The Lowland

Richard Grifalconi. At night he heard the precise ticking of an alarm clock at the side of his bed. And in the background, like an ongoing alarm itself, the shrill thrum of crickets. New birds woke him in the morning, small birds with delicate chirps that ruptured sleep nevertheless.
    Richard, a student of sociology, wrote editorials for the university newspaper. When he wasn’t working on his dissertation he decried, in terse paragraphs, the recent firing of a zoology professor who had spoken out against the use of napalm, or the decision to build a swimming pool instead of more dormitories on campus.
    He came from a Quaker family in Wisconsin. He wore his dark hair in a ponytail, and didn’t bother to trim his beard. He peered closely through wire-rimmed spectacles as he pecked out his editorials with two fingers at their kitchen table, a cigarette burning between his lips.
    He told Subhash he’d just turned thirty. For the sake of the next generation, he’d decided to become a professor. He’d traveled to the South when he was in college, to protest the segregation of public transportation. He’d spent two weeks in a Mississippi jail.
    He invited Subhash to go with him to the campus pub, where they shared a pitcher of beer and watched the television reports of Vietnam. Richard opposed the war, but he wasn’t a communist. He told Subhash that Gandhi was a hero to him. Udayan would have scoffed, saying that Gandhi had sided with enemies of the people. That he had disarmed India in the name of liberation.
    One day, walking past the quadrangle, Subhash saw Richard at the center of a group of students and faculty. He was wearing a black armband, standing on top of a van that had been driven onto the grass.
    Speaking through a megaphone, Richard said Vietnam was a mistake, and that the American government had had no right to intervene. He said innocent people in Vietnam were suffering.
    Some people called out or cheered, but most of them just listened and clapped, as they might at the theatre. They sprawled back on their elbows, sunning their faces on the grass in Rhode Island, listening to Richard protest a war that was being fought thousands of miles away.
    Subhash was the only foreigner. No students from other parts of Asia were there. It was nothing like the demonstrations that erupted now in Calcutta. Disorganized mobs representing rival communist parties, running helter-skelter through the streets. Chanting, unrelenting. They were demonstrations that almost always turned violent in the end.
    After listening to Richard for a few minutes, Subhash drifted away. He knew how much Udayan would have mocked him at that moment, for his desire to protect himself.
    He didn’t support the war in Vietnam, either. But like his father, he knew he had to be careful. He knew he could get arrested in America for denouncing the government, perhaps even for holding up a sign. He was here courtesy of a student visa, studying thanks to a fellowship. He’d been invited to America as Nixon’s guest.
    Here, each day, he remembered how he’d felt those evenings he and Udayan had snuck into the Tolly Club. This time he’d been admitted officially, and yet he remained vigilant, at the threshold. He knew that the door could close just as arbitrarily as it had opened. He knew that he could be sent back to where he’d come from, and that there would be plenty to take his place.
    There were a few other Indians at the university, but as far as Subhash could tell he was the only one from Calcutta. One day he met an economics professor named Narasimhan, from Madras. He had an American wife and two tanned, light-eyed sons who looked like neither of their parents.
    Narasimhan wore heavy sideburns, bell-bottomed jeans. His wife had a pretty neck, long beaded earrings, short red hair. Subhash saw them all for the first time one weekend on the quadrangle. They were the only people that afternoon in the square green enclosure at the center of campus, rimmed with trees.
    The boys were kicking a ball on the grass with their father. As Subhash and Udayan used to do, on the field on the other side of the lowland, though their father had never joined them. The wife was lying on a blanket on the grass, on her side, smoking, sketching something in a notebook.
    This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family had wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family had