The Lowland

that they were not able to hand in a paper because of a personal crisis that was overwhelming their lives. On occasion she handed them a tissue from the box she kept in her drawer, telling them not to worry, to file for an incomplete, telling them that she understood.
    The obligation to be open to others, to forge these alliances, had initially been an unexpected strain. She had wanted California to swallow her; she had wanted to disappear. But over time these temporary relationships came to fill a certain space. Her colleagues welcomed her. Her students admired her, were loyal. For three or four months they depended on her, they accompanied her, they grew fond of her, and then they went away. She came to miss the measured contact, once the classes ended. She became an alternate guardian to a few.
    Because of her background she was given a special responsibility to oversee students who came from India. Once a year she invited them to dinner, catering biriyani and kebabs. The students tended to be wealthy, pleased to be in America, not intimidated by it. They’d been made in a different India. At ease, it seemed, anywhere in the world.
    Certain former students sent her notes at the holidays, invited her to their weddings. She made time for them, because she came to have the time, because she saw to the needs of no one else.
    Her output, apart from the teaching, was steady, esteemed by a handful of peers. She had published three books in her life: a feminist appraisal of Hegel, an analysis of interpretive methods in Horkheimer, and the book that had been based on her dissertation, that had grown out of a blundering essay she’d written for Professor Weiss: The Epistemology of Expectation in Schopenhauer.
    She remembered the slow birth of the dissertation, behind a closed door in Rhode Island. Aware that the exigencies of her work were masking those of being a mother. She remembered fearing, as the years passed, as the process of the dissertation deepened, that it would never be done, that perhaps she would fail at this objective, too. But Weiss had called her after reading it, telling her he was proud of her.
    She might have spoken to Professor Weiss in German now, having studied it for so long, then spending a year, her fortieth, as a visiting scholar at Heidelberg University. Weiss was still alive. She’d heard that he’d moved to Florida for his retirement. He had helped Gauri get into the doctoral program in Boston, and then get her first teaching job, in California. He was the one to mention it to her, wanting to do her a favor, always keeping her in mind, not realizing that she would choose this job over the job of raising her child.
    She’d not kept in touch with him. She imagined word had spread, and that people in Rhode Island, at the university, had learned of what she’d done. And she knew that Weiss, who had mentored her, who had believed in her, who had always asked after Bela, would have lost his respect for her.
    Her ideology was isolated from practice, neutered by its long tenure in the academy. Long ago she’d wanted her work to be in deference to Udayan, but by now it was a betrayal of everything he had believed in. All the ways he had influenced and inspired her, shrewdly cultivated for her own intellectual gain.
    A few times a year she attended conferences, held in various parts of the country, or in foreign ones. They were the only long-distance journeys she made. At times she enjoyed the brief change of scene, the shift in routine. At times she enjoyed sharing the infrequent fruit of her solitary labor.
    The embroidered turquoise shawl she liked to have on hand during flights was always folded up inside her carry-on bag. The one thing Subhash had given her that she’d kept. She had traveled back to the East Coast, though she’d avoided Providence, even Boston and New Haven. It felt too close. Too illicit, to cross that line.
    Impractically, she’d remained a citizen of her birthplace. She was still a green-card holder, renewing her Indian passport when it expired. But she had never returned to India. It meant standing in separate lines when she traveled, it meant extra questions these days, fingerprints when she reentered the United States from abroad. But she was always welcomed back, ushered through.
    For the sake of retirement, for the sake of simplifying the end of her life, she would need to become an American. In this way, too, Udayan would soon be