The Lowland

from his face, he realized Bela was crying. Silently at first, then audibly when he put his arms around her.
    How long will you be there? he asked her now.
    I’m getting a ride back to Hyannis. There’s a bus from there that gets in tonight at eight.
    Gets in where?
    Providence.
    For a moment he was silent, as she was. She was calling from her cell phone; he couldn’t tell if she was still there, or if the line had gone dead.
    Baba?
    He had heard her. He’d heard her still calling him this.
    Can you pick me up, he heard her say, or should I get a cab?
    In the days that followed she thanked him for telling her about Udayan—it was by name that she referred to him—saying that it helped to explain certain things. She’d heard what was necessary; she didn’t need him to tell her anything more.
    In a way, she said, it helped her to feel closer to the child she was having. It was a detail, an element of life that, for different reasons, they would share.
    In autumn her daughter was born. After she became a mother she told Subhash it made her love him more, knowing what he’d done.

VII
    1.
    On her patio in California, Gauri has her toast and fruit and tea. She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day’s headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It’s a version of Bela’s definition, in childhood, of yesterday.
    Once in a while Gauri notices a piece in American papers mentioning Naxalite activity in various parts of India, or in Nepal. Short pieces about Maoist insurgents blowing up trucks and trains. Setting fire to police camps. Fighting corporations in India. Plotting to overthrow the government all over again.
    She skims these articles only sometimes, not wanting to know too much. Some of them refer back to Naxalbari, providing context for those who have never heard of it. They offer links to time lines of the movement, which summarize the events of those half-dozen years as a doomed critique of postcolonial Bengal. And yet the failure remains an example, the embers managing to ignite another generation.
    Who were they? Was this new movement sweeping up young men like Udayan and his friends? Would it be as rudderless, as harrowing? Would Calcutta ever experience something like that again? Something tells her no.
    Too much is within her grasp now. First at the computers she would log on to at the library, replaced by the wireless connection she has at home. Glowing screens, increasingly foldable, portable, companionable, anticipating any possible question the human brain might generate. Containing more information than anyone has need for.
    So much of it, she observes, is designed to eliminate mystery, to minimize surprise. There are maps to indicate where one is going, images of hotel rooms one might stay in. The delayed status of a plane one need not rush to board. Links to people, famous or anonymous—people one might reunite with, or fall in love with, or hire for a job. Citizens of the Internet dwell free from hierarchy. There is room for everyone, given that there are no spatial constraints. Udayan might have appreciated this.
    Some of her students no longer go to the library. They don’t turn to a dictionary to look up a word. In a way they don’t have to attend her class. Her laptop contains a lifetime of learning, along with what she will not live to learn. Summaries of philosophical arguments in online encyclopedias, explanations of modes of thinking that took her years to comprehend. Links to chapters in books she’d once had to hunt down and photocopy, or request from other libraries. Lengthy articles, reviews, assertions, refutations, it’s all there.
    She remembers standing on a balcony in North Calcutta, talking to Udayan. The library at Presidency where he would come to find her sometimes, sitting at a table barricaded with books, a giant fan rustling the papers. He’d stand behind her, saying nothing, waiting for her to turn around, to sense that he was there.
    She remembers reading smuggled books in Calcutta, the particular stall to the left of the Sanskrit College that carried what Udayan liked, that went out of its way for him. Ordering foreign volumes from publishers. She remembers the incremental path of her education, hours sifting through card catalogues, at