The Lowland Read online

How do you know?

  Because I know you. Because you only think of yourself.

  Subhash stared at his brother. Lounging on their bed, smoking, preoccupied by the newspapers.

  You don’t think what you’re doing is selfish?

  Udayan turned a page of the newspaper, not bothering to look up. I don’t think wanting to make a difference is selfish, no.

  This isn’t a game you’re playing. What if the police come to the house? What if you get arrested? What would Ma and Baba think?

  There’s more to life than what they think.

  What’s happened to you, Udayan? They’re the people who raised you. Who continue to feed and clothe you. You’d amount to nothing, if it weren’t for them.

  Udayan sat up, and strode out of the room. A moment later he was back. He stood before Subhash, his face lowered. His anger, quick to flare, had already left him.

  You’re the other side of me, Subhash. It’s without you that I’m nothing. Don’t go.

  It was the only time he’d admitted such a thing. He’d said it with love in his voice. With need.

  But Subhash heard it as a command, one of so many he’d capitulated to all his life. Another exhortation to do as Udayan did, to follow him.

  Then, abruptly, it was Udayan who went away. He traveled outside the city, he did not specify where. It was during a period that the school he worked in was closed. He informed Subhash and his parents the morning of his departure that he’d made this plan.

  It was as if he were heading out for a day, nothing but a cloth bag over his shoulder. Just enough money in his pocket for the train fare back.

  This is some sort of tour? their father asked. You’ve planned it with friends?

  That’s right. A change of scene.

  Why all of a sudden?

  Why not?

  He bent down to take the dust from their parents’ feet, telling them not to worry, promising to return.

  They did not hear from him while he was gone. No letter, no way to know if he was alive or dead. Though Subhash and his parents didn’t talk about it, none of them believed that Udayan had gone sightseeing. And yet no one had done anything to stop him. He returned after a month, a lungi around his waist, the beard and moustache overtaking his face not concealing the weight he’d lost.

  The tremor in his fingers had gotten worse, persistent enough so that his teacup sometimes rattled on the saucer when he held it, so that it could be noticed when he buttoned his shirt or gripped a pen. In the mornings the sheet on his side of the bed was cold with sweat, dark with the imprint of his body. When he woke up one morning, his heart racing, a rash covering his neck, a doctor was consulted, a blood test performed.

  They worried he’d contracted an illness in the countryside, malaria or meningitis. But it turned out to be an overactive thyroid gland, something medication could keep in check. The doctor mentioned to the family that the drug could take some time to work. That it needed to be taken consistently. That the disease could cause a person to be irritable, to be moody.

  He regained his health, and lived among them, but some part of Udayan was elsewhere. Whatever he had learned or seen outside the city, whatever he’d done, he kept to himself.

  He no longer tried to convince Subhash not to go to America. When they listened to the radio in the evenings, when he looked through the papers, he betrayed little reaction. Something had subdued him. Something that had nothing to do with Subhash, with any of them, preoccupied him now.

  On Lenin’s birthday, April 22, 1969, a third communist party was launched in Calcutta. The members called themselves Naxalites, in honor of what had happened at Naxalbari. Charu Majumdar was named the general secretary, Kanu Sanyal the party chairman.

  On May Day, a massive procession filled the streets. Ten thousand people marched to the center of the city. They gathered on the Maidan, beneath the domed white column of Shahid Minar.

  Kanu Sanyal, just released from prison, stood at a rostrum, and addressed the exuberant crowd.

  With great pride and boundless joy I wish to announce today at this meeting that we have formed a genuine Communist Party. The official name was the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. The CPI(ML).

  He did not express gratitude to the politicians who had released him. His release had been made possible by the law of history. Naxalbari had stirred the whole of India, Sanyal said.

  The revolutionary situation was ripe, both at home and abroad, he told them. A high tide of revolution was sweeping through the world. Mao Tse-tung was at the helm.

  Internationally and nationally, the reactionaries have grown so weak that they crumble whenever we hit them. In appearance they are strong, but in reality they are only giants made of clay, they are truly paper tigers.

  The chief task of the new party was to organize the peasantry. The tactic would be guerilla warfare. The enemy was the Indian state.

  Theirs was a new form of communism, Sanyal declared. They would be headquartered in the villages. By the year 2000, that is only thirty-one years from now, the people of the whole world will be liberated from all kinds of exploitation of man by man and will celebrate the worldwide victory of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought.

  Charu Majumdar wasn’t present at the rally. But Sanyal called for allegiance to him, comparing him to Mao in his wisdom, warning against those who challenged Majumdar’s doctrine.

  We will certainly be able to make a new sun and a new moon shine in the sky of our great motherland, he said, his words ringing out for miles.

  In the papers there were photographs, taken from a distance, of those who gathered to hear Sanyal’s speech, to give the Red Salute. A battle cry declared, a generation transfixed. A piece of Calcutta standing still.

  It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of. A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind.

  Subhash knew that Udayan had been there. He hadn’t accompanied him to the rally, nor had Udayan asked him to come. In this sense they had already parted.

  Chapter 6

  A few months later Subhash also traveled to a village; this was the word the Americans used. An old-fashioned word, designating an early settlement, a humble place. And yet the village had once contained a civilization: a church, a courthouse, a tavern, a jail.

  The university had begun as an agricultural school. A land grant college still surrounded by greenhouses, orchards, fields of corn. On the outskirts were lush pastures of scientifically cultivated grass, routinely irrigated and fertilized and trimmed. Nicer than the grass that grew inside the walls of the Tolly Club.

  But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.

  The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back.

  And yet, certain physical aspects of Rhode Island—a state so small within the context of America that on some maps its landmass was indicated only by an arrow pointing to its location—corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta, within India. Mountains to the north, an ocean to the east, the majority of land to the south and west.

  Both places were close to sea level, with estuaries where fresh and salt water combined. As Tollygunge, in a previous era, had been flooded by the sea, all of Rhode Island, he learned, had once been covered with sheets of ice. The advance and retreat of glaciers, spreading and melting over New England, had shifted bedrock and soil, leaving great trails of debris. They had created marshes and the bay, dunes and moraines. They had shaped the current shore.

  He found a room in a white wooden house, close to the main road of the village, with black s
hutters flanking the windows. The shutters were decorative, never opening or closing as they did throughout the day in Calcutta, to keep rooms cool or dry, to block rain or let in a breeze or adjust the light.

  He lived at the top of the house, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with another Ph.D. student named Richard Grifalconi. At night he heard the precise ticking of an alarm clock at the side of his bed. And in the background, like an ongoing alarm itself, the shrill thrum of crickets. New birds woke him in the morning, small birds with delicate chirps that ruptured sleep nevertheless.

  Richard, a student of sociology, wrote editorials for the university newspaper. When he wasn’t working on his dissertation he decried, in terse paragraphs, the recent firing of a zoology professor who had spoken out against the use of napalm, or the decision to build a swimming pool instead of more dormitories on campus.

  He came from a Quaker family in Wisconsin. He wore his dark hair in a ponytail, and didn’t bother to trim his beard. He peered closely through wire-rimmed spectacles as he pecked out his editorials with two fingers at their kitchen table, a cigarette burning between his lips.

  He told Subhash that he’d just turned thirty. For the sake of the next generation, he’d decided to become a professor. He’d traveled to the South, as an undergraduate, to protest segregation on public transportation. He’d spent two weeks in a Mississippi jail.

  He invited Subhash to go with him to the campus pub, where they shared a pitcher of beer and watched the television reports of Vietnam. Richard opposed the war, but he wasn’t a communist. He told Subhash that Gandhi was a hero to him. Udayan would have scoffed, saying that Gandhi had sided with enemies of the people. That he had disarmed India in the name of liberation.

  One day, walking past the quadrangle, Subhash saw Richard at the center of a group of students and faculty. He was wearing a black armband, standing on top of a van that had been driven onto the grass.

  Speaking through a megaphone, Richard said Vietnam was a mistake, and that the American government had had no right to intervene. He said innocent people in Vietnam were suffering.

  Some people called out or cheered, but most of them just listened and clapped, as they might at the theatre. They sprawled back on their elbows, sunning their faces, listening to Richard protest a war that was being fought thousands of miles away.

  Subhash was the only foreigner. No students from other parts of Asia were there. It was nothing like the demonstrations that erupted now in Calcutta. Disorganized mobs representing rival communist parties, running helter-skelter through the streets. Chanting, unrelenting. They were demonstrations that almost always turned violent.

  After listening to Richard for a few minutes, Subhash left. He knew how much Udayan would have mocked him at that moment, for his desire to protect himself.

  He didn’t support the war in Vietnam, either. But like his father, he knew he had to be careful. He knew he could get arrested in America for denouncing the government, perhaps even for holding up a sign. He was here courtesy of a student visa, studying thanks to a fellowship. He’d been invited to America as Nixon’s guest.

  Here, each day, he remembered how he’d felt those evenings he and Udayan had snuck into the Tolly Club. This time he’d been admitted officially, and yet he remained vigilant, at the threshold. He knew that the door could close just as arbitrarily as it had opened. He knew that he could be sent back to where he’d come from, and that there would be plenty to take his place.

  There were a few other Indians at the university, mostly bachelors like him. But as far as Subhash could tell, he was the only one from Calcutta. He met an economics professor named Narasimhan, from Madras. He had an American wife and two tanned, light-eyed sons who looked like neither of their parents.

  Narasimhan wore heavy sideburns, bell-bottomed jeans. His wife had a pretty neck, long beaded earrings, short red hair. Subhash saw them all for the first time on the quadrangle. They were the only people that Saturday afternoon in the square green enclosure at the center of campus, rimmed with trees.

  The boys were kicking a ball on the grass with their father. As Subhash and Udayan used to do, on the field on the other side of the lowland, though their father had never joined them. The wife was lying on a blanket on the grass, on her side, smoking, sketching something in a notebook.

  This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family had wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family had reacted to her. He wondered if she’d ever been to India. If she had, he wondered whether she’d liked it or hated it. He could not guess from looking at her.

  The ball rolled over in Subhash’s direction, and he kicked it back to them, preparing to continue on his way.

  You must be the new student in marine chemistry, Narasimhan said, walking toward him, shaking his hand. Subhash Mitra?

  Yes.

  From Calcutta?

  He nodded.

  I’m supposed to keep an eye out for you. I was born in Calcutta, Narasimhan added, saying that he still understood a word or two of Bengali.

  Subhash asked where in Rhode Island he lived, whether it was close to campus.

  Narasimhan shook his head. Their house was closer to Providence. His wife, Kate, was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design.

  And you? Where in Calcutta is your family?

  In Tollygunge.

  Ah, where the golf club is.

  Yes.

  You’re staying at the International House?

  I preferred a place with a kitchen. I wanted to make my own meals.

  And you’ve settled in? Made some friends?

  A few.

  Tolerating the cold?

  So far.

  Kate, write down our phone number for him, will you?

  She turned to the back of her notebook and tore out a page. She wrote down the number and handed it to Subhash.

  Anything you need, just give a call, Narasimhan said, patting him on the shoulder, turning back to his sons.

  Thank you.

  I’ll make you my yogurt rice one of these days, Narasimhan called out.

  But an invitation never came.

  The oceanography campus, where most of his classes were held, overlooked the Narragansett Bay. Every morning, on a bus, he left the village behind, traveling along a wooded road where mailboxes stuck on posts were visible, but many of the homes were not. Past a set of traffic lights, and a wooden observation tower, before proceeding downhill toward the bay.

  The bus crossed over a winding estuary, to an area that felt more remote. Here the air was never still, so that the windows of the bus would rattle. Here the quality of the light changed.

  The laboratory buildings were like small airplane hangars, flat-topped structures made of corrugated gray metal. He studied the gases that were dissolved in the sea’s solution, the isotopes found in deep sediments. The iodine found in seaweed, the carbon in plankton, the copper in the blood of crabs.

  At the foot of the campus, at the base of a steep hill, there was a small beach strewn with gray-and-yellow stones where he liked to eat his lunch. There were views of the bay, and the two bridges going to islands offshore. The Jamestown Bridge was prominent, the Newport Bridge, a few miles in the distance, more faint. On cloudy days, at intervals, the sound of a foghorn pierced the air, as conch shells were blown in Calcutta to ward off evil.

  Some of the smaller islands, reachable only by boat, were without electricity and running water. Conditions under which, he was told, certain wealthy Americans liked to spend their summers. On one island there was space only for a lighthouse, nothing more. All the islands, however tiny, had names: Patience and Prudence, Fox and Goat, Rabbit and Rose, Hope and Despair.

  At the top of the hill, leading up from the beach, there was a church with white shingles arranged like a honeycomb. The central portion rose to a steeple. The paint was no longer fresh, the wood beneath it having absorbed so much salt from the air, so many storms that had traveled up t
he Rhode Island coast.

  One afternoon he was surprised to see cars lining the road where it crested. For the first time he saw that the front doors of the church were open. A group of people, a mix of adults and children, no more than twenty, stood outside.

  He glimpsed a couple in middle age, newly married. A gray-haired groom with a carnation in his lapel, a woman in a pale blue jacket and skirt. They stood smiling on the steps of the church, ducking their heads as the group showered them with rice. Looking like they should have been parents of the bride and groom, closer to his parents’ generation than to his own.

  He guessed that it was a second marriage. Two people trading one spouse for another, dividing in two, their connections at once severed and doubled, like cells. Or perhaps it was a case of a couple who had both lost their spouses in midlife. A widow and widower with grown children, remarrying and moving on.

  For some reason the church reminded him of the small mosque that stood at the corner of his family’s neighborhood in Tollygunge. Another place of worship designated for others, which had served as a landmark in his life.

  One day, when the church was empty, Subhash walked up the stone path to the entrance. He felt the strange urge to embrace it; the narrow proportions were so severe that it seemed scarcely wider than his arm span. The only entrance was the rounded dark green door at the front. Above it, the windows, also rounded, were as thin as slits. Space for a hand to poke out but not a face.

  The door was locked, so he walked around the building, standing on the balls of his feet and looking into the windows. Some of the panes were made of red glass, interspersed with clear ones.

  Inside he saw gray pews, edged with red trim. It was an interior at once pristine and vibrant, bathed with light. He wanted to sit inside, to feel the pale walls around him. The simple, tightly angled ceiling overhead.

  He thought of the couple he’d seen, getting married. He imagined them standing next to one another.

  For the first time, he thought of his own marriage. For the first time, perhaps because he always felt in Rhode Island that some part of him was missing, he desired a companion.