The Lowland

addressed the exuberant crowd.
    With great pride and boundless joy I wish to announce today at this meeting that we have formed a genuine Communist Party. The official name was the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. The CPI(ML).
    He did not express gratitude to the politicians who had released him. His release had been made possible by the law of history. Naxalbari had stirred the whole of India, Sanyal said.
    The revolutionary situation was ripe, both at home and abroad, he told them. A high tide of revolution was sweeping through the world. Mao Tse-tung was at the helm.
    Internationally and nationally, the reactionaries have grown so weak that they crumble whenever we hit them. In appearance they are strong, but in reality they are only giants made of clay, they are truly paper tigers.
    The chief task of the new party was to organize the peasantry. The tactic would be guerilla warfare. The enemy was the Indian state.
    Theirs was a new form of communism, Sanyal declared. They would be headquartered in the villages. By the year 2000, that is only thirty-one years from now, the people of the whole world will be liberated from all kinds of exploitation of man by man and will celebrate the worldwide victory of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought.
    Charu Majumdar wasn’t present at the rally. But Sanyal called for allegiance to him, warning against those who challenged Majumdar’s doctrine, comparing him to Mao in his wisdom.
    We will certainly be able to make a new sun and a new moon shine in the sky of our great motherland, he said, his words ringing out for miles.
    In the papers there were photographs, taken from a distance, of those who gathered to hear Sanyal’s speech, to give the Red Salute. A battle cry declared, a generation transfixed. A piece of Calcutta standing still.
    It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of. A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind.
    Subhash knew that Udayan had been there. He hadn’t accompanied him to the rally, nor had Udayan asked him to come. In this sense they had already parted.
    6.
    A few months later Subhash also traveled to a village; this was the word the Americans used. An old-fashioned word, designating an early settlement, a humble place. And yet the village had once contained a civilization: a church, a courthouse, a tavern, a jail.
    The university had begun as an agricultural school. A land grant college still surrounded by greenhouses, orchards, fields of corn. On the outskirts were lush pastures of scientifically cultivated grass, routinely irrigated and fertilized and trimmed. Nicer than the grass that grew inside the walls of the Tolly Club.
    But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.
    The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back.
    And yet, certain physical aspects of Rhode Island—a state so small within the context of America that on some maps its landmass was indicated only by an arrow pointing to its location—corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta, within India. Mountains to the north, an ocean to the east, the majority of land to the south and west.
    Both places were close to sea level, with estuaries where fresh and salt water combined. As Tollygunge, in a previous era, had been flooded by the sea, all of Rhode Island, he learned, had once been covered with sheets of ice. The advance and retreat of glaciers, spreading and melting over New England, had shifted bedrock and soil, leaving great trails of debris. They had created marshes and the bay, dunes and moraines. They had shaped the current shore.
    He found a room in a white wooden house, close to the main road of the village, with black shutters flanking the windows. The shutters were decorative, never opening or closing as they did throughout the day in Calcutta, to keep rooms cool or dry, to block rain or let in a breeze or adjust the light.
    He lived at the top of the house, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with another Ph.D. student named