The Lowland

  She lives on her husband’s pension, and the income from the downstairs rooms that they began to rent to another family after Gauri moved away. Once in a while a check written out in dollars arrives from Subhash, something that takes months to cash. She does not ask for his help, but she is in no position to refuse it.

  In all it is enough to buy her food and to pay Deepa, even to have a small refrigerator, to install a telephone line. The lines are unpredictable, but on the first try she had picked up the phone and dialed Subhash’s number and transmitted her voice to America, conveying the news of her husband’s death. It was a few days after the fact. It came as a surprise, yes, but how deeply had it affected her?

  For over a decade they’d lived in separate rooms. For over a decade her husband had not spoken of what had happened to Udayan. He refused to talk about it with Bijoli, with anyone. Every morning, after his bath in the river, he picked up fruit at the market, stopping on his way home to chat with neighbors about this and that. Together, never speaking, the two of them had taken their evening meals, sitting on the floor under Udayan’s death portrait, never acknowledging it.

  They had loved this house; in a sense it had been their first child. They’d been proud of each detail, caring for it together, excited by every change.

  When it was first built, when it had been only two rooms, electricity was just coming to the area, lanterns lit to prepare the evening meal. The iron streetlamp outside their house, an elegant example of British city planning, had not yet been converted. Someone from the Corporation came each day before sunset, and again at daybreak, climbing a ladder, switching the gas on and off by hand.

  The plot was twenty-five feet wide, sixty feet deep. The house itself was narrow, sixteen feet across. There was a mandatory passageway of four feet on either side of the building, then the boundary wall.

  Bijoli had contributed her only resource. She’d sold off the gold she’d been given when she became a wife. For her husband had insisted, even before having children, that building a home for their family, owning however ordinary a property in Calcutta, was more important. He’d believed no security was greater.

  The roof was originally covered with tiles of dried clay, replaced later by corrugated asbestos. For a time Subhash and Udayan slept in a room without any bars on the windows. Burlap was tacked up at night because the shutters had not been installed. Rain blew in at times.

  She remembers her husband polishing hinges and latches with pieces of her old saris. Beating mattresses to release dust. Once a week, after a private bathroom was built, he’d clean it before he cleaned himself, pouring phenyle into the corners and eliminating cobwebs as soon as they formed.

  Within the rooms, each day, Bijoli had taken a meticulous inventory of their possessions. Lifting, dusting, replacing. Precisely aware of where everything was. Under her watch, the bedsheets had been tautly spread. The mirror free from smudges. The interiors of teacups unmarred by rings.

  Water was pumped manually from the tube well, a series of buckets filled up for the day’s use, drinking water stored in urns. Sometime in the fifties they’d gotten a septic tank. Before that there had been an outhouse by the entrance, and a man had come to carry their daily waste away on his head.

  Mejo Sahib, the second of three Nawab brothers, had owned the parcel that formed their enclave, and had sold them their plot. He was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, whom the British had killed, whose kingdom was divided, whose offspring were sequestered for a time in the Tolly Club. A visitor to England, Bijoli had once heard, could see Tipu’s sword and slippers, pieces of his tent and throne, displayed as trophies of conquest in one of Queen Elizabeth’s homes.

  During the first years of Subhash’s and Udayan’s lifetimes, when it was still unclear whether Calcutta would belong to India or Pakistan, these royal-blooded families had lived among them. They had been kind to Bijoli, inviting her to step off the street into their pillared homes, offering her sherbet to drink. Subhash and Udayan had stroked the rabbits they’d kept as pets, in cages in their courtyards. Together they’d swung on a wooden plank, beneath a bower of bougainvillea.

  In 1946 she and her husband had worried that the violence would spread to Tollygunge, and that perhaps their Muslim neighbors would turn against them. They had considered packing up the house, living for a while in another part of the city, where Hindus were the majority. But a nephew of Mejo Sahib’s had been outspoken. He had gone out of his way to protect them. Anyone who enters this enclave to threaten a Hindu will have to kill me first, he’d said.

  But after Partition, Mejo Sahib’s family, along with so many, had fled. Their native soil turning corrosive, like salt water invading the roots of a plant. Their gracious homes abandoned, most of them occupied or razed.

  Bijoli’s home feels just as forsaken, its course just as diverted. Udayan has not lived to inherit it, and Subhash refuses to come back. He should have been a comfort; the one son remaining when the other was taken away. But she was unable to love one without the other. He had only added to the loss.

  The moment he returned to them after Udayan’s death, the moment he stood before them, she’d felt only rage. Rage at Subhash for reminding her so strongly of Udayan, for sounding like him, for remaining a spare version of him. She’d overheard him talking with Gauri, paying attention to her, being kind.

  She’d told him, when he announced that he was going to marry Gauri, that the decision was not his to make. When he insisted, she told him that he was risking everything, and that they were never to enter the house as husband and wife.

  She’d said it to hurt them. She’d said it because a girl she did not like to begin with, did not want in her family, was going to become her daughter-in-law twice over. She’d said it because it was Gauri, not Bijoli, who contained a piece of Udayan in her womb.

  She’d not fully meant what she said. But for twelve years both Subhash and Gauri have held up their end of the bargain. They have not returned, either together or separately, to Tollygunge; they have stayed far from it, away. So that she feels the deepest shame a mother can feel, of not only surviving one child but losing another, still living.

  Forty-one years ago Bijoli had longed to conceive Subhash, more than she’d longed for anything in her life. She had been married for almost five years when it happened, already in her mid-twenties, beginning to think that perhaps she was unable to bear children, that perhaps she and her husband were not meant to have a family. That they had invested in the property and built their home in vain.

  But at the end of 1943 he was born. Tollygunge had been a separate municipality back then. The new Howrah Bridge had opened to traffic, but horse-drawn carts were still taking people to the train station. Gandhi had fasted against the British, and the British were fighting the Axis powers, so that the trees of Tollygunge were filled with foreign soldiers prepared to shoot down Japanese planes.

  The summer she was pregnant, villagers began spilling out at Ballygunge Station. They were skeletal, half-crazed. They were farmers, fishermen. People who had once produced and procured food for others, now dying from the lack of it. They lay on the streets of South Calcutta, beneath the shade of the trees.

  A cyclone the year before had destroyed paddy crops along the coast. But everyone knew that the famine that followed was a man-made calamity. The government distracted by military concerns, distribution compromised, the cost of war turning rice unaffordable.

  She remembers dead bodies turning fetid under the sun, covered with flies, rotting on the road until they were carted away. She remembers some women’s arms so thin that their wedding bangles, their only adornment, were pushed up past the elbow to prevent them from sliding off.

  Those with energy accosted people on the street, tapping strangers on the shoulder as they begged for the clouded starchy water that trickled out of a strained pot of rice and was normally thrown away. Phen.

  Bijoli used to save this water, giving it to groups of delirious people who gathered at
mealtimes outside the swinging doors of her house. Heavy with Subhash, she had gone to volunteer kitchens to serve bowls of gruel. The sound of their begging could be heard at night, like an animal’s intermittent bleating. Like the jackals in the Tolly Club, startling her in the same way.

  In the ponds across from their house, and in the flooded water of the lowland, she saw people searching for nourishment. Eating insects, eating soil, eating grubs that crawled in the ground. In that year of ubiquitous suffering, she had first brought life into the world.

  Fifteen months later, not long before the war ended and Japan surrendered, Udayan arrived. In her memory it had been one long pregnancy. They had occupied Bijoli’s body one after the other, Udayan’s cells beginning to divide and multiply before Subhash had taken his first step, before he had been given a proper name. In essence it was the three months between their birthdays that seemed to separate them, not the fifteen that had elapsed in real time.

  She’d fed them by hand, rice and dal mixed together on the same plate. She’d extracted the bones from a single piece of fish, lining them up at the side of the plate like a set of her sewing needles.

  From the beginning Udayan was more demanding. For some reason he had not been secure in her love for him. Crying out, protesting, from the very instant he was born. Crying out if she happened to hand him to someone else, or left the room for a moment. The effort to reassure him had bonded them. Though he’d exasperated her, his need for her was plain.

  Perhaps for this reason she still feels closer to Udayan than to Subhash. Both had defied her, running off and marrying Gauri. In Udayan’s case, at first, she’d tried to be accepting. She’d hoped having a wife would settle him, that it would distract him from his politics. She’ll go on with her studies, he’d told them. Don’t turn her into a housewife. Don’t stand in her way.

  He came home with gifts for Gauri, he took her to restaurants and films, to visit his friends. When Bijoli and her husband heard about what the students were doing after Naxalbari, what they were destroying, whom they were killing, they told themselves Udayan was married. That he had a future to consider, a family one day to raise. That he wouldn’t be mixed up with them.

  Without discussing it they’d been prepared to hide him, to lie to the police if they came. They’d assumed it was simply a matter of protecting him.

  Without asking where he went in the evenings, without knowing whom he went to meet, they’d been prepared to forgive him. They were his parents. They’d not been prepared, that evening, not to be his parents anymore.

  She can no longer picture it. Nor can she picture the life Subhash and Gauri lead in America, in the place called Rhode Island. The child, named Bela, whom they are raising as husband and wife. But now Subhash has lost his father. For the second time since he left India, for the sake of a second death, he is obliged to face her.

  One morning, watching from the terrace, Bijoli has an idea. She goes down the staircase and walks through the swinging doors of the courtyard, into the enclave, and then out onto the street. Schoolchildren in uniforms are walking past, in white socks and black shoes, satchels heavy with their books. Sky-colored skirts for the girls, shorts and ties for the boys.

  They laugh until they see her, stepping out of her way. Her sari is stained and her bones have turned soft, her teeth no longer firm in her gums. She has forgotten how old she is, but she knows without having to stop to think that Udayan would have turned thirty-nine this spring.

  She carries a large shallow basket meant to store extra coal. She walks over to the lowland, hoisting up her sari so that her calves are revealed, speckled like some eggshells with a fine brown spray. She wades into a puddle and bends over, stirring things around with a stick. Then, using her hands, she starts picking items out of the murky green water. A little bit, a few minutes each day; this is her plan, to keep the area by Udayan’s stone uncluttered.

  She piles refuse into the basket, empties the basket a little ways off, and then begins to fill it again. With bare hands she sorts through the empty bottles of Dettol, Sunsilk shampoo. Things rats don’t eat, that crows don’t bother to carry away. Cigarette packets tossed in by passing strangers. A bloodied sanitary pad.

  She knows she will never remove it all. But each day she goes out and fills up her basket, once, then a few times more. She does not care when some people tell her, when they stop to notice what she’s doing, that it is pointless. That it is disgusting and beneath her dignity. That it could cause her to contract some sort of disease. She’s used to neighbors not knowing what to make of her. She’s used to ignoring them.

  Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.

  One day there are some unexpected items piled up by Udayan’s memorial stone. Heaps of dirtied banana leaves, stained with food. Soiled paper napkins bearing a caterer’s name, and broken vessels from which guests have sipped their filtered water and tea. Garlands of dead flowers, used for decorating the entryway of a house.

  They are remnants of a marriage somewhere in the neighborhood. Evidence of an auspicious union, a celebration. A mess that repels her, that she refuses to touch or to clean.

  Neither of her sons was married this way. They had not celebrated, guests had not feasted. It was not until Udayan’s funeral that they had fed people at the house, banana leaves with heaps of salt and wedges of lemon lined on the rooftop, relatives and comrades waiting single file on the landing for their turn to climb the steps and eat the meal.

  She wonders which family it is, whose child has been married off. The neighborhood’s boundaries have been expanding; she no longer has a sense of where things begin and end. Once she could have knocked on their doors and been recognized, welcomed, treated to a cup of tea. She would have been handed an invitation to the wedding, beseeched to attend. But there are new homes now, new people who prefer their televisions, who never talk to her.

  She wants to know who has done this. Who has desecrated this place? Who has insulted Udayan’s memory this way?

  She calls out to the neighbors. Who was responsible? Why did they not come forward? Had they already forgotten what happened? Or were they unaware that it was here that her son had once hidden? Just beyond, in what used to be an empty field, where he’d been killed?

  She begs, cupping her hands, just as starving people used to, entering the enclave, seeking food. For those people she had done what she could. She had collected the starch in her rice pot and given it to them. But no one pays attention to Bijoli.

  Come forward, she calls out to those who are watching from their windows, their rooftops. She remembers the voice of the paramilitary, speaking through the megaphone. Walk slowly. Show your face to me.

  She waits for Udayan to appear amid the water hyacinth and walk toward her. It is safe now, she tells him. The police have gone. No one will take you away. Come quickly to the house. You must be hungry. Dinner is ready. Soon it will be dark. Your brother married Gauri. I am alone now. You have a daughter in America. Your father has died.

  She waits, certain that he is there, that he hears what she tells him. She talks to herself, to no one. Tired of waiting, she waits some more. But the only person who appears is Deepa. She rinses Bijoli’s soiled hands and muddied feet with fresh water. She puts a shawl over her shoulders, and places an arm around her waist.

  Come have your tea, Deepa says, coaxing her away, taking her indoors.

  On the terrace, along with her plate of biscuits, her cup of tea, Deepa hands her something else.

  What’s this?

  A letter, Mamoni. It was in the box today.

  It is from America, from Subhash. In it he confirms his plans to visit this summer, informing her of the date of his arrival. By then nearly three months will have passed since his fat
her’s death.

  He tells her it’s not feasible to come any sooner. He tells her that he will bring Udayan’s daughter with him, but that Gauri is unable to come. He mentions some lectures he intends to give in Calcutta. He tells her they will be there for six weeks. She regards me as her father, he writes in reference to the girl they’ve named Bela. She knows nothing else.

  The air is still. Government quarters, built recently behind their house, obstruct the southern breeze that used to course the length of the terrace. She returns the letter to Deepa. Like a spare packet of tea she doesn’t need at the moment, she stores away the information, and turns her mind to other things.

  Chapter 2

  They arrived at the start of the monsoon season. In Bengali it was called barsha kal. Each year around this time, her father said, the direction of the wind changed, blowing from sea to land instead of from land out to sea. On a map he showed her how the clouds traveled from the Bay of Bengal, over the warming landmass, toward the mountains in the north. Rising and cooling, unable to retain their moisture, trapped over India by the Himalayas’ height.

  When the rain came, he told Bela, tributaries in the delta would change their course. Rivers and city streets would flood; crops would thrive or fail. Pointing from the terrace of her grandmother’s house, he told her that the two ponds across the lane would overflow and become one. Behind the ponds, excess rain would collect in the lowland, the water rising for a time as high as Bela’s shoulders.

  In the afternoons, following mornings of bright sun, came the rumble of thunder, like great sheets of rippling tin. The approach of dark-rimmed clouds. Bela saw them lowering swiftly like a vast gray curtain, obscuring the day’s light. At times, defiantly, the sun’s glow persisted, a pale disc, its burning contours contained so as to appear solid, resembling a full moon instead.

  The rooms grew dark and then the clouds began to burst. Water came in, over the windowsills, through the iron bars, rags wedged beneath shutters that had to be quickly closed. A maid named Deepa rushed in to dry what leaked onto the floor.