The Lowland (25 page)

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 father’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.

From the terrace Bela watched the thin trunks of palm trees bending but not breaking in the maritime wind. The pointed foliage flapped like the feathers of giant birds, like battered windmills that churned the sky.

Her grandmother had not been at the airport to welcome them. In Tollygunge, on the terrace where she sat, on the top floor of the house
where her father had been raised, Bela was presented with a short necklace. The tiny gold balls, like decorations meant for holiday cookies, were strung tightly together. Her grandmother leaned in close. Saying nothing, she fastened the necklace at the base of Bela’s throat, then arranged it so that the clasp was at the back.

Though her grandmother’s hair was gray, the skin of her hands was smooth, unmarked. The sari wrapped around her body, made of white cotton, was plain as a sheet. Her pupils were milky, navy instead of black. Taking in Bela, her grandmother’s eyes traveled between Bela and her father, as if following a filament that connected them.

Watching them unpack their suitcases, her grandmother was disappointed that they had not brought special gifts for Deepa. Deepa wore a sari, and a gem in her nostril, and she called Bela
Memsahib
. Her face was shaped like a heart. She was strong enough, in spite of her lean frame, her wiry arms, to help Bela’s father carry their heavy suitcases up the stairs.

Deepa slept in the room next to her grandmother’s. A room that was like a large cupboard, up a half flight of steps, with a ceiling so low it was not possible to stand. This was where Deepa unrolled a narrow cushion at the end of the day.

Her grandmother gave away the American soaps and lotions Bela’s mother had picked out, the flowered pillowcase and sheet. She told Deepa to use them. She set aside the colorful spools of thread, the embroidery hoop, the tomato pincushion, saying Deepa did the sewing now. The black leather purse shaped like a large envelope, fastened by a single snap, which Bela had helped her mother choose in Rhode Island, at the Warwick Mall, went to Deepa also.

The day after they arrived her father sat for a ceremony to honor her grandfather, who had died a few months before. A priest tended a small fire that burned in the center of the room. Fruit was heaped beside it on brass plates and trays.

On the floor, propped against the wall, was a large photo of her grandfather’s face, and beside it, a photo of an older boy, a smiling teenager, in a dirty frame of pale wood. Incense burned in front of these pictures, fragrant white flowers draped like thick necklaces in front of the glass.

Before the ceremony a barber came to the house and shaved her father’s head and face in the courtyard, turning his face strange and small. Bela was told to put out her hands, and without warning, the nails of her fingers, then her toes, were pared off with a blade.

At dusk Deepa lit coils to ward off the mosquitoes. Celery-skinned geckoes appeared indoors, hovering close to the seam where wall and ceiling met. At night she and her father slept in the same room, on the same bed. A thick bolster was placed between them. The pillow beneath her head was like a sack of flour. The mesh of the mosquito netting was blue.

Every night, when the flimsy barricade was adjusted around them, when no other living thing could enter, she felt relief. When he had his back to her in sleep, hairless, shirtless, her father almost looked like another person. He was awake before she was, the mosquito netting balled up like an enormous bird’s nest suspended from one corner of the room. Her father was already bathed and dressed and eating a mango, scraping out the flesh with his teeth. None of it was unfamiliar to him.

For breakfast she was given bread toasted over an open flame, sweetened yogurt, a small banana with green skin. Her grandmother reminded Deepa, before she set out for the market, not to buy a certain type of fish, saying that the bones would be too troublesome.

Watching Bela try to pick up rice and lentils with her fingers, her grandmother told Deepa to fetch a spoon. When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her.

Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She’s not made to survive here.

After the first week her father began to go out during the day. He explained that he would be giving a few lectures at nearby universities, and also meeting with scientists who were helping him with a project. Initially it upset her, being left in the house with her grandmother and
Deepa. She watched him leave through the terrace grille, carrying a folding umbrella to shield his shaved head from the sun’s glare.

She was nervous until he returned, until he pressed the doorbell and a key was lowered and he unlocked the gate and stood before her again. She worried for him, swallowed up by the city, at once ramshackle and grand, which she’d seen from the taxi that had brought them to Tollygunge. She didn’t like to imagine him having to negotiate it, being prey to it somehow.