The Lowland (7 page)

His satisfaction was in watching: its breast feathers drooping as it dipped its head toward the water, as it took slow strides on long, backward-bent legs.

He wanted to sit in the car and watch as the bird stood there, staring out toward the sea. But on the narrow dirt road, which was normally empty, a car approached from behind, wanting to pass, forcing Subhash to drive on. By the time he circled back, the bird was gone.

The next afternoon he returned to the same spot. He walked along the edge of the marsh, searching for the bird’s outline. He stood watching the horizon as the light turned golden and the sun began to set. He wondered if perhaps the bird had flown off for the season. Then suddenly he heard a harsh, repetitive croaking.

It was the heron taking flight over the water, its great wings beating slowly and deliberately, looking at once encumbered and free. Its long neck was tucked in, dark legs dangling behind. Against the lowering sky the silhouette was black, the tips of its primary feathers distinct, the forked division of its toes.

He went back a third day, but was unable to see it anywhere. For the first time in his life, he felt a helpless love.

A new decade began: 1970. In winter, when the trees were naked, the stiff ground covered with snow, a second letter came from Udayan, in an envelope this time.

Subhash tore it open and found a small black-and-white photograph
of a young woman, standing. Her slender arms were folded across her chest.

She was at ease, also a little skeptical. Her head turned partly to one side, her lips closed but playful, her smile slightly askew. Her hair was in a braid, draped over the front of one shoulder. Her complexion was deep.

She was compelling without being pretty. Nothing like the demure girls that his mother used to point out to Udayan and Subhash at weddings, when they were in college. It was a candid shot, somewhere on the streets of Calcutta, in front of a building he did not recognize. He wondered if Udayan had taken the picture. If he’d inspired the playful expression on her face.

This is in lieu of a formal introduction, and it will be as formal an announcement as you will get. But it’s time that you met her. I’ve known her for a couple of years. We kept it quiet, but you know how it is. Her name is Gauri and she’s finishing a degree in philosophy at Presidency. A girl from North Calcutta, Cornwallis Street. Both her parents are dead, she lives with her brother—a friend of mine—and some relatives. She prefers books to jewels and saris. She believes as I do
.

Like Chairman Mao, I reject the idea of an arranged marriage. It is one thing, I admit, that I admire about the West. And so I’ve married her. Don’t worry, apart from running off with her there’s no scandal. You’re not about to be an uncle. Not yet, anyway. Too many children are victims of our defective social structure. This needs first to be fixed
.

I wish you could have been here, but you didn’t miss any type of celebration. It was a civil registration. I told Ma and Baba after the fact, as I am telling you. I told them, either you accept her, and we return to Tollygunge together, or we live as husband and wife somewhere else
.

They are still in shock, upset with me and also for no reason with Gauri, but we’re with them now, learning to live with one another. They can’t bear to tell you what I’ve done. So I’m telling you myself
.

At the end of the letter, he asked Subhash to buy a few books for Gauri, saying that they would be easier to find in the States.
Don’t bother putting them in the mail, they’ll only get lost or stolen. Bring them with you. You will show up to congratulate me one of these days, won’t you?

This time he didn’t reread the letter. Once was enough.

Though Udayan had a job, it was hardly enough to support himself, never mind a family. He was not yet twenty-five years old. Though the house would soon be big enough, to Subhash the decision felt impulsive, an imposition on his parents, premature. And he was puzzled that Udayan, so dedicated to his politics, so scornful of convention, would suddenly take a wife.

Not only had Udayan married before Subhash, but he’d married a woman of his choosing. On his own he’d taken a step that Subhash believed was their parents’ place to decide. Here was another example of Udayan forging ahead of Subhash, of denying that he’d come second. Another example of getting his way.

The back of the photograph was dated in Udayan’s handwriting. It was from over a year ago, 1968. Udayan had gotten to know her and fallen in love with her while Subhash was still in Calcutta. All that time, Udayan had kept Gauri to himself.

Once more Subhash destroyed the letter. The photograph he kept, at the back of one of his textbooks, as proof of what Udayan had done.

From time to time he drew out the picture and looked at it. He wondered when he would meet Gauri, and what he would think of her, now that they were connected. And part of him felt defeated by Udayan all over again, for having found a girl like that.

Part II

Chapter 1

Normally she stayed on the balcony, reading, or kept to an adjacent room as her brother and Udayan studied and smoked and drank cups of tea. Manash had befriended him at Calcutta University, where they were both graduate students in the physics department. Much of the time their books on the behaviors of liquids and gases would sit ignored as they talked about the repercussions of Naxalbari, and commented on the day’s events.

The discussions strayed to the insurgencies in Indochina and in Latin American countries. In the case of Cuba it wasn’t even a mass movement, Udayan pointed out. Just a small group, attacking the right targets.

All over the world students were gaining momentum, standing up to exploitative systems. It was another example of Newton’s second law of motion, he joked. Force equals mass times acceleration.

Manash was skeptical. What could they, urban students, claim to know about peasant life?

Nothing, Udayan said. We need to learn from them.

Through an open doorway she saw him. Tall but slight of build, twenty-three but looking a bit older. His clothing hung on him loosely. He wore kurtas but also European-style shirts, irreverently, the top portion unbuttoned, the bottom untucked, the sleeves rolled back past the elbow.

He sat in the room where they listened to the radio. On the bed that served as a sofa where, at night, Gauri slept. His arms were lean, his fingers too long for the small porcelain cups of tea her family served him, which he drained in just a few gulps. His hair was wavy, the brows thick, the eyes languid and dark.

His hands seemed an extension of his voice, always in motion, embellishing the things he said. Even as he argued he smiled easily. His upper teeth overlapped slightly, as if there were one too many of them. From the beginning, the attraction was there.

He never said anything to Gauri if she happened to brush by.
Never glancing, never acknowledging that she was Manash’s younger sister, until the day the houseboy was out on an errand, and Manash asked Gauri if she minded making them some tea.

She could not find a tray to put the teacups on. She carried them in, nudging open the door to the room with her shoulder. Looking up at her an instant longer than he needed to, Udayan took his cup from her hands.

The groove between his mouth and nose was deep. Clean-shaven. Still looking at her, he posed his first question.

Where do you study? he asked.

Because she went to Presidency, and Calcutta University was just next door, she searched for him on the quadrangle, and among the bookstalls, at the tables of the Coffee House if she went there with a group of friends. Something told her he did not go to his classes as regularly as she did. She began to watch for him from the generous balcony that wrapped around the two sides of her grandparents’ flat, overlooking the intersection where Cornwallis Street began. It became something for her to do.

Then one day she spotted him, amazed that she knew which of the hundreds of dark heads was his. He was standing on the opposite corner, buying a packet of cigarettes. Then he was crossing the street, a cotton book bag over his shoulder, glancing both ways, walking toward their flat.

She crouched below the filigree, under the clothes drying on the line, worried that he would look up and see her. Two minutes later she heard footsteps climbing the stairwell, and then the rattle of the iron knocker on the door of the flat. She heard the door being opened, the houseboy letting him in.

It was an afternoon everyone, including Manash, happened to be out, and she’d been reading, alone. She wondered if he’d turn back, given that Manash wasn’t there. Instead, a moment later, he stepped out onto the balcony.

No one else here? he asked.

She shook her head.

Will you talk to me, then?

The laundry was damp, some of her petticoats and blouses were clipped to the line. The material of the blouses was tailored to the shape of her upper torso, her breasts. He unclipped one of the blouses and put it further down the line to make room.

He did this slowly, a mild tremor in his fingers forcing him to focus more than another person might on the task. Standing beside him, she was aware of his height, the slight stoop in his shoulders, the angle at which he held his face. He struck a match against the side of a box and lit a cigarette, cupping his whole hand over his mouth when he drew the cigarette to his lips. The houseboy brought out biscuits and tea.

They overlooked the intersection, from four flights above. They stood beside one another, both of them leaning into the railing. Together they took in the stone buildings, with their decrepit grandeur, that lined the streets. Their tired columns, their crumbling cornices, their sullied shades.

Her face was supported by the discreet barrier of her hand. His arm hung over the edge, the burning cigarette was in his fingers. The sleeves of his Punjabi were rolled up, exposing the veins running from his wrist to the crook of the elbow. They were prominent, the blood in them greenish gray, like a pointed archway below the skin.

There was something elemental about so many human beings in motion at once: walking, sitting in busses and trams, pulling or being pulled along in rickshaws. On the other side of the street were a few gold and silver shops all in a row, with mirrored walls and ceilings. Always crowded with families, endlessly reflected, placing orders for wedding jewels. There was the press where they took clothes to be ironed. The store where Gauri bought her ink, her notebooks. Narrow sweet shops, where trays of confections were studded with flies.

The paanwallah sat cross-legged at one corner, under a bare bulb, spreading white lime paste on stacks of betel leaves. A traffic constable stood at the center, in his helmet, on his little box. Blowing a whistle and waving his arms. The clamor of so many motors, of so many scooters and lorries and busses and cars, filled their ears.

I like this view, he said.

She’d observed the world, she told him, all of life, from this balcony. Political processions, government parades, visiting dignitaries. The momentous stream of vehicles that started each day at dawn. The
city’s poets and writers passing by after death, their corpses concealed by flowers. Pedestrians wading knee-deep through the streets, during the monsoon.

In autumn came the effigies of Durga, and in winter, Saraswati. Their majestic clay forms were welcomed into the city as dhak were beaten, as trumpets played. They were ushered in on the backs of trucks, then carried away at the end of the holidays to be immersed in the river. These days students were marching up from College Street. Groups in solidarity with the uprising at Naxalbari, carrying flags and placards, raising their fists in the air.

He noticed the folding chair on which she’d been sitting. It had a sagging piece of striped fabric, like a sling, for a seat. A book was neglected beside it. A volume of Descartes’s
Meditations on First Philosophy
. He picked it up.

You read here, with all this going by?

It helps me to concentrate, she said.

She was used to the noise as she studied, as she slept; it was the ongoing accompaniment to her life, her thoughts, the constant din more soothing than silence would have been. Indoors, with no room of her own, it was harder. But the balcony had always been her place.

When she was a little girl, she told him, she would sometimes stumble out of bed during the night, and her grandparents would find her in the morning, fast asleep on the balcony, her face against the blackened filigree, her body on the stone floor. Deaf to the traffic that rumbled past. She had loved waking up out-of-doors, without the protection of walls and a ceiling. The first time, seeing that she was missing from the bed, they thought she had disappeared. They had sent people down to the street to search for her, shouting her name.

And? Udayan asked.

They discovered that I was here, still sleeping.

Did your grandparents forbid you from doing it again?

No. As long as it wasn’t too cold or raining, they left a little quilt out for me.

So this is your bodhi tree, where you achieve enlightenment.

She shrugged.

His eyes fell to the pages she’d been reading.

What does Mr. Descartes tell us about the world?

She told him what she knew. About the limits of perception and the experiment with a piece of wax. Held up to heat, the essence of the wax remained, even as its physical aspect changed. It was the mind, not the senses, that was able to perceive this, she said.

Thinking is superior to seeing?

For Descartes, yes.

Have you read any Marx?

A little.

Why do you study philosophy?

It helps me to understand things.

But what makes it relevant?

Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.