The Lowland (33 page)

The guests stood in circles, talking. Some photographs were taken by distant relatives for whom the gathering was a reunion as well as a funeral. For those who had traveled long distances it was an opportunity to explore Rhode Island, to drive to Newport the following day.

Elise Silva was a neighbor.

She came up to the sliding glass window where Subhash was standing, taking in the view of the descending birch-filled property behind Richard’s house. When he turned to look at her, she introduced herself.

I saw Richard and Claire a few weeks ago, hand in hand like they’d just met, she said. She told him that there was a small pond behind the trees. When it froze over, Elise said, Richard and Claire would go skating with their elbows linked.

She had olive skin, nearly as tan as his. Her hair had turned white but her brows were still dark. The hair was pulled back as Bela sometimes wore hers, a single clip fastened at the back of her head so that it would not interfere with her face. She wore a black dress with long sleeves, gray stockings, a silver chain around her neck.

They spoke of how long they’d both known Richard. But there was another connection Elise and Subhash shared. It emerged when he told her his name, and then she asked if by any chance he was related to a student named Bela Mitra, who had taken her American history class many years ago at the local high school.

I’m her father.

He still felt nervous, proclaiming it that way.

He looked at this woman who had once taught her. Elise Silva was one of so many things he had not known about his daughter, after she’d reached a certain age. He still remembered the names of some of her
teachers in elementary school. But by high school it was just the report card, the list of grades he scanned.

You don’t know me, and yet you’ve let me drive your daughter to Hancock Shaker Village, she said. She had taken Bela with a small group of other students on a field trip there.

My ignorance is shameful. I don’t even know where Hancock Shaker Village is.

She laughed. That is shameful.

Why does one visit?

She explained. A religious sect begun in the eighteenth century, dedicated to celibacy, to simple life. A utopian population whose very faith had caused their numbers to dwindle. She asked where Bela lived now.

Nowhere. She’s a nomad.

Let me guess, she carries her life around in a backpack, doing things to make the world a better place?

How did you know?

Some kids form early. They’re focused. Bela was one.

He had a sip of wine. She had no choice, he said.

Elise looked at him, nodding. Indicating that she knew the circumstances, that Gauri had left.

She talked to you about it?

No. But her teachers were told.

Do you still teach?

After fifty-five I couldn’t keep up with them. I suppose I needed a change.

She worked part-time at the local historical society now, she said. She was transferring archives online, editing their newsletter.

He told her he’d been reading about the Great Swamp Massacre. He asked if any records remained.

Oh sure. You can even find musket balls if you poke around the obelisk.

I tried to find it once. I got lost.

It’s tricky. You used to have to pay a farmer who maintained the road.

He felt tired from standing. He realized he had not eaten. I’m going to get some food. Would you like to join me?

They approached the buffet table. Richard’s widow stood at one end. She was crying, being embraced by one of her guests.

I went through this, years ago, Elise said. She had watched her husband die from leukemia at forty-six. He’d left her with three children, two sons and a daughter. The youngest had been four. After her husband’s death she’d moved with her children into her parents’ home.

I’m sorry.

I had my family. Sounds like, with Bela, you were on your own.

Her daughter had married a Portuguese engineer and lived in Lisbon. It was where Elise’s ancestors were from, but she’d never visited Europe until her daughter’s wedding. Her sons lived in Denver and Austin. For a while, after she retired, she’d split her time among those places, helping out with grandchildren, going to Lisbon once a year. But she had moved back to Rhode Island about a decade ago, after her father died, to be closer to her mother.

She mentioned a tour the following weekend, a house in the village that the historical society had restored. She handed him a postcard that was in her purse, with the details.

He accepted the card, thanking her. He folded it to fit into his jacket pocket.

Tell Bela hello from me, she said, leaving him with no one to talk to, turning to someone else in the room.

After the funeral, for several nights, sometimes as late as three o’clock in the morning, he lay awake, unable to lose consciousness for any sustained period. The house was silent, the world surrounding it silent, no cars on the road at that hour. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing, or the sound his throat made if he swallowed.

The house, always to his regret, was too far from the bay to hear the waves. But sometimes the wind was strong enough to approximate the roar of the sea as it blew inland. A violent power, insubstantial, rooted in nothingness. Threatening, as he lay unmoving under his blanket, to tear the rooms of the house from the foundation, to fell the trembling trees, to demolish the structure of his life.

A colleague, noticing his fatigue at work, suggested getting more exercise, or a glass of wine in the evenings with dinner. A cup of chamomile
tea. There were pills he could take, but he resisted this option. Already there was a pill to lower his cholesterol, another to raise his potassium, a daily aspirin to promote the passage of blood to his heart through his veins. He stored them in a plastic box with seven compartments, labeled with the days of the week, counting them out with his morning oatmeal.

Again it was anxiety that kept him up, though not the same anxiety that used to rouse him from sleep after Gauri first left and he was alone with Bela in the house, asleep in the next room. Aware that she was suffering, aware that he was the only person in the world responsible for raising her.

He remembered Bela as an infant, when the distinction between night and day did not exist for her: awake, asleep, awake, asleep, shallow alternating phases of an hour or two. He’d read somewhere that at the start of life these concepts were reversed, that time within the womb was the inverse of time outside of it. He remembered learning, the first time he was at sea, about how whales and dolphins swam close to the surface of the water, how they emerged to draw air into their lungs, each breath a conscious act.

He drew breath through his nostrils, hoping this essential function, as faithful as the beating of his heart, might release him for a few hours. His eyes were closed, but his mind was unblinking.

It was like this now since the news of Richard’s death: a disproportionate awareness of being alive. He yearned for the deep and continuous sleep that refused to accommodate him. A release from the nightly torment that took place in his bed.

When he was younger wakefulness would not have troubled him; he would have taken advantage of the extra hours to read an article, or step outside to look at the stars. At times even his body felt full of energy, and he wished it were daylight, so that he could get up and walk along the bike path. He would walk as far as the bench where he’d bumped into Richard two years ago, to sit and think.

Instead, in his bed, he found himself traveling into the deeper past, sifting at random through the detritus of his boyhood. He revisited the years before he left his family. His father returning from the market every morning, the fish his mother would slice and salt and fry for breakfast, silver-skinned pieces spilling out of a burlap bag.

He saw his mother hunched over the black sewing machine she used to operate with her feet, pumping a pedal up and down, unable to talk because of the pins she held between her lips. She sat before it in the evenings, hemming petticoats for her customers, stitching curtains for the house. Udayan would oil the machine for her, fix the motor from time to time. A bird in his yard in Rhode Island, its call a rapid stopping and starting, mimicked the sound of it.

He saw his father teaching him and Udayan how to play chess, drawing the squares on a sheet of paper. He saw his brother hunching over, cross-legged on the floor, extending his index finger as he was finishing up a meal, to consume the final sauce that coated his plate.

Udayan was everywhere. Walking with Subhash to school in the mornings, walking home in the afternoons. Studying in the evenings on the bed they’d shared. Books spread between them, memorizing so many things. Writing in a notebook, concentrating, his face just inches above the page. Lying beside him at night, listening to the jackals howling in the Tolly Club. Quick-footed, assured, controlling the ball in the field behind the lowland.

These minor impressions had formed him. They had washed away long ago, only to reappear, reconstituted. They kept distracting him, like pieces of landscape viewed from a train. The landscape was familiar, but certain things always jolted him, as if seen for the first time.

Until he left Calcutta, Subhash’s life was hardly capable of leaving a trace. He could have put everything belonging to him into a single grocery bag. When he was growing up in his parents’ house, what had been his? His toothbrush, the cigarettes he and Udayan used to smoke in secret, the cloth bag in which he carried his textbooks. A few articles of clothing. Until he went to America he had not had his own room. He had belonged to his parents and to Udayan, and they to him. That was all.

Here he had been quietly successful, educating himself, finding engaging work, sending Bela to college. It had been enough, materially speaking.

But he was still too weak to tell Bela what she deserved to know. Still pretending to be her father, still hoarding what had not been earned. Udayan had been right in calling him self-serving.

The need to tell her hung over him, terrified him. It was the greatest
unfinished business of his life. She was old enough, strong enough to handle it, and yet, because she was all he loved, he could not muster the strength.

He was increasingly aware these days of how much he owned, of the ongoing effort his life required. The thousands of trips to the grocery store he had made, all the heaping bags of food, first paper, then plastic, now canvas sacks brought from home, unloaded from the trunk of the car and unpacked and stored in cupboards, all to sustain a single body. The pills he swallowed every morning. The cinnamon sticks he pried out of a tin to flavor the oil for a pot of curry or dal.

One day he would die, like Richard, and his things would remain for other people to puzzle over or sort through, to throw away. Already his brain had stopped holding on to directions he would never have to follow again, the names of people he would speak to only once. So much of what occupied his mind was negligible. There was only one thing, the story of Udayan, that he wanted to lay bare.

He recognized the house at once. It was the rooming house he’d once lived in with Richard, across from the hand pump and the village well. A white wooden house with black shutters. Because the addresses of the houses had changed since then, because there had not been a picture on the postcard Elise had given him, he had not known.

Elise smiled when she saw him, handing him his ticket off a fat spool, his change. She looked different today, wearing a loose shift of sage-colored linen, her silver hair framing her face, a pair of sunglasses on her head.

Thank you for coming. How have you been?

I know this house. I used to live here. With Richard.

You did?

When I first got here, yes. You didn’t know?

Her face changed, the smile fading, but there was a look of concern now in her eyes. I had no idea.

She didn’t share what he’d told her with the rest of the group once the tour began. The layout had changed, the number of rooms fewer than they’d been. The rooms were sparsely furnished, the doorways fitted with iron latches, the furniture made of dark wood. The tables
had dropped leaves that partially concealed their pedestals, like a modest woman’s skirt. The surface of the writing desk could be tucked away and locked. The lintel of the fireplace was made of oak.

He remembered nothing. And yet he had lived here, he had looked out through these small windows as he’d studied. A time so long ago, when he was new to Rhode Island, when Udayan was still alive. Here he had read Udayan’s letters. Here he had looked at a photograph of Gauri, wondering about her, not realizing that he was to marry her.

Elise pointed to the different styles of chairs that were popular: slat-back, banister back, fiddleback. The street had been the town’s commercial district, she told the group. Next door there had been a hat shop, and after that a barbershop, where the village men went to get shaved.

This house had first been a tailor’s shop and residence, then a lawyer’s office, then a family’s home for four generations. It was cut up into a rooming house in the sixties. When the last landlord died, he’d bequeathed it to the historical society, and slowly they had raised funds to restore it, collaborating with a local art gallery so that there would be exhibits in the rooms downstairs.

He was struck by the effort to preserve such places. The corner cupboard encased platters and bowls people had eaten from, candlesticks from which their light had burned. The kitchen walls displayed the ladles and griddles they had cooked with. The pine floors were the same hue they’d been when those people had walked through the rooms.

The effect was disquieting. He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he’d landed and made his life, was not his. Like Bela, it had accepted him, while at the same time keeping a distance. Among its people, its trees, its particular geography he had studied and grown to love, he was still a visitor. Perhaps the worst form of visitor: one who had refused to leave.