The Lowland (42 page)

After the bypass, turning after a fancy hospital, a few familiar things. The train tracks at Ballygunge, the tangled intersection at Gariahat. Life pouring out of crooked lanes, seated on broken steps. Hawkers, selling clothes, selling slippers and purses, lining the streets.

It was Durga Pujo, the city’s most anticipated days. The stores, the sidewalks, were overflowing. At the ends of certain alleys, or in gaps among buildings, she saw the pandals. Durga armed with her weapons, flanked by her four children, depicted and worshiped in so many versions. Made of plaster, made of clay. She was resplendent, formidable. A lion helped to conquer the demon at her feet. She was a daughter visiting her family, visiting the city, transforming it for a time.

The guesthouse was on Southern Avenue. The flat was on the seventh floor. Overlooking the lake. A women’s fitness club below. The elevator seemed hardly more spacious than a telephone booth. Yet somehow she and the caretaker and her suitcase managed to fit.

You’ve come for Pujo? the caretaker asked.

She’d been on her way to London, not here. Somewhere over the Atlantic, the destination had become clear.

In London she hadn’t left the airport. The lecture she was supposed
to deliver, the printed pages in a folder in her suitcase, would go unheard.

She hadn’t bothered e-mailing the organizers of the conference to explain her absence. It didn’t matter to her. Nothing did, after the things Bela had said.

She’d gone to the booking office in Heathrow, asking about flights to India. The Indian passport she continued to carry, the citizenship she’d never renounced, enabled her, the following morning, to board another plane.

It took her to Mumbai. It was a direct flight, there was no longer a need to refuel in the Middle East. Another night at another airport hotel, cold white sheets, Indian television programs. Black-and-white films from the sixties, CNN International. Unable to sleep, turning on her laptop, she looked up guesthouses in Kolkata, booked a place to stay.

The kitchen would be stocked in the morning. The durwan could send someone out to bring in dinner tonight, she heard the caretaker say.

That won’t be necessary.

Should I set up a driver?

She could pay him a flat rate for the day, the caretaker told her. He would show up as early as she liked. He would take her, within the city limits, anywhere she wanted to go.

I’ll be ready at eight, she said.

She woke in darkness, her eyes open at five. At six she showered with hot water. She shed her clothes in a corner of the bathroom, brushed her teeth at a pink sink. On the pantry shelves in the kitchen she found a box of Lipton, lit a burner, and made herself a cup of tea. She drank it, and ate a packet of crackers left over from the plane.

At seven the doorbell rang. A maid carrying a bag of fruit, bread and butter, biscuits, the newspaper. The caretaker had mentioned something about this.

Her name was Abha. She was a woman in her thirties, a talkative mother of four children. The eldest, she told Gauri, was sixteen. In the
afternoons she had a job, at one of the fancy hospitals, cleaning. She brewed more tea, set out a plate of biscuits.

Abha’s tea was better, stronger, served with sugar and warmed milk. A few minutes later, she brought out another plate.

What’s this?

She’d prepared an omelette, sliced toast with butter. The butter was salty, the omelette spiced with pieces of chili. Gauri ate everything. She drank more tea.

At eight o’clock, looking down from the small balcony off the bedroom, Gauri saw a car parked below. The driver was a young man with curly hair and a potbelly, wearing trousers, leather slippers. He was leaning against the hood, smoking a cigarette.

She went to the north, up College Street, past Presidency, to visit her old neighborhood, to find Manash. But Manash was in Shillong, where one of his sons lived; he went every year at this time. His wife received her in her grandparents’ old flat, where the dark stairwell was still uneven, where the door opened for her, where Manash and his family continued to live.

She sat with them in one of the bedrooms. She met his other son, the grandchildren from that family. They were incredulous to see her, welcoming, polite. They offered her sandesh, mutton rolls, tea. Behind her, beyond the shuttered door, she heard a constable’s whistle, the clanging of the tram.

She was tempted to ask if she could step outside for a moment, onto the balcony that wrapped around the rooms of the flat, then changed her mind. How many hours had she spent staring down at the traffic, the intersection, her body bent slightly forward, elbows on the railing, chin cupped in her hand? She was unable to picture herself, suddenly, standing there.

Using a cell phone, they rang Manash in Shillong. She heard his voice on the phone. Manash, whom she’d followed to this city, who’d been the conduit to Udayan; Manash, the first companion of her life.

Gauri, he said. His voice had deepened, also weakened. An old man’s voice. Thick with the emotion she also felt.

It’s really you?

Yes.

What finally brings you here?

I needed to see it again.

Still he addressed her in the affectionate mode, the diminutive form of exchange reserved for bonds formed in childhood, never questioned, never subject to change. It was how parents spoke to their children, how Udayan and Subhash had once spoken to one another. It conveyed the intimacy of siblings but not of lovers. It was not how either Udayan or Subhash had spoken to her.

Come to Shillong for a few days. If not, wait for me to come back to Kolkata.

I’ll try. I’m not sure how long I can stay.

He told her she was the only one of his sisters still living. That their family had dwindled to the two of them.

How is my niece, my Bela? Will I meet her? Will I know her one day?

She assured him, knowing it would never happen. She said goodbye. The driver headed south again. Toward Chowringhee, Esplanade. The Metro Cinema, the Grand Hotel.

She sat in the car, in snarled traffic, the atmosphere heavy with smog. She saw a version of herself, standing on one of the crowded busses, hanging on to a strap, wearing one of the cotton saris she’d worn to college. Going to meet Udayan somewhere he’d suggested, some tucked-away restaurant where no one would recognize them, where he would be waiting for her, where they could sit across from one another for as long as they liked.

Should I take you to New Market? the driver asked her. Or to one of the new shopping centers?

No.

When the driver approached Southern Avenue she told him to continue.

To Kalighat?

To Tollygunge. Just after the tram depot, not too far in.

Past the replica of Tipu Sultan’s mosque, past the cemetery. There was a metro station now, opposite the depot, cutting through the city underground. It traveled all the way to Dum Dum, the driver said. She saw people rushing up the shallow steps, people old enough to work, young enough to have grown up with the metro all their lives.

She saw the high brick walls on either side of the road, shielding the film studios, the Tolly Club. Forty years later the little mosque at the corner still stood, the red-and-white minarets visible.

She told the driver to stop, giving him money for tea, asking him to wait for her there. It would be a brief visit, she said.

People were glancing at her now that she was out of the car. Taking in her sunglasses, her American clothing and shoes. Unaware that once she, too, had lived here. Cell phones rang, but the rubber horns of the cycle rickshaws still squawked on the main roads.

Behind the mosque there was a grouping of huts with walls of woven bamboo, sheltering those who still lived there.

She continued down the lane, stepping past the stray dogs. Some of the houses were taller now, blocking out more of the sky. They had windows made of glass, wooden trims painted white. Rooftops thick with antennas. Patios with terrazzo floors. The older homes were more derelict, constructed from narrow bricks, sections of filigree missing.

All of it was crammed tightly together. Not a single empty plot, no space for children to play cricket or football. The lane remained so narrow that a car could barely fit.

She came to the house in which she was once destined to grow old with Udayan. The home in which she had conceived Bela, in which Bela might have been raised.

She’d expected to find it aged but standing, as she was. In fact it looked younger, the edges smoother, the facade painted a warm orange shade. The swinging wooden double doors had been replaced by a cheerful green gate, to match the terrace grilles.

The courtyard no longer existed. The proportions of the building had extended forward, so that the facade nearly abutted the street. That area was perhaps now a living room, or a dining room, she could not tell. In one of the rooms a television was on. The open drain at the threshold, that she’d stepped over to come and go, had been closed.

She walked past the house, across the lane, and over toward the two ponds. She had forgotten no detail. The color and shape of the ponds clear in her mind. But the details were no longer there. Both ponds were gone. New homes filled up an area that had once been watery, open.

Walking a bit farther, she saw that the lowland was also gone. That
sparsely populated tract was now indistinguishable from the rest of the neighborhood, and on it more homes had been built. Scooters parked in front of doorways, laundry hung out to dry.

She wondered if any of the people she passed remembered things as she did. She was tempted to stop a man about her age who looked vaguely familiar, who might have been one of Udayan’s class friends. He was on his way to the market, wearing an undershirt, a lungi, carrying a shopping bag. He passed by, not recognizing her.

Somewhere close to where she stood, Udayan had hidden in the water. He’d been taken to an empty field. Somewhere there was a tablet with his name on it, commemorating the brief life he’d led. Or perhaps this, too, had been removed.

She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.

Scarcely two years of her life, begun as a wife, concluded as a widow, an expectant mother. An accomplice in a crime.

It had seemed reasonable, what Udayan had asked of her. What he’d told her: that they wanted a policeman out of the way. Depending on one’s interpretation, it had not even been a lie.

She’d accepted the benign version. The stray particle of doubt, the mute piece of her that suspected something worse, as she sat by the window with the brother and sister, glancing down at the street, she’d smothered.

No one connected her to it. Still no one knew what she’d done.

She was the sole accuser, the sole guardian of her guilt. Protected by Udayan, overlooked by the investigator, taken away by Subhash. Sentenced in the very act of being forgotten, punished by means of her release.

Again she remembered what Bela had said to her. That her reappearance meant nothing. That she was as dead as Udayan.

Standing there, unable to find him, she felt a new solidarity with him. The bond of not existing.

The night before they came for him he fell asleep, as he had been unable to do for days. But in his sleep he began to cry out, waking her.

At first she could not rouse him, even when she shook him by the
shoulders. Then he woke up, startled, shivering. His head burned with fever. He complained of the cold in the room, of a draft, though the air was humid and still. He asked her to turn off the fan and close the shutters.

She spread a quilt over him, pulling it out of a metal trunk that was under their bed. She tucked it up beneath his shoulders, beneath his chin.

Go back to sleep, she told him.

Just like Independence, he said.

What?

Me and Subhash. We both had a fever. My parents tell a story, of how both our teeth were chattering the night Nehru made his speech, the night freedom came. I never told you?

No.

Miserable fools in bed, just like this.

She poured him water he refused to sip, pushing it away so that it spilled over the quilt. She dampened a handkerchief and wiped his face. She worried that the fever was caused by an infection, something to do with his injured hand. But he did not complain of any worse pain, and then the fever began to subside, fatigue reclaiming him.

Until morning he slept soundly. She stayed awake, sitting in the sweltering room, sealed up with him. Staring at him, though she could not see him in the darkness.

Slowly his profile came into view. His forehead, his nose and lips, edged with gray light. This was the first light that penetrated the vents above the windows, the plaster there perforated in a series of wavy lines.

A neglected beard covered his cheeks, a moustache hiding the detail of his face—the shaded groove above his mouth—that she most loved. The image of him so still, with his eyes closed, disconcerted her. She put her hand over his chest, feeling its rise and fall.

He opened his eyes, seeming suddenly lucid, himself again.

I’ve been thinking, he said.

About what?

About having children. Would it be enough for you, if we never did?

Why are you thinking of this now?

I can’t become a father, Gauri.

After a moment he added, Not after what I’ve done.

What have you done?

He wouldn’t say. Whatever happened, he told her, he regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.

He closed his eyes again, reaching for her hand, their fingers joined. As the morning steadily brightened, he did not let it go.

At the guesthouse, in a microwave oven, she warmed up the meal Abha had left for her, eating fish stew and rice at an oval table that sat six. The table was covered with a flowered tablecloth, a sheet of plastic over that. She watched some television, then put the leftover food away.

The bed was made, the cover smoothly spread, the nylon mosquito netting bunched up onto hooks. She lowered it, tucking in the sides. There was only an overhead light. Not possible to read in bed. She lay in darkness. Eventually, for a few hours, she slept.