The Lowland

used her. And yet he had loved her. A bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She’d been prepared to live her life alone, but from the moment he’d known her he’d needed her. And now he was about to abandon her.
    Or was it she abandoning him? For she looked at him as she’d never looked before. It was a look of disillusion. A revision of everything they’d once shared.
    They pushed him into the back of the van and started the engine. He felt the vibration of the door slamming shut. They would take him somewhere, outside the city, to question him, then finish him off. Either that or to prison. But no, they’d already cut the engine, the van had stopped. The door opened. He was pulled out again.
    They were in the field where he’d come so many times with Subhash.
    They asked him nothing. They untied his hands, then pointed, indicating that he was to walk in a certain direction now, again with his hands raised over his head.
    Slowly, he heard them say. Make sure to pause after every step.
    He did as he was told. Step by step he walked away from them. Go back to your family, they said. But he knew that they were only waiting for him to fall into the ideal range.
    One step, then another. He started counting. How many more?
    He’d known from the beginning the risk of what he was doing. But only the policeman’s blood had prepared him. That blood had not belonged only to the police officer, it had become a part of Udayan also. So that he’d felt his own life begin to ebb, irrevocably, as the policeman lay dying in the alley. Since then he’d waited for his own blood to spill.
    For a fraction of a second he heard the explosion tearing through his lungs. A sound like gushing water or a torrent of wind. A sound that belonged to the fixed forces of the world, that then took him out of the world. The silence was pure now. Nothing interfered.
    He was not alone. Gauri stood in front of him wearing a peach-colored sari. She was a little out of breath, sweat pooling in the material of her blouse, from her armpits. It was the bright afternoon outside the cinema hall, during the interval. They’d missed the first part of the film.
    She’d arrived to meet him in the middle of the day, still more stranger than wife, about to sit with him in the dark.
    Her hair shimmered. He wanted to lift it off her neck, to feel its unfettered weight against his fingers. The light was bouncing off it, making a mirror of it, casting a spectrum that was faint but complete.
    He strained to hear what she was saying. He took another step toward her, dropping the cigarette from his fingers.
    He adjusted his body in relation to hers. His head angled down, his hand forming a canopy between them to shield her face from the sun. It was a useless gesture. Only silence. The sunlight on her hair.

Acknowledgments
    I wish to thank the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the American Academy in Rome for their generous support.
    The following publications were essential to my understanding of the Naxalite movement: India’s Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising by Sumanta Banerjee, The Naxalite Movement by Biplab Dasgupta, “India’s Third Communist Party” (in Asian Survey, vol. 9, no. 11) by Marcus F. Franda, The Crimson Agenda: Maoist Protest and Terror by Ranjit Gupta, Maoist “Spring Thunder”: The Naxalite Movement (1967–1972) by Arun Prosad Mukherjee, The Naxalites Through the Eyes of the Police edited by Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay, The Naxalites and Their Ideology by Rabindra Ray, and The Naxalite Movement in India by Prakash Singh. The website sanhati.com was a useful source.
    I am also grateful to the following individuals: Gautam Bhadra, Mihir Chakraborty, Robin Desser, Amitava Ganguli, Avijit Gangopadhyay, Dan Kaufman, Aniruddha Lahiri, Cressida Leyshon, Subrata Mozumder, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Eric Simonoff, Arunava Sinha, and Charles Wilson.