The Lowland

  One weekend, stopping at a yard sale, Bela and her father found a brown metal file cabinet among the odds and ends for sale. Her father made sure the drawers opened and closed easily, then bought it. He carried it from the trunk of the car into her mother’s study, knocking on her door, surprising her with this gift.

  They found her at her typewriter, holding her head the way she always did when she concentrated, staring up at them. Her elbows on the desk, the last two of her fingers pressed against her cheekbone, making a V, creating a partial triangle that framed her eye.

  Her father handed her a tiny key that dangled like an earring from a hoop. I thought you could use this, he said.

  Her mother stood up, clearing things off the floor so that Bela and her father could enter the room more easily. Where would you like it? her father asked, and her mother said that the corner was best.

  To Bela’s surprise her mother wasn’t angry, that day, that they’d interrupted. She asked them if they were hungry, and emerged from her study, and prepared them lunch.

  Every day Bela heard the drawers opening and closing, containing the pages her mother typed. She had a dream one night, of returning home from school and finding their house burned down to a skeletal frame, like the houses she would construct out of Popsicle sticks when she was younger, with only the file cabinet, intact, on the grass.

  One day in Tollygunge, pacing up and down the stairs, she noticed small rings bolted to either side of the landing. Black iron hoops. Deepa was wiping down the staircase. She was twisting a rag into a bucket of water, working on her hands and knees.

  What are these? Bela asked, tugging at one of the rings with her fingers.

  They’re to make sure she doesn’t go out if I’m not here.

  Who?

  Your grandmother.

  How does it work?

  I put a chain across.

  Why?

  She might get lost otherwise.

  Like her grandmother, Bela was not able to leave the house in Tollygunge on her own. She was not permitted even to move through it freely, to go down to the courtyard or to visit the roof without permission.

  She was not able to join the children she sometimes saw playing in the street, or to enter the kitchen to help herself to a snack. If she was thirsty for a glass of the cooled boiled water in her water bottle, she had to ask.

  But in Rhode Island, since third grade, her mother had let Bela wander through the campus in the afternoons. She’d done this with Alice, another girl around her age, who had lived in their apartment complex. They were told to remain on the campus, this was all. But the campus was enormous to her, with streets to cross, cars to be mindful of. Easily she and Alice might have lost their way.

  She and Alice had played on the campus as other children might have visited a park, amusing themselves by climbing up and down steps, racing across the plaza in front of the fine arts building, chasing each other on the quadrangle. They stopped in at the library, where Alice’s mother worked.

  They would go to her desk, sit at empty cubicles. Swiveling on chairs, eating snacks that Alice’s mother kept in her desk drawer. They would drink cold water at the fountain, and hide among the shelves of books.

  A few minutes later they’d be outdoors again. They liked to go to the greenhouse that flanked the botany building, surrounded by a flower garden filled with butterflies. They played in the student union on rainy days.

  Bela had prided herself on being unsupervised, finding the way home without having to ask. They were to listen to the clock chiming, to head back in winter by half past four.

  She’d mentioned nothing of these occasions to her father. Knowing he would have worried, she’d kept them a secret from him. And so, until they moved away from campus, these afternoons remained a bond between Bela and her mother, a closeness based on the fact that they spent that time apart. She’d given her mother those hours to herself, not wanting to fail at this, not wanting to threaten this link.

  By now Bela was old enough to wake up on her own, to retrieve the box of cereal left on the counter in the mornings, her hands steady enough to pour milk. When she was ready to leave the house, she walked unaccompanied down the street to the bus stop. Her father left the house early. Her mother, after staying up in her study at night, liked to sleep late.

  There was no one to observe whether she had toast or cereal, whether or not she finished, though she always did, spooning up the last of the sweetened milk, putting the dirty bowl into the sink, running a little water in it so that it would be easier to rinse clean. After school, if her mother was out at the university, she was now old enough to retrieve a key her father kept in an empty bird feeder and let herself in.

  Every morning she went upstairs, down the short hallway, and knocked on her parents’ door to tell her mother she was leaving, not wanting to disturb her mother but also hoping she’d been heard.

  Then one morning, needing a paper clip to keep two pages of a book report together, she went into her mother’s study. She found her mother with her back turned away from the door, asleep on the sofa, one arm flung over her head. She began to understand that the room her mother referred to as a study also served as her bedroom. And that her father slept in the other bedroom, alone.

  How old were you in that picture? she asked her father as they lay together in bed, under the mosquito netting, before beginning another day.

  Which picture?

  In Dida’s room, where we eat. The picture next to Dadu’s that she stares at all the time.

  Her father was lying on his back. She saw him close his eyes. That was my brother, he said.

  You have a brother?

  I used to. He died.

  When?

  Before you were born.

  Why?

  He had an illness.

  What kind?

  An infection. Something the doctors were unable to cure.

  He was my uncle?

  Yes, Bela.

  Do you remember him?

  He turned to face her. He stroked her head with his hand. He’s a part of me. I grew up with him, he said.

  Do you miss him?

  I do.

  Dida says it’s a picture of you.

  She’s getting old, Bela. She confuses things, sometimes.

  He began to take her out during the days. They walked to the mosque at the corner to get a taxi or a rickshaw. Sometimes they walked to the tram depot and took a tram. He took her with him if he had a meeting with a colleague, leaving her to sit in a chair in a high-ceilinged corridor, giving her Indian comic books to read.

  He took her to darkened Chinese restaurants for lunch, for plates of chow mein. To stalls so that she could buy colored glass bracelets and drawing paper, ribbons for her hair. Pretty notebooks to write and draw in, translucent erasers that smelled of fruit.

  He took her to the zoo garden to visit white tigers that napped on rocks. On the busy sidewalks he stopped in front of beggars who pointed to their stomachs, and tossed coins onto their plates.

  One day they went into a sari store to buy saris for her grandmother and Deepa. White ones for her grandmother, colored ones for Deepa. They were made of cotton, rolled up on the shelves like fat starchy scrolls that the salesman would shake out for them. In the window of the shop were fancier ones made of silk, draped on mannequins.

  Can we buy one for Ma? Bela asked.

  She never wears them, Bela.

  But she might.

  The salesman began to shake out the fancier material, but her father shook his head. We’ll find something else for your mother, he said.

  He took her to a jewelry store, where Bela chose a necklace of tiger’s-eye beads. And they bought the one thing her mother had requested, a pair of slippers made of pale reddish leather, her father telling the salesman, at the last minute, that they’d take two pairs instead of one.

  In the taxis they sat in traffic, pollution filling her chest, coating the skin of her arms with a fine dark grit. She h
eard the clanging of trams and the beeping of car horns, the bells of colorful rickshaws pulled by hand. Rumbling busses with conductors thumping their sides, reciting their routes, hollering for passengers to get on.

  Sometimes she and her father sat for what felt like an hour on the congested roads. Her father would get frustrated, tempted to stop the meter, to get out and walk. But Bela preferred it to being stuck in her grandmother’s house.

  Passing a street lined with bookstalls, her father mentioned that it was where her mother had gone to college. Bela wondered if she used to resemble the female students she saw on the sidewalk, going in and out of the gate. Young women wearing saris, their long hair braided, pressing handkerchiefs to their faces, carrying cotton satchels of books.

  On the streets she noticed certain buildings decorated, standing out from the rest. Though it was August they were draped with Christmas lights, their facades disguised behind colorful cloths. In the taxi one day they were stopped close to one of these buildings, behind a row of cars. A thin red carpet was spread over the entrance, ushering in guests. Music was playing, people in fancy clothes were walking in.

  What’s happening there?

  A wedding. See the car up ahead, covered with flowers?

  Yes.

  The groom is about to step out of it.

  And the bride?

  She’s waiting for him inside.

  Did you and Ma get married like that?

  No, Bela.

  Why not?

  I had to get back to Rhode Island. There wasn’t time for a big celebration.

  I don’t want a big celebration, either.

  You have a while to think about that.

  Ma told me once that you were strangers when you were married.

  This couple may not know each other very well, either.

  What if they don’t like each other?

  They’ll try.

  Who decides how people get married?

  Sometimes parents arrange it. Sometimes the bride and groom decide for themselves.

  Did you and Ma decide for yourselves?

  We did. We decided for ourselves.

  They spent the afternoon of her twelfth birthday at a club not far from her grandparents’ house. An acquaintance of her father’s, an old college friend, was a member, and he had invited them to be his guests.

  There was a pool for her to swim in. A bathing suit magically produced, because her mother had not packed one. Tables to eat and drink at, overlooking the grounds.

  There were other children for her to play with in the pool and on the playground, to speak to in English. They were a mix of Indians, most of them visiting, like Bela, from other countries, and some Europeans. She felt emboldened to speak with them, telling them her name. She was given a pony ride. There were cheese and cucumber sandwiches for her to eat afterward, a bowl of spicy tomato soup. A slab of melting ice cream on a plate.

  Her father and his friend sat talking to one another, drinking tea at one of the outdoor tables, followed by a beer, and then she and her father walked along paths that covered their shoes with red dust, along the edges of a golf course, past potted flowers, among trees filled with songbirds.

  Her father paused to watch the golfers. They stopped under an enormous banyan. Her father explained that it was a tree that began life attached to another, sprouting from its crown. The mass of twisted strands, hanging down like ropes, were aerial roots surrounding the host. Over time they coalesced, forming additional trunks, encircling a hollow core if the host happened to die.

  Posing her before the tree, her father took her picture. As they were sitting together on a bench, he produced a small packet wrapped in newspaper from his shirt pocket. It was a pair of mirrored bangles she’d admired one day in the market, that he’d gone back to buy.

  You’re enjoying yourself?

  She nodded. She felt him lean toward her and kiss the top of her head.

  I’m glad we came today. The rain’s held off. Not like the day you were born.

  They continued on, walking farther away from the clubhouse, past clearings where packs of jackals were resting. She felt mosquitoes beginning to sting her ankles, her calves.

  Where are we going?

  There was an area back this way, where my brother and I used to play.

  You came here when you were growing up?

  He hesitated, then admitted that once or twice, at the very back of the property, he and his brother had snuck in.

  Why did you have to sneak in?

  It wasn’t our place.

  Why not?

  Things were different back then.

  He noticed something a little ways off, on the grass, and walked over to pick it up. It was a golf ball. They kept walking.

  Whose idea was it to sneak in?

  Udayan’s. He was the brave one.

  Did you get caught?

  Eventually.

  Her father stopped. He tossed the golf ball away. He was looking to either side of him, then up at the trees. He seemed confused.

  Should we turn back, Baba?

  Yes, I think we should.

  She wanted to remain at the club, to run on the lawn and catch the fireflies that the other children who were there said came out at night. She wanted to sleep in one of the guest rooms, to take a hot bath in a tub, and spend the following day as she’d spent this one, swimming in the pool and visiting the reading room filled with English books and magazines.

  But her 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?

  The line’s still down, Bela. You’ll see her soon.

  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 they approached the mosque on the corner, 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.

  Chapter 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.

  Ev
erything 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, 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.