The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  But now the distance between them was not merely physical, or even emotional. It was intractable. It triggered a delayed burst of responsibility in Subhash. An attempt, once it no longer mattered, to be present. Every year for the following three years he traveled back to Calcutta in winter, to see her. He sat beside her, reading newspapers, drinking tea with her. Feeling as cut off as Bela must have felt, from Gauri.

  He stayed in Tollygunge as if he were a young boy again, never straying farther than the mosque at the corner. Only walking through the enclave now and again, always stopping at Udayan’s memorial, then turning back. The rest of the city, alive, importunate, held no meaning for him. It was simply a passageway from the airport and back. He had walked away from Calcutta just as Gauri had walked away from Bela. And by now he had neglected it for too long.

  In the course of his last visit his mother had needed to be hospitalized. Her heart was too weak, she’d needed oxygen. He’d spent all day at her side, arriving early each morning at the hospital to hold her hand. The end was coming, and the doctors told him his visit had been well timed. But the attack happened late at night.

  Bijoli did not die in Tollygunge, in the house to which she’d clung. And though Subhash had returned to be close to her, from so far, he’d arrived, that final morning at the hospital, too late. She’d died on her own, in a room with strangers, denying him the opportunity to watch her pass.

  For college Bela chose a small liberal arts school in the Midwest. He drove her there, crossing Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, occasionally letting her take the wheel. He met her roommate, her roommate’s mother and father, and then he left her there. The college had an alternative curriculum, without exams or letter grades. The atypical method suited her. According to the lengthy evaluation letters her professors wrote at the end of the year, she did well. She majored in environmental science. For her senior thesis she studied the adverse effects of pesticide runoff in a local river.

  But graduate school, which he hoped would be the next step, was of no interest to her. She told him she did not want to spend her life inside a university, researching things. She had learned enough from books and labs. She didn’t want to cut herself off that way.

  She said this to him not without some disdain. It was the closest she came to rejecting how both he and Gauri lived. And he remembered Udayan, suddenly turning cold to his education, just as Bela had.

  She talked at times about the Peace Corps, wanting to travel to other parts of the world. He wondered if she would join, if maybe she would want to go back to India. She was twenty-one, old enough to make such decisions. Instead, after graduating, she moved not terribly far away from him, to Western Massachusetts, where she got a job on a farm.

  He thought at first it was in a research capacity that she was there, to test the soil or help cultivate a new crop breed. But no, she was there to work as an agricultural apprentice, in the field. Putting in irrigation lines, weeding and harvesting, cleaning out animal pens. Packing crates to sell vegetables, weighing them for customers on the side of the road.

  When she came home on weekends he saw that the shape and texture of her hands were being altered by the demands of her labor. He noticed calluses on her palms, dirt beneath her nails. Her skin smelled of soil. The back of her neck and her shoulders, her face, turned a deeper brown.

  She wore denim coveralls, heavy soiled boots, a cotton kerchief tied over her hair. She woke at four in the morning. A man’s undershirt with the sleeves pushed up to her shoulders, dark strips of leather knotted around her wrist in place of bangles.

  Each time there was something new to take in. A tattoo that was like an open cuff above her ankle. A bleached section of her hair. A silver hoop in her nose.

  It became her life: a series of jobs on farms across the country, some close by, others far. Washington State, Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri. Rural towns he had to look up on a map, towns where she said sometimes there were no stoplights for miles. She traveled for the growing season or the breeding season, to plant peach trees or maintain beehives, to raise chickens or goats.

  She told him she lived in close quarters, often not paid in wages but simply by the food and shelter that were provided. She’d lived with groups who pooled their income. She’d lived for a few months in Montana, in a tent. She found odd jobs when she needed to, spraying orchards, doing landscape work. She lived without insurance, without heed for her future. Without a fixed address.

  Sometimes she sent him a postcard to tell him where she’d gone, or sent a cardboard box containing softening bunches of broccoli, or some pears wrapped in newspaper. Dried red chilies, fashioned into a wreath. He wondered if her work ever took her to California, where Gauri still lived, or if this was a place she avoided.

  He’d had no contact with Gauri. Only a post office box to which, for the first few years, he’d directed their tax returns, until they started filing separately. Apart from this official correspondence he had not sought her out.

  On either side of the enormous country they lived apart, Bela roaming between them. They had not bothered to obtain a divorce. Gauri had not asked for one, and Subhash had not cared. Staying married was better than having to negotiate with her again. It appalled him that she had never contacted Bela, never sent a note. That her heart could be so cold. At the same time he was grateful that the break was clean.

  Now and again, at a dinner he attended at the home of an American colleague, or one of the local Indian families with whom he kept cordial ties, there would be someone, a widow or a woman who’d never married. Once or twice he’d called these women, or they would call him, inviting him to attend a classical music concert in Providence, or a play.

  Though he had little interest in such entertainments, he’d gone; on a handful of occasions, craving company, he had spent a few nights in a woman’s bed. But he had no interest in a relationship. He was in his fifties, it was too late to start another family. He had overstepped with Gauri. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to take that step again.

  The only company he longed for was Bela’s. But she was skittish, and he could never be certain of when he would see her again. She tended to return in the summer, taking off a week or two around the time of her birthday, to visit the beaches and swim in the sea, in the place where he’d raised her. Now and then she came during Christmas. Once or twice, promising to be there, then telling him something had come up at the last minute, she did not show up in the end.

  When she was there she slept in her old bed. She rubbed camphoraceous salves onto her arms and legs, and soaked herself in the bathtub. She allowed him to cook for her, to take care of her, briefly, in this simple way. She watched old movies on television with him, and they went on walks around Ninigret Pond, or through the groves of rhododendrons in Hope Valley, as they used to do when she was small.

  Still, she required a certain amount of time to herself, so that even during the course of her visits she would stay up late after he’d gone to bed, baking loaves of zucchini bread, or she would borrow his car and go for a drive, not inviting him to go with her. He knew, even when she returned, that part of her was closed off from him. That her sense of limits was fierce. And though she seemed to have found herself, he feared that she was still lost.

  At the end of each visit she zipped her bag and left him, never saying when she’d be back. She disappeared, as Gauri had disappeared, her vocation taking precedence. Defining her, directing her course.

  • • •

  Over the years her work started merging with a certain ideology. He saw that there was a spirit of opposition to the things she did.

  She was spending time in cities, in blighted sections of Baltimore and Detroit. She helped to convert abandoned properties into community gardens. She taught low-income families to grow vegetables in their backyards, so that they wouldn’t have to depend entirely on food banks. She dismissed Subhash when he praised her for these efforts. It was necessary, she said.

  In Rhode Island,
she went through his refrigerator, chiding him for the apples he continued to buy from supermarkets. She was opposed to eating food that had to be transported long distances. To the patenting of seeds. She talked to him about why people still died from famines, why farmers still went hungry. She blamed the unequal distribution of wealth.

  She reproached Subhash for throwing out his vegetable scraps instead of composting them. Once, during a visit, she went to a hardware store to buy plywood and nails, building a bin in his backyard, showing him how to turn the pile as it cooled.

  What we consume is what we support, she said, telling him he needed to do his part. She could be self-righteous, as Udayan had been.

  He worried at times about her having such passionate ideals. Nevertheless, when she was gone, even though it was quicker and cheaper simply to go to the supermarket, he began to drive out to a farm stand on Saturday mornings, to get his fruits and vegetables, his eggs for the week.

  The people who worked there, who weighed his items and placed them in his canvas bag, who added up what he owed with the stub of a pencil instead of at a cash register, reminded him of Bela. They brought back to mind her pragmatic simplicity. Thanks to Bela he grew conscious of eating according to what was in season, according to what was available. Things he’d taken for granted when he was a child.

  Her dedication to bettering the world was something that would fulfill her, he imagined, for the rest of her life. Still, he was unable to set aside his concern. She had eschewed the stability he had worked to provide. She’d forged a rootless path, one which seemed precarious to him. One which excluded him. But, as with Gauri, he’d let her go.

  A loose confederation of friends, people she spoke of fondly but never introduced him to, provided her with an alternate form of family. She spoke of attending these friends’ weddings. She knitted sweaters for their children, or sewed them cloth dolls, mailing them off as surprises. If there was any other partner in her life, a romantic interest, he was unaware of it. It was always just the two of them, whenever she came.

  He learned to accept her for who she was, to embrace the turn she’d taken. At times Bela’s second birth felt more miraculous than the first. It was a miracle to him that she had discovered meaning in her life. That she could be resilient, in the face of what Gauri had done. That in time she had renewed, if not fully restored, her affection for him.

  And yet sometimes he felt threatened, convinced that it was Udayan’s inspiration; that Udayan’s influence was greater. Gauri had left them, and by now Subhash trusted her to stay away. But there were times Subhash believed that Udayan would come back, claiming his place, claiming Bela from the grave as his own.

  Part VI

  Chapter 1

  In their bedroom, in Tollygunge, she combs out her hair before bed. The door bolt is fastened, the shutters closed. Udayan lies inside the mosquito netting, holding the shortwave on his chest. One leg folded, the ankle resting on the other knee. On the bedcover, beside him, he keeps a small metal ashtray, a box of matches, a packet of Wills.

  It is 1971, the second year of their marriage. Almost two years since the party’s declaration. A year since the offices of Deshabrati and Liberation were raided. The issues Udayan continues to read are secretly published and circulated. He hides them under the mattress. Their content has been deemed seditious, and possessing them might now be used as evidence of a crime.

  Ranjit Gupta is the new police commissioner, and the prisons are swelling. The police seize comrades from their homes, from their campuses, from safe houses. They confine them in lockups throughout the city, extracting confessions. Some emerge after a few days. Others are detained indefinitely. Cigarette butts are pressed into their backs, hot wax is poured into their ears. Metal rods pushed into their rectums. People who live near Calcutta’s prisons cannot sleep.

  One day, within a few hours, four students are shot dead near College Street. One of them had nothing to do with the party. He’d been passing through the gates of the university, to attend a class.

  Udayan turns off the radio. Do you regret your decision? he asks.

  Which decision?

  Becoming a wife?

  She holds the comb still for a moment, glancing at his reflection in the mirror, unable to see his face clearly through the mosquito netting. No.

  Becoming my wife?

  She gets up and lifts the netting, sitting on the edge of the bed. She stretches out beside him.

  No, she says once more.

  They’ve arrested Sinha.

  When?

  A few days ago.

  He says this without discouragement. As if it has nothing to do with him.

  What does it mean?

  It means either they’ll get him to talk, or they’ll kill him.

  She sits up again. She starts braiding her hair for sleep.

  But he draws her fingers away. He undrapes her sari, letting the material fall from her breasts, revealing the skin between her blouse and petticoat. He drapes her hair around her shoulders.

  Leave it like this tonight.

  The hair sheds into his hands, strands of it scattering onto the bed. Then the weight is gone, it turns short again, of a coarser texture, streaked with gray.

  But in the dream Udayan remains a boy in his twenties. Three decades younger than Gauri is now, almost a decade younger than Bela. His wavy hair is swept back from his forehead, his waist narrow compared to his shoulders. But she is a woman of fifty-six, the years made present by virtue of the resilience they have taken away.

  Udayan is blind to this disjuncture. He pulls her to him, unhooking her blouse, seeking pleasure from her dormant body, her neglected breasts. She tries to resist, telling him that he should have nothing to do with her. She tells him that she has married Subhash.

  The information has no effect. He removes the rest of her clothes, the touch of her husband feeling forbidden. For she is coupled naked with a boy who appears as youthful as a son.

  When she was married to Udayan, her recurring nightmare was that they had not met, that he had not come into her life. In those moments returned the conviction she’d had before knowing him, that she would live her life alone. She had hated those first disorienting moments after waking up in their bed in Tollygunge, inches away from him, still cloistered in an alternate world in which they had nothing to do with one another, even as he held her in his arms.

  She’d known him only a few years. Only beginning to discover who he was. But in another way she had known him practically all her life. After his death began the internal knowledge that came from remembering him, still trying to make sense of him. Of both missing and resenting him. Without that there would be nothing to haunt her. No grief.

  She wonders what he might have looked like now. How he would have aged, the illnesses he might have suffered, the diseases to which he might have succumbed. She tries to imagine the flat stomach softening. Gray hairs on his chest.

  In all her life, apart from when Subhash asked, and the day she told Otto Weiss, she has not spoken to a single person about what had happened to him. No one else knows to ask. What had happened in Calcutta in the last years of his life. What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. What she’d done for him, because he’d asked.

  In California, in the beginning, it was the living that haunted her, not the dead. She used to fear that Bela or Subhash would materialize, sitting in a lecture hall, or walking into a meeting. She used to look up from the podium to scan the room on the first day of a new class, half expecting one of them to be occupying a chair.

  She used to fear that they would find her on the sunny campus, on one of the sidewalks that led from one building to another. Confronting her, exposing her. Apprehending her, the way the police had apprehended Udayan.

  But in twenty years no one had come. She had not been summoned back. She had been given what she’d demanded, granted exactly the freedom she had sought.

  By the time Bela was ten, Gauri had been able, somehow
, to imagine her doubled, at twenty. By then Bela had spent most of her time at school, she’d spent weekends sometimes at the home of a friend. She’d had no trouble spending two weeks at overnight Girl Scout camp in summer. She’d sat between Gauri and Subhash at dinner, put her plate into the sink when finished and then drifted upstairs.

  Still, Gauri had waited until she’d been offered a job, until the occasion of Subhash’s return to Calcutta. She knew that the errors she’d made during the first years of Bela’s life were not things she could go back and fix. Her attempts kept collapsing, because the foundation was not there. Over time this feeling ate away at her, exposing only her self-interest, her ineptitude. Her inability to abide herself.

  She’d convinced herself that Subhash was her rival, and that she was in competition with him for Bela, a competition that felt insulting, unjust. But of course it had not been a competition, it had been her own squandering. Her own withdrawal, covert, ineluctable. With her own hand she’d painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.

  During that first flight across the country the plane was so bright she’d put on sunglasses. For much of it she had been able to see the ground, her forehead pressed against the oval window. Below her a river glinted like a crudely bent wire. Brown and gold earth was veined with crevasses. Precipices rose like islands, cracked from the sun’s heat.

  There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow. Thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads.

  There was a geometric section, like a patterned carpet in shades of pink and green and tan. Composed of circular shapes in various sizes, close together, some slightly overlapping, some with a slice neatly missing. She learned from the person sitting next to her that they were crops. But to Gauri’s eyes they were like a pile of faceless coins.