The Lowland

rice and coal. They had waited with him in the long lines, under the shade of his umbrella when the sun was strong.
    They had helped him to carry back the fish and the vegetables, the mangoes that their father sniffed and prodded, that he sometimes set to further ripen under the bed. On Sundays they bought meat from the butcher, carved from a hanging goat carcass, weighed on the scale, wrapped in a packet of dried leaves.
    Are you close to your father? Holly asked him.
    For some reason he thought of the picture in Joshua’s room, of Joshua on top of his father’s shoulders. Subhash’s father had not been an affectionate parent, but he had been a consistent one.
    I admire him, he said.
    And your brother?
    He paused. Yes and no.
    She didn’t prod him further. So often it’s both, she said.
    In her cramped bedroom, setting aside his guilt, he cultivated an ongoing defiance of his parents’ expectations. He was aware that he could get away with it, that it was merely the shoals of physical distance that allowed his defiance to persist.
    He thought of Narasimhan as an ally now; Narasimhan and his American wife. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to lead a similar life with Holly. To live the rest of his life in America, to disregard his parents, to make his own family with her.
    At the same time he knew that it was impossible. That she was an American was the least of it. Her situation, her child, her age, the fact that she was technically another man’s wife, all of it would be unthinkable to his parents, unacceptable. They would judge her for those things.
    He didn’t want to put Holly, or any other woman, through that. And yet he continued to see Holly on Fridays, forging this new clandestine path.
    Udayan would have understood. Perhaps he would even respect him for it. But there was nothing Udayan could say that Subhash did not already know; that he was involved with a woman he didn’t intend to marry. A woman whose company he was growing used to, but whom, perhaps due to his own ambivalence, he didn’t love.
    And so he divulged nothing about Holly to anyone. The affair remained concealed, inaccessible. His parents’ disapproval threatened to undermine what he was doing, lodged like a silent gatekeeper at the back of his mind. But without his parents there, he was able to keep pushing back their objection, farther and farther, like the promise of the horizon, anticipated from a ship, that never came.
    One Friday he was unable to see her; Holly phoned to say there had been a last-minute change in plans, and Joshua was not going to go to his father’s. Subhash understood that these were the terms. And yet, that weekend, he found himself wishing the plan would change.
    The following weekend, when he visited her again, the phone rang as they were having dinner. She began talking, trailing the cord so that she was able to sit on the sofa, on her own. He realized it was Joshua’s father.
    Joshua had come down with a fever, and Holly was telling her husband to put him into a lukewarm bath. Explaining how much medicine to give.
    Subhash was surprised, also troubled, that she could speak to him calmly, without acrimony. The person on the other end of the line remained deeply familiar to her. He saw that because of Joshua, in spite of their separation, their lives were permanently tied.
    He sat at the table with his back to her, not eating, waiting for the conversation to end. He looked at the calendar that was on the wall next to Holly’s phone.
    The following day was August 15, Indian Independence. A holiday for the country, lights on government buildings, flag hoisting and parades. An ordinary day here.
    Holly hung up the phone. You look upset, she observed. Is something wrong?
    I just remembered something.
    What’s that?
    It was his first memory, August 1947, though sometimes he wondered if it was only a comforting trick of the mind. For it was a night the entire country claimed to remember, and the recollection that was his had always been saturated by his parents’ retelling.
    It had been the only thing on his parents’ minds that evening, as fireworks went off in Delhi, as ministers were sworn in. As Gandhi fasted to bring peace to Calcutta, as the country was born. Udayan had been just two, Subhash closer to four. He remembered the unfamiliar touch of a doctor’s hand on his forehead, the slight slaps on his arms, on the soles of his feet.