The Lowland

  Holly called him to dinner. They ate pieces of chicken cooked in mushrooms and wine, served with bread warmed in the oven instead of with rice. The taste was complex, flavorful but without heat of any kind.

  He pulled out the bay leaf she’d put in. These grow on a tree behind my family’s home, he said. Only they’re twice the size.

  Will you bring some back for me, when you go to visit them?

  He told her he would, but it felt unreal, in her company, that he would ever be back in Tollygunge, with his family. Even more unreal that Holly would still care to spend time with him when he returned.

  She told him she’d lived in the cottage since last September. Joshua’s father had offered to move out of the old place they’d shared, off Ministerial Road, but she didn’t want to be there. The cottage had belonged to her grandparents. She’d spent time in it as a young girl.

  After the stew there were slices of an apple cake and mugs of lemon tea. As the rain fell harder, lashing the windowpanes, Holly spoke of Joshua. She was worried about how the separation was affecting him. Since his father had left, she said, he’d turned inward, frightened by things that had not frightened him before.

  What things?

  He’s afraid of sleeping alone. You see how close our rooms are. But he’s been coming into my bed at night. He hasn’t done that for years. He’s always loved swimming, but this summer he’s nervous in the water, afraid of the waves. And he doesn’t want to go back to school in the fall.

  He swam at the beach the other day.

  Maybe because you were there.

  Chester began to bark and Holly got up and clipped the leash to his collar. She threw on her rain jacket, and picked up an umbrella by the entrance.

  You stay where it’s dry. I’ll only be a minute or two.

  While he waited for her to return, he went to the sink and washed the dishes. He marveled at the self-sufficient nature of her life. And he was also slightly nervous for her, living alone in such a remote place, without bothering to lock her door. There was no one to help her, apart from the babysitter who looked after Joshua while she worked. Though her parents were alive, though they lived nearby, in another part of Rhode Island, they had not come to take care of her.

  And yet he himself did not feel completely alone with her here. They were accompanied by Chester, and Joshua’s clothes and toys. Even a picture of the man she’d once loved.

  That’s the first night in a long time I haven’t had to do the dishes after dinner, she said, joining him again. The plates and glasses had been put away, the dish towel was drying on a hook.

  I don’t mind.

  You’ll be all right, driving home in this weather? Can I lend you a jacket?

  I’ll be fine.

  Let me walk you under the umbrella to your car.

  He put his hand on the doorknob. But he didn’t want to go; he still didn’t want to leave her. As he stood wavering, he felt the side of her face, pressed lightly against the back of his shirt. Then her hand, resting on his shoulder. Her voice, asking if he’d like to stay.

  Her bedroom was the mirror image of Joshua’s. But because the bed was larger there was room for practically nothing else. Inside this room he was able to forget about what his parents would think, and the consequences of what he was about to do. He forgot about everything other than the body of the woman in the bed with him, guiding his fingers to the hollow of her throat, over the ridge of her collarbones, down toward the softer skin of her breasts.

  The surface of her skin fascinated him. All the minute markings and imperfections, the patterns of freckles and moles and spots. The range of tones and shades she contained, not only the inverse shadows from tanning, highlighting portions of her body he was seeing for the first time, but also an inherent, more subtle mixture, as quietly variegated as a handful of sand, that he could discern only now, under the lamplight.

  She allowed him to touch the slack skin of her belly, the coarse mound, darker than her hair, between her legs. When he paused, uncertain, she looked up at him, incredulous.

  Really?

  He turned his face. I should have told you.

  Subhash, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

  He felt her fingers clasping his erection, positioning it, drawing him near. He was embarrassed, exhilarated. He felt and did what he had only imagined until now. He moved inside her, against her, unaware and also aware, with every nerve of his being, of where he was.

  The rain had stopped. He heard the sound of water, from the leaves of the tree that spread over the roof of her house, a sound that was like sporadic bursts of applause. He lay beside her, meaning to go back to his apartment before the next day began, but he realized after a few minutes that Holly was not simply being quiet. Without warning, she had fallen asleep.

  It felt wrong to wake her, or to go without telling her. So he remained. In the bed that was warm from the heat of their bodies, he was unable at first to fall asleep. He was distracted by her presence in spite of the intimacy they’d just shared.

  In the morning he woke up to the sound of Chester’s breathing, to the smell of his fur, his paws clicking softly around the three sides of the bed. The dog stood patiently, panting by Holly’s side. The room was warm and bright.

  She’d been sleeping with her back to Subhash, nestled against him, unclothed. She got out of bed and pulled on the jeans and blouse she’d been wearing the night before.

  I’ll make coffee, she said.

  He dressed quickly. Stepping out to use the bathroom, he saw the open door to Joshua’s room. The boy’s absence had made it possible. He was there because Joshua was not.

  Holly came back from taking Chester outside, and offered to make breakfast. But Subhash told her he had work to catch up on.

  Should I let you know, the next time Joshua goes over to his father’s?

  He felt uncertain; he saw that the encounter of the night before might be a beginning, not an end. At the same time he was impatient to see her again.

  If you like.

  Opening the door, he saw that the tide was in. The sky was bright, the ocean calm. No sign, apart from all the seaweed that had washed like empty nests up on the sand, of the storm there had been.

  Chapter 3

  He wanted to tell Udayan. Somehow, he wanted to confess to his brother the profound step he’d taken. He wanted to describe who Holly was, what she looked like, how she lived. To discuss the knowledge of women that they now shared. But it wasn’t something he could convey in a letter or a telegram. Not a conversation he could imagine, even if a connection were possible, taking place over the phone.

  Friday evenings: this was when he was able to visit Holly at the cottage and to spend the night. The rest of the time he kept a distance, sometimes meeting her for a sandwich on the beach but nothing more. For most of the week he was able to pretend, if he needed to, that he did not know her, and that nothing in his life had changed.

  But on Friday evenings he drove to her cottage, turning off the highway onto the long wooded road that gave way to the salt marsh. Through Saturday, sometimes as late as Sunday morning, he stayed. She was undemanding, always at ease with him. Trusting, each time they parted, that they would meet again.

  They walked along the beach, on firm sand ribbed by the tide. He swam with her in the cold water, tasting its salt in his mouth. It seemed to enter his bloodstream, into every cell, purifying him, leaving sand in his hair. On his back he floated weightless, his arms spread, the world silenced. Only the sea’s low-pitched hum, and the sun glowing like hot coals behind his eyes.

  Once or twice they did certain ordinary things, as if they were already husband and wife. Going together to the supermarket, filling the cart with food, putting the bags in the trunk of her car. Things he would not have done with a woman, in Calcutta, before getting married.

  In Calcutta, when he was a student, it had been enough to feel an attraction toward certain women. He’d been too shy to pursue them. He didn’t cour
t Holly as he’d observed college friends trying to impress women they were interested in, women who almost always became their wives. As Udayan had surely courted Gauri. He didn’t take Holly to the movies or to restaurants. He didn’t write her notes, delivered, so as not to rouse suspicion from a girl’s parents, by the aid of a friend, asking her to meet him here or there.

  Holly was beyond such things. The only place it made sense for them to meet was at her home, where it was easiest to be, where he liked to spend time, and where she saw to their needs. The hours passed with their talking, long conversations about their families, their pasts, though she didn’t talk about her marriage. She never tired of asking him about his upbringing. The most ordinary details of his life, which would have made no impression on a girl from Calcutta, were what made him distinctive to her.

  One evening, as they drove back together from the grocery store, where they’d bought corn and watermelon to celebrate the Fourth of July, Subhash described his father setting out each morning to the market, carrying a burlap sack in his hand. Shopping for what was available, what was affordable that day. If their mother complained that he hadn’t brought back enough, he’d say, Better to eat a small piece of fish with flavor than a large one without. He’d witnessed a famine of devastating proportions, never taking a single meal for granted.

  Some mornings, Subhash told her, he and Udayan had accompanied their father to shop, or to pick up rationed rice and coal. They had waited with him in the long lines, under the shade of his umbrella when the sun was strong.

  They had helped him to carry back the fish and the vegetables, the mangoes that their father sniffed and prodded, that he sometimes set to further ripen under the bed. On Sundays they bought meat from the butcher, carved from a hanging goat carcass, weighed on the scale, wrapped in a packet of dried leaves.

  Are you close to your father? Holly asked him.

  For some reason he thought of the picture in Joshua’s room, of Joshua on top of his father’s shoulders. Subhash’s father had not been an affectionate parent, but he had been a consistent one.

  I admire him, he said.

  And your brother? Do you two get along?

  He paused. Yes and no.

  So often it’s both, she said.

  • • •

  In her cramped bedroom, setting aside his guilt, he cultivated an ongoing defiance of his parents’ expectations. He was aware that he could get away with it, that it was merely the shoals of physical distance that allowed his defiance to persist.

  He thought of Narasimhan as an ally now; Narasimhan and his American wife. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to lead a similar life with Holly. To live the rest of his life in America, to disregard his parents, to make his own family with her.

  At the same time he knew that it was impossible. That she was an American was the least of it. Her situation, her child, her age, the fact that she was technically another man’s wife, all of it would be unthinkable to his parents, unacceptable. They would judge her for those things.

  He didn’t want to put Holly through that. And yet he continued to see her on Fridays, forging this new clandestine path.

  Udayan would have understood. Perhaps he would even respect him for it. But there was nothing Udayan could say that Subhash did not already know; that he was involved with a woman he didn’t intend to marry. A woman whose company he was growing used to, but whom, perhaps due to his own ambivalence, he didn’t love.

  And so he divulged nothing about Holly to anyone. The affair remained concealed, inaccessible. His parents’ disapproval threatened to undermine what he was doing, lodged like a silent gatekeeper at the back of his mind. But without his parents there, he was able to keep pushing back their objection, farther and farther, like the promise of the horizon, anticipated from a ship, that one never reached.

  One Friday he was unable to see her; Holly phoned to say there had been a last-minute change in plans, and Joshua was not going to go to his father’s. Subhash understood that these were the terms. And yet, that weekend, he found himself wishing the plan would change.

  The following weekend, when he visited her again, the phone rang as they were having dinner. She began talking, trailing the cord so that she was able to sit on the sofa, on her own. He realized it was Joshua’s father.

  Joshua had come down with a fever, and Holly was telling her husband to put him into a lukewarm bath. Explaining how much medicine to give.

  Subhash was surprised, also troubled, that she could speak to him calmly, without acrimony. The person on the other end of the line remained deeply familiar to her. He saw that because of Joshua, in spite of their separation, their lives were permanently tied.

  He sat at the table with his back to her, not eating, waiting for the conversation to end. He looked at the calendar that was on the wall next to Holly’s phone.

  The following day was August 15, Indian Independence. A holiday for the country, lights on government buildings, flag hoisting and parades. An ordinary day here.

  Holly hung up the phone. You look upset, she observed. Is something wrong?

  I just remembered something.

  What’s that?

  It was his first memory, August 1947, though sometimes he wondered if it was only a comforting trick of the mind. For it was a night the entire country claimed to remember, and the recollection that was his had always been saturated by his parents’ retelling.

  It had been the only thing on his parents’ minds that evening, as fireworks went off in Delhi, as ministers were sworn in. As Gandhi fasted to bring peace to Calcutta, as the country was born. Udayan had been just two, Subhash closer to four. He remembered the unfamiliar touch of a doctor’s hand on his forehead, the slight slaps on his arms, on the soles of his feet. The weight of the quilts when chills overtook them.

  He remembered turning to his younger brother, both of them shivering. He remembered the unfocused glaze in Udayan’s eyes, the flush of his face, the nonsensical things he’d said.

  My parents were worried that it was typhoid, he told Holly. They were worried, for a few days, that we might die, the way another young boy in our neighborhood recently had. Even now, when they talk about it, they sound afraid. As if they’re still waiting for our fevers to break.

  That’s what happens when you become a parent, Holly told him. Time stops when something threatens them. The meaning goes away.

  Chapter 4

  One weekend in September, when Joshua was visiting his father, Holly suggested that the two of them go to a part of Rhode Island he hadn’t seen. They took the ferry from Galilee to Block Island, traveling more than ten miles out to sea, and walked together from the harbor to an inn.

  There had been a last-minute cancellation, and so they were given a room on the top floor, nicer than the one Holly had booked, with a view of the ocean, a four-poster bed. They had come to see the kestrels, starting to fly south now over the island. Unpacking their things for the weekend, she presented him with a gift: it was a pair of binoculars, in a brown leather case.

  This is unnecessary, he said, admiring them.

  I thought it was time to stop passing mine between us.

  He kissed her shoulder, her mouth. He had nothing else to give her in exchange. He studied the little compass that was affixed between the lenses, and placed the strap around his neck.

  The island would soon be shutting down for the season, the tourists disappearing, only one or two restaurants remaining open for the tiny population that never left. The aster was in bloom, the poison ivy turning red. But the sun shone and the air was calm, a perfect late summer’s day.

  They rented bikes and cycled around. It took him a moment to regain his balance. He had not been on a bicycle since he was a boy, since he and Udayan had learned to ride on the quiet lanes of Tollygunge. He remembered the front wheel wobbling, one of them on the seat, the other one pedaling the heavy black bicycle they’d managed to share.

  Folded in his pocket was a letter from
Udayan. It had come the day before.

  A sparrow got into the house today, into the room we used to share. The shutters were open, it must have hopped in through the bars. I found it flapping around. And I thought of you, thinking how much this nuisance would have excited you. It was as if you’d come back. Of course it flew away as soon as I walked in.

  Being twenty-six feels fine so far. And you, in another two years, will turn thirty. A new phase of life for us both, more than halfway now to fifty!

  I have already grown quite boring, still teaching, tutoring students. Let’s hope they’ll go on to accomplish greater things than I did. The best part of the day is coming home to Gauri. We read together, we listen to the radio, and so the evenings pass.

  Did you know twenty-six was the age Castro was imprisoned? By then he’d already led the attack on the Moncada Barracks. And did you know, his brother was in jail with him at the same time? They were kept isolated, forbidden to see one another.

  Speaking of communication, I was reading about Marconi the other day. He was just twenty-seven when he was sitting in Newfoundland, listening for the letter S from Cornwall. His wireless station on Cape Cod looks close to where you are. It’s in a place called Wellfleet. Have you been there?

  The letter consoled Subhash, also confused him. Invoking codes and signals, games of the past, the singular bond he and Subhash had shared. Invoking Castro, but describing quiet evenings at home with his wife. He wondered if Udayan had traded one passion for another, and his commitment was to Gauri now.

  He followed Holly along curving narrow roads, past the enormous salt pond that bisected the island and the glacial ravines. Past rolling meadows and turreted properties. The pastures were barren, with boulders here and there, partially framed by stone walls. He noticed that there were hardly any trees.

  Quickly they traveled from one side of the island to the other, only about three miles across. The kestrels glided over the bluff and out to sea, their wings motionless, their bodies seeming to drift backward when the wind was strong. Holly pointed to Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, visible that day across the water.