The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Grasping the dashboard, as if to push it away; this was the only way she could bear the ride to the hospital, her body threatening to split apart unless she held herself in that position.

  Now the sky released a hot pouring summer rain. It forced Subhash to slow down, unable to see more than a few feet in front of him through the window, in spite of the windshield wipers pumping back and forth. She imagined the car spinning out of control, skidding into the opposite lane of oncoming cars.

  She remembered the fog on the way to the airport, the night she was leaving Calcutta. That night she had been desperate to move through it, to get out. Now, in spite of the pain, in spite of the urgency, part of her wanted the car to stop. Part of her wanted the pregnancy simply to continue, for the pain to subside but for the baby not to be born. To delay, if only for a little longer, its arrival.

  But Subhash leaned forward in his seat and drove on, sending up great sprays of water from the rolling tires of the car, until the small brick hospital, set on a hilltop, came into view.

  It was a girl, as she was certain it would be. She was relieved that her hope had been fulfilled, and that a young version of Udayan had not come back to her. And in a way it was better to give the child a name Subhash had thought of, to grant him that claim.

  As she’d pushed she’d clenched her teeth, her body convulsed, but she had not screamed. It was eight in the evening, still light outside, no longer raining. The cord was clipped and suddenly the child was no longer a part of Gauri. Others were bundling her, cleaning and weighing and warming her. A little later, when Subhash was called up from the waiting room, Bela was placed in his arms.

  She dreamed of gulls on the beach in Rhode Island, screeching and attacking one another, blood and feathers, dismembered wings on the sand. Again, as it was after Udayan’s death, there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby’s lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood.

  After bringing her home they tended to her, Subhash in his way, Gauri in hers. At first a part of her resisted sharing Bela with him, including him in the experience that had been solely hers. It was one thing for him to be her husband, another to be Bela’s father. For his name to be on the birth certificate, a falsehood no one questioned.

  Seeking only the milk from her body, Bela rested, burrowed against Gauri’s breast. Her child’s mind contained nothing. Her heart was simply an instrument for pumping blood.

  She demanded little, and yet she demanded everything. The awareness of her was all-consuming. It absorbed every particle in Gauri’s body, every nerve. But the nurse in the hospital had been right, she could not do it all by herself, and every time Subhash took over, so that she could get some rest or take a shower or drink a cup of tea before it turned cold, every time he picked Bela up when she cried so that Gauri did not have to, she could not deny the relief she felt at being allowed, however briefly, to step aside.

  Framed between two pillows arranged on either side of her, Bela slept. When she was awake, she would slowly twist her neck and her cloudy eyes would intently search the corners of the room, as if already she knew that something was missing.

  When she was sleeping, she breathed with her whole body, like an animal or a machine. This fascinated Gauri but also preoccupied her: the grand effort of each breath, one after the next for as long as she would live, drawn from the air shared by everyone else in the world.

  While pregnant she had felt capable. But now Gauri was aware of how the slightest oversight on her part could cause Bela to be destroyed. Carrying her out of the hospital, through the lobby that led to the parking lot, where people streamed by briskly without a glance, she had felt terrified, aware that America was just as dangerous a place as any. Aware that there was no one, other than Subhash, to protect Bela from harm.

  She began to imagine scenarios, unbidden but persistent. Grotesque images of Bela’s head snapping back, her neck breaking. When Bela fell asleep at her breast, Gauri imagined falling asleep also, forgetting to unlatch her from her nipple, Bela’s capacity to breathe put to an end. At night, alone with her in the bedroom, Gauri started to worry that Bela would fall to the floor, or that Gauri would roll on top of her, crushing her.

  The day they took her for a walk through campus, Gauri stood on the terrace of the student union, with Bela in her arms, waiting for Subhash to buy some Coca-Colas. At first she stood at the edge of the terrace, but then she backed away, afraid of losing control of her muscles, afraid of dropping her daughter. Standing still on a sultry late summer’s day, without a trace of breeze, she was nevertheless afraid that a sudden wind would pry Bela from her grasp.

  Later that evening, in the apartment, knowing she shouldn’t, wanting to see what would happen, she loosened her grip ever so slightly behind Bela’s neck, relaxing her own shoulders. But Bela’s instinct for survival was reflexive. Instantly she stirred from a deep sleep, protesting.

  There was only one way for Gauri to minimize these images, to rid her mind of these impulses. To handle Bela less, to ask Subhash to hold her instead.

  She reminded herself that all mothers needed assistance. She reminded herself that Bela was her child and Udayan’s; that Subhash, for all his helpfulness, for the role he’d deftly assumed, was simply playing a part. I’m her mother, she told herself. I don’t have to try as hard.

  He entered the bedroom without knocking now, the minute Bela woke up in the middle of the night and cried. Picking her up, walking her around the apartment. He was unprepared for how small she was. Her only weight seemed to come from the blankets wrapped around her, nothing more.

  Already, she seemed to be recognizing him. To accept him, and to allow him to ignore the reality that he was an uncle, an imposter. She reacted to the sound of his voice as she lay in a flat cradle he formed by crossing one of his legs and resting his ankle on top of the opposite knee. In that nest of his folded limbs, cushioned against his thigh, she lay contentedly, seeking him with her eyes. He felt purposeful as he held her, essential to the life she’d begun.

  One night he switched off the television and entered the bedroom with Bela. Gauri was turned away from him, asleep. He perched on the other side of the bed, then leaned back, placing Bela’s moist black head on his chest, quieting her. He extended his legs on the bed so that Bela could stretch out.

  He remained on top of the covers, his eyes open in the dark. Though Bela rested on top of his body, his awareness of Gauri, no longer pregnant, was greater. His curiosity, his desire for her, had only intensified. For now he marveled at how she had produced the child that lay against him, trusting, tranquil, her cheek turned to one side.

  When he opened his eyes Bela was no longer on his chest but beside him, in Gauri’s arms, feeding. The room was dark, the blinds down. Birds were chirping. His body was warm, still clothed.

  What time is it?

  Morning.

  He had fallen asleep; they had passed the night in the same bed. Lying next to her on top of a shared sheet, with Bela between them.

  When he realized what had happened he sat up, apologizing.

  Gauri shook her head. She was looking down at Bela, but then she turned her face to him. She put out a hand, not using it to touch him, but offering it to him.

  Stay.

  She told him it had been reassuring, having him with her in the room. She said that she was ready, that it had been long enough.

  Her altered appearance made it easier: her shortened hair, her face that was turning gaunt again after the baby’s birth, the slacks and tops she now wore exclusively. Also the effects of Bela’s birth, the shadows that were beneath her eyes, the smell of milk on her skin, so that her body was marked less by the fact of Udayan impregnating her, and more by the infant they now shared.

  At first she expressed no obvious desire, only a willingness. And yet this combination of indifference and intent excited him. They set up the playpen for Bela, and when she was in
it, asleep, the bed was theirs.

  She lay on her stomach, or on her side. Her back to him, her head turned, her eyes closed. He pushed the material of her nightgown up to her waist. He saw the tapering shape of it. The long straight valley bisecting her back.

  Inside of her, surrounded by her, he worried that she would never accept him, that she would never fully belong to him, even as he breathed in the smell of her hair, and clasped her breast in his hand.

  Her skin was uniform, the color even. No tan lines, not a blemish or a fleck of variation as there had been, everywhere, on Holly’s body. No nicks on her calves from shaving, not the prickly texture he expected to find on her buttocks and thighs. It was almost disturbing in its softness, like an underbelly that ought not to be exposed.

  And yet it did not bruise from his weight, did not redden or swell from the pressure of his teeth or hands. The briny odor between her legs, transferred temporarily to his fingers when he probed her, was absent the following morning when he sought it again.

  She did not speak to him, but after the first few times she began to take his hand and put it where she needed it to be. She began turning to him, kneeling up on the bed, facing him. She reached the moment when her breathing quickened and was audible, her skin glowing, her body tensely held.

  It was the only moment he felt no part of her resisting him. She watched as he finished up outside her, wiping what spilled on the surface of her abdomen, or watching as he directed the proof of his desire into his cupped hand. She bore his weight when he collapsed on top of her, when he had nothing more to give.

  Chapter 4

  At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.

  It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.

  Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said.

  Pronounced slightly differently, Bela’s name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night.

  Bela’s yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its contents limited. Lacking chronology, randomly rearranged.

  So that one day she told Gauri, who was combing a stubborn knot out of Bela’s thick hair:

  I want short hair, like yesterday.

  It had been many months ago that Bela’s hair was short. And at first, this was what Gauri told her. She explained that it took more than a day for hair to grow long again. She told Bela that her hair had been short perhaps one hundred yesterdays ago, not one.

  But for Bela, three months ago and the day before were the same.

  She was frustrated with Gauri for contradicting her. Disappointment traveled like a dark cloud across her face. There was no obvious trace in it of Gauri or of Udayan. How was it that her forehead was faintly convex, that the inner corners of her eyes dipped down? The placement of the eyes was distinctive. Gauri was aware of the contrast of her own toffee skin to Bela’s lighter complexion, a creamy fairness she had received from Gauri’s mother-in-law.

  Where is my other jacket? Bela asked another day, as Gauri handed her a new one. They were on their way to school.

  Which?

  The yellow one from yesterday.

  It was true, there had been a yellow one the previous spring, with a hood trimmed in fur. Too small for her now, given away to a church on campus that took in used clothes.

  That was last year’s jacket. It fit you when you were three.

  Yesterday I was three.

  She was waiting for Bela to stop marching this way and that in the corridor. To stand still so that Gauri could put her arms into the sleeves of the jacket, so that they could be on their way. When Bela resisted, she gripped her by the shoulders.

  That hurt. You hurt me.

  Bela, we’re in a hurry.

  The jacket was on now, unfastened. Bela wanted to pull up the zipper. Her fumbling attempt to do this was delaying them further, and after a moment Gauri could not bear it, she pried Bela’s fingers away.

  Baba lets me do it myself.

  Your father’s not here.

  She tugged the zipper shut at the base of Bela’s throat, perhaps a bit harder than she should have, almost catching the skin. She chided herself for being impatient. She wondered when her daughter would know the full meaning of what Gauri had just said.

  After dropping off Bela she bought a cup of coffee at the student union. Every summer and again every winter, at the start of each term, hundreds of students stood in long lines, registering for classes. From time to time Gauri would pick up a catalogue abandoned on the floor. She looked at the offerings in the philosophy department, circling classes that appealed to her. She remembered sitting in on the ancient philosophy class, secretly, after she’d first arrived in Rhode Island.

  There were no classes that term during the time Bela was at school. Instead Gauri walked over to the library, to sit and read. The effort of concentration eliminated, if only for an hour or two, the obligation of anything else. It eliminated her awareness of those hours passing.

  She saw time; now she sought to understand it. She filled notebooks with her questions, observations. Did it exist independently, in the physical world, or in the mind’s apprehension? Was it perceived only by humans? What caused certain moments to swell up like hours, certain years to dwindle to a number of days? Did animals have a sense of it passing, when they lost a mate, or killed their prey?

  In Hindu philosophy the three tenses—past, present, future—were said to exist simultaneously in God. God was timeless, but time was personified as the god of death.

  Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance.

  On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away.

  In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined.

  He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time reversal invariance, in which there was no fundamental distinction between forward and backward, when the motions of particles were precisely defined.

  The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. Each year began with an unmarked diary. A version of a clock, printed and bound. She never recorded her impressions in them. Instead she used them to write rough drafts of compositions, or work out sums. Even when she was a child, each page of a diary she had yet to turn, containing events yet to be experienced, filled her with apprehension. Like walking up a staircase in darkness. What proof was there that another December would come?

  Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren’t the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.

  The Greeks had had no clear notion of it. For them the future had been indeterminable. In Aristotle’s teaching, a man could never say for certain if there would be a sea battle tomorro
w.

  Willfully anticipating, in ignorance and in hope—this was how most people lived. Her in-laws had expected Subhash and Udayan to grow old in the house they had built for them. They had wanted Subhash to return to Tollygunge and marry someone else. Udayan had given his life for the future, expecting society itself to change. Gauri had expected to stay married to him, not for less than two years but always. In Rhode Island, Subhash was expecting him and Gauri and Bela to carry on as a family. For Gauri to be a mother to Bela, and to remain a wife to him.

  At times Gauri derived comfort from Bela’s version of history. According to Bela, Udayan might still have been living the day before, and Gauri might still be married to him, when really almost five years had passed since he was killed. Almost five years, she’d been married to Subhash.

  What she’d seen from the terrace, the evening the police came for Udayan, now formed a hole in her vision. Space shielded her more effectively than time: the great distance between Rhode Island and Tollygunge. As if her gaze had to span an ocean and continents to see. It had caused those moments to recede, to turn less and less visible, then invisible. But she knew they were there. What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.

  Bela’s birth, on the other hand, remained its own yesterday for Gauri. That summer evening formed a vivid tableau that seemed just to have occurred. She recalled the rain on the way to the hospital, the face of the nurse who’d stood at her side, the view of the marina out the window. The feel of the hospital gown against her skin, a needle inserted into the top of her hand. Just yesterday, it seemed, she had held Bela and looked at her for the first time. She remembered the ballast of pregnancy, suddenly missing. She remembered astonishment that such a specific-looking being, contained for so long within her, had emerged.