The Lowland (24 page)

This routine, these small deprivations, structured his days. He’d stopped reading the papers. He’d stopped sitting with Bijoli on the terrace, complaining that the breeze was too damp, that it settled in his chest. He read the Mahabharata in Bengali translation, a few pages at a time. Losing himself in familiar tales, in ancient conflicts that had not afflicted them. When his eyes began to give him trouble, cloudy with cataracts, he did not bother getting them checked. Instead he used a magnifying glass.

At a certain point he suggested selling the house and moving away from Tollygunge, leaving Calcutta altogether. Perhaps moving to another part of India, to some restful mountain town. Or perhaps applying for visas, and going to America to stay with Subhash and Gauri. Nothing, he said, bound them to this place. The house stood practically empty. A mockery of the future they’d assumed would unfold.

Briefly she’d considered it. Traveling, making amends with Subhash, accepting Gauri, getting to know Udayan’s child.

But it wasn’t possible for Bijoli to abandon the house where Udayan had lived since birth, the neighborhood where he died. The terrace from which she’d last seen him, at a distance. The field past the lowland, where they’d taken him.

The field is no longer empty. A block of new houses sits on it now, their rooftops crowded with television antennas. In the mornings, close by, a new market sets up, where Deepa says the prices for vegetables are better.

A month ago, before going to bed, her husband tied his mosquito netting to the nails in the wall and wound his watch to mark the hours of the following day. In the morning Bijoli noticed that the door to his room, next to hers, was still shut. That he had not gone for his bath.

She didn’t knock on his door. She went to the terrace, to sit and view the sky and sip her tea. There were a few clouds in the sky but no rain. She told Deepa to bring her husband his tea, to rouse him.

A few minutes later, after Deepa entered the room, Bijoli heard the cup and saucer break into pieces against the floor. Before Deepa came to find her on the terrace, to tell her he’d died in his sleep, Bijoli already knew.

She became a widow, as Gauri had become. Bijoli now wears white saris, without a pattern or a border. She’s removed her bangles, and stopped eating fish. Vermillion no longer marks the parting of her hair.

But Gauri is married again, to Subhash, a turn of events that still stupefies her. In some ways it was less expected, more shocking, than Udayan’s death. In some ways, just as devastating.

Deepa does everything now. A capable teenaged girl whose family lives outside the city, who has five siblings to help support. Bijoli has given Deepa her costume jewelry and colorful things, the keys to her house. Deepa washes and combs Bijoli’s hair, arranging it so that the thinning parts are less obvious. She sleeps in the house with Bijoli at night, in the prayer room where Bijoli no longer prays.

She handles the money, goes to the market, cooks the meals,
fetches the mail. In the mornings she draws the drinking water from the tube well. At night, she makes sure that the gate is locked.

If something needs to be hemmed she operates the sewing machine that Udayan used to oil, that he would repair with his tools so that Bijoli never had to take it into a shop. Bijoli tells Deepa to use the sewing machine as often as she likes, and by now it has become a source of extra income for her, as it used to be for Bijoli, hemming frocks and trousers, taking in or letting out blouses for women in the neighborhood.

In the afternoons, on the terrace, Deepa reads Bijoli articles from the newspaper. Never the whole story, just a few lines, skipping over the difficult words. She tells her that a film star is the president of America. That the CPI(M) has been running West Bengal again. That Jyoti Basu, whom Udayan used to revile, is the chief minister.

Deepa has replaced everyone: Bijoli’s husband, her daughter-in-law, her sons. She believes Udayan arranged for this.

She remembers him sitting with a piece of chalk in the courtyard, teaching the boys and girls who used to work for them, who’d not gone to school, to write and read. He befriended these children, eating beside them, involving them in his games, giving them the meat from his own plate if Bijoli hadn’t set enough aside. He would come to their defense, if she happened to scold them.

When he was older he collected worn-out items, old bedding and pots and pans, to distribute to families living in colonies, in slums. He would accompany a maid to her home, into the poorest sections of the city, to bring medicine. To summon a doctor if a member of her family was ill, to see to a funeral if someone died.

But the police had called him a miscreant, an extremist. A member of an illegal political party. A boy who did not know right from wrong.

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.