The Lowland

the door. Down the steps, cutting across the parking lot, into the hot leafy day.
    She was running more than walking. Her feet were light. In the store she felt like a criminal, worried that the elderly man standing behind the register, always kind to Bela, thought Gauri was stealing the milk she’d come to buy.
    Where’s your daughter today?
    With a friend.
    He smiled and handed her a piece of peppermint candy from the little bowl by the register. Tell her it’s from me.
    Quickly but carefully she counted out her change. The transaction overwhelmed her, as it used to when she’d first come here. She remembered to say thank you as she was handed her bag. She threw out the candy before she got to the apartment building, not wanting there to be any trace, apart from the milk carton, of what she’d done.
    The following day she set Bela up at the coffee table in front of the television. She considered every detail: a glass of water in case she was thirsty, a generous plate of biscuits and grapes. Extra pencils, in case the tip of the one she was drawing with happened to snap. Half an hour’s careful preparation, to allow for five minutes away.
    The five minutes doubled to ten, sometimes a bit more. Fifteen minutes to be alone, to clear her head. It was time to run across the quadrangle to the library to return a book, a simple errand she could have done at any time but that she was determined to accomplish at that moment. Time to go to the post office and send a letter, requesting an application for one of the doctoral programs Otto Weiss had suggested she look into. Time to glimpse that, without Bela or Subhash, her life might be a different thing.
    It turned into a dare, a puzzle to solve, to keep herself sharp. A private race she felt compelled to run again and again, fearing, if she stopped, that her ability to perform the feat would be lost. Before stepping out she checked that the stove was turned off, the windows shut, the knives placed out of reach. Not that Bela was that sort of child.
    So it began in the afternoons. Not every afternoon but often enough, too often. Disoriented by the sense of freedom, devouring the sensation as a beggar devours food.
    Sometimes she simply walked to the store and back, without buying anything. Sometimes she really did get the mail, and sat on a bench on campus and sorted through it. Or she went over to the student union to get a copy of the campus paper. Then back inside, rushing up the flight of stairs, at once triumphant and appalled at herself. She unlocked the door, where Bela would be, just as she’d left her. Never suspecting, never asking where she’d been.
    Then one day that summer Subhash came home earlier than usual, intending to take advantage of the last of the warm weather, and take Bela to the beach.
    He found Bela concealed beneath one of the tents she sometimes made by removing the blankets from her bed, draping them over the sofa and the coffee table in the living room. She was content within this structure, playing on her own.
    She told him that her mother had gone to get the mail. But Gauri wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs. Subhash knew that, having just retrieved the mail and come up the stairs himself.
    Ten minutes later Gauri returned with a newspaper. She hadn’t noticed Subhash’s car in the parking lot. Because he hadn’t called to say he was leaving early, there was no reason to think he was already home.
    There she is, Bela said when she walked through the door. See, I told you she always comes back.
    But it took Subhash, who was standing at the window, his back to the room, several minutes before he turned around.
    At first he had said nothing to reproach her. For a week his only punishment was in refusing to speak, refusing to acknowledge her, just as her in-laws had ignored her after Udayan was killed. Living with her in the apartment as if she were invisible, as if only Bela were there, his fury contained. The day he broke his silence he said,
    My mother was right. You don’t deserve to be a parent. The privilege was wasted on you.
    She apologized, she told him it would never happen again. Though she hated him for insulting her, she knew that his reaction was justified, and that he would never forgive her for what she’d done.
    While continuing to live in the same house he turned away from her, just as she had turned away from him. The wide berth for herself that she had been seeking in