"What are you doing?" I said.

They leapt apart, startled, realizing I was there. Spread out on the gray carpet, arranged like a game of Solitaire, were about a dozen photographs of my mother taken from the box my father had sealed up and hidden after her death. Even from a distance the banished images assaulted me: my mother wearing a swimsuit by the edge of the pool at our old club in Bombay. My mother sitting with me on her lap on the brown wooden steps of our house in Cambridge. My mother and my father standing before I was born in front of a snow-caked hedge.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I said now.

Rupa looked at me, her dark eyes flashing, and Piu began to cry. I walked into the room and picked up the pictures, putting them face down on my old dresser. Then I grabbed Rupa by the shoulders from where she sat crouched on the floor, shaking her forcefully. Her body had gone limp, her thin legs wobbling in their cabled black tights. I wanted to throw her against the wall, but instead I managed to direct her to the folding cot and forced her to sit, knowing that I was squeezing too hard. "Tell me, where did you find these?" I demanded, just inches from her face.

Now Rupa began to cry as well, but she pointed to the closet. I walked toward it, but Piu, still sobbing on the carpet and shaking her head, said "It is not there anymore." She crawled toward the cot where her sister was sitting and pulled out a black shoebox, white at the edges, the masking tape that had once bound it shut lifted away. This time it was Piu that I grabbed, dragging her away from the shoebox as if her proximity would contaminate it, and thrusting her aside.

"You have no right to be looking at those," I told them. "They don't belong to you, do you understand?"

They nodded, Rupa trembling as if with cold, Piu's lips pressed tightly together. Tears fell down their faces but words continued to pour out of me, words that should not have been uttered, should not have been heard. "Well, you've seen it for yourselves, how beautiful my mother was. How much prettier and more sophisticated than yours. Your mother is nothing in comparison. Just a servant to wash my father's clothes and cook his meals. That's the only reason she's here, the only reason both of you are here."

Now the girls were no longer crying, their shiny black heads staring down at the carpet, not moving, saying nothing in reply. I took the shoebox and the rest of my mother's photographs and left the room. I wanted to remove the pictures from the house, as far as I could. I returned to the guestroom, hastily packed my things, and then got into my car, telling myself that my father and Chitra would be back from their party soon enough. My actions felt spontaneous, almost involuntary, propelled by the adrenaline of a state of emergency, but I realize now that on some level I had been thinking of running away for days. Rupa and Piu never came out of their room, never opened the door to see or question what I was doing, and when I started the car they did not rush out of the house to beg me to stay.

I had no idea where to go, but I got on the highway and started driving north. I quickly left Massachusetts, driving through a small piece of New Hampshire and over the bridge into Maine. As I approached Portland, I turned onto a smaller, two-lane road that occasionally hugged the sea. I drove down dark, empty stretches punctuated now and then by a cluster of churches and restaurants and homes. I could not see the ocean but detected its salty smell and the jerking sound of the wind, a sound like that of a fire burning, penetrating the closed doors and windows of my car. I thought at first that I would drive through the night, but eventually I began to feel tired and looked for a place to sleep. Most of the hotels and motels were shut for the season, and the ones that looked open were closed because it was so late. I was considering pulling onto the shoulder to nap when I spotted a motel with a twenty-four-hour sign glowing in the parking lot.

The next day I was woken by the calls of sea birds. I sat up in a sagging brass bed and saw the water for the first time, outside my window. I remember that the window was disproportionately small for the room, as if the motel itself were a ship. The water was choppy, a gray a shade or two darker than the sky, its nearness and activity unknown to me as I'd slept. The room was dank and clammy, wallpapered with small blue anchors against a white ground, and the empty medicine cabinet in the bathroom was edged with rust. The desk clerk told me that there was a restaurant a few miles down the road, and that I was somewhere on Penobscot Bay.

After breakfast I walked around the town and along the harbor, past boarded-up businesses and homes of people who would occupy them in summer. But I spent most of the day in the motel, either looking at the ocean from the armchair in my room or downstairs at the bar, drinking, feeling sick to my stomach about what had happened the night before, afraid of myself and ashamed. I kept seeing Rupa and Piu with their heads bent, their bodies prepared to be shaken again, absorbing all the things I was too afraid to tell my father and Chitra. And I thought of them in the house after I'd left them there, knowing how frightened they were to be alone. I wondered what had happened when my father and Chitra returned from the party, what Rupa and Piu had told them. I assumed they'd told everything, that they had done the dirty work of expressing what I could not. I was aware that by disappearing I was causing my father concern, though I felt worse about my treatment of the girls. It was to Rupa and Piu that I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that what was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.

In the afternoon I went to a pay phone and called my father at work. "I know that you aren't happy, that this is hard for you," he told me, as if my disappearance were something he'd been prepared for. "But you could have done the decent thing and waited until morning. You could have said good-bye."

I didn't offer an explanation. I had none. Instead, I asked how the girls had been when my father and Chitra returned.

"They were asleep," my father said. "Still, you shouldn't have abandoned them in the house, Kaushik, not so late at night. Anything might have happened. Chitra was quite disturbed. She's worried that it's her fault you've run off, that she's said or done something to upset you. She's trying her best, you know."

I realized then: the girls had said nothing. Chitra had no idea that I had ranted at her daughters, that I had harmed and terrified them.

"We leave for Florida day after tomorrow," my father said. "Do you plan to return by then?" "I don't think so."

"You will get back to college on time?" "Yes."

"We will speak in a few weeks, then."

He hung up the phone. He had not bothered to ask me where I'd gone.

The next morning I got back in my car, and for days I did the same thing: driving up the coast, eating in restaurants when I was hungry, finding motels when I was tired, paying for it with the money my father had given me for Christmas. I didn't bother getting a map. A gas station attendant told me that eventually I would hit Canada. Now and again I saw the water, little islands and striped lighthouses and tiny spits of land. It was too brutally cold to get out of the car, but occasionally I did, to look at the ocean or explore a bit of trail. It was like no other place I'd seen, nothing like the North Shore of Massachusetts. The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.