The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Always at the end of a queue, in the shadow of others, she believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own.

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.

She was not only ashamed of her feelings but also frightened that the final task Udayan had left her with, the long task of raising Bela, was not bringing meaning to her life.

Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night. She had no wish to overcome it. Rather, it was something upon which she’d come to depend, with which she’d entered by now into a relationship, more satisfying and enduring than the relationships she’d experienced in either of her marriages.

Instead, in his bed, he found himself traveling into the deeper past, sifting at random through the detritus of his boyhood.