The Lowland

building to another. Confronting her, exposing her. Apprehending her, the way the police had apprehended Udayan.
    But in twenty years no one had come. She had not been summoned back. She had been given what she’d demanded, granted exactly the freedom she had sought.
    By the time Bela was ten, Gauri had been able, somehow, to imagine her doubled, at twenty. By then Bela had spent most of her time at school, she’d spent weekends sometimes at the home of a friend. She’d had no trouble spending two weeks at overnight Girl Scout camp in summer. She’d sat between Gauri and Subhash at dinner, put her plate into the sink when finished and then drifted upstairs.
    Still, Gauri had waited until she’d been offered a job, until the occasion of Subhash’s return to Calcutta. She knew that the errors she’d made during the first years of Bela’s life were not things she could go back and fix. Her attempts kept collapsing, because the foundation was not there. Over time this feeling ate away at her, exposing only her self-interest, her ineptitude. Her inability to abide herself.
    She’d convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition with him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had been her own squandering. Her own withdrawal, covert, ineluctable. With her own hand she’d painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.
    During that first flight across the country the plane was so bright she’d put on sunglasses. For much of it she had been able to see the ground, her forehead pressed against the oval window. Below her a river glinted like a crudely bent wire. Brown and gold earth was veined with crevasses that resembled rivers also, but were in fact void. Precipices rose like islands, cracked from the sun’s heat. There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow.
    There were thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads. There was a geometric section, like a patterned carpet in shades of pink and green and tan. Composed of circular shapes in various sizes, close together, some slightly overlapping, some with a slice neatly missing. She learned from the person sitting next to her that they were crops. But to Gauri’s eyes they were like a pile of faceless coins.
    They crossed the unpopulated desert, featureless and flat, and finally reached the opposite edge of America, and the low sprawl of Los Angeles, dense and ongoing. A place she knew would contain her, where she knew she would be conveniently lost. Within her was the guilt and the adrenaline unleashed by what she’d done, the sheer exhaustion of effort. As if, in order to escape Rhode Island, she’d walked every step of the way.
    She entered a new dimension, a place where a fresh life was given to her. The three hours on her watch that separated her from Bela and Subhash were like a physical barrier, as massive as the mountains she’d flown over to get here. She’d done it, the worst thing that she could think of doing.
    After her first job she’d moved briefly north, to teach in Santa Cruz, and then in San Francisco. But she had come back to Southern California to live out her life, in a small college town flanked by biscuit-colored mountains on the other side of the freeway. A campus mainly of undergraduates, at a small but well-run school built after World War II.
    It was impossible, at such an intimate institution, to lead an anonymous life. Her job was not only to teach students but to mentor them, to know them. She was expected to maintain generous office hours, to be approachable.
    In the classroom she led groups of ten or twelve, introducing them to the great books of philosophy, to the unanswerable questions, to centuries of contention and debate. She taught a survey of political philosophy, a course on metaphysics, a senior seminar on the hermeneutics of time. She had established her areas of specialization, German Idealism and the philosophy of the Frankfurt School.
    She broke her larger classes into discussion groups, sometimes inviting small batches of students to her apartment, making tea for them on Sunday afternoons. During office hours she spoke to them in her book-lined office in the soft light of a lamp she’d brought from home. She listened to them confess, with terror, with dread,