The Lowland (38 page)

They asked Gauri, in English, where she was from, saying they came to America every summer, that this was where both their sons lived and that they liked it very much. One son lived in Sacramento, the other in Atlanta.

Since becoming grandparents, they took each of their grandchildren on a separate vacation, to get to know them on their own terms, and to give their sons and daughters-in-law some time to themselves.

At our age, what else is there to live for? the man asked Gauri, the
child tucked into his elbow. And yet they preferred India, not wanting to retire here.

Do you go back often? the wife asked.

It’s been a while.

Are you a grandmother?

Gauri shook her head, then added, wanting suddenly to align herself with this couple, I’m still waiting.

How many children do you have?

One. A daughter.

Normally she told people she did not have any children. And people backed away politely from this revelation, not wanting to press.

But today Gauri could not deny Bela her existence. And the woman merely laughed, nodding, saying that children these days had minds of their own.

In time her wrist grew stronger. In her therapy sessions they wrapped it in warmed wax. Again she was able to grasp her toothbrush and clean her teeth, to sign a check, or turn the knob of a door. Then she was able to drive again, to seize the gearshift and make a turn, to edit drafts and correct student papers with her dominant hand.

The semester went on, she taught her last classes, turned in her grades. She would be on leave the coming fall. One afternoon, after finishing up at her desk, she walked across the parking lot of her apartment complex and opened her mailbox. With some effort she twisted the key.

She returned to her apartment and pushed back the sliding glass door that was off the living room, leading to her patio. She set the mail on the teak table and sat down to go through it.

Among the bills, the catalogues that had come to her that day, there was a personal letter. Subhash’s handwriting was on the envelope, the return address of the house in Rhode Island, close to the bay. He had boiled down to the proof of his penmanship, the dried saliva on the back of a stamp.

He’d sent it care of her department. The secretary had done the courtesy of forwarding it to her home.

Inside was a short letter written in Bengali, on two sides of a sheet of office stationery. She had not read Bengali penmanship in decades; her communication with Manash was by e-mail, in English.

Gauri
,

The Internet tells me this is your address, but please confirm that this has reached you. As you see, I am in the same place. I am in decent health. I hope you are, too. But I will be seventy before too long, and we are entering a phase of life when anything might happen. Whatever lies ahead, I would like to begin to simplify things, given that, legally, we remain tied. If you have no objection, I am going to sell the house in Tollygunge, to which you still have a claim. I also think it’s time to remove your name as joint owner of the house in Rhode Island. I will leave it to Bela, of course
.

She paused, warming her hand against the surface of the table before continuing. The hand had turned vulnerable while it was bound up. Now her veins protruded, so that they resembled a piece of coral rooted to her wrist.

He told her he didn’t want to drag her back to Rhode Island in the event of an emergency, not wanting to burden her in case he were to go first.

I don’t mean to rush you, but I’d like to resolve things by the end of the year. I don’t know if there’s anything else we have to say to one another. Though I cannot pardon what you did to Bela, it was I who benefited, and continue to benefit, from your actions, however wrong they were. She remains a part of my life, but I know she is not a part of yours. If it were easier I’d be open to our meeting in person, and concluding things face-to-face. I bear you no ill will. Then again it’s just a matter of some signatures, and of course the mail will do
.

She had to read the letter a second time to realize the point of it. That after all this time, he was asking her for a divorce.

Chapter 2

Telling no one in their families, not even Manash, they’d married each other. It was January 1970. A registrar came to a house in Chetla. It belonged to one of Udayan’s comrades, a senior party member who was also a professor of literature. A gentle man, mild of manner, a poet. They called him Tarun-da.

A few other comrades had been there. They asked her questions, and told her how to conduct herself from now on. Udayan placed his hand over a copy of the Red Book before they signed the papers. His sleeves rolled back as they always were, his forearms exposed. A beard and moustache by then. When they’d finished, and both of them were perched on the edge of a sofa, leaning together over the low table where the papers had been spread, he turned to look at her, grinning, taking a moment to convey to her, only to her, how happy he was.

She did not care what her aunts and uncles, her sisters, would think of what she was doing. This would serve to put them behind her. The only one in her family she cared about was Manash.

Some cutlets and fish fries were brought in and distributed, a few boxes of sweets. This was the extent of the celebration. They spent their first week as husband and wife together in the house in Chetla, in a room the professor had to spare.

It was there, at night, after their many shared conversations, that they began to communicate in a different way. There that she first felt his hand exploring the surface of her body. There, as he slept next to her, that she felt the cool of his bare shoulder nestled in her armpit. The warmth of his knees against the backs of her legs.

The entrance to the house was at the side, off a long alley, hidden from the street. The staircase turned sharply, once and then again, leading to rooms organized tightly around the balcony. The floors were cracked here and there, brownish red.

The rooms were filled with Tarun-da’s books, piled in stacks as tall as children. Housed in cabinets and on shelves. The sitting room, at
the front of the building, had a narrow balcony overlooking the street. They were told not to stand there, not to draw attention to themselves.

A few days later she wrote to Manash, saying she had not, after all, gone on a trip to Santiniketan with her friends. She told him that she had married Udayan, and that she would not be returning home.

Then Udayan went to Tollygunge, to tell his parents what they had done. He told his parents that they were prepared to live elsewhere. They were stunned. But his brother was in America, and they wanted their remaining son home. Secretly Gauri had hoped that his parents would not take them in. In that cluttered but cheerful house in Chetla, hiding with Udayan, she’d felt at once brazen and protected. Free.

Udayan talked about their living on their own one day. He didn’t believe in a joint family. And yet, for the time being, because they could not go on staying at the professor’s home, because the home was a safe house and the room they’d been given was needed to harbor someone, because he did not make enough money for them to rent a flat elsewhere, he took her to Tollygunge.

It was only a few miles away. Still, traveling toward it, after Hazra Road, Gauri perceived a difference. The city she knew at her back. The light brighter in her eyes, the trees more plentiful, casting a dappled shade.

His parents stood in the courtyard, waiting to receive her. The house was spacious but utilitarian, plain. She understood immediately the circumstances from which Udayan had come, the conventions he’d rejected.

The end of her sari was draped over her head in a gesture of propriety. His mother’s head was draped also. This woman was now her mother-in-law. She was wearing a sari of crisp cream-colored cotton, checked with golden threads. Her father-in-law was tall and lean, like Udayan, with a moustache, a placid expression, swept-back graying hair.

Her mother-in-law asked Udayan if he objected to a few abbreviated rituals. He objected, but she ignored him, blowing her conch shell, then putting tuberose garlands around their necks. A woven tray was raised toward Gauri’s head, her chest, her belly. A tray heaped with auspicious items, with fruit.

She was presented with a box, opened to show the necklace inside. On the tray was a pot of vermillion powder. Her mother-in-law instructed Udayan to apply it to the parting of her hair. Taking Gauri’s left hand, she pressed her fingers together and slid an iron bangle over her wrist.

A few strangers, now her neighbors, had gathered to watch, looking over the courtyard wall.

You are our daughter now, her in-laws said, accepting her though they had not wanted her, placing their hands in a gesture of blessing over her head. What is ours is yours. Gauri bowed down, to take the dust from their feet.

The courtyard had been decorated with patterns in her honor, painted by hand. At the threshold of the house a pan of milk was simmering on a coal stove, coming to a boil as she approached. There were two stunted banana trees, one on either side of the door. Inside there was another pan of milk, tinted with red. She was told to dip her feet into the red liquid, then walk up the staircase. The staircase was still under construction, there was not a banister to hold.

The steps had been covered loosely with a white sari, like a thin slippery carpet laid over the treads. Every few steps there was an overturned clay cup she had to crush, bearing down with all her strength. This was the first thing asked of her, to mark her passage into Udayan’s home.

Because the lane was so narrow there was rarely the sound of a car or even a cycle rickshaw going past. Udayan told her it was easier, when returning to the enclave, to get out at the corner by the mosque and walk the rest of the way. Though many of the houses were walled off, she could hear the lives of others carrying on. Meals being prepared and served, water being poured for baths. Children being scolded and crying, reciting their lessons. Plates being scoured and rinsed. The claws of crows striking the rooftop, flapping their wings, scavenging for peels.

Every morning she was up at five, climbing stairs to a new portion of the house, and accepting the cup of tea her mother-in-law poured, a biscuit stored in the cream cracker tin. The line for the gas hadn’t been
hooked up yet, so the day began with the elaborate process of lighting the clay stove with coals, dung patties, kerosene, a match.

Thick smoke stung her eyes, blurring her vision as she fanned the flame. Her mother-in-law had told her, the first morning, to put away the book she’d brought with her, and to concentrate on the task at hand.

The workers arrived soon afterward. Barefoot, with soiled rags twisted around their heads. They hollered and hammered throughout the day, so that studying in the house was impossible. Dust coated everything, bricks and mortar brought in by the barrowful, additional rooms completed one by one.

After her father-in-law brought back a fish from the market, it was her job to cut the pieces, coat them with salt and turmeric, and fry them in oil. She sat in front of the stove on the flats of her feet. She reduced the sauce they would put the fish into for evening, seasoning it according to her mother-in-law’s instructions. She helped cut up cabbage, shell peas. Rid spinach of sand.

If the servant was late or had a day off she had to grind the turmeric root and chilies on a stone slab, to pound mustard or poppy seeds if her mother-in-law wanted to cook with them that day. When she ground the chilies her palms felt as if the skin had been scraped off. Tipping the rice pot onto a plate, she let the water drain, making sure the cooked grains didn’t slip out. The weight of the inverted pan strained her wrists, steam scalding her face if she forgot to turn it away.

Twice a week she accomplished all this before bathing and packing her books and taking the tram back to North Calcutta, to visit the library, to attend lectures. She hadn’t complained to Udayan. But he had known, telling her to be patient.

He told her that one day, when his brother, Subhash, returned from America and got married, there would be another daughter-in-law to do her share. And from time to time Gauri had wondered who that woman would be.

In the evenings she waited for Udayan to return from his tutoring job, watching from the terrace of her in-laws’ home. And when he pushed
through the swinging wooden doors he always paused to look up at her, as he used to look up from the intersection below her grandparents’ flat, she hoping he would stop by, he hoping to find her there. But now it was different: his arrival was expected, and the fact that she stood waiting for him was not a surprise, because they were married, and this was the house where they both lived.

He would wash up and have something to eat, and then she would put on a fresh sari and they would go out for a walk. Behaving at first like any other recently married couple. She enjoyed being out of the house with him, but she was unsettled by the quiet of Tollygunge, the raw simplicity she perceived.

The neighborhood was set in its ways. More uniformly Bengali than in North Calcutta, where Punjabis and Marwaris occupied many of the flats in her grandparents’ building, where the radio shop across from Chacha’s Hotel played Hindi film songs that floated over the traffic, where the energy of students and professors was thick in the air.

Here there was little to distract her, the way the view from her grandparents’ balcony could occupy her day and night. From her in-laws’ house there was little to see. Only other homes, laundry on rooftops, palms and coconut trees. Lanes curving this way and that way. The hyacinth that teemed, greener than grass, in the lowland and the ponds.

He began to ask her to do certain things. And so, in order to help him, in order to feel a part of it, she agreed. At first the tasks were simple. He drew her maps, telling her to walk here or there in the course of an errand, to observe whether a scooter or cycle was parked outside.