The Lowland (44 page)

He climbed over the rear wall of the courtyard as he used to when he was a child, to escape the house without his mother noticing. Unable to do it quickly because of his hand, but managing, stepping over the kerosene tin. The evening was warm, the smell of sulfur strong.

He moved quickly, cutting past the ponds, over to the lowland. He entered the section where the water hyacinth was thickest, taking one step, then another, the water receiving him until his body was concealed.

He took a deep breath, closed his mouth, and went under. He tried not to move. With the fingertips of his uninjured hand he was pinching his nostrils shut.

After the first few seconds the pressure mounted and burned in his lungs, as if all the weight of his body were centered there. The
breath he was holding was turning solid, crowding his chest. This was normal, not from a lack of oxygen, but because carbon dioxide was building up in his blood.

If one could fight the instinct at that point to take a breath, the body could survive up to six minutes. Blood would begin to ebb from his liver and his intestines, flowing to his heart and his brain. The doctor who’d treated his hand, whom he’d asked, had explained this to him.

He monitored his pulse, ministering to himself. It would have been better if he hadn’t been running. If his pulse had been slower as he’d entered the water. He began to count. He counted ten seconds. Fighting the urge to surface, forcing himself to bear it a few seconds more.

Underwater there was the freedom of not having to struggle to listen to anything. He was spared the frustration of misunderstanding, of asking people to repeat things. The doctor said the hearing might improve, that the distortion and the ringing in his ears might subside over time. He would have to wait and see.

The silence underwater was not absolute. Rather, a toneless exhalation that penetrated his skull. It was different from the partial deafness he’d been experiencing since the explosion. Water, a better conductor of sound than air.

He wondered if this deafness was what it was like to visit a country where one did not understand the language. To absorb nothing of what was said. He had never been to another country. Never been to China or to Cuba. He remembered something he’d read recently, the final words Che had written to his children:
Remember that the revolution is the important thing and that each one of us alone is worth nothing
.

But in this case it had fixed nothing, helped no one. In this case there was to be no revolution. He knew this now.

If he was worth nothing, then why was he so desperate to save himself? Why, in the end, did the body not obey the brain?

All at once his body overcame him and he surfaced, his head and chest exposed, his nostrils burning, his lungs gasping for air.

Two paramilitary stood facing him, their guns raised. One of them was shouting into a megaphone, so that Udayan had no trouble hearing what was said.

They’d surrounded the lowland. He saw that a soldier stood at a distance behind him, two more to either side. They’d captured his family. They would start shooting them if he did not surrender, the voice announced. A threat loud enough not only for his own benefit but for the entire neighborhood to hear.

Carefully he stood up in thick weedy water that came to his waist. He was spitting up what he’d swallowed, coughing so violently that his organs seized. They were telling him to walk forward, to raise his hands above his head.

Again the unsteadiness, the dizziness. The surface of the water at an angle, the sky lower than it should be, the horizon unfixed. He wanted a shawl for his shoulders. The soft maroon one Gauri always kept hanging on a rod in their room, that enveloped him in her smell some mornings when he wrapped it around himself to smoke his first cigarette on the roof.

He had hoped that she and his mother were still out shopping. But when he emerged from the water, he saw that they had returned in time for this.

It had begun in college, in Gauri’s neighborhood, on the campus just down the street from the flat where she lived. There was always talk during labs, during meals at the canteen, about the country and all that was wrong with it. The stagnant economy, the deterioration of living standards. The latest rice shortage, pushing tens of thousands to the verge of starvation. The travesty of Independence, half of India still in chains. Only it was Indians chaining themselves now.

He got to know some members of the Marxist student wing. They’d talked of the example of Vietnam. He started cutting classes, wandering with them through Calcutta. Visiting factories, visiting slums.

In 1966 they’d organized a strike at Presidency, over the maladministration of hostels. They’d demanded that the superintendent resign. They’d risked expulsion. They’d shut down all of Calcutta University, for sixty-nine days.

He’d gone to the countryside to further indoctrinate himself. He’d been instructed to move from place to place, to walk fifteen miles
each day before sundown. He met tenant farmers living in desperation. People who resorted to eating what they fed their animals. Children who ate one meal a day.

Those with less sometimes killed their families, he was told, before ending their own lives.

Their subsistence was contingent on arrangements with landowners, moneylenders. On people who took advantage of them. On forces beyond their control. He saw how the system coerced them, how it humiliated them. How it had stripped their dignity away.

He ate what he was given. Coarse grains of rice, thinned lentils. Water that never quenched his thirst. In some villages there was no tea. He seldom bathed, he’d had to defecate in fields. No place to suffer with privacy the violent cramps that ripped through his bowels, through the stinging aperture of his skin. For him it was a temporary deprivation. But too many knew nothing else.

At night he and his companions were hidden on beds of string, on sacks of grain. They were tormented by mosquitoes, slow-moving swarms that bit them to the bone. Some of the boys came from wealthy families. One or two left within a matter of days. At night, in that collective silence, upset by the things he’d seen and heard, Udayan allowed himself to think of a single comfort. Gauri. He imagined seeing her again, talking to her. He wondered if she’d be willing to be his wife.

One day, visiting a clinic, he confronted the corpse of a young woman. She was around Gauri’s age, already the mother of numerous children. It was unclear, from her appearance, why she’d died. No one in the group answered correctly when the doctor asked them to guess. Trying to obtain cheap rice for her family, they were told, she had been trampled in a stampede. Her lungs crushed.

Ironically, her face was full, her belly slack. He imagined the other people pushing behind her, determined enough to knock her down. People she might have known from her village, might have called neighbors and friends. Here was more proof that the system was failing, that such poverty was a crime.

They were told that there was an alternative. Still, in the beginning it had mainly been a matter of opinion. Of attending meetings and rallies, of continuing to educate himself. Putting up posters, painting
slogans in the middle of the night. Reading the leaflets of Charu Majumdar, trusting Kanu Sanyal. Believing a solution was at hand.

In Calcutta, just after the party was formed, Subhash left, going to America. He was critical of the party’s objectives, disapproving, in fact. His brother’s disapproval had angered Udayan, but their parting had filled him with foreboding, though he tried to shake it off, that they would never see one another again. A few months later he married Gauri.

With Subhash gone Udayan’s only friends were his comrades. Slowly the missions turned more purposeful. Gasoline poured in the registrar’s office of a government college. Bomb-making instructions studied, ingredients stolen from labs. Among the squad members of the neighborhood, a discussion of potential targets. The Tolly Club, for what it represented. A policeman, for the authority he embodied, and for his gun.

After the party was declared he began living two lives. Occupying two dimensions, obeying two sets of laws. In one world he was married to Gauri, living with his parents, coming and going so as not to arouse suspicion, teaching his students, guiding them through simple experiments at the school. Writing cheerful letters to Subhash in America, pretending the movement was behind him, pretending his commitment had cooled. Lying to his brother, hoping that it would bring them closer again. Lying to his parents, not wanting to concern them.

But in the world of the party it had also been expected for him to help kill a policeman. They were symbols of brutality, trained by foreigners.
They are not Indians, they do not belong to India
, Charu Majumdar said. Each annihilation would spread the revolution. Each would be a forward step.

He’d shown up at the appointed time, guarding the alley where the action was to take place. The attack occurred in the early afternoon, when the policeman was on his way to pick up his son from school. A day he was off duty. A day, thanks to Gauri, they knew he would not be armed.

In meetings Udayan and his squad members had studied where in the abdomen the dagger should be directed, at what point below the ribs. They remembered what Sinha had told them before he was
arrested: that revolutionary violence opposed oppression. That it was a force of liberation, humane.

In the alley he’d felt calm and purposeful. He’d watched the constable’s clothing darken, the look of astonishment, the bulge of the eyes, the grimace of pain that seized his face. And then the enemy was no longer a policeman. No longer a husband, or a father. No longer a version of someone who’d once stricken Subhash with a broken putter outside the Tolly Club. No longer alive.

A simple dagger was enough to kill him. A tool intended to cut up fruit. Not the loaded gun being aimed now behind Udayan’s head.

He had not been the one to wield the dagger, only to stand watch. But his part in it had been crucial. He had gone as close as he could, he had dipped his hand in the fresh blood of that enemy, writing the party’s initials on the wall as the blood leaked down his wrists, into the crook of his arm, before he ran from the scene.

Now he stood at the edge of a lowland, in the enclave where he’d lived all his life. It was an October evening, Tollygunge at dusk, the week before Durga Pujo.

His parents were pleading with the police, insisting he was innocent. But it was they who were innocent of the things he’d done.

His hands were bound behind him, the rope chafing his skin. This discomfort preoccupied him. He was told to turn around.

It was too late to run or to fight. So he stood and waited, his back to his family, picturing but not seeing them.

The last he’d seen of his parents was the ground at their feet, as he’d bent down to ask for their pardon. The softened rubber slippers his father wore around the house. The dark brown border of his mother’s sari, the end of it draped over her face and wrapped around her shoulders, held by her fingers at her throat.

It was only Gauri he’d managed to look in the face, at the moment his hands were being restrained. He could not have turned away from her without having done that.

He knew that he was no hero to her. He had lied to her and used her. And yet he had loved her. A bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She’d been prepared to live her life alone,
but from the moment he’d known her he’d needed her. And now he was about to abandon her.

Or was it she abandoning him? For she looked at him as she’d never looked before. It was a look of disillusion. A revision of everything they’d once shared.

They pushed him into the back of the van and started the engine. He felt the vibration of the door slamming shut. They would take him somewhere, outside the city, to question him, then finish him off. Either that or to prison. But no, they’d already cut the engine, the van had stopped. The door opened. He was pulled out again.

They were in the field where he’d come so many times with Subhash.

They asked him nothing. They untied his hands, then pointed, indicating that he was to walk in a certain direction now, again with his hands raised over his head.

Slowly, he heard them say. Make sure to pause after every step.

He did as he was told. Step by step he walked away from them. Go back to your family, they said. But he knew that they were only waiting for him to fall into the ideal range.

One step, then another. He started counting. How many more?

He’d known from the beginning the risk of what he was doing. But only the policeman’s blood had prepared him. That blood had not belonged only to the police officer, it had become a part of Udayan also. So that he’d felt his own life begin to ebb, irrevocably, as the policeman lay dying in the alley. Since then he’d waited for his own blood to spill.

For a fraction of a second he heard the explosion tearing through his lungs. A sound like gushing water or a torrent of wind. A sound that belonged to the fixed forces of the world, that then took him out of the world. The silence was pure now. Nothing interfered.

He was not alone. Gauri stood in front of him wearing a peach-colored sari. She was a little out of breath, sweat pooling in the material of her blouse, from her armpits. It was the bright afternoon outside the cinema hall, during the interval. They’d missed the first part of the film.

She’d arrived to meet him in the middle of the day, still more stranger than wife, about to sit with him in the dark.

Her hair shimmered. He wanted to lift it off her neck, to feel its unfettered weight against his fingers. The light was bouncing off it, making a mirror of it, casting a spectrum that was faint but complete.

He strained to hear what she was saying. He took another step toward her, dropping the cigarette from his fingers.

He adjusted his body in relation to hers. His head angled down, his hand forming a canopy between them to shield her face from the sun. It was a useless gesture. Only silence. The sunlight on her hair.