The Lowland

heard his father clearing his throat, seeming to loosen the secretions of a long silence.
    Lock the gate behind you, he instructed Subhash, before retracting the key.
    Subhash climbed a staircase with smooth black banisters, sky-blue walls. Biren Kaka and his wife followed behind. When he saw his parents, standing together on the terrace, he bent over to touch their feet. He was an only son, an experience that had left no impression in the first fifteen months of his life. That was to begin in earnest now.
    At first his parents looked the same to him. The oily sheen to his mother’s hair, the pallid cast of her skin. The lean, stooping frame of his father, the sheer cotton of his Punjabi. The downward turn to his mouth that might have conveyed disappointment, but suggested a fixed amiability instead. The difference was in their eyes. Calloused by grief, blunted by what no parent should have seen.
    In spite of the picture that hung in his parents’ new room, which they took him to see, he could not believe that Udayan was nowhere. But here was the proof. The photo had been taken nearly ten years ago by a relative who owned a camera, one of the only pictures of them that existed. It was the day they had gotten the results of their higher secondary exams, the day his father said had been the proudest of his life.
    He and Udayan had posed side by side in the courtyard. Told to stand at a certain angle in relation to the sun. Subhash saw an inch of his own shoulder, pressed up beside Udayan’s. The rest of him, in order to make the death portrait, had been cut away.
    He stood before the image and wept, his head cradled in his arm, in an awkward embrace of himself. But his parents, beyond the shock of it, observed him as they might observe an actor on a stage, waiting for the scene to end.
    From the terrace he had an open view of the place where he and Udayan had been raised. Lower rooftops of tin or tile, with squash vines trailing over them. The tops of walls, dotted white, splattered with excrement expelled from crows. Two oblong ponds on the other side of the lane. The lowland, looking to him now like a mudflat after the tide.
    He went downstairs, to the ground floor, to the part of the house that was unchanged, to the room he and Udayan had once shared. He was struck by how dark the room was, how small. There was the study table beneath the window, the shelves set into the wall, the simple rack where they’d draped their clothes. The bed they’d slept on together had been replaced by a cot. Udayan must have used the room to tutor students. He saw textbooks on the shelves, measuring instruments and pens. He wondered what had happened to the shortwave. All the political books were gone.
    He unpacked his belongings and bathed with water that the pump released twice a day from the corporation tank. The water, too rich with iron, had a metallic smell. It left his hair stiff, his skin tacky to the touch.
    He’d been told to go upstairs to eat his lunch. That was where the kitchen was now. On the floor of his parents’ bedroom, where Udayan’s portrait was, plates had been set out for his father, for Biren Kaka and his wife, for Subhash. His mother would eat after serving them, as she always did.
    He sat with his back to the portrait. He could not bear to look at it again.
    He was ravenous for the simple meal: dal and slices of fried bitter melon, rice and fish stew. Sweet pabda fish from the river, their cooked eyes like yellow pebbles.
    Again the broad plates of heavy brass. The freedom to eat with his fingers. Drinking water was poured from a black clay urn in the corner of the room. The cup heavy in his hand, the rim slightly too wide for his mouth.
    Where is she? he asked.
    Who?
    Gauri.
    His mother ladled the dal onto his rice. She takes her meals in the kitchen, she said.
    Why?
    She prefers it.
    He didn’t believe her. He didn’t say what came to his mind. That Udayan would have hated them for segregating her, for observing such customs.
    Is she there now? I would like to meet her.
    She’s resting. She’s not feeling well today.
    Have you called a doctor?
    His mother looked down, preoccupied with the food she was serving to the others.
    There’s no need for that.
    Is it serious?
    Finally she explained herself.
    She is expecting a child, she said.
    After lunch he went out, walking past the two ponds. There were scattered clumps of water hyacinth in the lowland, and