The Lowland

ponds. She had forgotten no detail. The color and shape of the ponds clear in her mind. But the details were no longer there. Both ponds were gone. New homes filled up an area that had once been watery, open.
    Walking a bit farther, she saw that the lowland was also gone. That sparsely populated tract was now indistinguishable from the rest of the neighborhood, and on it more homes were clustered together. Scooters were parked in front of doorways, laundry was hung out to dry.
    She wondered if any of the people she passed remembered things as she did. She was tempted to stop a man about her age who looked vaguely familiar, who might have been one of Udayan’s class friends. He was on his way to the market, wearing an undershirt, a lungi, carrying a shopping bag. He passed by, not recognizing her.
    Somewhere close to where she stood, Udayan had hidden in the water. He’d been taken to an empty field. Somewhere there was a tablet with his name on it, commemorating the brief life he’d led. Or perhaps this, too, had been removed.
    She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.
    Scarcely two years of her life, begun as a wife, concluded as a widow, an expectant mother. An accomplice in a crime.
    It had seemed reasonable, what Udayan had asked of her. What he’d told her: that they wanted the policeman out of the way. Depending on one’s interpretation, it had not even been a lie.
    She’d accepted the benign version. The stray particle of doubt, the mute piece of her that suspected something worse, as she sat by the window with the brother and sister, glancing down at the street, she’d smothered.
    No one connected her to it. Still no one knew what she’d done.
    She was the sole accuser, the sole guardian of her guilt. Protected by Udayan, overlooked by the investigator, taken away by Subhash. Sentenced in the very act of being forgotten, punished by means of her release.
    Again she remembered what Bela had said to her. That her reappearance meant nothing. That she was as dead as Udayan was.
    Standing there, unable to find him, she felt a new solidarity with him. The bond of not existing.
    The night before they came for him he fell asleep, as he had been unable to do for days. But in his sleep he began to cry out, waking her.
    At first she could not rouse him, even when she shook him by the shoulders. Then he woke up, shivering. His head burned with fever. He complained of the cold in the room, of a draft, though the air was humid and still. He asked her to turn off the fan and close the shutters.
    She spread a quilt over him, pulling it out of a metal trunk that was under their bed. She tucked it up beneath his shoulders, beneath his chin.
    Go back to sleep, she told him.
    Just like August fifteenth, he said.
    What?
    Me and Subhash. We both had a fever. My parents tell a story, of how both our teeth were chattering the night Nehru made his speech, the night freedom came. I never told you?
    No.
    Miserable fools in bed, just like this.
    She poured him water he refused to sip, pushing it away so that it spilled over the quilt. She dampened a handkerchief and wiped his face. She worried that the fever was caused by an infection, something to do with his injured hand. But he did not complain of any worse pain, and then the fever began to subside, fatigue reclaiming him.
    Until morning he slept soundly. She stayed awake, sitting in the sweltering room, sealed up with him. Staring at him, though she could not see him in the darkness.
    Slowly his profile came into view. His forehead, his nose and lips, edged with gray light. This was the first light that penetrated the vents above the windows, the plaster there perforated in a series of wavy lines.
    A neglected beard covered his cheeks, a moustache hiding the detail of his face—the shaded groove above his mouth—that she most loved. The image of him so still, with his eyes closed, unsettled her. She put her hand over his chest, feeling its rise and fall.
    He opened his eyes, seeming suddenly lucid, himself again.
    I’ve been thinking, he said.
    About what?
    About having children. Would it be enough for you, if we never did?
    Why are you thinking of this now?
    I can’t become a father, Gauri.
    After a moment he added, Not after what I’ve done.
    What have you done?
    He wouldn’t say. Whatever happened, he told her, he regretted only one thing: that he had