The Lowland

of confections were studded with flies.
    The paanwallah sat cross-legged at one corner, under a bare bulb, spreading white lime paste on stacks of betel leaves. A traffic constable stood at the center, in his helmet, on his little box. Blowing a whistle and waving his arms. The sustained honking of so many motors and horns, of scooters and lorries and taxis and cars, filled their ears.
    I like this view, he said.
    She’d observed the world, she told him, all of life, from this balcony. Political processions, government parades, visiting dignitaries. The momentous stream of vehicles that started each day at dawn. The city’s poets and writers passing by after death, their corpses concealed by flowers. Pedestrians wading knee-deep through the streets, suring the monsoon.
    In autumn came the effigies of Durga, and in winter, Saraswati. Their majestic clay forms were welcomed into the city as dhak were beaten, as trumpets played. They were ushered in on the backs of trucks, then carried away at the end of the holidays to be immersed in the river. These days students were marching up from College Street. Groups in solidarity with the uprising at Naxalbari, carrying flags and placards, raising their fists in the air.
    He noticed the folding chair on which she’d been sitting. It had a sagging piece of striped fabric, like a sling, for a seat. A book was neglected beside it. A volume of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. He picked it up.
    You read here, with all this going by?
    It helps me to concentrate, she said.
    She was used to the noise as she studied, as she slept; it was the ongoing accompaniment to her life, her thoughts, the constant din more soothing than silence would have been. Indoors, with no room of her own, it was harder. But the balcony had always been her place.
    When she was a little girl, she told him, she would sometimes stumble out of bed during the night, and her grandparents would find her in the morning, fast asleep on the balcony, her face against the blackened filigree, her body on the stone floor. Deaf to the traffic that rumbled past. She had loved waking up out-of-doors, without the protection of walls and a ceiling. The first time, seeing that she was missing from the bed, they thought she had disappeared. They had sent people down to the street to search for her, shouting her name.
    And? Udayan asked.
    They discovered that I was here, still sleeping.
    Did your grandparents forbid you from doing it again?
    No. As long as it wasn’t too cold or raining, they left a little quilt out for me.
    So this is your bodhi tree, where you achieve enlightenment.
    She shrugged.
    His eyes fell to the pages she’d been reading.
    What does Mr. Descartes tell us about the world?
    She told him what she knew. About the limits of perception and the experiment with a piece of wax. Held up to a candle, the essence of the wax remained, even as its physical aspect changed. It was the mind, not the senses, able to perceive this, she said.
    Thinking is superior to seeing?
    For Descartes, yes. Common sense can’t be trusted.
    Have you read any Marx?
    A little.
    Why do you study philosophy?
    It helps me to understand things.
    But what makes it relevant?
    Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.
    There’s nothing to learn unless we’re living. In death we’re equal. It has that advantage over life.
    He handed the book back to her, closing it so that he caused her to lose her place.
    And now a degree has become meaningless in this country.
    You’re getting a master’s in physics, she pointed out.
    My parents expect me to. It doesn’t matter to me.
    What matters to you?
    He looked down at the street, gesturing. This impossible city of ours.
    He changed the subject, asking about the others who lived with her and Manash: two uncles, their wives, two sets of children. Her maternal grandparents, who had once owned the flat, were dead, as were her own parents. Her older sisters lived elsewhere, scattered here and there, now that they were married.
    You all grew up here?
    She shook her head. There had been various homes in eastern Bengal, in Khulna, in Faridpur, where her parents and sisters had once lived. Her father was a district judge, and her parents and her sisters had moved every few years from place to place, to beautiful bungalows paid for by the government, in pretty parts of the countryside. The houses had come with cooks, servants