next week?
    He shook his head, brushing his hands against one another. I have finished with this class. And I suggest you put this paper in a drawer and not look at it for a few years.
    She thought he was brushing his hands of her also. She thanked him for the class. She stood up to go.
    What brings you to Rhode Island from India?
    My husband.
    What does he do?
    He studied here also.
    You met in America?
    She turned her face away.
    I’ve asked something I should not have?
    He was patient, steadily gazing up at her from his chair. He did not press. But he seemed to sense that she had more to say.
    She turned to him