The Lowland

father said it was time to go. The bathing suit was returned, a cycle rickshaw with a tin carriage and a sapphire-blue bench summoned to take them back to her grandmother’s house.
    She could not picture her grandmother at the club where they’d just been, among the people who sat at tables, laughing, with cigarettes and glasses of beer. Men asking for cocktails, their wives prettily dressed. She could not picture her grandmother anywhere but on the terrace of the house in Tollygunge, with chains put across the staircase when Deepa was not there, or taking her brief walk to the edge of the lowland, where there was only dirty water and garbage to see.
    Bela missed her mother suddenly. She’d never spent a birthday without her. In the morning she’d hoped for a phone call, but her father told her the line was out of order.
    Can we try her now?
    It’s early. She might still be sleeping.
    Bela pictured her mother lying on the sofa in her study. Books and papers strewn across the carpet, the hum of a box fan in the window. The day’s light, starting to creep in.
    In Rhode Island, on her birthdays, Bela would wake to the fragrance of milk warming slowly on the stove. There, undisturbed, it thickened. Her mother stepped out of her study to monitor it, to add the sugar, the rice.
    Later in the day, in the afternoon, once it had been poured and slightly cooled, her mother would call Bela to have her first taste of the peach-colored pudding. She would let her scrape off the tastiest bit, the congealed milk that coated the pan.
    Baba?
    Yes, Bela?
    Can we go back to the club another day?
    Perhaps the next time we visit, her father said.
    He told her he wanted her to rest, that it was a long journey back to Rhode Island. Five of the six weeks in India had passed. Already her father’s hair was beginning to grow back.
    The rickshaw sped forward, past the huts and stalls that lined the road, selling flowers, selling sweets, selling cigarettes and sodas. When the mosque on the corner approached, the rickshaw slowed down. A conch shell was being blown, to signal the start of the evening.
    Stop here, her father told the driver, reaching for his wallet, saying that they would walk the rest of the way.
    3.
    They took a bus from Logan Airport to Providence, then a taxi to the house. Bela was wearing the mirrored bangles around her wrist. Her face and arms were tanned. The braids her grandmother had tightly woven the evening of their departure reached the middle of her back.
    Everything was just as they’d left it. The bright blue of the sky, the roads and homes. The bay in the distance, filled with sailboats. The beaches filled with people. The sound of a lawn mower. The salty air, the leaves on the trees.
    As they approached the house she saw that the grass had grown nearly to her shoulders. The different varieties sprouted like wheat, like straw. It was tall enough to reach the mailbox, to conceal the shrubs on either side of the door. No longer green at that height, some sections reddish for lack of water. The pale specks at their tips seemed attached to nothing. Like clusters of tiny insects that didn’t move.
    Looks like you’ve been away awhile, the taxi driver said.
    He pulled into the driveway, helping her father to unload the suitcases from the trunk, bringing them up to the house.
    Bela plunged into the grass as if it were the sea, her body briefly disappearing. Pushing her way through it, her arms spread wide. The feathery ends shimmered in the sunlight. Softly they scraped her face, the backs of her legs. She rang the doorbell, waiting for her mother to open the door.
    When the door did not open, her father had to unlock it with his key. Inside the house they called out. There was no food in the refrigerator. Though the day was warm, the windows were shut and locked. The rooms dark, the curtains drawn, the soil of the houseplants dry.
    At first Bela reacted as if to a challenge, a game. For it was the one game her mother had liked playing with her when she was little. Hiding behind the shower curtain, crouching in a closet, wedged behind a door. Never breaking down, never coughing after a few minutes elapsed and Bela could not find her, never once giving her a clue.
    She walked like a detective through the house. Down the set of half steps to the living room and kitchen, up the half steps to where the bedrooms were, where the hall was carpeted in the same tightly woven olive shade,