The Lowland (23 page)

One day she looked back at him. Staring at him, challenging him to stop, to say something. She had no idea what she would do, but she began to want this to happen, to will it. She felt her body reacting when she saw him, the acceleration of her heart, the tautness of her limbs, a damp release between her legs.

Seeking out Subhash in bed, she pretended she was with this man, in a hotel room, or in his home. Feeling his mouth, his sex against her own.

On Wednesdays, the days she saw him, she began to prepare herself for the encounter. The class met in the morning, which meant there would be time. A little over an hour, to go with him and come back, before she had to get Bela. On Tuesdays she prepared more than she needed for dinner the next day, to accommodate the potential lapse in her schedule.

But the next time she saw him was a Monday afternoon, in a different part of campus. She recognized him from behind. She needed to pick up Bela in half an hour, she’d been on her way to the library to get a book, but she changed course and began to follow him, racing to keep up while at the same time leaving a space.

She followed him into the student union. She felt her inhibitions dissolving. She would go up to him, look at him. Please, she would say.

She walked behind him into the double-chambered room lined with sofas, televisions in the corners. He stopped to pick up a copy of the campus newspaper, glancing at it for a moment. Then she saw him walk to one of the sofas, lean over to kiss a woman who was waiting. Touch her knee.

She escaped to the only place she could think of, the enormous women’s room, pushing against the heavy door, crossing the thick carpet of the lounge, locking herself into a stall. She was alone, there was no one in the neighboring stalls, and she could not help herself, she pushed her hand up her shirt, to her breast, caressing it, another hand unzipping her jeans, hooking her fingers over the ridge of bone, her forehead against the cold metal of the door.

It took only a moment to calm herself, to put an end to it. She
washed her hands at the sink, smoothed her hair, saw the color that had risen to her face. She strode past the lounge, not checking to see if the man and his companion were sitting there.

The following Wednesday, she took an alternate route to her class. She made sure she never ran into him again, walking in the opposite direction if she did.

One afternoon Bela was occupied with a pair of scissors, a book of paper dolls. It was July, Bela’s school closed for the long vacation; the campus was at rest. Subhash was teaching summer courses in Providence, spending the rest of his time in a lab in Narragansett. Gauri spent her days with Bela, without a car in which they might go anywhere, without a break.

Gauri sat with her own book beside her, Spinoza’s
Ethics
, trying to read a section to its end. But something was beginning to change: it was becoming possible to read a book and to be with Bela at the same time. Possible to be together, engaged in separate ways.

The television was turned off, the apartment quiet apart from the intermittent sound of Bela’s scissors, slowly slicing through thick pieces of paper.

Going to the kitchen to make tea, Gauri saw that they were out of milk. She returned to the living room. She saw the back of Bela’s neck, bent over her task. She was talking to herself, carrying on a dialogue in different voices between the paper dolls.

Put on your shoes, Bela.

Why?

Let’s go out.

I’m busy, she said, sounding suddenly like a girl of twelve instead of six. As if, with a snip of her scissors, she had sliced away the need for Gauri, eliminating her.

The idea presented itself. The store was just behind the apartment complex, a two-minute walk. She could see it through the kitchen window, past the Dumpster and the soda machine and the cars parked in back.

I’m just going down to get the mail.

Without stopping to think things through, she went out, locking the door. Down the steps, cutting across the parking lot, into the hot leafy day.

She was running more than walking. Her feet were light. In the store she felt like a criminal, worried that the elderly man standing behind the register, always kind to Bela, thought Gauri was stealing the milk she’d come to buy.

Where’s your daughter today?

With a friend.

He smiled and handed her a piece of peppermint candy from the little bowl by the register. Tell her it’s from me.

Quickly but carefully she counted out her change. The transaction overwhelmed her, as it used to when she’d first come here. She remembered to say thank you. She threw out the candy before she got to the apartment building, hiding the milk in her tote bag.

The following day she set Bela up at the coffee table in front of the television. She considered every detail: a glass of water in case she was thirsty, a generous plate of biscuits and grapes. Extra pencils, in case the tip of the one she was drawing with happened to snap. Half an hour’s careful preparation, to allow for five minutes away.

The five minutes doubled to ten, sometimes a bit more. Fifteen minutes to be alone, to clear her head. It was time to run across the quadrangle to the library to return a book, a simple errand she could have done at any time but that she was determined to accomplish at that moment. Time to go to the post office and send a letter, requesting an application for one of the doctoral programs Otto Weiss had suggested she look into. Time to speculate that, without Bela or Subhash, her life might be a different thing.

It turned into a dare, a puzzle to solve, to keep herself sharp. A private race she felt compelled to run again and again, convinced, if she stopped, that her ability to perform the feat would be lost. Before stepping out she checked that the stove was turned off, the windows shut, the knives placed out of reach. Not that Bela was that sort of child.

So it began in the afternoons. Not every afternoon but often enough, too often. Disoriented by the sense of freedom, devouring the sensation as a beggar devours food.

Sometimes she simply walked to the store and back, without buying
anything. Sometimes she really did get the mail, and sat on a bench on campus and sorted through it. Or she went over to the student union to get a copy of the campus paper. Then back inside, rushing up the flight of stairs, at once triumphant and appalled at herself. She unlocked the door, where Bela would be, just as she’d left her. Never suspecting, never asking where she’d been.

Then one day that summer Subhash came home earlier than usual, intending to take advantage of the last of the warm weather, and take Bela to the beach.

He found Bela concealed beneath one of the tents she sometimes made by removing the blankets from her bed, draping them over the sofa and the coffee table in the living room. She was content within this structure, playing on her own.

She told him that her mother had gone to get the mail. But Gauri wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs. Subhash knew that, having just retrieved the mail and come up the stairs himself.

Ten minutes later Gauri returned with a newspaper. She hadn’t noticed Subhash’s car in the parking lot. Because he hadn’t called to say he was leaving early, there was no reason to think he was already home.

There she is, Bela said when she walked through the door. See, I told you she always comes back.

But it took Subhash, who was standing at the window, his back to the room, several minutes before he turned around.

At first he had said nothing to reproach her. For a week his only punishment was in refusing to speak, refusing to acknowledge her, just as her in-laws had ignored her after Udayan was killed. Living with her in the apartment as if she were invisible, as if only Bela were there, his fury contained. The day he broke his silence he said,

My mother was right. You don’t deserve to be a parent. The privilege was wasted on you.

She apologized, she told him it would never happen again. Though she hated him for insulting her, she knew that his reaction was justified, and that he would never forgive her for what she’d done.

While continuing to live in the same house he turned away from
her, just as she had turned away from him. The wide berth for herself that she had been seeking in their marriage, he now willingly gave. He no longer wanted to touch her in bed, he no longer brought up the possibility of a second child.

When she was admitted the following spring to a doctoral program in Boston, when they offered to pay her way, he did not object. He said nothing when she started taking the bus there two days a week, or when she arranged for undergraduates to look after Bela the days she was gone. He didn’t fault her for creating a disruption, or for wanting to spend that time away.

Because of Bela, the possibility of separating was not discussed. The point of their marriage was Bela, and in spite of the damage Gauri had wrought, in spite of her new schedule, her coming and going, the fact of Bela remained.

Besides, she was a student, without an income. Like Bela, Gauri wouldn’t survive without him.

Part V

Chapter 1

Each day it diminishes: a little less water to see through the terrace grille. Bijoli watches as the two ponds in front of the house, and the tract of lowland behind them, are clogged with waste. Old clothes, rags, newspapers. Empty packets of Mother Dairy. Jars of Horlicks, tins of Bournvita and talcum powder. Purple foil from Cadbury chocolate. Broken clay cups in which roadside tea and sweetened yogurt were once served.

The heap forms a thickening bank around the water’s edge. Whitish from a distance, colorful up close. Even her own garbage has ended up there: wrappers from packets of biscuits or blocks of butter. Another flattened tube of Boroline. The brittle clumps of hair her scalp sheds, pulled from the teeth of her comb.

People have always tossed refuse into these bodies of water. But now the accumulation is deliberate. An illegal practice taking place in ponds, in paddy fields, all over Calcutta. They are being plugged up by promoters so that the city’s swampy land turns solid, so that new sectors can be established, new homes built. New generations bred.

It had happened on a massive scale in the north, in Bidhannagar. She had read about it in the papers, the Dutch engineers laying down pipes to bring in silt from the Hooghly, closing up the lakes, turning water into land. They’d established a planned city, Salt Lake, in its place.

Long ago, when they had first come to Tollygunge, the water had been clean. Subhash and Udayan had cooled off in the ponds on hot days. Poor people had bathed. After the rains the floodwater turned the lowland into a pretty place filled with wading birds, clear enough to reflect moonlight.

The water that remains has been reduced to a green well in the center, a dull green that reminds her of military vehicles. Winter days, when the sun’s heat is strong, when most of the lowland has turned back to mud, she sees water from certain puddles evaporating before her eyes, rising up like steam from the ground.

In spite of the garbage the water hyacinth still grows, stubbornly rooted. The promoters who want this land will have to burn it to eradicate it, or remove it with machines.

At a certain hour she gets up from her chair. She goes down to the courtyard to pick a few marigold tops and jasmine, enclosing them in her hand. Her husband’s dahlias are still in bloom this winter, people peering over the wall to admire them.

She walks past the ponds to the edge of the lowland. Her gait has changed. She has lost the coordination required to place one foot directly in front of the other. Instead she moves by shifting her body from side to side, leaning in with one shoulder, her feet feeling for the ground.

That evening was long enough ago now for stories to be told. The neighborhood children, born after Udayan’s death, go quiet when they see her with the flowers and small brass urn.

She washes the memorial tablet and replaces the flowers, brushing away those that have dried out from the day before. This past October was the twelfth anniversary. She puts her hand into a puddle, sprinkling the flowers with the water that clings to her fingers, to keep them moist through the night.

Bijoli understands that she scares these children; that to them she, too, is a kind of ghostly presence in the neighborhood, a specter watching over them from the terrace, always emerging at the same time every day. She is tempted to tell them that they are right, and that Udayan’s ghost does lurk, inside the house and around it, in and around the enclave.

Some days, she would tell them if they asked, she sees him coming into view, approaching the house after a long day at college. He walks through the swinging doors into the courtyard, a book bag over his shoulder. Still clean-shaven, focused on his studies, eager to settle down at his desk. Telling her he’s hungry, thirsty for tea, asking why she hasn’t already put the kettle on.

She hears his footsteps on the stairs, the fan in his bedroom spinning. Static on the shortwave that stopped working years ago. The brief sound his match makes, the flame raging, then ebbing, when it strikes the edge of the box.

As a final disgrace to their family, his body was never returned.
They were denied even the comfort of honoring his bullet-ridden corpse. They had been unable to anoint it, to drape it with flowers. It had not been carried out of the enclave, hoisted on the shoulders of his comrades, carried into the next world to shouts of
hari bol
.

After his death there was no recourse to the law. It was the law, at the time, that had made it possible for the police to kill him. For a while she and her husband had looked for his name in the papers. Needing proof even after what they’d seen. But no notice was printed. No admission of what had been done. The small stone tablet that his party comrades thought to put up is the only acknowledgment.

They had named him after the sun. The giver of life, receiving nothing in return.

The year after Udayan’s death, the year Subhash took Gauri to America, Bijoli’s husband had retired. He woke before dawn and took the first tram north, to Babu Ghat, where he bathed in the Ganges. For the rest of the day, after his breakfast, he sequestered himself in his room and read. He refused rice for lunch, telling her to cut up fruit, to warm a bowl of milk instead.