No, she said to herself. She heard the word in her head. But then she realized that her mouth was open, like an idiot’s. Had she said something? Whispered it? She could not be sure.
What did you say?
I said nothing.
The tip of the gun was still steady at her throat. But suddenly it was removed, the officer tipping his head toward the lowland, stepping away.
He’s there, he told the others.
Again the officer began speaking through a megaphone.
Udayan Mitra, step forward, surrender yourself, he said, the words at once distorted and piercing, audible throughout the enclave. We are prepared to eliminate the members of your family if you don’t do as we say.
He paused, then added, One member for each false step.
At first nothing happened. Only the sound of her own breathing. Some of the soldiers were wading into the water, aiming rifles. One of them fired a shot. Then, from somewhere in the lowland, she heard the sound of the water’s surface breaking.
Udayan appeared. Amid the hyacinth, in water up to his waist. Bent over, coughing, gasping for air.
His right hand was bandaged, concealed by layers of gauze. His hair was sticking to his scalp, the shirt he was wearing was sticking to his skin. His beard and moustache needed trimming. He raised his arms over his head.
Good. Walk toward us now.
He stepped through the weeds, out of the water, until he stood only a few feet away. He was shivering, struggling to regulate his breathing. She saw the lips that never fully met, leaving the small diamond-shaped gap at the center. The lips were blue. She saw flecks of algae coating his neck, his forearms. She could not tell if it was water or perspiration dripping down the sides of his face.
He was told to bend down and touch his parents’ feet. He was told to ask for their forgiveness. He had to do this with his left hand. He stood before his mother and bent down. Forgive me, he said.
What are we to forgive? her father-in-law asked, his voice cracking, when Udayan bent before him. He appealed to the officers. You are making a mistake.
Your son has betrayed his country. It is he who has made the mistake.
The current in Gauri’s legs intensified, radiating all the way to her feet. She felt a tingling sensation spreading from the base of her neck across her scalp. She thought that her legs would buckle, there was no strength in them. Nothing was supporting her. But she continued to stand.
His hands were bound by a rope. She saw him wince when they did this, the injured hand twitching in pain.
This way, the officer said, pointing with his gun.
Udayan paused, and glanced at her. He looked at her face as he always did, absorbing its details as if for the first time.
They pushed him into the van and slammed the door shut. Gauri and her in-laws were ordered back into the house. One of the soldiers escorted them. She wondered which prison they would take him to. What they would do to him there.
They heard the van starting. But instead of reversing and heading out of the enclave, toward the main road, it traveled over the damp grass that edged the lowland, the tires leaving thick tracks. Over toward the empty field that was on the other side of it.
Inside the house they climbed to the third floor, to the terrace. They could make out the van, and Udayan standing next to it. It would have been impossible for anyone else in their neighborhood to witness what was happening. But the top floor of the house, recently completed, afforded them this view.
They saw one of the soldiers undoing the rope around his wrists. They saw Udayan walking across the field, away from the paramilitary. He was walking toward the lowland, back toward the house, arms raised over his head.
Gauri remembered all the times she’d watched him from her grandparents’ balcony in North Calcutta, crossing the busy street, coming to visit her.
For a moment it was as if they were letting him go. But then a gun was fired, the bullet aimed at his back. The sound of the shot was brief, unambiguous. There was a second shot, then a third.
She watched his arms flapping, his body leaping forward, seizing up before falling to the ground. There was the clean sound of the shots, followed by the sound of crows, coarsely calling, scattering.
It wasn’t possible to see where he’d been wounded, where exactly the bullets had gone. It was too distant to see how much blood had spilled.
The soldiers dragged his body by the legs, then tossed him into the back of the van.
They heard the doors slam shut, the engine starting up again. The van containing the body, driving away.
In their bedroom, under the mattress, forgotten among folded sections of newspaper they’d not bothered to toss, was a diary the police had discovered. It contained all the proof they needed. Among the equations and notes on routine formulas and experiments was a page of instructions for how to put together a Molotov cocktail, a homemade bomb. Notes on the difference in effect between methanol and gasoline. Potassium chlorate versus nitric acid. Storm matches versus a kerosene wick.
In the diary there was also a map Udayan had sketched of the layout of the Tolly Club. The locations and names of the buildings, the stables, the caretaker’s cottage. The arrangement of the driveway, the configuration of the walking paths.
Certain times of day had been jotted down, a schedule of when the guards moved around, when employees went on and off duty. When the restaurants and bars opened and closed, when the gardeners clipped and watered the grass. Various places where a person might enter and exit the premises, targets where one might throw an explosive, or leave a timed device behind.
A few months ago he’d been brought in for questioning. It had become routine by then, for the city’s young men. At the time they believed what he’d told them. That he was a high school teacher, married, living in Tollygunge. No ties to the CPI(ML).
He was asked if he’d known anything about an incident of vandalism in the school’s library: who had broken into it one night to slash the portraits of Tagore and Vidyasagar hanging on the walls. At the time they were satisfied with his answers. Concluding that he’d had nothing to do with it, they asked him nothing else.
Then one night, about a month before he was killed, he did not come home. He returned early the next morning, not entering through the courtyard, not ringing the bell. He went around to the back, climbing over the wall that was shoulder high.
He waited in the garden, behind the shed filled with coal and broken wood to light the stove. He tossed up bits of terra-cotta from a broken flowerpot, until Gauri opened the shutters to their bedroom and looked down.
His right hand was bandaged, his arm in a sling. He and his squad members had been trying to assemble a pipe bomb, using a firecracker as an explosive. Udayan, with the slight tremor that had never fully left his fingers, should not have been the one to attempt it.
The blast had occurred at a remote location, at a safe house. He’d managed to get away.
He told his parents it had happened in the course of a routine experiment at school. That a bit of sodium hydroxide had spilled on his skin. He told them not to worry, that the hand would heal in a few weeks. But he told Gauri what had really happened. The two comrades who’d been helping him had stepped away in time, but not Udayan, and under his bandage there was now a useless paw. The bandage would come off, but the fingers were gone.
By then, in the course of raids in Tollygunge, the police had discovered ammunition in the film studios. In makeup rooms, in editing rooms. They were conducting searches at random, harassing young men on the streets. Arresting them, torturing them. Filling the morgues, the crematoriums. In the mornings, dumping corpses on the streets, as a warning.
For two weeks Udayan was gone. He told his parents he was simply taking precautions, though by then they, too, must have known. And he told Gauri that he was afraid, that the injury to his hand made him conspicuous, that the police might put it all together now.
Gauri did not know where he was, whether
it was one safe house or several. Occasionally there was a note, retrieved at the stationer’s on the main road. A sign that he was still alive, a request for fresh clothes, his thyroid pills. There was still enough of a network in the neighborhood to arrange for this. At the end of the two weeks, because there was no other place to shelter him, he returned to their enclave.
Once he was home again he was unable to leave. His parents, anxious for his return, preferred him there than anywhere else. They made sure no one saw him. No neighbor, no workman, no visitor to the house. The houseboy was sworn to secrecy. They got rid of his things, as if he were already dead. His books hidden, his clothes stored in a trunk under the bed.
He kept to the back rooms. Never showing his face from a terrace or a window. Never speaking above a whisper. His only freedom was to go up to the rooftop in the middle of the night, to sit against the parapet and smoke under the stars. Because of his hand he needed help dressing and bathing. He was like a child, needing to be fed.
He had trouble hearing, asking Gauri to repeat herself. There had been damage to one of his eardrums from the explosion. He complained of dizziness, a high-pitched sound that would not go away. He said he could not hear the shortwave, when she could hear it perfectly well.
He worried that he might not be able to hear the buzzer, if it rang, or the approach of a military jeep. He complained of feeling alone even though they were together. Feeling isolated in the most basic way.
Nearly a week passed. Perhaps the police had not connected the dots, perhaps they’d lost track of him. Perhaps they would be diverted by the approaching festival, he said. He was the one who’d convinced Gauri and his mother to leave the house for the day, to do what they had put off. To distract themselves, to appear normal to their neighbors, to do some holiday shopping.
The body was not returned to them. They were never told where it had been burned. When her father-in-law went to the police station, seeking information, seeking some explanation, they denied any knowledge of the incident. After taking him in full view, his captors had left no trace.
For ten days after his death there were rules to follow. She did not wash her clothes or wear slippers or comb her hair. She shut the door and the shutters to preserve whatever invisible particles of him floated in the atmosphere. She slept on the bed, on the pillow Udayan had used and that continued to smell for a few days of him, until it was replaced by her own odor, her greasy skin and hair.
No one bothered her. She was aware of holding her body very still, as if posing for a photograph that was never taken. In spite of the stillness, she felt at times as if she were falling, the bed seeming to give way. She was unable to cry. There were only the tears disconnected to feeling, that gathered and sometimes fell from the corners of her eyes in the morning, after sleep.
The days of Pujo arrived and began to pass: Shashthi, Saptami, Ashtami, Navami. Days of worship and celebration across the city. Of mourning and seclusion inside the house. The vermillion was washed clean from her hair, the iron bangle removed from her wrist. The absence of these ornaments marked her as a widow. She was twenty-three years old.
After eleven days a priest came for the final rites, and a cook to prepare the ceremonial meal. Inside the house, Udayan’s portrait was propped against the wall in a frame, behind glass, wreathed with tuberoses. She was unable to look at his face in the photograph. She sat for the ceremony, her wrists bare.
If anything happens to me, don’t let them waste money on my funeral, he’d once told her. But a funeral took place, the house filled with people who’d known him, family members and party members coming to pay their respects. To eat dishes made in his honor, the particular foods that he had loved.
After the mourning period ended her in-laws began to eat fish and meat again, but not Gauri. She was given white saris to wear in place of colored ones, so that she resembled the other widows in the family. Women three times her age.
Dashami came: the end of Pujo, the day of Durga’s return to Shiva. At night the effigies that had stood in the small pandal in their neighborhood were taken to the river to be immersed. It was done without fanfare this year, out of respect for Udayan.
But in North Calcutta, below the balcony where they had first spoken to one another, the processions would continue throughout the night. People lined up on the sidewalks for a final glimpse, the noise so great it would have been impossible to sleep. She will come back, she will return to us, people chanted as they marched on the street, accompanying the goddess to the river, bidding her another year’s farewell.
One morning, after the first month had passed, she was unable to go to the kitchen to help her mother-in-law with the day’s preparations, as she was once again expected to do. Feeling drained of energy, dizzy when she tried to stand up, she remained in bed.
Five minutes passed, another ten. Her mother-in-law entered the room and told her it was late. She opened the shutters and looked down at Gauri’s face. She held a cup of tea in her hands but did not offer it right away. For a moment she only stood there, staring at her. Gauri sat up slowly, to take the tea from her hands.
I’ll be upstairs in a moment.
Don’t bother today, her mother-in-law said.
Why not?
You won’t be of help.
She shook her head, confused.
An intelligent girl. This is what he told us after he married you. And yet, incapable of understanding simple things.
What haven’t I understood?
Her mother-in-law had already turned to leave the room. At the door she paused. Careful from now on, not to slip in the bathroom, or on the stairs.
From now on?
You’re going to be a mother, Gauri heard her say.
From the beginning of their marriage he did not touch her for one week out of every month. He had asked her to keep track of her periods in the pages of her diary, telling him when it was safe.
After the revolution was successful, he’d told her, they’d bring children into the world. Only then. But in the final weeks before his death, when he was hiding at the house, they had both lost track of the days.
She had been born with a map of time in her mind. She pictured other abstractions as well, numbers and the letters of the alphabet, both in English and in Bengali. Numbers and letters were like links on a chain. Months were arrayed as if along an orbit in space.
Each concept existed in its own topography, three-dimensional, physical. So that ever since she was a child it was impossible for her to calculate a sum, to spell a word she was unsure of, to access a memory or await something in the coming months, without retrieving it from a specific location in her mind.
Her strongest image was always of time, both past and future; it was an immediate horizon, at once orienting and containing her. Across the limitless spectrum of years, the brief tenancy of her own life was superimposed. To the right was the recent past: the year she’d met Udayan, and before that, all the years she’d lived without knowing him. There was the year she was born, 1948, prefaced by all the years and centuries that came before.
To the left was the future, the place where her death, unknown but certain, was an end point. In less than nine months a baby would come. But its life had already started, its heart already beating, represented by a separate line creeping forward. She saw Udayan’s life, no longer accompanying her own as she’d assumed it would, but ceasing in October 1971. This formed a grave in her mind’s eye.
Only the present moment, lacking any perspective, eluded her grasp. It was like a blind spot, just over her shoulder. A hole in her vision. But the future was visible, unspooling incrementally.
She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipate it against her will.
There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would. It was like holding her br
eath, as Udayan had tried to do in the lowland. And yet somehow she was breathing. Just as time stood still but was also passing, some other part of her body that she was unaware of was now drawing oxygen, forcing her to stay alive.
Chapter 3
The day after speaking to Gauri, Subhash went out, alone, into the city for the first time. He took the material his parents had given him, his share and Udayan’s, to a men’s tailoring shop. He didn’t need new shirts and trousers, and yet he felt obligated, not wanting the material to go to waste. The news that there was nowhere to have clothes tailored in Rhode Island, that American clothing was all ready-made, had come to his parents as a surprise. It was the first detail of his life there they’d openly reacted to.
He took the tram to Ballygunge, walking past the hawkers who called out to him. He found the small shop owned by distant relatives, where he and Udayan always went together, once a year, to be measured. A long counter, a fitting room in the corner, a rod where the finished clothing was hung. He placed his order, watching the tailor sketch the designs quickly in a notebook, clipping a triangle of the material and stapling it to the corner of each receipt.
There was nothing else he needed, nothing from the city he wanted. After hearing what Gauri had told him, after picturing it, he could focus on little else.
He got on a bus, riding with no destination in mind, getting out close to Esplanade. He saw foreigners on the streets, Europeans wearing kurtas, beads. Exploring Calcutta, passing through. Though he looked like any other Bengali he felt an allegiance with the foreigners now. He shared with them a knowledge of elsewhere. Another life to go back to. The ability to leave.
There were hotels he might have entered in this part of the city, to have a whiskey or a beer, to fall into a conversation with strangers. To forget the way his parents behaved, to forget the things Gauri had said.
He stopped to light a cigarette, Wills, the brand Udayan smoked. Feeling tired, he stood in front of a store that sold embroidered shawls.
The Lowland Page 11
