The Lowland

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 simply to a letter box somewhere in Tollygunge, then in person. He told her to place the sheet of paper under the bills 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.
    In February 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 going there 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 garbha. Spirit of the