The Lowland (12 page)

They took control of certain neighborhoods, calling them Red
Zones. They took control of Tollygunge. They set up makeshift hospitals, safe houses. People began avoiding these neighborhoods. Policemen started chaining their rifles to their belts.

But then new legislation was passed, and an old law was renewed. Laws that authorized the police and the paramilitary to enter homes without a warrant, to arrest young men without charges. The old law had been created by the British, to counter Independence, to cut off its legs.

After that, the police started to cordon off and search the neighborhoods of the city. Sealing exits, knocking on doors, interrogating Calcutta’s young men. The police had killed Udayan. This much Subhash was able to surmise.

He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcutta. The people filling the platform, passengers and coolies, and vagrants for whom the station was merely a shelter, were bundled in woolen caps and shawls.

Only two people had come to receive him. A younger cousin of his father’s, Biren Kaka, and his wife. They were standing by a fruit vendor, unable to smile when they spotted him. He understood this diminished welcome, but he could not understand why, after he’d traveled for more than two days, after he’d been away for more than two years, his parents were unwilling to come even this far to acknowledge his return. When he’d left India his mother had promised a hero’s welcome, a garland of flowers draped around his neck when he stepped off the train.

It was here, at the station, that Subhash had last seen Udayan. He’d arrived late on the evening of his departure, not riding with Subhash and his parents and other relatives who’d formed a small caravan from Tollygunge, but assuring him that he’d meet up with them on the platform. Subhash was already seated on the train, he had already said his good-byes, when Udayan put his head up to the window.

He extended his hand through the bars, reaching for Subhash’s shoulder and pressing it, then slapping his face lightly. Somehow, at the final moment, they had found one another in that great crowd.

He pulled some green-skinned oranges from his book bag, giving them to Subhash to eat on the journey. Try not to forget us completely, he said.

You’ll look after them? Subhash asked, referring to their parents. You’ll let me know if anything happens?

What’s going to happen?

Well then, if you need anything?

Come back someday, that’s all.

Udayan remained close, leaning forward, his hand on Subhash’s shoulder, saying nothing else, until the engine sounded. His mother began weeping. Even his father’s eyes were damp as the train began to pull away. But Udayan stood smiling between them, his hand raised high, his gaze fixed as Subhash retreated farther and farther away from them.

As they crossed Howrah Bridge the light was still gray. On the other side, the markets had just opened. The sidewalks were lined with baskets, displaying the morning’s vegetables. They traveled through the broad heart of the city, toward Dalhousie, down Chowringhee. A city with nothing, with everything. By the time they were approaching Tollygunge, crossing Prince Anwar Shah Road, the day was bustling and bright.

The streets were as he remembered. Crowded with cycle rickshaws, the squawking of their horns sounding to his ears like a flock of agitated geese. The congestion was of a different order, that of a small town as opposed to a city. The buildings lower, spaced farther apart.

He saw the tram depot come into view, the stalls where people sold biscuits and crackers in glass jars, and boiled aluminum kettles of tea. The walls of the film studios, the Tolly Club, were covered with slogans.
Make 1970s the decade of liberation. Rifles bring freedom, and freedom is coming
.

As they turned before the small mosque off Baburam Ghosh Road, Subhash felt his prolonged journey ending too soon. The taxi fit but just barely, threatening to scrape the walls on either side. He was assaulted by the sour, septic smell of his neighborhood, of his childhood. The smell of standing water. The stink of algae, of open drains.

As they approached the two ponds, he saw that the small home he’d left behind had been replaced by something impressive, ungainly. Some scaffolding was still in place, but the construction looked complete. He saw palm trees rising behind the house. But the mango tree that had spread its dark branches and leaves over the original roof was gone.

He stepped across a slab set over the gutter that separated his family’s property from the street. A pair of swinging doors led to the courtyard. Mildew coated the walls. But it was still a welcoming space, with a tube well in one corner, and terra-cotta pots containing dahlias, and the marigold and basil his mother used for prayers. A vine with a tangle of yellow branches was in flower at that time of year.

This was the enclosure where he and Udayan had played as children. Where they had drawn and practiced sums with bits of coal or broken clay. Where Udayan had run out the day they’d been told to stay in, falling off the plank before the concrete had dried.

Subhash saw the footprints and walked past them. He looked at the upper portion of the house, rising out of what had first been there. Long terraces, like airy corridors, ran from front to back down one side. They were enclosed by grilles forged in a trefoil pattern. The emerald paint was glossy and bright.

Through one of the grilles he saw his parents, sitting on the top floor. He strained to see their expressions but could make out nothing. Now that he was so close, part of him wanted to return to the taxi, which was backing out slowly. He wanted to tell the driver to take him somewhere else.

He pressed the buzzer that Udayan had installed. It still worked.

His parents did not stand or say his name. They did not come downstairs to greet him. Instead his father lowered a key on a string through the ironwork. Subhash waited to retrieve it, and opened a heavy padlock at the side of the house. Finally he heard his father clearing his throat, seeming to loosen the secretions of a long silence.

Lock the gate behind you, he instructed Subhash, before retracting the key.

Subhash climbed a staircase with smooth black banisters, sky-blue walls. Biren Kaka and his wife followed behind. When he saw his parents,
standing together on the terrace, he bent over to touch their feet. He was an only son, an experience that had left no impression in the first fifteen months of his life. That was to begin in earnest now.

At first his parents looked the same to him. The oily sheen to his mother’s hair, the pallid cast of her skin. The lean, stooping frame of his father, the sheer cotton of his kurta. The downward turn to his mouth that might have conveyed disappointment, but suggested a fixed amiability instead. The difference was in their eyes. Calloused by grief, blunted by what no parent should have seen.

In spite of the picture that hung in his parents’ new room, which they took him to see, he could not believe that Udayan was nowhere. But here was the proof. The photo had been taken nearly ten years ago by a relative who owned a camera, one of the only pictures of the brothers that existed. It was the day they had gotten the results of their higher secondary exams, the day his father said had been the proudest of his life.

He and Udayan had posed side by side in the courtyard. Subhash saw an inch of his own shoulder, pressed up beside Udayan’s. The rest of him, in order to make the death portrait, had been cut away.

He stood before the image and wept, his head cradled in his arm, in an awkward embrace of himself. But his parents, beyond the shock of it, observed him as they might an actor on a stage, waiting for the scene to end.

From the terrace he had an open view of the place where he and Udayan had been raised. Lower rooftops of tin or tile, with squash vines trailing over them. The tops of walls, dotted white, splattered with excrement from crows. Two oblong ponds on the other side of the lane. The lowland, looking to him like a mudflat after the tide.

He went downstairs, to the ground floor, to the part of the house that was unchanged, to the room he and Udayan had once shared. He was struck by how dark the room was, how small. There was the study table beneath the window, the shelves set into the wall, the simple rack where they’d draped their clothes. The bed they’d slept on together had been replaced by a cot. Udayan must have used the room to tutor
students. He saw textbooks on the shelves, measuring instruments and pens. He wondered what had happened to the shortwave. All the political books were gone.

He unpacked his belongings and bathed with water that the pump released twice a day from the corporation tank. The water, too rich with iron, had a metallic smell. It left his hair stiff, his skin tacky to the touch.

He’d been told to go upstairs to eat his lunch. That was where the kitchen was now. On the floor of his parents’ bedroom, where Udayan’s portrait was, plates had been set out for his father, for Biren Kaka and his wife, for Subhash. His mother would eat after serving them, as she always did.

He sat with his back to the portrait. He could not bear to look at it again.

He was ravenous for the simple meal: dal and slices of fried bitter melon, rice and fish stew. Sweet pabda fish from the river, their cooked eyes like yellow pebbles.

Again the broad plates of heavy brass. The freedom to eat with his fingers. Drinking water was poured from a black clay urn in the corner of the room. The cup heavy in his hand, the rim slightly too wide for his mouth.

Where is she? he asked.

Who?

Gauri.

His mother ladled the dal onto his rice. She takes her meals in the kitchen, she said.

Why?

She prefers it.

He didn’t believe her. He didn’t say what came to his mind. That Udayan would have hated them for segregating her, for observing such customs.

Is she there now? I would like to meet her.

She’s resting. She’s not feeling well today.

Have you called a doctor?

His mother looked down, preoccupied with the food she was serving to the others.

There’s no need for that.

Is it serious?

Finally she explained herself.

She is expecting a child, she said.

After lunch he went out, walking past the two ponds. There were scattered clumps of water hyacinth in the lowland, and still enough water to form puddles here and there.

He noticed a small stone marker that had not been there before. He walked toward it. On it was Udayan’s name. Beneath that, the years of his birth and death: 1945–1971.

It was a memorial tablet, erected for political martyrs. Here where the water came and went, where it collected and vanished, was where his brother’s party comrades had chosen to put it.

Subhash remembered an afternoon playing football with Udayan and a few of the other neighborhood boys, in the field on the other side of the lowland. He’d twisted his ankle in the middle of the game. He’d told Udayan to keep playing, that he’d manage on his own, but Udayan had insisted on accompanying him.

He remembered draping an arm over Udayan’s shoulder, leaning on him as he limped back, the swollen ankle turning heavy with pain. He remembered Udayan teasing him even then for the clumsy move that had led to the injury, saying their side had been winning until then. And at the same time supporting him, guiding him home.

He returned to the house, intending to rest briefly, but fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up it was late, past the hour his parents normally ate dinner. He’d slept through the meal. The fan wasn’t moving; the current had gone. He found a flashlight under the mattress, switched it on, and went upstairs.

The door to his parents’ bedroom was closed. Going to the kitchen to see if there was anything left to eat, he saw Gauri sitting on the floor, with a candle lit beside her.

He recognized her at once, from the snapshot Udayan had sent. But she was no longer the relaxed college girl who had smiled for his brother. That picture of her had been in black and white, but now
the absence of color, even in the warm light of the candle, was more profound.

Her long hair was pulled back above her neck. She sat with her head down, her wrists bare, dressed in a sari of crisp white. She was thin, without a trace of the life she was carrying. She wore glasses, a detail withheld from the photograph. When she looked up at him, he saw in spite of the glasses another thing the photo had not fully conveyed. The frank beauty of her eyes.

He took her in but did not speak to her, watching her eat some dal and rice. She could have been anyone, a stranger. And yet she was now a part of his family, the mother of Udayan’s child. She was dragging a few grains of salt with her index finger from the little pile at the edge of her plate and mixing it into her food. He saw that the fish he had been served at lunch had not been given to her.

I am Subhash, he said.

I know.

I don’t mean to disturb you.

They tried to wake you for dinner.

I’m wide awake now.

She started to get up. Let me fix a plate for you.

Finish your meal. I can get it myself.

He felt her eyes on him as he scanned the shelves with his flash-light, retrieved a dish, uncovered the pots and pans that had been left for him.

You sound just like him, she said.

He sat down beside her, the candle between them, facing her. He saw her hand resting over her plate, the tips of her fingers coated with food.

Is it because of my parents that you’re not eating fish?

She ignored his question. You have the same voice, she said.

Quickly he turned passive, waking up in his box of white mosquito netting. Waiting for his tea to be handed to him in the morning, waiting for his discarded clothes to be washed and folded, for his meals to be served. He never rinsed a plate or cup, knowing the houseboy would come to take them away. Coarse crystals of sugar studded his breakfast
toast, which he washed down with hot too-sweet tea, tiny ants arriving to haul away the crumbs.