The Lowland

universities that supported the world’s most gifted scientists. MIT. Princeton, where Einstein had been.
    But none of this impressed Udayan. How can you walk away from what’s happening? There, of all places?
    It’s a degree program. It’s only a matter of a few years.
    Udayan shook his head. If you go, you won’t come back.
    How do you know?
    Because I know you. Because you only think of yourself.
    Subhash stared at his brother. Lounging back on their bed, smoking, preoccupied by the papers. He was reading an article about Kanu Sanyal’s recent arrest.
    You don’t think what you’re doing is selfish?
    Udayan turned a page of the newspaper, not bothering to look up. I don’t think wanting to make a difference is selfish, no.
    This isn’t a game you’re playing. What if the police come to the house? What if you get arrested? What would Ma and Baba think?
    There’s more to life than what they think.
    What’s happened to you, Udayan? They’re the people who raised you. Who continue to feed and clothe you. You’d amount to nothing, if it weren’t for them.
    Udayan sat up, and strode out of the room. A moment later he was back. He stood before Subhash, his face lowered. His anger, quick to flare, had already left him.
    You’re the other side of me, Subhash. It’s without you that I’m nothing. Don’t go.
    It was the only time he’d admitted such a thing. He’d said it with love in his voice. With need.
    But Subhash heard it as a command, one of so many he’d capitulated to all his life. Another exhortation to do as Udayan did, to follow him.
    Then, abruptly, it was Udayan who went away. He traveled outside the city, he did not specify where. It was during a period that the school he worked in was closed. He informed Subhash and his parents the morning of his departure that he’d made this plan.
    It was as if he were heading out for a day, nothing but a cloth bag over his shoulder. Just enough money in his pocket for the train fare back.
    This is some sort of tour? their father asked. You’ve planned it with friends?
    That’s right. A change of scene.
    Why all of a sudden?
    Why not?
    He bent down to take the dust from their parents’ feet, telling them not to worry, promising to return.
    They did not hear from him while he was gone. No letter, no way to know if he was alive or dead. Though Subhash and his parents didn’t talk about it, none of them believed that Udayan had gone sightseeing. And yet no one had done anything to stop him. He returned after a month, a lungi around his waist, the beard and moustache overtaking his face not concealing the weight he’d lost.
    The tremor in his fingers had gotten worse, persistent enough so that his teacup sometimes rattled on the saucer when he held it, so that it became a challenge to button his shirt or grip a pen. In the mornings the sheet on his side of the bed was cold with sweat, dark with the imprint of his body. When he woke up one morning, his heart racing, his neck covered with hives, a doctor was consulted, a blood test performed.
    They worried he’d contracted an illness in the countryside, malaria or meningitis. But it turned out to be an overactive thyroid gland, something medication could keep in check. The doctor mentioned to the family that the drug could take some time to work. That it needed to be taken consistently. That the disease could cause a person to be irritable, to be moody.
    He regained his health, and lived among them, but some part of Udayan was elsewhere. Whatever he had learned or seen outside the city, whatever he’d done, he kept to himself.
    He no longer tried to convince Subhash not to go to America. When they listened to the radio in the evenings, when he looked through the papers, he betrayed little reaction. Something had subdued him. Something that had nothing to do with Subhash, with any of them, preoccupied him now.
    On Lenin’s birthday, April 22, 1969, a third communist party was launched in Calcutta. The members called themselves Naxalites, in honor of what had happened at Naxalbari. Charu Majumdar was named the General Secretary, Kanu Sanyal the Party Chairman.
    On May Day, a massive procession filled the streets. Ten thousand people marched to the center of the city. They gathered on the Maidan, beneath the domed white column of Shahid Minar.
    Kanu Sanyal, just released from prison, stood at a rostrum, and