The Lowland

  How is my niece, my Bela? Will I meet her? Will I know her one day?

  She assured him, knowing it would never happen. She said goodbye. The driver headed south again. Toward Chowringhee, Esplanade. The Metro Cinema, the Grand Hotel.

  She sat in the car, in snarled traffic, the atmosphere heavy with smog. She saw a version of herself, standing on one of the crowded busses, hanging on to a strap, wearing one of the cotton saris she’d worn to college. Going to meet Udayan somewhere he’d suggested, some tucked-away restaurant where no one would recognize them, where he would be waiting for her, where they could sit across from one another for as long as they liked.

  Should I take you to New Market? the driver asked her. Or to one of the new shopping centers?

  No.

  When the driver approached Southern Avenue she told him to continue.

  To Kalighat?

  To Tollygunge. Just after the tram depot, not too far in.

  Past the replica of Tipu Sultan’s mosque, past the cemetery. There was a metro station now, opposite the depot, cutting through the city underground. It traveled all the way to Dum Dum, the driver said. She saw people rushing up the shallow steps, people old enough to work, young enough to have grown up with the metro all their lives.

  She saw the high brick walls on either side of the road, shielding the film studios, the Tolly Club. Forty years later the little mosque at the corner still stood, the red-and-white minarets visible.

  She told the driver to stop, giving him money for tea, asking him to wait for her there. It would be a brief visit, she said.

  People were glancing at her now that she was out of the car. Taking in her sunglasses, her American clothing and shoes. Unaware that once she, too, had lived here. Cell phones rang, but the rubber horns of the cycle rickshaws still squawked on the main roads.

  Behind the mosque there was a grouping of huts with walls of woven bamboo, sheltering those who still lived there.

  She continued down the lane, stepping past the stray dogs. Some of the houses were taller now, blocking out more of the sky. They had windows made of glass, wooden trims painted white. Rooftops thick with antennas. Patios with terrazzo floors. The older homes were more derelict, constructed from narrow bricks, sections of filigree missing.

  All of it was crammed tightly together. Not a single empty plot, no space for children to play cricket or football. The lane remained so narrow that a car could barely fit.

  She came to the house in which she was once destined to grow old with Udayan. The home in which she had conceived Bela, in which Bela might have been raised.

  She’d expected to find it aged but standing, as she was. In fact it looked younger, the edges smoother, the facade painted a warm orange shade. The swinging wooden double doors had been replaced by a cheerful green gate, to match the terrace grilles.

  The courtyard no longer existed. The proportions of the building had extended forward, so that the facade nearly abutted the street. That area was perhaps now a living room, or a dining room, she could not tell. In one of the rooms a television was on. The open drain at the threshold, that she’d stepped over to come and go, had been closed.

  She walked past the house, across the lane, and over toward the two ponds. She had forgotten no detail. The color and shape of the ponds clear in her mind. But the details were no longer there. Both ponds were gone. New homes filled up an area that had once been watery, open.

  Walking a bit farther, she saw that the lowland was also gone. That sparsely populated tract was now indistinguishable from the rest of the neighborhood, and on it more homes had been built. Scooters parked in front of doorways, laundry hung out to dry.

  She wondered if any of the people she passed remembered things as she did. She was tempted to stop a man about her age who looked vaguely familiar, who might have been one of Udayan’s class friends. He was on his way to the market, wearing an undershirt, a lungi, carrying a shopping bag. He passed by, not recognizing her.

  Somewhere close to where she stood, Udayan had hidden in the water. He’d been taken to an empty field. Somewhere there was a tablet with his name on it, commemorating the brief life he’d led. Or perhaps this, too, had been removed.

  She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.

  Scarcely two years of her life, begun as a wife, concluded as a widow, an expectant mother. An accomplice in a crime.

  It had seemed reasonable, what Udayan had asked of her. What he’d told her: that they wanted a policeman out of the way. Depending on one’s interpretation, it had not even been a lie.

  She’d accepted the benign version. The stray particle of doubt, the mute piece of her that suspected something worse, as she sat by the window with the brother and sister, glancing down at the street, she’d smothered.

  No one connected her to it. Still no one knew what she’d done.

  She was the sole accuser, the sole guardian of her guilt. Protected by Udayan, overlooked by the investigator, taken away by Subhash. Sentenced in the very act of being forgotten, punished by means of her release.

  Again she remembered what Bela had said to her. That her reappearance meant nothing. That she was as dead as Udayan.

  Standing there, unable to find him, she felt a new solidarity with him. The bond of not existing.

  The night before they came for him he fell asleep, as he had been unable to do for days. But in his sleep he began to cry out, waking her.

  At first she could not rouse him, even when she shook him by the shoulders. Then he woke up, startled, shivering. His head burned with fever. He complained of the cold in the room, of a draft, though the air was humid and still. He asked her to turn off the fan and close the shutters.

  She spread a quilt over him, pulling it out of a metal trunk that was under their bed. She tucked it up beneath his shoulders, beneath his chin.

  Go back to sleep, she told him.

  Just like Independence, he said.

  What?

  Me and Subhash. We both had a fever. My parents tell a story, of how both our teeth were chattering the night Nehru made his speech, the night freedom came. I never told you?

  No.

  Miserable fools in bed, just like this.

  She poured him water he refused to sip, pushing it away so that it spilled over the quilt. She dampened a handkerchief and wiped his face. She worried that the fever was caused by an infection, something to do with his injured hand. But he did not complain of any worse pain, and then the fever began to subside, fatigue reclaiming him.

  Until morning he slept soundly. She stayed awake, sitting in the sweltering room, sealed up with him. Staring at him, though she could not see him in the darkness.

  Slowly his profile came into view. His forehead, his nose and lips, edged with gray light. This was the first light that penetrated the vents above the windows, the plaster there perforated in a series of wavy lines.

  A neglected beard covered his cheeks, a moustache hiding the detail of his face—the shaded groove above his mouth—that she most loved. The image of him so still, with his eyes closed, disconcerted her. She put her hand over his chest, feeling its rise and fall.

  He opened his eyes, seeming suddenly lucid, himself again.

  I’ve been thinking, he said.

  About what?

  About having children. Would it be enough for you, if we never did?

  Why are you thinking of this now?

  I can’t become a father, Gauri.

  After a moment he added, Not after what I’ve done.

  What have you done?

  He wouldn’t say. Whatever happened, he told her, he regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.

  He closed his eyes again, reaching for her hand, their fingers joined. As the morning steadily brightened, he did not let it go.

  At the guesthouse, in a microwave oven, she warmed up the meal Abha had left
for her, eating fish stew and rice at an oval table that sat six. The table was covered with a flowered tablecloth, a sheet of plastic over that. She watched some television, then put the leftover food away.

  The bed was made, the cover smoothly spread, the nylon mosquito netting bunched up onto hooks. She lowered it, tucking in the sides. There was only an overhead light. Not possible to read in bed. She lay in darkness. Eventually, for a few hours, she slept.

  The crows woke her. She got out of bed and stepped onto the balcony that was off the bedroom. The milky dawn was opaque, as if she were high in the mountains and not at the base of a sprawling delta, the world’s largest delta, at the level of the sea.

  The balcony was small, just enough room for a plastic stool, a small tub in which to soak dirty clothes. Not a place to pass the time.

  The road was empty. The shopkeepers had not yet arrived to open their padlocks and raise their grates.

  Water was being poured from buckets, the pavement swept clean. A few people were entering the grounds of the lake for their morning walk, striding purposefully alone, or in pairs. She saw a stall across the avenue, selling newspapers and fruit, bottled water and tea.

  The street sweeper moved on to the next block. There was no one there now. She heard the sound of traffic, intensifying. Soon it would be constant. Soon nothing else would be heard.

  She pressed herself against the railing of the balcony. It was high enough. She felt desperation rising up inside her. Also a clarity. An urge.

  This was the place. This was the reason she’d come. The purpose of her return was to take her leave.

  She imagined swinging one leg over, then the other. The sensation of nothing supporting her, of no longer resisting. It would take only a few seconds. Her time would end, it was as simple as that.

  Forty years ago she hadn’t had the courage. Bela had been inside her. It wasn’t the emptiness, the husk of existence she felt now.

  She thought of Kanu Sanyal, and of the woman who’d found him. A woman like Abha who saw to his needs, who came and went each day.

  Who, coming back from a morning’s walk around the lake, feeling invigorated, might happen to see her fall? Who, realizing it was too late to save her, would shield his face, turning away?

  She closed her eyes. Her mind was blank. It held only the present moment, nothing else. The moment that, until now, she’d never been able to see. She thought it would be like looking directly at the sun. But it did not deflect her.

  Then one by one she released the things that fettered her. Lightening herself, the way she’d removed her bangles after Udayan was killed. What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. What she’d done to Bela. The image of a policeman passing beneath a window, holding his son by the hand.

  A final image: Udayan standing beside her on the balcony in North Calcutta. Looking down at the street with her, getting to know her. Leaning forward, just inches between them, the future spread before them. The moment her life had begun a second time.

  She leaned forward. She saw the spot where she would fall. She recalled the thrill of meeting him, of being adored by him. The moment of losing him. The fury of learning how he’d implicated her. The ache of bringing Bela into the world, after he was gone.

  She opened her eyes. He was not there.

  The morning had begun, another day. Mothers taking uniformed children to school, men and women hurrying to their jobs. The group of men who would sit playing cards all day had arranged themselves on a cot at the corner. The man who repaired sarods spread a bedsheet on the pavement, putting out the broken instruments he would restring and tune that day.

  Directly below Gauri a little produce stand had set up, selling tomatoes and eggplants from shallow baskets. Carrots more red than orange, foot-long string beans. The owner sat cross-legged under the shade of a soiled tarp, tending to customers who’d already begun to approach.

  He placed the weights on the scale. They were striking the plates. One of the customers stepped away.

  It was Abha, coming to cook breakfast, to brew the tea. She looked up at Gauri, holding up a bunch of bananas, a small packet of detergent, a loaf of bread. In her other hand was the newspaper.

  She called up. What else for today?

  That’s all, nothing else.

  At the end of the week she would leave Kolkata and return to her life. When Abha rang the bell, Gauri left the balcony, and let her in.

  Several months later, in California, a second letter arrived from Rhode Island.

  This time it was in English. Light blue ink, the address heedlessly scrawled—how had the mailman deciphered it? No longer the neat penmanship Bela had learned in school. But here it was, legible enough to reach her, the closest she’d ever come to visiting.

  Gauri studied the envelope, the illustration of a sailboat on the stamp. She sat at the table on her patio, and unfolded the page. There was a second sheet folded within it, a drawing Meghna had made and signed: a solid strip of blue sky, another strip of green ground, a colorful cat floating in the white space between.

  The letter bore no salutation.

  Meghna asks about you. Maybe she senses something, I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell her the story now. But one day I’ll explain to her who you are, and what you did. My daughter will know the truth about you. Nothing more, nothing less. If, then, she still wants to know you, and to have a relationship with you, I’m willing to facilitate that. This is about her, not about me. You’ve already taught me not to need you, and I don’t need to know more about Udayan. But maybe, when Meghna is older, when she and I are both ready, we can try to meet again.

  Part VIII

  Chapter 1

  On the western coast of Ireland, on the peninsula of Beara, a couple come for a week’s stay. They drive from Cork through the drowsy countryside, arriving late in the afternoon to a terrain that is mountainous, stark. The region’s valleys conceal evidence of prehistoric agriculture. Field patterns, stone-wall systems, buried under deposits of peat.

  They have rented a house in one of the few towns. White stucco, the door and shutters painted blue. The entire town feels hardly larger than the enclave of homes in which, long ago, the man was raised.

  The street is narrow and sloping, lined with blossoming fuchsia, parked cars. They are two doors from a pub, an arm’s reach from a yellow church that serves the residents of the village. From the post office, which is also a general store, they buy their provisions: milk and eggs, baked beans and sardines, a jar of blackberry jam. It is possible to sit outside the post office, at a table for two on the sidewalk, and order a pot of tea, fresh cream and butter, a plate of scones.

  At night, after the long journey, a pint of beer at the pub, the man’s sleep is shallow. He wakes up in the bed where he lies with his new wife. She sleeps peacefully beside him, her head turned away, hands crossed below her chin.

  He goes downstairs and opens the door at the back of the house. He steps barefoot onto the wooden porch that overlooks the garden, the pastures beyond, running down to the Kenmare Bay. His hair is thick, snowy white. His wife likes to run her fingers through it. He sees the wide beam of the moon’s light over the water, pouring down. He is overwhelmed by the sky’s clarity, the number of stars.

  A strong wind courses over the land, mimicking the sound of the waves. He looks up, forgetting the names of the constellations he’d once taught his daughter. Burning gases, perceived on earth as cool points of light.

  He returns to bed, still looking out the window at the sky, the stars. He is startled anew by the fact that their beauty, even in daytime, is there. He is awash with the gratitude of his advancing years, for the timeless splendors of the earth, for the opportunity to behold them.

  The following morning after breakfast they set out for their first day’s walk, on paths that edge the sea. They cross rough pastures where sheep and cows graze in silence against the horizon, fields of foxglove and ferns. The day is overcast but luminous, the clouds holding. The
ocean washes up into stony inlets, lies calm beyond steep cliffs.

  The man and woman take in the immensity of their surroundings. The stillness of the place. On this outcrop of land, after walking for hours, climbing up and down little ladders that separate one property from the next, they are less than halfway to where they thought they might end up on the map of the region they pause to study.

  The trip is a honeymoon, the man’s first, though he was married once before. A few days ago, across the same ocean, in America, the couple stood to exchange their vows on the grounds of a small red-and-white church in Rhode Island that the man has admired for many years, its spire rising over Narragansett Bay.

  The couple’s union was witnessed by a group of friends and family. The man has gained two sons, a second daughter in addition to his own. There are seven grandchildren. Flung far apart, occasionally thrust together, they will know each other in a limited way. Still, it is a point of origin, a looking forward late in life.

  The years the couple have together are a shared conclusion to lives separately built, separately lived. There is no use wondering what might have happened if the man had met her in his forties, or in his twenties. He would not have married her then.

  The next day when they step out of the house they encounter a group bidding an unknown villager farewell, mourners in dark clothing spreading down the sloping street. For a moment it is as if they, too, are part of the funeral. There is no sense of its boundaries, where it begins or ends, whom it grieves. Then they pass, respectfully, out of its shadow.

  If their grandchildren were along, they would take them by cable car to see the dolphins and whales that swim off Dursey Island. Instead they devote their days to walking. Hand in hand, wearing bulky sweaters they’ve bought to ward off the slight autumn chill.

  They stop when they tire, to admire the views, to sit and eat biscuits, pieces of cheese. In tide pools with rocks that form chambers and grottoes, they discover heaps of flat gray pebbles, perforated shells that have worn away to hard white rings. The man gathers a handful, thinking they will make a nice necklace for his granddaughter in Rhode Island, strung through a bit of yarn. He imagines placing it on her head, so that it adorns her like a crown.