The Lowland (37 page)

He’d spent summers in Calcutta, staying at his grandparents’ house on Jamir Lane. She thought he’d gone off to law school, but no, he’d changed his mind, explaining in his e-mail that he was a visiting professor of political science at one of the other colleges in the consortium, specializing in South Asia. Telling her she’d been an influence.

He was writing to say hello, to say he was nearby. He was coming to her college the following week, to attend a panel. He asked Gauri if he could take her to lunch. He was putting together a book, hoping she might contribute to it. Would she be open to discussing the possibility?

She considered saying no. Instead, curious to see him again, she suggested a quiet restaurant she knew well, where she came from time to time on her own.

Dipankar was already at the table. No longer in the shorts and sandals he would wear to her class, no string of shells around his neck. A striped cotton shirt now, loafers, belted trousers covering his legs. He’d gone to Nebraska for graduate school, Buffalo for his first job. He was glad to be in California again. He took out his iPhone, showing her pictures of his twins, a boy and girl, in the arms of his American wife.

She congratulated him. She wondered if Bela really was married by now. If she’d also had a child.

They ordered their food. She had an hour, she told Dipankar, before she needed to get back to campus. Tell me, what’s this book about?

You were at Presidency in the late sixties, right?

He’d gotten a contract from an academic press, to write a history of students at the college when the Naxalite movement was at its height. The idea was to compare it to the SDS in America. He was hoping to write it as an oral history. He wanted to interview her.

Her eyelid twitched. It was a nervous tic she’d developed at some point. She wondered if it was noticeable. She wondered if Dipankar could detect the nerve firing.

I wasn’t involved, she said. Her mouth felt dry.

She lifted her glass to her lips. She drank some water. She felt tiny cubes of ice, slipping down her throat before she could catch them.

It doesn’t matter, Dipankar said. I want to know what the atmosphere was like. What students were thinking and doing. What you observed.

I’m sorry, I don’t want to be interviewed.

Not even if we protect your identity?

She was suddenly afraid that he knew something. That maybe her name was on a list. That an old file had been opened, an investigation of a long-ago occurrence under way. She put a hand over her eyelid, to steady it.

But no, she saw that he’d simply been counting on her. That she was just a convenient source. There was a pause as their food was brought to the table.

Listen, I can tell you what I know. But I don’t want to be part of the book.

Fair enough, Professor.

He asked her permission, and turned on a small recording device. But it was Gauri who posed the first question.

What got you interested in this?

He told her his own father’s brother had been involved. A college student who’d gotten in over his head, who’d been imprisoned. Dipankar’s grandparents had managed to get him out. They’d sent him to London.

What does he do now?

He’s an engineer. He’s the subject of the first chapter of the book. Under an alias, of course.

She nodded, wondering what the fate had been of so many others. If they’d been as fortunate. There was so much she might have said.

He talked to me about the rally the day the party was declared, Dipankar continued.

She remembered standing in the heat on May Day, under the Monument. Watching Kanu Sanyal at the rostrum, set free.

She and Udayan had been among thousands on the Maidan, listening to his speech. She remembered the sea of bodies, the fluted white column, with its two balconies at the top, rising into the sky. The rostrum, decorated with a life-sized portrait of Mao.

She remembered Kanu Sanyal’s voice, emitted through the loudspeaker. A young man with glasses, ordinary-looking, charismatic nevertheless.
Comrades and friends!
she still heard him calling out, greeting them. She remembered the single emotion she’d felt a part of. She remembered being thrilled by the things he’d said.

Her impressions were flickering, from a lifetime ago. But they were vivid inside Dipankar. All the names, the events of those years, were at his fingertips. He could quote from the writings of Charu Majumdar. He knew about the rift, toward the end, between Majumdar and Sanyal, Sanyal objecting to the annihilation line.

Dipankar had studied the movement’s self-defeating tactics, its lack of coordination, its unrealistic ideology. He’d understood, without ever having been a part of things, far better than Gauri, why it had surged and failed.

My uncle was still there when Sanyal got arrested again, in 1970. He was sent away to London soon after.

This, too, she remembered. His followers had begun rioting. It was after Sanyal’s arrest, a year after the party’s declaration, that the worst violence in Calcutta had begun.

I was married that year.

And your husband? Was he affected?

He was in America, studying, she said. He had nothing to do with it. She was grateful that the second reality could paper over the first.

I’m planning to do some fieldwork in Calcutta, he said. Is there anyone you still know, people I might want to talk to?

I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.

I’d like to get up to Naxalbari if I can. I’d like to see the village where Sanyal lived, after he was released from prison.

She nodded. You should.

It fascinates me, the turn his life took.

What do you mean?

The way he was chastened but remained a hero. Still cycling through villages in Naxalbari years later, mobilizing support. I would have liked to speak to him.

Why don’t you?

He’s dead. You hadn’t heard?

It had happened nearly a year ago. His health was in decline. His
kidneys and eyesight failing. He’d been suffering from depression. A stroke in 2008 had left him partly paralyzed. He’d refused to be treated in a government hospital. He’d refused to approach the state while he was still fighting it.

He died of kidney failure?

Dipankar shook his head. He killed himself.

She went home, to her desk, and switched on the computer. She typed Kanu Sanyal’s name into the search box. The hits appeared, one after the next, in a series of Indian sites she’d never looked at before.

She began clicking them open, reading details of his biography. One of the founding members of the movement, along with Majumdar. A movement that still threatened the Indian state.

Born in 1932. Employed early on as a clerk in a Siliguri court.

He’d worked as a CPI(M) organizer in Darjeeling, then broken with the party after the Naxalbari uprising. He’d gone to China to meet with Mao. He’d spent close to a decade in jail. He’d been the chairman of the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. Following his release, he’d renounced violent revolution.

He’d remained a communist, dedicating his life to the concerns of tea plantation workers, rickshaw drivers. He’d never married. He’d concluded that India was not a nation. He supported the independence of Kashmir, of Nagaland.

He owned a few books, clothes, cooking utensils. Framed pictures of Marx and Lenin. He’d died a pauper.
I was popular once, I have lost my popularity
, he’d said in one of his final interviews.
I am unwell
.

Many of the articles celebrated his life, his commitment to India’s poor, his tragic passing. They referred to him as a hero, a legend. His critics condemned him, saying that a terrorist had died.

It was the same set of information, repeated in various ways. She opened the links anyway, unable to stop.

One of them led to a video. A television news segment from March 23, 2010. A female newscaster’s voice was summarizing the details. There was some black-and-white footage of Calcutta streets in the late sixties, banners and graffiti, a few seconds of a protest march.

It cut to a shot of weeping villagers, their faces in their hands.
People gathered at the doorway of a house, the thatched mud hut that had served as Sanyal’s home, his party office. His cook was being interviewed. She was agitated, nervous in front of the camera. Speaking in the particular accent of the village.

She’d come to check on him after his lunch, she explained to the reporter. She looked through the window but didn’t see him resting in his bedroom. The door wasn’t latched. She checked again. Then she saw him in another part of the room.

Gauri saw him, too. On the screen of her computer, on her desk, in her darkened study in California, she saw what the cook had seen.

A seventy-eight-year-old man, wearing an undershirt and cotton pajamas, hanging from a nylon rope. The chair he’d used to secure the rope still stood in front of him. It had not been knocked over. No spasm, no final reaction, had kicked it away.

His head was cocked to the right, the back of his neck exposed above the undershirt. The sides of his feet were touching the floor. As if he were still supported by the earth’s gravity. As if all he had to do was straighten his shoulders and move on.

For a few days she was unable to rid her mind of the image. She could not stop thinking about the final passivity of a man who’d refused, until the moment his life ended, to bow his head.

She could not rid herself of the emotion it churned up in her. She felt a terrible weight, combined with a void.

The following week, stepping off a staircase outside a campus building, not paying attention, she lost her footing and fell. She reached out, broke the fall with her hand. The skin had split from its contact with the pathway. She looked and saw blood beading across it, highlighting the etched lines of her palm.

Someone rushed over, asking if she was all right. She was able to stand, to take a few steps. The greater pain was in her wrist. Her head was spinning, and there was a throbbing on one side.

A university ambulance took her to the hospital. The wrist was badly sprained, and because the pain in her head had not subsided, because it had spread to the other side also, she would need to get some scans, some tests.

She was given forms to fill out and asked to name her next of kin. All her life, on such forms, having no other choice, she’d put Subhash’s name. But there had never been an emergency, never a need to contact him.

Weakly she formed the letters with her left hand. The address in Rhode Island, and the phone number she still remembered. She used to dial it sometimes when the receiver was still on its hook, when thinking of Bela. When she was appalled by her transgression, overtaken by regret.

She had not been a patient in a hospital since Bela was born. Even now the memory was intact. A rainy evening in summer. Twenty-four years old. A typed bracelet around her wrist. Everyone congratulating Subhash when it was over, flowers coming from his department at the university.

Again she was given a bracelet, entered into the hospital’s system. She gave them the information they needed about her medical history, the insurance card. There was no one to help her this time. She was dependent on the nurses, the doctors, when they came.

A few X-rays were taken, a CT scan. Her right hand was bound up, just as Udayan’s had been after his accident. They told her she was a bit dehydrated. They put fluids into her veins.

She was kept there until evening. The scans showed no bleeding on the brain. She went home with nothing more than a prescription for painkillers and a referral to a physical therapist. She had to call a colleague, for she was told that she would be unable to drive for a few weeks, unable to negotiate the simple town, with its short grassy blocks, where she had lived for so many years.

The colleague, Edwin, drove her to the pharmacy to pick up her prescriptions. He invited her to stay with him and his wife for a few days, offering her their guest room, saying it would be no trouble. But Gauri told him there was no need. She returned to her own home, sat at the desk in her office, pulled out a pair of scissors, and managed to clip away the typed bracelet around her wrist.

She switched on the computer, then lit the burner on the stove to make tea. She struggled to remove the tea bag from its wrapper, to raise the boiling kettle over the cup. Everything done slowly, everything feeling clumsy in the hand she was not accustomed to using.

The refrigerator was empty, the carton of milk nearly finished. Only then did she remember that she’d intended to buy groceries as she was walking to her car, when she’d fallen. She would have to call Edwin later, and ask him if he minded picking up a few things.

It was eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. She had no classes to teach, no plans for the evening. She poured herself a glass of water, spilling some of it on the counter. Somehow she managed to open the bottle of pills. She left the cap off, so that she would not have to do it again.

Not wanting to burden anyone, but unable to manage alone, she went away, a weekend’s journey that had nothing to do with work. With one hand she packed a small suitcase. She left her laptop at home. She called a car service and checked into a hotel that some of her colleagues liked, in a desert town. A place where she could walk in the mountains and soak her body in a spring, where she would not have to cook for a few days.

On the roof of the hotel, at the pool surrounded by steep hills, she observed an elderly, wealthy-looking Indian couple taking care of a little boy. They were trying to teach the boy not to fear the water, showing him how little plastic figures floated, the grandfather swimming a few strokes to demonstrate. The husband and wife lightly quarreled, in Hindi, about how much sunscreen to put on the child, whether or not his head should be protected by a hat.

The husband was nearly bald but still vigorous. What hair was left wreathed the lower portion of his head. The wife seemed younger, her hair tinted with henna, her toenails polished, pretty sandals on her feet. At breakfast Gauri watched them feeding the boy yogurt and cereal from a spoon.