The Lowland (16 page)

Yes.

You were sympathetic to his beliefs?

In the beginning.

Are you currently a member of any political organization?

No.

I’d like to go over some photographs. They’re of some people your husband knew.

All right.

He took an envelope out of his pocket. He began handing her pictures. Small snapshots Subhash was unable to see.

Do you recognize any of these people?

No.

You’ve never met them? Your husband never introduced you to them?

No.

Look carefully, please.

I have.

The investigator put the snapshots back into the envelope, mindful not to smudge them.

Did he ever mention someone named Nirmal Dey?

No.

You are certain?

Yes.

Gopal Sinha?

Subhash swallowed, and glanced at her. She was lying. Even he remembered Sinha, the medical student, from the meeting he’d attended. Surely Udayan had mentioned him to Gauri.

Or had he? Perhaps, for the sake of protecting her, he’d been dishonest with her, too. Subhash had no way of knowing. As vivid as her account of Udayan’s final days and moments had been, certain details remained vague.

The investigator took a few more notes, then wiped his face with a handkerchief. May I trouble you for some water?

Subhash poured it for him, from the urn in the corner of the room, handing him the stainless-steel cup that was kept, overturned, beside it. He watched the investigator drain the cup, then set it down on Gauri’s desk.

We’ll return if we have further questions, the investigator said.

The policemen stepped on their cigarettes to put them out, and then the group turned back toward the staircase. Subhash followed, seeing them out of the house, locking the gate behind them.

When do you return to America? the investigator asked.

In a few weeks.

What is your subject?

Chemical oceanography.

You’re nothing like your brother, he remarked, then turned to go.

• • •

She was waiting for him on the terrace, sitting on one of the folding chairs.

You’re all right? he asked.

Yes.

How long before they come back?

They won’t come again.

How can you be sure?

She raised her head, then her eyes. Because I have nothing else to tell them, she said.

You’re certain?

She continued to look at him, her expression neutral, composed. He wanted to believe her. But even if there was anything else she had to tell, he understood that there was nothing else she was willing to say.

You’re not safe here, he said. Even if the police leave you alone, my parents won’t.

What do you mean?

He paused, then told her what he knew.

They want you out of this house, Gauri. They don’t want to take care of you. They want their grandchild to themselves.

After she had absorbed this, he said the only things he could think of, the most obvious of facts: that in America no one knew about the movement, no one would bother her. She could go on with her studies. It would be an opportunity to begin again.

Because she said nothing to interrupt him, he went on, explaining that the child needed a father. In America it could be raised without the burden of what had happened.

He told her he knew she still loved Udayan. He told her not to think about what people might say, how his parents would react. If she went with him to America, he promised her, it would all cease to matter.

She’d recognized most of the people in the photographs. They were all Udayan’s comrades, party members from the neighborhood. She remembered some of them from a meeting she’d gone to once, before it got too dangerous. She’d recognized Chandra, a woman who worked
at the tailor shop, and also the man from the stationer’s. She’d pretended not to.

Among the names the investigator had gone over, there was only one that Udayan had never mentioned. Only one, truthfully, she did not know. Nirmal Dey. And yet something told her she was not in ignorance of this man.

You don’t have to do this, she said to Subhash the following morning.

It’s not only for you.

He wouldn’t have wanted this.

I understand.

I’m not talking about our getting married.

What, then?

In the end he didn’t want a family. He told me the day before he died. And yet—

She stopped herself.

What?

He once told me, because he got married before you, that he wanted you to be the first to have a child.

Part IV

Chapter 1

He was there, standing behind a rope at the airport, waiting for her. Her brother-in-law, her husband. The second man she had married in two years.

The same height, a similar build. Counterparts, companions, though she’d never seen them together. Subhash was a milder version. Compared to Udayan’s, his face was like the slightly flawed impression the man at Immigration had just stamped into her passport, indicating her arrival, stamped over a second time for emphasis.

He was wearing corduroy pants, a checkered shirt, a zippered jacket, athletic shoes. The eyes that greeted her were kind but weak; the weakness, she suspected, that had led him to marry her, and to do her the favor he’d done.

Here he was, to receive her, to accompany her from now on. Nothing about him had changed; at the end of her voyage, there was nothing to greet her but the reality of the decision she’d made.

But she saw him registering the obvious change in her. Five months pregnant now, her face and hips fuller, her waist thick, the child’s presence obvious beneath the turquoise shawl he’d given her, draped around her for warmth.

She entered his car and sat beside him, to his right, her two suitcases stacked in their canvas slipcovers on the backseat. She waited while he started the engine and let it run for a bit. He unpeeled a banana and poured himself some tea from a flask. She put her lips to the other side of the cap when he offered, swallowing a hot tasteless liquid, like wet wood.

How do you feel?

Tired.

Again the voice, also Udayan’s. Almost the exact pitch and manner of speaking. This was the deepest and most startling proof of their fraternity. For a moment she allowed this isolated aspect of Udayan, preserved and replicated in Subhash’s throat, to travel back to her.

How are my parents?

The same.

The heat’s arrived in Calcutta?

More or less.

And the situation generally?

Some would say better. Others worse.

This was Boston, he told her. Rhode Island was south of here. They emerged from a tunnel that went below a river, passing by a harbor, and then the city fell away. He drove more quickly than she was used to, more consistently than cars could travel on Calcutta streets. The continuous movement sickened her. She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.

Along the side of the road were gray- and white-skinned trees that looked incapable of ever producing leaf or fruit. Their branches were copious but thin, dense networks she could see through. On some trees, a few leaves still clung. She wondered why they had not fallen like the others.

Among the trees, here and there, were patches of snow. She would remember the smooth pitch of the roads, the flat, squared-off shapes of the cars. And all the space between and around things—the cars traveling in two directions, the infrequent buildings. The barren but densely growing trees.

He glanced at her. Is it what you expected?

I didn’t know what to expect.

Again the child was stirring and shifting. It was unaware of its new surroundings, and of the astonishing distance it had traveled. Gauri’s body remained its world. She wondered if the new environment would affect it in any way. If it could sense the cold.

She felt as if she contained a ghost, as Udayan was. The child was a version of him, in that it was both present and absent. Both within her and remote. She regarded it with a sort of disbelief, just as she still did not really believe that Udayan was gone, missing now not only from Calcutta but from every other part of the earth she’d just flown across.

As the plane was landing in Boston, she’d momentarily feared that their child would dissolve and abandon her. She’d feared that it would perceive, somehow, that the wrong father was waiting to receive them. That it would protest and stop forming.

After entering Rhode Island she expected to see the ocean, but the highway merely continued. They approached a small city called Providence. She saw hilly streets, buildings close together, peaked rooftops, an ornate white dome. She knew that the word
providence
meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced.

It was the middle of the day, the sun directly overhead. A bright blue sky, transparent clouds. A time of day lacking mystery, only an assertion of the day itself. As if the sky were not meant to darken, the day not meant to end.

On the plane time had been irrelevant but also the only thing that mattered; it was time, not space, she’d been aware of traveling through. She’d sat among so many passengers, captive, awaiting their destinations. Most of them, like Gauri, freed in an atmosphere not their own.

For a few minutes Subhash turned on the car radio, listening to a man report local news, the weather forecast. She’d had an English education, she’d studied at Presidency, and yet she could barely understand the broadcast.

Eventually she saw horses grazing, cows standing still. Homes with glass windows shut tight to block out the cold. Walls low enough to step over, forming boundaries, made of large and small stones.

They reached a traffic light swaying on a wire. While they were stopped, he pointed left. She saw a wooden tower, rising like an internal staircase to a nonexistent building. Over the tops of pine trees, in the distance, at last, was a thin dark line. The sea.

My campus is that way, he said.

She looked at the flat gray road, with two ongoing stripes painted down the middle. This was the place where she could put things behind her. Where her child would be born, ignorant and safe.

She thought Subhash would turn left, where he told her his campus was located. But when the light turned green, and he pushed the gearshift forward, they turned right.

The apartment was on the ground floor, facing the front: a little grass, a pathway, then a strip of asphalt. On the other side of the asphalt
was a row of matching apartment buildings, low and long and faced with bricks. The two of them were posed like barracks. At the end of the road was the lot where Subhash parked his car and took out the garbage. A smaller building in the lot was where one did the laundry.

The main doors were almost always left open, held in place by large rocks. The locks on the apartment doors were flimsy, little buttons on knobs instead of padlocks and bolts. But she was in a place where no one was afraid to walk about, where drunken students stumbled laughing down a hill, back to their dormitories at all hours of the night. At the top of the hill was the campus police station. But there were no curfews or lockdowns. Students came and went and did as they pleased.

The neighbors were other graduate student couples, a few families with young children. They seemed not to notice her. She heard only a door shutting, or the muffled ring of someone else’s telephone, or footsteps going up the stairs.

Subhash gave her the bedroom and told her he would sleep on the sofa, which unfolded and became a bed. Through the closed door she listened to his morning routine. The beeps of his alarm clock, the exhaust fan in the bathroom. When the fan was switched off she heard a gentle swishing of water, a razor blade scraping his face.

No one came to prepare the tea, to make the beds, to sweep or dust the rooms. On the stove he cooked breakfast on a coil that reddened at a button’s touch. Oatmeal and hot milk.

When it was finished she heard the spoon methodically scraping the bottom of the pan, then the water he immediately ran to make it easier to clean. The clink of the spoon against the bowl, and at the same time, in a separate pan, the rattle of the egg he boiled and took away for his lunch.

She was thankful for his independence, and at the same time she was bewildered. Udayan had wanted a revolution, but at home he’d expected to be served; his only contribution to his meals was to sit and wait for Gauri or her mother-in-law to put a plate before him.

Subhash acknowledged her independence also. He left her with a few dollars, the telephone number to his department written on a slip of paper. A key to the mailbox, and a second key to the door. A
few minutes later came the sound she waited for before getting up: the chain on the inside of the apartment, like an ugly broken bit of a necklace, sliding open, and then the door shutting firmly behind him.

In a way it had been another flaunting of convention, perhaps something Udayan might have admired. When she’d eloped with Udayan, she’d felt audacious. Agreeing to be Subhash’s wife, to flee to America with him, a decision at once calculated and impulsive, felt even more extreme.

And yet, with Udayan gone, anything seemed possible. The ligaments that had held her life together were no longer there. Their absence made it possible to couple herself, however prematurely, however desperately, with Subhash. She’d wanted to leave Tollygunge. To forget everything her life had been. And he had handed her the possibility. In the back of her mind she told herself she could come one day to love him, out of gratitude if nothing else.

Her in-laws had accused Gauri, as she knew they would, of disgracing their family. Her mother-in-law had lashed out, telling her she’d never been worthy of Udayan. That perhaps he would still be alive, if he’d married another sort of girl.

They had accused Subhash also, of wrongly taking Udayan’s place. But in the end, after denouncing both of them, they had not forbidden it. They had not said no. Perhaps they appreciated, as Gauri did, that they would no longer have to be responsible for her, that they would be free from one another. And so, though in one way she’d burrowed even more deeply into their family, in another way she’d secured her release.