The Lowland

children’s camps. She was uncovetous, uninterested in buying things.
    The summer after she graduated from high school she didn’t travel with him when news came from Deepa, saying his mother had suffered a stroke. She told him she wanted to stay in Rhode Island, to spend time with the friends from whom she’d soon be separated. He arranged for her to stay with one of them. And though he didn’t like the idea of being so far away from Bela for a few weeks, in a way it was a relief, not to have to take her back to Tollygunge again.
    It was unclear to Subhash, the degree to which his mother recognized him. She spoke to him in fragments, sometimes as if he were Udayan, or as if they were boys. She told him not to muddy his shoes in the lowland, not to stay out late playing games.
    He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality. The coordination of her legs was gone, so there was no longer the need to place a chain across the stairwell. She was bound to the terrace, on the top floor of the house, for good.
    He understood that perhaps he no longer existed in his mother’s mind, that she’d already let go of him. He’d defied her by marrying Gauri; for years he’d avoided her, leading his life in a place she’d never seen. And yet, as a child, he’d spent so many hours sitting by her side.
    But now the distance between them was not merely physical, or even emotional. It was no longer negotiable. It triggered a delayed burst of responsibility in Subhash. An attempt, now that it no longer mattered, to be present. Every year for the following three years he traveled back to Calcutta for a few weeks in winter, to see her. He sat beside her, reading newspapers, drinking tea with her. Feeling as cut off as Bela must have felt, from Gauri.
    He stayed in Tollygunge as if he were a young boy again, never straying farther than the mosque at the corner. Only walking through the enclave now and again, always stopping at Udayan’s memorial, then turning back. The rest of the city, alive, importunate, held no meaning for him. It was simply a passageway from the airport and back. He had walked away from Calcutta just as Gauri had walked away from Bela. And by now he had neglected it for too long.
    In the course of his last visit his mother had needed to be hospitalized. Her heart was too weak, she’d needed oxygen. He’d spent all day at her side, arriving early each morning at the hospital to hold her hand. The end was coming, and the doctors told him his visit had been well timed. But the attack happened late at night.
    Bijoli did not die in Tollygunge, in the house to which she’d clung. And though Subhash had returned to be close to her, from so far, he’d arrived, that final morning at the hospital, too late. She’d died on her own, in a room with strangers, denying him the opportunity to watch her pass.
    For college Bela chose a small liberal arts school in the Midwest. He drove her there, crossing Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, occasionally letting her take the wheel. He met her roommate, her roommate’s mother and father, and then he left her there. It was an alternative curriculum, without exams or letter grades. The atypical method suited her. According to the lengthy evaluation letters her professors wrote at the end of the year, she did well. She majored in environmental science. For her senior thesis she studied the adverse effects of pesticide runoff in a local river.
    But graduate school, which he hoped would be the next step, was of no interest to her. She told him she did not want to spend her life inside a university, researching things. She had learned enough from books and labs. She didn’t want to cut herself off that way.
    She said this to him not without some disdain. It was the closest she came to rejecting how both he and Gauri lived. And he remembered Udayan, suddenly turning cold to his education, just as Bela had.
    She talked at times about the Peace Corps, wanting to travel to other parts of the world. He wondered if she would join, if maybe she would want to go back to India. She was twenty-one, old enough to make such decisions. Instead, after graduating, she moved not terribly far away from him, to Western Massachusetts, where she got a job on a farm.
    He thought at first it was in a research capacity that she was there, to test the soil or help cultivate a new crop breed. But no, she was there to