The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The truth is, she had always liked Elise Silva. Bela had forgotten about her, but she remembered looking forward to her class. Last summer, right away, she’d perceived the affection between Elise and her father. The way they’d studied the menu together at breakfast, her father looking over Elise’s shoulder when he might have picked up his own. The way Elise encouraged him to forgo the oatmeal and indulge in Belgian waffles. She observed a tranquility in their faces. She saw how, shyly, in contrast to her mother and father, they were already united.

  She wonders if her father and Elise will eventually marry. But this would mean his divorcing her mother first. Bela will never marry, she knows this about herself. The unhappiness between her parents: this has been the most basic awareness of her life.

  When she was younger she’d been angry at her father, more angry than she’d been at her mother. She’d blamed him for driving her mother away, and for not figuring out a way to bring her back. Perhaps a remnant of that anger is the reason she doesn’t bother to tell him now that she’s living just three hours away in New York City. But this has been her policy: seeing him on her own terms, never making it clear where she is.

  At this point she’s lived nearly half her life apart from him. Eighteen years in Rhode Island, fifteen on her own. She’ll be thirty-four on her next birthday. She craves a different pace sometimes, an alternative to what her life has come to be. But she doesn’t know what else she might do.

  She wishes it were easier, the time she spends with her father. She wishes Rhode Island, which she’d loved as a child, wouldn’t remind her of her mother, who’d hated it. When Bela’s there she’s aware that she is unwanted, that her mother is never coming back for her. In Rhode Island she feels whatever is solid within her draining. And so, though she continues visiting, though she’s more or less made peace with her father, though he is her only family, she can never bear it for very long.

  Years ago, Dr. Grant had helped her to put what she felt into words. She’d told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother’s absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she’d gone.

  Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days overlooking a lowland, a pair of ponds.

  She approaches the workmen. Once again she absorbs their conversation, both foreign and familiar. They have no idea that their talk affects her. She moves down the block, saluting them, wondering where she’ll go after Brooklyn. They see her and wave.

  The next time she visits her father she’ll speak to him in English. Were her mother ever to stand before her, even if Bela could choose any language on earth in which to speak, she would have nothing to say.

  But no, that’s not true. She remains in constant communication with her. Everything in Bela’s life has been a reaction. I am who I am, she would say, I live as I do because of you.

  Chapter 4

  June brought clouds that concealed the sun, storms that turned the sea gray. The atmosphere was raw enough for Subhash to keep wearing corduroy slippers instead of flip-flops; to continue to preheat the electric blanket on the bed. The rhythm of the rain was nocturnal, drumming heavily on the rooftop, tapering to a drizzle in the mornings, pausing but never clearing. It gathered strength and weakened, then intensified again.

  At the side of the house he scraped scales of fungus off the shingles. His basement smelled of mildew, his eyes stinging when he put in the laundry. The soil of his vegetable garden was too wet to till, the roots of the seedlings he’d planted washing away. The rhododendrons shed their purple petals too soon, the peonies barely opening before the stalks bent over, the blossoms smashed across the drenched ground. It was carnal, the smell of so much moisture. The smell of the earth’s decay.

  At night the rain would wake him. He heard it pelting the windows, washing the pitch of the driveway clean. He wondered if it was a sign of something. Of another juncture in his life. He remembered rain falling the first night he spent with Holly, in her cottage. Heavy rain the evening Bela was born.

  He began expecting it to leak through the bricks around the fireplace, to drip through the ceiling, to seep in below the doors. He thought of the monsoon coming every year in Tollygunge. The two ponds flooding, the embankment between them turning invisible.

  In July his garden started filling with weeds. The evenings were long, the morning sky turned light at five. Bela called to say she was arriving. Sometimes she came by train, other times she flew into Boston or Providence. Once she showed up after driving herself hundreds of miles in a borrowed car.

  He vacuumed the carpet in her bedroom, laundered the sheets, though no one had slept on them since Bela’s last visit to Rhode Island. He brought up another box fan from the basement now that it had turned warm and sunny, a bit humid, even, unscrewing the plastic grilles and wiping the blades before setting it into her window.

  On her shelves were certain things they’d discovered together, in the canopy of the woods, or along the shore. A small bird’s nest of woven twigs. The skull of a garter snake. The vertebra of a porpoise, shaped like a propeller. He remembered the excitement of finding these things with her, how she’d preferred them to toys and dolls. He remembered how she’d put pinecones and stones into the hood of her coat, when it was winter, when her pockets got too full, when she was small.

  She would stir up the staid atmosphere of his life. She would scatter her things through the house, shed her clothes on the floor; her long hairs would slow the shower drain. The foods she liked to eat, that she would go to the health food store to buy, would stand out for a while on the kitchen counter: amaranth flakes, chunks of carob, herbal teas. Butter made from almonds, milk derived from rice. Then she would go away.

  He set out for Boston to greet her. He remembered the drive to meet Gauri at the airport, in 1972, believing he would spend his life with her. He remembered coming back from the same airport with Bela, twelve years later, to discover that Gauri was gone.

  She arrived with a duffel bag, a backpack. Her plane had landed from Minnesota. She stood out from the others in their suits and wind-breakers, checking messages on their cell phones, tensely rolling their luggage behind them. She was brown, sturdy, unadorned. She stood undistracted. She approached him, her skin radiant, embracing him with her strong arms.

  How are you, Bela?

  I’m good. I’m well.

  Are you hungry? Would you like to go out to eat somewhere, in Boston?

  I want to go home. Let’s go to the beach tomorrow. How have you been?

  He told her that his health was fine, that he was busy with his research, with an article he was contributing to. He said that the tomatoes in his garden weren’t thriving; there were black spots on the leaves.

  Don’t bother with them. Too much rain this spring. How is Elise?

  He told her Elise was fine. But such small talk felt imbalanced, given that Bela had never brought a boyfriend home.

  She’d never sought his permission, when she was a teenager and still lived with him, to date. She had given him no trouble in that regard. The lack of it troubled him now.

  Even today part of him had hoped that she would surprise him, and appear with a companion at the airport. Someone to care for her, to share the unconventional life she led. I won’t be here forever, he’d once gone as far as to say, conveying the news of Richard’s death by phone. But Bela had only reproached him for being melodramatic.

  He had learned to set aside the responsibility he’d once believed would be his: to do his part to secure a daughter’s future by pairing it with another person’s. If he’d raised her in Calcutta it would have been reasonable for him to bring up the subject of her marriage. Here it was considered meddlesome, out-of-bounds. He had raised her in a place free from
such stigmas. When he’d voiced his concerns one evening to Elise, she had advised him to say nothing, reminding him that so many people these days waited until their thirties to marry, even their forties.

  Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them.

  She missed New England. She always said so as he drove her back to the house. The expression on her face as she looked through the window of the car was one of unfiltered recognition. She asked him to pull over when she saw one of the trucks that appeared here and there in summer, that sold cups of frozen lemonade.

  At the house she opened up her bags, unwrapping fragrant plums and nectarines from sheets of tissue, arranging them in bowls.

  How long will you stay? he asked over dinner, over the lamb and rice he’d made. Two weeks this time?

  She had eaten two helpings. She put her fork down.

  It depends.

  On what? Is something the matter?

  She looked into his eyes. He saw nervousness in hers, combined with eagerness, and a certain resolve. He remembered how she would press her palms together when she was a little girl, bobbing up and down in waist-deep water when she was learning to swim. Pausing, deliberating, preparing for the effort, for the leap of faith it required.

  There’s something I need to tell you, Baba. Some news.

  His heart skipped a beat, then started racing. He understood it now. The reason for the smile that had been on her face when he saw her at the airport, the contentment that he’d sensed all evening, humming within her.

  But no, she had not met anyone. There was no special friend she wanted to introduce him to, to invite to the house.

  She took a deep breath, exhaled.

  I’m pregnant, she said.

  She was more than four months along. The father was not a part of her life, not aware of her condition. He was simply someone Bela had known, with whom she had been involved, perhaps for a year, perhaps merely for an evening. She did not say.

  She wanted to keep the child. She wanted to become a mother. She told him that she’d thought about it carefully, that she was ready.

  She said it was better that the father did not know. It was less complicated that way.

  Why?

  Because he’s not the kind of father I want for my child. She added after a moment, He’s nothing like you.

  I see.

  But he did not see. Who was this man who had turned his daughter into a mother? Who was unaware, undeserving, of paternity?

  He began gently. It’s not so easy, Bela, bringing up a child alone.

  You did it. Lots of people do.

  Ideally, a child has both parents in its life, he continued. A father as well as a mother.

  Does it bother you?

  What?

  That I’m not married?

  You have no fixed income, Bela. No stable home.

  I have this one.

  And you are welcome here, always. But you stay with me two weeks of the year. The rest of the time you are elsewhere.

  Unless.

  Unless?

  She wanted to come home again. She wanted to stay with him, to give birth in Rhode Island. She wanted to provide the same home for her child that he had provided for her. She wanted not to have to work for a while.

  Would that be all right with you?

  The coincidence coursed through him, numbing, bewildering. A pregnant woman, a fatherless child. Arriving in Rhode Island, needing him. It was a reenactment of Bela’s origins. A version of what had brought Gauri to him, years ago.

  After dinner, after clearing the table and washing the dishes, Bela told him she wanted to take a drive.

  Where?

  I want to watch the sunset from Point Judith.

  You don’t need to rest?

  I’m full of energy. Will you come with me?

  But he said he was tired from the trip to Boston and back, that he preferred not to go out again.

  I’ll go, then.

  On your own?

  He could not help it, the thought of her driving the car, something she’d done capably since she was sixteen, worried him now. He had an irrational impulse not to let her out of his sight.

  She shook her head as he handed her the keys. I’ll be careful. I’ll be back in a little while.

  And though they had not seen each other in a year, though she’d asked him to accompany her, he felt, as she must have felt, the need to be alone, to think privately about what she’d said.

  He turned the lights on outside. But inside where he sat, after she left, he did not bother. He watched the sky turn pale before deepening, the silhouettes of the trees turning black, the contrast acute. They looked two-dimensional, lacking texture. After a few more minutes their outlines were indistinguishable from the night sky.

  Gauri had walked out on her. But he knew that his own failing was worse. At least Gauri’s actions had been honest, definitive. Not craven, not ongoing, not stealthily leeching her trust, like his.

  And yet this child, their child, was now determined to be a mother. Already he knew she would be a different mother than Gauri. He sensed the pride, the ease, with which she carried the child.

  Her refusal to reveal who the father was, her insistence upon raising a child without one; he could not set this concern aside. But it wasn’t the prospect of Bela being a single mother that upset him. It was because he was the model she was following; that he was an inspiration to her.

  A conversation between them rose to his memory, from long ago.

  Why aren’t there two of you? she’d asked, sitting across from him.

  The question had startled him. At first he had not understood.

  I have two eyes, she’d persisted. Why do I see only one of you?

  An innocent question, an intelligent one. She’d been six or seven. He’d told her that in fact each eye did take in a different image, at a slightly different angle. He’d covered one of her eyes, then the other, so she could see for herself. So that he’d appeared to double, shifting back and forth.

  He’d told her the brain fused the separate images together. Matching up what was the same, adding in what was different. Making the best of both.

  So I see with my brain, not my eyes?

  She would have to see with her mind now. Somehow, she would have to process what he would say.

  He was still sitting in the dark when, about an hour later, he heard the car’s approach. The sharp croak of the emergency brake, the soft thud of the door.

  He walked to the entry, opening the front door before she rang the bell. He saw her on the other side of the screen that was covered with moths. For years he had worried about how much the information would upset her, but there was now a doubled worry, for the child she was carrying. She had returned to him, seeking stability. Now was the worst time. And yet he was unable to wait another moment.

  The presence of another generation within her was forcing a new beginning, also demanding an end. He had replaced Udayan and turned into her father. But he could not become a grandfather in the same surreptitious way.

  He was afraid Bela would hate him now, just as she hated Gauri. Because she had not married, he had not given her away, symbolically or otherwise, to another man. But this was what he felt he was about to do. He prepared himself to give her back to Udayan. To push her away at the very moment she wanted to come back to him. To risk letting her go.

  What are you doing, Baba? she said, causing the insects to scatter, stepping into the house. It’s getting late. Why are all the lights off? Why are you standing here like this?

  In the darkened hallway, she could not see the tears already forming in his eyes.

  All night they stayed up. Until it grew light again, he attempted to explain.

  I’m not your father.

  Who are you, then?
/>   Your stepfather. Your uncle. Both those things.

  She refused to believe him. She thought something had happened to him, that he’d lost his mind, that perhaps he’d suffered a stroke. She kneeled in front of him on the sofa, gripping him by the shoulders, inches from his face.

  Stop saying that, she said. He sat, passive, in her clutches, and yet he felt as if he were striking her. He was aware of the brute force of the truth, worse than any physical blow. At the same time he had never felt more pathetic, more frail.

  She shouted at him, asking why he’d never told her, pushing him angrily against the sofa. Then she started to cry. She behaved just as he felt—as if he had suddenly died in front of her.

  She started shaking him, willing him to come back to life, as if he were just a shell now, as if the person she’d known were gone.

  As the night wore on and the information settled over her, she asked a few questions about the circumstances of Udayan’s death. She asked a bit about the movement, of which she was ignorant, and was now curious; this was all.

  Was he guilty of anything?

  Certain things. Your mother never told me the full story.

  Well, what did she tell you?

  He told her the truth, that Udayan had plotted violent acts, that he had assembled explosives. But he added that after all these years it remained uncertain, the extent of what he had done.

  Did he know about me? Did he know I was going to be born?

  No.

  She sat across from him, listening. Somewhere in the house, he told her, there were a few letters he’d saved, that Udayan had sent to him. Letters that referred to Gauri as his wife.

  He offered to read them to Bela, but she shook her head. Her face was implacable. Now that he’d come back to life, he was a stranger to her.

  He was unaware of the conversation reaching any conclusion, only of his growing exhausted. He covered one of his eyes with his hand because of the strain, the impossibility of keeping it open. All the sleepless nights, ever since Richard’s death, were crushing him, and he excused himself, unable to stay awake, going up to his bed.