The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Chapter 2

  In the second year of his Ph.D. Subhash lived on his own, now that Richard, who’d found a teaching job in Chicago, was gone.

  In the spring semester, for three weeks, he boarded a research vessel with a group of students and professors. As the ship pulled away, the water cleaved a foaming trail that vanished even as it was being formed. The shoreline receded, resting calmly like a thin brown snake upon the water. He saw the earth’s mass shrinking, turning faint.

  Under the sun’s glare, as they picked up speed, he felt the wind’s motion on his face, the wild turbulence of the atmosphere. They docked first in Buzzards Bay. A barge had hit rocks off the coast of Falmouth two years before, running aground on a foggy night, spilling nearly two hundred thousand gallons of fuel oil. The wind had pushed it into Wild Harbor. The hydrocarbons had killed off the marsh grass. Fiddler crabs, unable to bury themselves, had frozen in place.

  They lowered nets for trawling fish and coffee cans for sampling the sediment. They learned that the contamination could persist indefinitely.

  They continued on to survey Georges Bank, where the phytoplankton was in bloom, the population of diatoms exploding in great swirls of peacock blue. But on cloudy days the ocean looked opaque, as dark as tar.

  He watched the life that circled the ship, gannets with creamy heads and black-and-white wings, dolphins that leaped in pairs. Humpback whales spouted mists as they breathed, playfully breaching in the water, sometimes swimming beneath the ship without disturbing it, emerging on the other side.

  Sailing even slightly east reminded Subhash of how far away he was from his family. He thought of the time it took to cross even a tiny portion of the earth’s surface.

  Isolated on the ship with the scientists and other students and crew, he felt doubly alone. Unable to fathom his future, severed from his past.

  For a year and a half he had not seen his family. Not sat down with them, at the end of the day, to share a meal. In Tollygunge his family did not have a phone line. He’d sent a telegram to let them know he’d arrived. He was learning to live without hearing their voices, to receive news of them only in writing.

  Udayan’s letters no longer referred to Naxalbari, or ended with slogans. He didn’t mention politics at all. Instead he wrote about football scores, or about this or that in the neighborhood—a certain store closing down, a family they’d known moving away. The latest film by Mrinal Sen.

  He asked Subhash how his studies were going, and how he spent his days in Rhode Island. He wanted to know when Subhash would return to Calcutta, asking him, in one of the letters, if he planned to get married.

  Subhash saved a few of these letters, since it no longer seemed necessary to throw them away. But their blandness puzzled him. Though the handwriting was the same, it was almost as if they’d been written by a different person. He wondered what was happening in Calcutta, what Udayan might be masking. He wondered how he and his parents were getting along.

  Letters from his parents referred only obliquely to Gauri, and only as an example of what not to do. We hope, when the time comes, you will trust us to settle your future, to choose your wife and to be present at your wedding. We hope you will not disregard our wishes, as your brother did.

  He replied, reassuring his mother and father that his marriage was up to them to arrange. He sent a portion of his stipend to help pay for the work on the house, and wrote that he was eager to see them. And yet, day after day, cut off from them, he ignored them.

  Udayan was not alone; he’d remained in Tollygunge, attached to the place, the way of life he’d always known. He’d provoked his parents but was still protected by them. The only difference was that he was married, and that Subhash was missing. And Subhash wondered if the girl, Gauri, had already replaced him.

  • • •

  One cloudy day in summer he went down to the beach at the foot of the campus. At first he saw no one there apart from a fisherman casting for scup at the tip of the jetty. Nothing but shallow waves breaking over the gray-and-yellow stones. Then he noticed a woman walking, with a child and a jet-black dog.

  The woman was locating sticks on the sand and throwing them to the dog. She wore tennis sneakers without socks, a rubber rain slicker. A cotton skirt billowed out around her knees.

  The boy was holding a bucket, and Subhash watched as they untied their sneakers and wandered over the rocks into the tide pools. They were looking for starfish. The boy was frustrated, complaining that he could not find any.

  Subhash rolled up his pants. He removed his shoes and waded in, knowing where they hid. He pried one off a rock, and allowed it to rest, stiff but alive, in his hand. He turned his wrist to reveal the underside, pointing to the eyespots at the tips of the arms.

  Do you know what will happen if I put it for a moment on your arm?

  The boy shook his head.

  It will pull off the little hairs on your skin.

  Does it hurt?

  Not really. Let me show you.

  Where have you come from? the woman asked him.

  Her face was plain but appealing, the pale blue of her eyes like the lining of a mussel shell. She looked a bit older than Subhash. Her hair was long, dark blond, marsh grass in winter.

  India. Calcutta.

  This must be pretty different.

  It is.

  Do you like it here?

  No one had asked him this, until now. He looked out at the water, at the steel piles of the two bridges stretching across the bay: the lower, cantilevered centerpiece of the first, and the soaring steel towers of the second. The symmetrical rise and fall of the Newport Bridge, recently completed, had arched portals and cables that would light up at night.

  He had learned from one of his professors about the bridge’s construction. End to end, he was told, the wires of all the suspended cables would span just over eight thousand miles. It was the distance between America and India; the distance that now separated him from his family.

  He saw the small, squared-off lighthouse, with three windows, like three buttons on the placket of a shirt, that stood at Dutch Island’s tip. There was a wooden pier that ended with a covered hut, where boats were moored, jutting out at one end of the beach. A few sailboats were out, specks of white against the navy sea.

  There are times I think I have discovered the most beautiful place on earth, he said.

  He didn’t belong, but perhaps it didn’t matter. He wanted to tell her that he had been waiting all his life to find Rhode Island. That it was here, in this minute but majestic corner of the world, that he could breathe.

  Her name was Holly. The boy, Joshua, was nine, and his summer vacation had just begun. The dog’s name was Chester. They lived in Matunuck, close to one of the salt ponds. They came to the campus beach every so often to walk the dog. They’d gotten to know it because a woman who was looking after Joshua, on the days Holly worked as a nurse at a small hospital in East Greenwich, lived nearby.

  She didn’t mention what her husband did. But Joshua had referred to him in the course of the afternoon, asking Holly if his father was going to take him fishing that weekend. Subhash supposed he worked at an office at that time of day.

  The next time he noticed Holly’s car parked in the lot he ventured out to say hello. She seemed pleased to see him, waving from a distance, Chester bounding ahead of her, Joshua trailing behind.

  They began walking together, loosely, as they talked, up and down the short beach. Seaweed was strewn everywhere, rockweed with air bladders like textured orange grapes, lonely scraps of sea lettuce, tangled nests of rusty kelp caught in the waves. A jellyfish had drifted up from the Caribbean, spread like a flattened chrysanthemum on the hard sand.

  When he asked her about her background, she said she had been born in Massachusetts, that her family was French Canadian, that she had lived in Rhode Island most of her life. She’d studied nursing at the university. She asked about his studies there, and he explained that after his course work
there was a comprehensive exam to study for, then an original piece of research to conduct, a dissertation to submit.

  How long will all that take?

  Another three years. Maybe more.

  Holly knew all about the seabirds. She told him how to distinguish buffleheads and pintails, gulls and terns. She pointed to the sandpipers sprinting to the water’s edge and back. When he described the heron he’d seen his first autumn in Rhode Island, she told him it had been a juvenile great blue without its plumes.

  Going to her car to fetch binoculars, she showed him how to magnify a group of mergansers, beating their wings in a steadfast direction over the bay.

  Do you know what the baby plovers do?

  No.

  They group themselves in the sky because the adults keep calling to each other. They fly all the way from Nova Scotia to Brazil, resting only occasionally on the waves.

  They sleep on the sea?

  They navigate the world better than we can. As if compasses were built into their brains.

  She was curious about birds in India, and so he described those that she would not have seen. Mynas that nested in the walls of buildings, kokils that cried throughout the city at the start of spring. Spotted owlets hooting at twilight in Tollygunge, tearing apart geckoes and mice.

  And you? she asked. Will you return to Calcutta when you finish?

  If I can find work there.

  For she was right; it was assumed, by his family, by himself, that his life here was temporary.

  What do you miss about it?

  It’s where I was made.

  He told her he had parents, a brother who was slightly younger. He told her he had a sister-in-law now, a woman he had yet to meet.

  Where do your brother and his wife live, now that they’re married?

  With my parents.

  He explained that daughters joined their in-laws after they married, and sons stayed at home. That generations didn’t separate as they did here.

  He knew that it was impossible for Holly, probably for any American woman, to imagine that life. But she considered what he’d described.

  It sounds better, in a way.

  One afternoon Holly spread a bedcover, unpacking cheese sandwiches, sticks of cucumber and carrot, almonds and sliced fruit. She shared this simple food with him, and because the light lingered, it became their dinner. In the course of conversation, while Joshua was playing at a distance from them, she mentioned that she and Joshua’s father lived separately. This had been the case for nearly a year.

  She looked out at the water, her legs folded, her knees bent, her fingers clasped loosely around them. Her hair was like a schoolgirl’s that day, in two braids that trailed over her shoulders.

  He didn’t want to pry. But without his having to ask she said, He’s with another woman now.

  He understood that she was making something clear to him. That though she was a mother, she belonged to no one else.

  It was the presence of Joshua, always with them, always between them, that continued to motivate him to seek Holly out. It kept their friendship in check. Under the broad sky, on the beach with her, his mind emptied. Until now he had worked through evenings and weekends without a break. As if his parents were watching him, monitoring his progress, and he was proving to them that he was not wasting his time.

  One particularly warm day, when she wore a sheer button-down shirt, he saw the contour of one side of her body. The curve of her underarm.

  When she unbuttoned her shirt and removed it, revealing the bathing suit top she wore underneath, he saw that her stomach was soft. Her rounded breasts, set wide apart, faced slightly away from one another. Her shoulders were spotted with freckles from many summers in the sun.

  She lay out on the beach while he played with Joshua at the water’s edge. Joshua called him Subhash, just as Holly did. He was a mild-tempered boy, speaking only when spoken to, drawn to Subhash but also suspicious of him.

  They formed a tentative bond, skipping stones, and playing with Chester, who pranced into the water to wash himself, shaking off his fur, bounding back with a tennis ball in his teeth. Holly lay watching them through her sunglasses, lying on her stomach, sometimes closing her eyes, napping a little.

  When Subhash came back to her, to dry off his quickly tanning skin, she neither lifted her eyes from the book she was reading nor moved away as he settled himself beside her on the blanket, close enough for their bare shoulders nearly to touch.

  He was aware of the great chasms that separated them. It was not only that she was American, and that she was probably ten years older than he was. He was twenty-seven, and he guessed she was about thirty-five. It was that she had already fallen in love, and been married, and had a child, and had her heart broken. He had yet to experience any of those things.

  Then one afternoon, going down to meet her, he saw that Joshua was not there. It was a Friday, and the boy would be spending the night with his father. It was important for Joshua to continue to have contact with him, she said.

  It disturbed Subhash to think of Holly speaking to Joshua’s father, making this plan. Behaving reasonably toward a man who had hurt her. Perhaps even seeing him, in the course of dropping Joshua off.

  When a light rain began to fall soon after the blanket was spread, Holly invited him to join her for dinner at her home. She said there was some stew in the refrigerator that would be enough for them both. And he accepted, not wanting to part from her.

  As the rain turned steadier he followed her toward Matunuck in Richard’s car. He still thought of it that way, even though, when Richard moved to Chicago, Subhash had bought the car from him.

  After the highway the landscape turned flatter and emptier. He drove down a dirt road lined with bulrushes. Then he arrived at the restrained palette of sand and sea and sky.

  He pulled behind her into the driveway, bleached shells crackling under the tires as he slowed to a stop. The back of the cottage overlooked a salt pond. There was no lawn at the front, just a bit of slanted fencing, bound together by rusted wire. Here and there were other single-story cottages, plainly built.

  Why are the windows boarded up? he asked, noticing the house that was closest to hers.

  In case of storms. No one’s living in that one now.

  He gazed at the other homes that were visible, all of them facing the sea. Who owns these?

  Rich people. They come down from Boston or Providence on the weekends, now that it’s summer. Some stay a week or two. They’ll all be gone by fall.

  No one rents them, when they’re empty?

  Sometimes students do, because they’re cheap. In spring I was the only one out here.

  Holly’s cottage was tiny: a kitchen and a sitting area at the front, a bathroom and two bedrooms at the back, the ceilings low. Even the home he’d grown up in had felt more spacious. She’d opened the door without inserting a key.

  The radio was on, reporting the weather as they walked through the door. Showers that evening would be heavy at times. Chester greeted them with his barking, wagging his tail and pressing his body against their legs.

  Did you forget to shut it off? he asked her, as she turned down the radio’s volume.

  I keep it on. I hate coming back to a quiet house.

  He remembered the shortwave radio that he and Udayan had put together, drawing information from all over the world to another isolated place. He realized that in some sense Holly was more alone than he was. Her isolation, without a husband, without neighbors around her, seemed severe.

  The roof of the cottage was as thin as a membrane, the pelting sound of the rain like an avalanche of gravel. Sand was everywhere, between the cushions of the sofa, on the floor, on the round carpet in front of the fireplace where Chester liked to sit.

  Hastily she swept it out, just as the dust was swept out twice a day in Calcutta, then shut the windows. The mantel above the fireplace was piled with stones and shells, pieces of driftwood; there seemed to be little else
decorating the house.

  He looked out the window, seeing the ocean covered with storm clouds, the dark sand at the water’s edge.

  Why bother going to the campus beach, when you have this?

  It’s a change of scene. I love arriving at the bottom of that hill.

  She busied herself in the kitchen. She was turning on the oven, filling the sink with water, soaking lettuce leaves.

  Will you get a fire started?

  He went to the fireplace and looked at it. There were logs to one side, a set of iron tools. Some ashes within. He removed the screen. He noticed a book of matches on top of the mantel.

  Let me show you, she said, already next to him before he needed to turn around and ask.

  She opened a vent that was inside, then arranged the logs and the thinner sticks. Handing him one of the tools, she told him to nudge them together after the flame was lit. He sat monitoring the fire, but she had lit it perfectly. There was nothing to do other than allow it to warm his face and hands as Holly prepared the meal.

  He wondered if this was where she had lived with Joshua’s father, and if this was the home he had left her in. Something told him no. There were only Holly’s things, and Joshua’s. Their two raincoats and summer jackets hanging on pegs by the door, their pairs of boots and sandals lined up beneath.

  Do you mind checking the window over Joshua’s bed? I think I left it open.

  The boy’s room was like a ship’s cabin, constricted and low. He saw the bed beneath the window, covered with a plaid quilt, the pillow damp with rain.

  On the floor, below a bookcase, was a partially completed jigsaw puzzle of horses grazing in a meadow, looking like a frame to a missing image. He crouched down and put a hand into the box, sifting through seemingly identical pieces that were nevertheless distinct.

  When he stood up he noticed a snapshot lying on Joshua’s chest of drawers. Right away Subhash knew it was Joshua’s father, Holly’s husband. A man in shorts, barefoot, on a beach somewhere, holding a smaller version of Joshua on his shoulders. His face tilted up at his son, both of them laughing.