In the afternoon they cooled themselves in the ocean, walking down a steep set of rickety wooden steps, stripping to their bathing suits and swimming in rough waves. In spite of the warmth, the days were turning brief again. They rode over to another beach to watch the sun sink like a melting scarlet stain into the water.
Returning to the town, they saw a box turtle at the edge of the road. They stopped, and Subhash picked it up, studying its markings, then removing it to the grass from which it had come.
We’ll have to tell Joshua, Subhash said.
Holly said nothing. She’d turned pensive, the glow of twilight tinting her face, her mood strange. He wondered if his mentioning Joshua had upset her. She was quiet at dinner, eating little, saying that their day in the sun had left her with a bit of a headache.
For the first time they kissed each other good night but nothing more. He lay beside her, listening to the crash of the sea, watching a waxing moon rise into the sky. He longed for sleep, but it would not immerse him; that night the waters he sought for his repose were deep enough to wade in, but not to swim.
In the morning she seemed better, sitting across from him at the breakfast table, hungry for toast, scrambled eggs. But as they waited for the ferry on the way back to the mainland, she told him that she had something to say.
I’ve enjoyed getting to know you, Subhash. Spending this time.
The shift he felt was instantaneous. It was as if she’d picked them up and put them off the precarious path they were on, just as he’d removed the turtle from the road the day before. Putting their connection to one another out of harm’s way.
I want us to end this nicely, she continued. I think we can.
He heard her say that she had been speaking with Joshua’s father, and that they were going to try to work things out between them.
He left you.
He wants to come back. I’ve known him for twelve years, Subhash. He’s Joshua’s father. I’m thirty-six years old.
Why did we come here together, if you don’t want to see me again?
I thought you might like it. You never expected this to go anywhere, did you? You and me? With Joshua?
I like Joshua.
You’re young. You’re going to want to have your own children someday. In a few years you’ll go back to India, live with your family. You’ve said so yourself.
She had caught him in his own web, telling him what he already knew. He realized he would never visit her cottage again. The gift of the binoculars, so that they would no longer have to share; he understood the reason for this, too.
He could not blame her; she had done him a favor by ending it. And yet he was furious with her for being the one to decide.
We can remain friends, Subhash. You could use a friend.
He told her he had heard enough, that he was not interested in remaining friends. He told her that, when the ferry reached the port in Galilee, he would wait for a bus to take him home. He told her not to call him.
On the ferry they sat separately. He took out Udayan’s letter, reading it once again. But when he was finished, standing on the deck, he tore it into pieces, and let them escape his hands.
He began his third autumn in Rhode Island, 1971.
Once more the leaves of the trees lost their chlorophyll, replaced by the shades he had left behind: vivid hues of cayenne and turmeric and ginger pounded fresh every morning in the kitchen, to season the food his mother prepared.
Once more these colors seemed to have been transported across the world, appearing in the treetops that lined his path. The colors intensified over a period of weeks until the leaves began to dwindle, foliage clustered here and there among the branches, like butterflies feeding at the same source, before falling to the ground.
He thought of Durga Pujo coming again to Calcutta. As he was first getting to know America, the absence of the holiday hadn’t mattered to him, but now he wanted to go home. The past two years, around this time, he’d received a battered parcel from his parents, containing gifts for him. Kurtas too thin to wear most of the time in Rhode Island, bars of sandalwood soap, some Darjeeling tea.
He thought of the Mahalaya playing on All India Radio. Throughout Tollygunge, across Calcutta and the whole of West Bengal, people were waking up in darkness to listen to the oratorio as light crept into the sky, invoking Durga as she descended to earth with her four children.
Every year at this time, Hindu Bengalis believed, she came to stay with her father, Himalaya. For the days of Pujo, she relinquished her husband, Shiva, before returning once more to married life. The hymns recounted the story of Durga being formed, and the weapons that were provided for each of her ten arms: sword and shield, bow and arrow. Axe, mace, conch shell, and discus. Indra’s thunderbolt, Shiva’s trident. A flaming dart, a garland of snakes.
This year no parcel came from his family. Only a telegram. The message consisted of two sentences, lifeless, drifting at the top of a sea.
Udayan killed. Come back if you can.
Part III
Chapter 1
He left behind the brief winter days, the obscure place where he’d grieved alone. Where another Christmas was coming, where in December the doorways and windows of small shops and homes were decorated with beaded frames of light.
He took a bus to Boston and boarded a night flight to Europe. The second flight involved a layover in the Middle East. He waited in the terminals, he walked from gate to gate. At last he landed in Delhi. From there he boarded an overnight train to Howrah Station.
As he traveled halfway across India, from companions on the train, he heard a bit about what had been taking place in Calcutta during the time he’d been away. Information that neither Udayan nor his parents had mentioned in letters. Events Subhash had not come across in any newspaper in Rhode Island, or heard on the AM radio in his car.
By 1970, people told him, things had taken a turn. By then the Naxalites were operating underground. Members surfaced only to carry out dramatic attacks.
They ransacked schools and colleges across the city. In the middle of the night they burned records and defaced portraits, raising red flags. They plastered Calcutta with images of Mao.
They intimidated voters, hoping to disrupt the elections. They fired pipe guns on the streets. They hid bombs in public places, so that people were afraid to sit in a cinema hall, or stand in line at a bank.
Then the targets turned specific. Unarmed traffic constables at busy intersections. Wealthy businessmen, certain educators. Members of the rival party, the CPI(M).
The killings were sadistic, gruesome, intended to shock. The wife of the French consul was murdered in her sleep. They assassinated Gopal Sen, the vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University. They killed him on campus while he was taking his evening walk. It was the day before he planned to retire. They bludgeoned him with steel bars, and stabbed him four times.
They took control of certain neighborhoods, calling them Red Zones. They took control of Tollygunge. They set up makeshift hospitals, safe houses. People began avoiding these neighborhoods. Policemen started chaining their rifles to their belts.
But then new legislation was passed, and an old law was renewed. Laws that authorized the police and the paramilitary to enter homes without a warrant, to arrest young men without charges. The old law had been created by the British, to counter Independence, to cut off its legs.
After that, the police started to cordon off and search the neighborhoods of the city. Sealing exits, knocking on doors, interrogating Calcutta’s young men. The police had killed Udayan. This much Subhash was able to surmise.
He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcutta. The people filling the platform, passengers and coolies, and vagrants for whom the station was merely a shelter, were bundled in woolen caps and shawls.
Only two people had come to receive hi
m. A younger cousin of his father’s, Biren Kaka, and his wife. They were standing by a fruit vendor, unable to smile when they spotted him. He understood this diminished welcome, but he could not understand why, after he’d traveled for more than two days, after he’d been away for more than two years, his parents were unwilling to come even this far to acknowledge his return. When he’d left India his mother had promised a hero’s welcome, a garland of flowers draped around his neck when he stepped off the train.
It was here, at the station, that Subhash had last seen Udayan. He’d arrived late on the evening of his departure, not riding with Subhash and his parents and other relatives who’d formed a small caravan from Tollygunge, but assuring him that he’d meet up with them on the platform. Subhash was already seated on the train, he had already said his good-byes, when Udayan put his head up to the window.
He extended his hand through the bars, reaching for Subhash’s shoulder and pressing it, then slapping his face lightly. Somehow, at the final moment, they had found one another in that great crowd.
He pulled some green-skinned oranges from his book bag, giving them to Subhash to eat on the journey. Try not to forget us completely, he said.
You’ll look after them? Subhash asked, referring to their parents. You’ll let me know if anything happens?
What’s going to happen?
Well then, if you need anything?
Come back someday, that’s all.
Udayan remained close, leaning forward, his hand on Subhash’s shoulder, saying nothing else, until the engine sounded. His mother began weeping. Even his father’s eyes were damp as the train began to pull away. But Udayan stood smiling between them, his hand raised high, his gaze fixed as Subhash retreated farther and farther away from them.
As they crossed Howrah Bridge the light was still gray. On the other side, the markets had just opened. The sidewalks were lined with baskets, displaying the morning’s vegetables. They traveled through the broad heart of the city, toward Dalhousie, down Chowringhee. A city with nothing, with everything. By the time they were approaching Tollygunge, crossing Prince Anwar Shah Road, the day was bustling and bright.
The streets were as he remembered. Crowded with cycle rickshaws, the squawking of their horns sounding to his ears like a flock of agitated geese. The congestion was of a different order, that of a small town as opposed to a city. The buildings lower, spaced farther apart.
He saw the tram depot come into view, the stalls where people sold biscuits and crackers in glass jars, and boiled aluminum kettles of tea. The walls of the film studios, the Tolly Club, were covered with slogans. Make 1970s the decade of liberation. Rifles bring freedom, and freedom is coming.
As they turned before the small mosque off Baburam Ghosh Road, Subhash felt his prolonged journey ending too soon. The taxi fit but just barely, threatening to scrape the walls on either side. He was assaulted by the sour, septic smell of his neighborhood, of his childhood. The smell of standing water. The stink of algae, of open drains.
As they approached the two ponds, he saw that the small home he’d left behind had been replaced by something impressive, ungainly. Some scaffolding was still in place, but the construction looked complete. He saw palm trees rising behind the house. But the mango tree that had spread its dark branches and leaves over the original roof was gone.
He stepped across a slab set over the gutter that separated his family’s property from the street. A pair of swinging doors led to the courtyard. Mildew coated the walls. But it was still a welcoming space, with a tube well in one corner, and terra-cotta pots containing dahlias, and the marigold and basil his mother used for prayers. A vine with a tangle of yellow branches was in flower at that time of year.
This was the enclosure where he and Udayan had played as children. Where they had drawn and practiced sums with bits of coal or broken clay. Where Udayan had run out the day they’d been told to stay in, falling off the plank before the concrete had dried.
Subhash saw the footprints and walked past them. He looked at the upper portion of the house, rising out of what had first been there. Long terraces, like airy corridors, ran from front to back down one side. They were enclosed by grilles forged in a trefoil pattern. The emerald paint was glossy and bright.
Through one of the grilles he saw his parents, sitting on the top floor. He strained to see their expressions but could make out nothing. Now that he was so close, part of him wanted to return to the taxi, which was backing out slowly. He wanted to tell the driver to take him somewhere else.
He pressed the buzzer that Udayan had installed. It still worked.
His parents did not stand or say his name. They did not come downstairs to greet him. Instead his father lowered a key on a string through the ironwork. Subhash waited to retrieve it, and opened a heavy padlock at the side of the house. Finally he heard his father clearing his throat, seeming to loosen the secretions of a long silence.
Lock the gate behind you, he instructed Subhash, before retracting the key.
Subhash climbed a staircase with smooth black banisters, sky-blue walls. Biren Kaka and his wife followed behind. When he saw his parents, standing together on the terrace, he bent over to touch their feet. He was an only son, an experience that had left no impression in the first fifteen months of his life. That was to begin in earnest now.
At first his parents looked the same to him. The oily sheen to his mother’s hair, the pallid cast of her skin. The lean, stooping frame of his father, the sheer cotton of his kurta. The downward turn to his mouth that might have conveyed disappointment, but suggested a fixed amiability instead. The difference was in their eyes. Calloused by grief, blunted by what no parent should have seen.
In spite of the picture that hung in his parents’ new room, which they took him to see, he could not believe that Udayan was nowhere. But here was the proof. The photo had been taken nearly ten years ago by a relative who owned a camera, one of the only pictures of the brothers that existed. It was the day they had gotten the results of their higher secondary exams, the day his father said had been the proudest of his life.
He and Udayan had posed side by side in the courtyard. Subhash saw an inch of his own shoulder, pressed up beside Udayan’s. The rest of him, in order to make the death portrait, had been cut away.
He stood before the image and wept, his head cradled in his arm, in an awkward embrace of himself. But his parents, beyond the shock of it, observed him as they might an actor on a stage, waiting for the scene to end.
From the terrace he had an open view of the place where he and Udayan had been raised. Lower rooftops of tin or tile, with squash vines trailing over them. The tops of walls, dotted white, splattered with excrement from crows. Two oblong ponds on the other side of the lane. The lowland, looking to him like a mudflat after the tide.
He went downstairs, to the ground floor, to the part of the house that was unchanged, to the room he and Udayan had once shared. He was struck by how dark the room was, how small. There was the study table beneath the window, the shelves set into the wall, the simple rack where they’d draped their clothes. The bed they’d slept on together had been replaced by a cot. Udayan must have used the room to tutor students. He saw textbooks on the shelves, measuring instruments and pens. He wondered what had happened to the shortwave. All the political books were gone.
He unpacked his belongings and bathed with water that the pump released twice a day from the corporation tank. The water, too rich with iron, had a metallic smell. It left his hair stiff, his skin tacky to the touch.
He’d been told to go upstairs to eat his lunch. That was where the kitchen was now. On the floor of his parents’ bedroom, where Udayan’s portrait was, plates had been set out for his father, for Biren Kaka and his wife, for Subhash. His mother would eat after serving them, as she always did.
He sat with his back to the portrait. He could not bear to look at it again.
He was ravenous for the simple meal: dal and slices of fried bitte
r melon, rice and fish stew. Sweet pabda fish from the river, their cooked eyes like yellow pebbles.
Again the broad plates of heavy brass. The freedom to eat with his fingers. Drinking water was poured from a black clay urn in the corner of the room. The cup heavy in his hand, the rim slightly too wide for his mouth.
Where is she? he asked.
Who?
Gauri.
His mother ladled the dal onto his rice. She takes her meals in the kitchen, she said.
Why?
She prefers it.
He didn’t believe her. He didn’t say what came to his mind. That Udayan would have hated them for segregating her, for observing such customs.
Is she there now? I would like to meet her.
She’s resting. She’s not feeling well today.
Have you called a doctor?
His mother looked down, preoccupied with the food she was serving to the others.
There’s no need for that.
Is it serious?
Finally she explained herself.
She is expecting a child, she said.
After lunch he went out, walking past the two ponds. There were scattered clumps of water hyacinth in the lowland, and still enough water to form puddles here and there.
He noticed a small stone marker that had not been there before. He walked toward it. On it was Udayan’s name. Beneath that, the years of his birth and death: 1945–1971.
It was a memorial tablet, erected for political martyrs. Here where the water came and went, where it collected and vanished, was where his brother’s party comrades had chosen to put it.
Subhash remembered an afternoon playing football with Udayan and a few of the other neighborhood boys, in the field on the other side of the lowland. He’d twisted his ankle in the middle of the game. He’d told Udayan to keep playing, that he’d manage on his own, but Udayan had insisted on accompanying him.
The Lowland Page 9
