The Lowland

first.
    I’m planning to do some fieldwork in Calcutta, he said. Is there anyone you still know, people I might want to talk to?
    I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.
    I’d like to get up to Naxalbari if I can. I’d like to see the village where Sanyal lived, after he was released from prison.
    She nodded. You should.
    It fascinates me, the turn his life took.
    What do you mean?
    The way he was chastened but remained a hero. Still cycling through villages in Naxalbari years later, mobilizing support. I would have liked to speak to him.
    Why don’t you?
    He’s dead. You hadn’t heard?
    It had happened nearly a year ago. His health was in decline. His kidneys and eyesight failing. He’d been suffering from depression. A stroke in 2008 had left him partly paralyzed. He’d refused to be treated in a government hospital. He’d refused to approach the state while he was still fighting it.
    He died of kidney failure?
    Dipankar shook his head. He killed himself.
    She went home, to her desk, and switched on the computer. She typed Kanu Sanyal’s name into the search box. The hits appeared, one after the next, in a series of Indian sites she’d never looked at before.
    She began clicking them open, reading details of his biography. One of the founding members of the movement, along with Majumdar. A movement that still threatened the Indian state.
    Born in 1932. Employed early on as a clerk in a Shiliguri court.
    He’d worked as a CPI(M) organizer in Darjeeling, then broken with the party after the Naxalbari uprising. He’d gone to China to meet with Mao. He’d spent close to a decade in jail. Following his release, he’d renounced violent revolution.
    He’d remained a communist, dedicating his life to the concerns of tea plantation workers, rickshaw drivers. He’d never married. He’d concluded that India was not a nation. He supported the independence of Kashmir, of Nagaland.
    He owned a few books, clothes, cooking utensils. Framed pictures of Marx and Lenin. He’d died a pauper. I was popular once, I have lost my popularity, he’d said in one of his final interviews. I am unwell.
    Many of the articles celebrated his life, his commitment to India’s poor, his tragic passing. They referred to him as a hero, a legend. His critics condemned him, saying that a terrorist had died.
    It was the same set of information, repeated in various ways. She opened the links anyway, unable to stop.
    One of them led to a video. A television news segment from March 23, 2010. A female newscaster’s voice was summarizing the details. There was some black-and-white footage of Calcutta streets in the late sixties, banners and graffiti, a few seconds of a protest march.
    It cut to a shot of weeping villagers, their faces in their hands. People gathered at the doorway of a house, the thatched mud hut that had served as Sanyal’s home, his party office. His cook was being interviewed. She was agitated, nervous in front of the camera. Speaking in the particular accent of the village.
    She’d come to check on him after his lunch, she explained to the reporter. She looked through the window but didn’t see him resting in his bedroom. The door wasn’t latched. She checked again. Then she saw him in another part of the room.
    Gauri saw him, too. Inside the screen of her computer, on her desk, in her darkened study in California, she saw what the cook had seen.
    A seventy-eight-year-old man, wearing an undershirt and cotton pajamas, hanging from a nylon rope. The chair he’d used to secure the rope still stood in front of him. It had not been knocked over. No spasm, no final reaction, had kicked it away.
    His head was cocked to the right, the back of his neck exposed above the undershirt. The sides of his feet were touching the floor. As if he were still supported by the earth’s gravity. As if all he had to do was straighten his shoulders and move on.
    For a few days she was unable to rid her mind of the image. She could not stop thinking about the final passivity of a man who’d refused, until the moment his life ended, to bow his head.
    She could not rid herself of the emotion it churned up in her. She felt a terrible weight, combined with a void.
    The following week, stepping off a staircase outside a campus building, not paying attention, she lost her footing and fell. She reached out, broke the fall with her hand. The skin had split from