The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Her mother-in-law asked Udayan if he objected to a few abbreviated rituals. He objected, but she ignored him, blowing her conch shell, then putting tuberose garlands around their necks. A woven tray was raised toward Gauri’s head, her chest, her belly. A tray heaped with auspicious items, with fruit.

  She was presented with a box, opened to show the necklace inside. On the tray was a pot of vermillion powder. Her mother-in-law instructed Udayan to apply it to the parting of her hair. Taking Gauri’s left hand, she pressed her fingers together and slid an iron bangle over her wrist.

  A few strangers, now her neighbors, had gathered to watch, looking over the courtyard wall.

  You are our daughter now, her in-laws said, accepting her though they had not wanted her, placing their hands in a gesture of blessing over her head. What is ours is yours. Gauri bowed down, to take the dust from their feet.

  The courtyard had been decorated with patterns in her honor, painted by hand. At the threshold of the house a pan of milk was simmering on a coal stove, coming to a boil as she approached. There were two stunted banana trees, one on either side of the door. Inside there was another pan of milk, tinted with red. She was told to dip her feet into the red liquid, then walk up the staircase. The staircase was still under construction, there was not a banister to hold.

  The steps had been covered loosely with a white sari, like a thin slippery carpet laid over the treads. Every few steps there was an overturned clay cup she had to crush, bearing down with all her strength. This was the first thing asked of her, to mark her passage into Udayan’s home.

  Because the lane was so narrow there was rarely the sound of a car or even a cycle rickshaw going past. Udayan told her it was easier, when returning to the enclave, to get out at the corner by the mosque and walk the rest of the way. Though many of the houses were walled off, she could hear the lives of others carrying on. Meals being prepared and served, water being poured for baths. Children being scolded and crying, reciting their lessons. Plates being scoured and rinsed. The claws of crows striking the rooftop, flapping their wings, scavenging for peels.

  Every morning she was up at five, climbing stairs to a new portion of the house, and accepting the cup of tea her mother-in-law poured, a biscuit stored in the cream cracker tin. The line for the gas hadn’t been hooked up yet, so the day began with the elaborate process of lighting the clay stove with coals, dung patties, kerosene, a match.

  Thick smoke stung her eyes, blurring her vision as she fanned the flame. Her mother-in-law had told her, the first morning, to put away the book she’d brought with her, and to concentrate on the task at hand.

  The workers arrived soon afterward. Barefoot, with soiled rags twisted around their heads. They hollered and hammered throughout the day, so that studying in the house was impossible. Dust coated everything, bricks and mortar brought in by the barrowful, additional rooms completed one by one.

  After her father-in-law brought back a fish from the market, it was her job to cut the pieces, coat them with salt and turmeric, and fry them in oil. She sat in front of the stove on the flats of her feet. She reduced the sauce they would put the fish into for evening, seasoning it according to her mother-in-law’s instructions. She helped cut up cabbage, shell peas. Rid spinach of sand.

  If the servant was late or had a day off she had to grind the turmeric root and chilies on a stone slab, to pound mustard or poppy seeds if her mother-in-law wanted to cook with them that day. When she ground the chilies her palms felt as if the skin had been scraped off. Tipping the rice pot onto a plate, she let the water drain, making sure the cooked grains didn’t slip out. The weight of the inverted pan strained her wrists, steam scalding her face if she forgot to turn it away.

  Twice a week she accomplished all this before bathing and packing her books and taking the tram back to North Calcutta, to visit the library, to attend lectures. She hadn’t complained to Udayan. But he had known, telling her to be patient.

  He told her that one day, when his brother, Subhash, returned from America and got married, there would be another daughter-in-law to do her share. And from time to time Gauri had wondered who that woman would be.

  In the evenings she waited for Udayan to return from his tutoring job, watching from the terrace of her in-laws’ home. And when he pushed through the swinging wooden doors he always paused to look up at her, as he used to look up from the intersection below her grandparents’ flat, she hoping he would stop by, he hoping to find her there. But now it was different: his arrival was expected, and the fact that she stood waiting for him was not a surprise, because they were married, and this was the house where they both lived.

  He would wash up and have something to eat, and then she would put on a fresh sari and they would go out for a walk. Behaving at first like any other recently married couple. She enjoyed being out of the house with him, but she was unsettled by the quiet of Tollygunge, the raw simplicity she perceived.

  The neighborhood was set in its ways. More uniformly Bengali than in North Calcutta, where Punjabis and Marwaris occupied many of the flats in her grandparents’ building, where the radio shop across from Chacha’s Hotel played Hindi film songs that floated over the traffic, where the energy of students and professors was thick in the air.

  Here there was little to distract her, the way the view from her grandparents’ balcony could occupy her day and night. From her in-laws’ house there was little to see. Only other homes, laundry on rooftops, palms and coconut trees. Lanes curving this way and that way. The hyacinth that teemed, greener than grass, in the lowland and the ponds.

  He began to ask her to do certain things. And so, in order to help him, in order to feel a part of it, she agreed. At first the tasks were simple. He drew her maps, telling her to walk here or there in the course of an errand, to observe whether a scooter or cycle was parked outside.

  He gave her notes to deliver, at first to a letter box somewhere in Tollygunge, then in person. He told her to place the sheet of paper under the rupees she used to pay the man at the stationer’s, if she needed to buy some ink. The note usually contained a piece of information. A location or a time of day. Some communication that made no sense to her but was essential to someone else.

  One series of notes went to a woman who worked at a tailor’s shop. Gauri was to ask specifically for a woman named Chandra, to take measurements for a blouse. The first time, Chandra greeted her as if they were old friends, asking how she’d been. A pudgy woman with a bit of kink to her hair.

  She took Gauri behind a curtain, calling out different numbers without ever placing the tape against Gauri’s body, yet writing them in her pad. It was Chandra who undraped herself, taking advantage of the drawn curtain, taking the note from Gauri’s hand, reading and refolding it. She tucked it inside her own blouse, underneath her brassiere, before opening the curtain again.

  These missions were small joints in a larger structure. No detail overlooked. She’d been linked into a chain she could not see. It was like performing in a brief play, with fellow actors who never identified themselves, simple lines and actions that were scripted, controlled. She wondered exactly how she was contributing, who might be watching her. She asked Udayan but he would not tell her, saying this was how she was being most useful. Saying it was better for her not to know.

  The following February, just after their first marriage anniversary, he arranged for her to have a tutoring job. Effigies of Saraswati stood on the street corners, students offered textbooks at her feet. The kokils were beginning to sing, their calls plaintive, yearning. A brother and sister in Jadavpur needed help passing their Sanskrit exams.

  Every day she went to their home, taking a cycle rickshaw to get there, introducing herself by a fictitious name. Before she went the first time, Udayan described the house to her, as if he’d already been there. He told her about the room where she’d sit, the arrangement of the furniture, the color of the walls, the study table that was beneath the window.

  He told
her which of the chairs at the table she was to take. To pull the curtain slightly to one side, saying she wanted to let in a bit of light, if it happened to be drawn.

  At a certain point during the hour, he told her, a policeman would walk past the house, crossing the window from left to right. She was to jot down the time he passed by, and observe whether or not he was in uniform.

  Why?

  This time he told her. The policeman’s route passed a safe house, he said. They needed to know his schedule, his days off. There were comrades needing shelter. They needed him out of the way.

  Sitting with her students, helping them with their grammar, her wristwatch resting on the table, her diary open, she saw him. A man in his thirties, clean-shaven, in his khaki uniform, heading off for duty. From a window on the second floor she saw the black of his moustache, the top of his head. She described him to Udayan.

  With the brother and sister she read lines from the Upanishads, the Rig Veda. The ancient teachings, the sacred texts she’d first studied with her grandfather. Atma devanam, bhuvanasya garbho. Spirit of the gods, seed of all the worlds. A spider reaches the liberty of space by means of its own thread.

  One day, a Thursday, the policeman was not in uniform. Instead of walking from left to right he came from the opposite direction, in civilian clothing. He was accompanying a little boy home from school. It was twenty past the hour. He was walking in a more casual way.

  When she reported this to Udayan, he said, Keep observing him. Next week, when he’s off duty again, tell me which day. Remember to jot down the time.

  Again the following Thursday, at twenty past, she saw the policeman in his alternate guise, holding the hand of the young boy, coming from the opposite direction. It was the boy who would be in uniform those days. White shorts and a shirt, a water canteen over one shoulder, a satchel in his hand. Damp hair neatly combed. She saw the boy skipping, two or three lively paces to each of his father’s slower strides.

  She heard the boy’s voice, telling his father about what he’d learned in school that day, and heard his father, laughing at the things he said. She saw their joined hands, their arms slightly swinging.

  Four weeks passed. It was always a Thursday, she told Udayan. That was the day he walked his son home from school.

  You are positive, Thursday? Never another day?

  No, never.

  He seemed satisfied. But then he asked, You’re certain it’s his son?

  Yes.

  How old is he?

  I don’t know. Six or seven.

  He turned his face from her. He asked her nothing more.

  The week before going to America to be with Subhash, she went back to Jadavpur, to the neighborhood of the brother and sister she’d tutored. She hired a rickshaw. She wore a printed sari now that she was married again, looking as she had when she’d been Udayan’s wife.

  She was five months pregnant, carrying a child who would not know him. She had leather slippers on her feet, bangles on her wrists, a colorful purse in her lap. She wore sunglasses, not wanting to be noticed. Soon the heat would be unbearable, but she would be far away by then.

  She approached the street of the brother and sister, then told the rickshaw to stop. Continuing on foot, she looked at the letter boxes mounted to each home.

  The last one bore the name she’d been looking for. The name the investigator had mentioned the day she and Subhash had been questioned. It was a single-story house, a simple grille enclosing the verandah. The name of a dead man was painted carefully on the wood of the letter box, in white block letters. Nirmal Dey. The policeman they’d needed out of the way.

  The occupants of the house were visible, standing on the verandah, facing the street, staring out though there was nothing to see. It was as if they’d been waiting for her. There was the little boy Gauri used to see skipping down the road while holding his father’s hand. All this time she’d seen the boy only from the back, for he’d always been walking away from her. But she knew, just from looking at his body, that it was him.

  For the first time she saw his face. She saw the loss that would never be replaced, a loss that the child forming inside her shared.

  He was home from school, no longer in his bright white uniform, but in a pair of faded shorts and a shirt instead. He stood still, his fingers hooked over the grille. Briefly he looked at her, then averted his gaze.

  She imagined the afternoon at school he’d waited to be picked up by his father. Being told, finally, by someone, that his father would not be coming for him.

  Next to him was a woman, the boy’s mother. A woman perhaps only a few years older than Gauri. It was the mother who wore white now, as Gauri had worn until a few weeks ago. The colorless fabric was wrapped around the woman’s waist, draped over her shoulder, over the top of her head. Her life turned upside down, her complexion looking like it had been scrubbed clean.

  Seeing Gauri, the mother did not look away. Who are you looking for? she asked.

  Gauri said the only reasonable thing she could think of, the surname of the brother and sister she’d tutored.

  They live back that way, the woman told her, pointing in the opposite direction. You’ve come too far.

  She walked away, aware that the woman and boy had already forgotten her. She was like a moth that had strayed into a room, only to flutter out of it again. Unlike Gauri, they would never think back to this moment. Though she’d had a hand in something they would mourn all their lives, she had already slipped from their minds.

  Chapter 3

  Meghna was four. Old enough to be apart from Bela for a time. She was attending a summer program run by the school where she would begin kindergarten in the fall. It was out past the train station, on a campsite by a pond.

  A few times a week she spent her mornings in the company of other children, learning to play with them in a grove of trees, and sit with them at a picnic table, to share food. They baked brown rolls that she brought home in small paper packets. When it rained she sat in a teepee, resting on sheepskin. Molding beeswax, watching felted dolls enact stories that were read aloud.

  Because Bela had to leave the house so early, it was Subhash who dropped Meghna off those mornings. Bela picked her up when her shift was done. It was good to be working again. To wake up before the sun rose, to sweat once it was in the sky, to feel tightness in her arms and legs at the end of the day.

  She’d come to this farm as a child on field trips with her class, to watch the shearing of sheep. She’d come with her father to pick out pumpkins in October, bedding plants in spring. Now she sowed seeds in the rocky, acidic soil, scraping it with a hoe to remove weeds.

  She’d dug long trenches for potatoes. She’d created narrow footpaths between the rows for microorganisms to thrive. She’d started the early crops in a hoophouse, and in cut-up pieces of sod, before moving seedlings to open ground.

  One afternoon, taking advantage of the sunshine after a cloudy start to the day, needing to cool off her body, she drove with Meghna to the cove in Jamestown where her father used to bring her, where she had first learned to swim. On the way back from the beach she noticed corn for sale, and stopped the car.

  On the table there was a coffee can with a slit in the plastic lid, asking a dollar for three ears. There was a price list for a few other items. Bundles of radishes and basil. A picnic cooler containing oak-leaf. Butterheads, free from tipburn.

  She picked up the can, heard a few coins rattling inside. She bought some corn, some radishes, pushing the bills through the slot. The following week she went back, making the short drive over the bridge from her father’s house. Still there was no one. She began to wonder who had grown these things, who was so trusting. Who left them, untended, for a seagull to carry away, for strangers to buy or steal.

  Then, on a Saturday, someone was there. He had more vegetables in the back of a pickup truck, onions and carrots in baskets, tatsoi with spoon-shaped leaves. Two small black lambs sat in a cage, on a bed of straw
, wearing matching red collars. When Meghna approached he showed her how to feed them from her hand, and let her pet their wool.

  You grow this stuff on the island? Bela asked.

  No. I come here to fish. A friend lets me keep a stand on his property, given how many tourists pass through this time of year.

  She picked up a lemon cucumber. She smelled its skin.

  We tried growing these this season.

  Where’s that?

  Keenans’, off 138.

  I know the Keenans. Are you new to Rhode Island?

  She shook her head. They’d both been born here. They’d attended different high schools, not so far apart.

  He had green eyes, a few creases in the skin, salt-and-pepper hair that stirred in the breeze. He was courteous, but he was not afraid to look at her.

  Next time I’ll bring the rabbits. I’m Drew.

  He kneeled down and put out his hand, not to Bela but to Meghna. What’s your name?

  But Meghna wouldn’t answer, and Bela had to say it for her.

  Pretty. What’s it mean?

  It was one of the rivers that flowed into the Bay of Bengal, Bela told him. A name Subhash had chosen, had given.

  Anyone call you Meg for short?

  No.

  Can I? Next time your mommy stops by?

  He began bringing other animals, chicks and puppies and kittens, so that Meghna started talking about Drew during the week, asking Bela when they would visit him again. He gave Bela things she wasn’t paying for, tucking them into her bag and refusing her money. Purple bush beans that turned green when she cooked them. Pink heads of garlic, peas in their pods.

  The farm belonged to his family. He’d lived on it all his life. It was just a few acres now, something one could take in at a glance. There used to be more of it, land lived off for several generations. But his parents had had to sell a large portion to developers. He had the support of some community shareholders to run it now.