The Lowland

unifying the rooms like a moss that spread from one doorway to the next.
    She opened the doors and found certain things: bobby pins in the bathroom, a stapler on the dusty surface of her mother’s desk, a pair of scuffed sandals in the closet. A few books on the shelves.
    Her father was sitting on the sofa, not seeing Bela as she approached, not even though she stood a few feet away. His face looked different, as if the bones had shifted. As if some of them weren’t there.
    Baba?
    On the table beside him was a sheet of paper. A letter.
    He put out his hand, seeking hers.
    I have not made this decision in haste. If anything, I have been thinking about it for too many years. You tried your best. I tried, too, but not as well. We tried to believe we would be a companion to one another.
    Around Bela I am only reminded of all the ways I’ve failed her. In a way I wish she were young enough simply to forget me. Now she will come to hate me. Should she want to speak to me, or eventually to see me, I will do my best to arrange this.
    Tell her whatever you think will be least painful for her to hear, but I hope you will tell her the truth. That I have not died or disappeared but that I have moved to California, because a college has hired me to teach. Though it will be of no comfort to her, tell her that I will miss her.
    As for Udayan, as you know, for many years I wondered how and when we might tell her, what would be the right age, but it no longer matters. You are her father. As you pointed out long ago, and as I have long come to accept, you have proven yourself to be a better parent than I. I believe you are a better father than Udayan would have been. Given what I’m doing, it makes no sense for her connection with you to undergo any change.
    My address is uncertain, but you can reach me care of the university. I will not ask anything else of you; the money they offer will be enough. You are no doubt furious with me. I will understand if you do not wish to communicate. I hope in time that my absence will make things easier, not harder, for you and for Bela. I think it will. Good luck, Subhash, and good-bye. In exchange for all you have done for me, I leave Bela to you.
    The letter had been composed in Bengali, so there was no danger of Bela deciphering its contents. He conveyed a version of what it said, somehow managing to look into her confused face.
    She was old enough to know how far away California was. When she asked when Gauri was coming back, he said he didn’t know.
    He was prepared to calm her, to quell her shock. But it was she who comforted him in that moment, putting her arms around him, her strong slim body exuding its concern. Holding him tightly, as if he would float away from her otherwise. I’ll never go away from you, Baba, she said.
    He knew the marriage, which had been their own choice, had become a forced arrangement day after day. But there had never been a conversation in which she expressed a wish to leave.
    He’d sometimes thought, in the back of his mind, that after Bela went off to college, after she moved away from them, he and Gauri might begin to live apart. That a new phase could begin when Bela was more independent, when she needed them less.
    He’d assumed, because of Bela, that Gauri would tolerate their marriage for now, as he’d been tolerating it. He never thought she would lack the patience to wait.
    Of the three women in Subhash’s life—his mother, Gauri, Bela—there remained only one. His mother’s mind was now a wilderness. There was no shape to it any longer, no clearing. It had been overtaken, overgrown. She’d been converted permanently by Udayan’s death.
    That wilderness was her only freedom. She was locked inside her home, taken out once each day. Deepa would prevent her from endangering herself, from embarrassing herself, from making further scenes.
    But Gauri’s mind had saved her. It had enabled her to stand upright. It had cleared a path for her. It had prepared her to walk away.
    What else had her mother left behind? On Bela’s right arm, just above the elbow, in a spot she had to twist her arm to see, a freckled constellation of her mother’s darker pigment, an almost solid patch at once discreet and conspicuous. A trace of the alternative complexion she might have had. On the ring finger of her right hand, just below the knuckle, was a single spot of this same shade.
    In the house in Rhode