The Lowland

the bus stop. Her father left the house early. Her mother, after staying up in her study late at night, liked to sleep late.
    There was no one to observe whether she had toast or cereal, whether or not she finished, though she always did, spooning up the last of the sweetened milk, putting the dirty bowl into the sink, running a little water in it so that it would be easier to rinse clean. After school, if her mother was out at the university, she was now old enough to retrieve a key her father kept in an empty bird feeder and let herself in.
    Every morning she went upstairs, down the short hallway, and knocked on her parents’ door to tell her mother she was leaving, not wanting to disturb her mother but also hoping she’d been heard.
    Then one morning, needing a paper clip to keep two pages of a book report together, she went into her mother’s study. She found her mother with her back turned away from the door, asleep on the sofa, one arm flung over her head. She began to understand that the room her mother referred to as a study also served as her bedroom. And that her father slept in the other bedroom, alone.
    How old were you in that picture? she asked her father as they lay together in bed, under the mosquito netting, before beginning another day.
    Which picture?
    In Dida’s room, where we eat. The picture next to Dadu’s that she stares at all the time.
    Her father was lying on his back. She saw him close his eyes. That was my brother, he said.
    You have a brother?
    I used to. He died.
    When?
    Before you were born.
    Why?
    He had an illness.
    What kind?
    An infection. Something the doctors were unable to cure.
    He was my uncle?
    Yes, Bela.
    Do you remember him?
    He turned to face her. He stroked her head with his hand. He’s a part of me. I grew up with him, he said.
    Do you miss him?
    I do.
    Dida says it’s a picture of you.
    She’s getting old, Bela. She confuses things, sometimes.
    He began to take her out during the days. They walked to the mosque at the corner to get a taxi or a rickshaw. Sometimes they walked to the tram depot and took a tram. He took her with him if he had a meeting with a colleague, leaving her to sit in a chair in a high-ceilinged corridor, giving her Indian comic books to read.
    He took her to darkened Chinese restaurants for lunch, for plates of chow mein. To shops so that she could buy colored glass bracelets and drawing paper, ribbons for her hair. Pretty notebooks to write and draw in, translucent erasers that smelled of fruit.
    He took her to the zoo garden to visit white tigers that napped on rocks. On the busy sidewalks he stopped in front of beggars who pointed to their stomachs, and tossed coins onto their plates.
    One day they went into a sari store to buy saris for her grandmother and Deepa. White ones for her grandmother, colored ones for Deepa. They were made of cotton, rolled up on the shelves like fat starchy scrolls that the salesman would shake out for them. In the window of the shop were fancier ones made of silk, draped on mannequins.
    Can we buy one for Ma? Bela asked.
    She never wears them, Bela.
    But she might.
    The salesman began to shake out the fancier material, but her father shook his head. We’ll find something else for your mother, he said. He took her to a jewelry store, where Bela chose a necklace of tiger’s-eye beads. And they bought the one thing her mother had requested, a pair of slippers made of pale reddish leather, her father telling the salesman, at the last minute, that they’d take two pairs instead of one.
    In the taxis they sat in traffic, pollution filling her chest, coating the skin of her arms with a fine dark grit. She heard the clanging of trams and the honking of car horns, the bells of colorful rickshaws pulled by hand. Rumbling busses with conductors thumping their sides, reciting their routes, hollering for passengers to get on. Sometimes she and her father sat for what felt like an hour on the congested roads. Her father would get frustrated, tempted to stop the meter, to get out and walk. But Bela preferred it to being stuck in her grandmother’s house.
    Passing a street lined with bookstalls, her father mentioned that it was where her mother had gone to college. Bela wondered if she used to look like the female students she saw on the sidewalk, passing in and out of the gate. Young women wearing saris, their long hair braided, pressing handkerchiefs to their faces, carrying cotton