The Lowland

enough at night to hear the jackals howling in the Tolly Club. At times they were still awake when the crows began quarreling in near unison, signaling the start of another day.
    Udayan wasn’t afraid to contradict their teachers about hydraulics, about plate tectonics. He gesticulated to illustrate his points, to emphasize his opinions, the interplay of his hands suggesting that molecules and particles were within his grasp. At times he was asked by their Sirs to step outside the room, told that he was holding up the class, when in fact he’d moved beyond them.
    At a certain point a tutor was hired to prepare them for their college entrance exams, their mother taking in extra sewing to offset the expense. He was a humorless man, with palsied eyelids, held open with clips on his glasses. He could not keep them open otherwise. Every evening he came to the house to review wave-particle duality, the laws of refraction and reflection. They memorized Fermat’s principle: The path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time.
    After studying basic circuitry, Udayan familiarized himself with the wiring system of their home. Acquiring a set of tools, he figured out how to repair defective cords and switches, to knot wires, to file away the rust that compromised the contact points of the table fan. He teased their mother for always wrapping her finger in the material of her sari because she was terrified to touch a switch with her bare skin.
    When a fuse blew, Udayan, wearing a pair of rubber slippers, never flinching, would check the resistors and unscrew the fuses, while Subhash, holding the flashlight, stood to one side.
    One day, coming home with a length of wire, Udayan set about installing a buzzer for the house, for the convenience of visitors. He mounted a transformer to the fuse box, and a black button to push by the main door. Hammering a hole in the wall, he fed the new wires through.
    Once the buzzer was installed, Udayan said they should use it to practice Morse code. Finding a book about telegraphy at a library, he wrote out two copies of the dots and dashes that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, one for each of them to consult.
    A dash was three times as long as a dot. Each dot or dash was followed by silence. There were three dots between letters, seven dots between words. They identified themselves simply by initial. The letter s, which Marconi had received across the Atlantic Ocean, was three quick dots. U was two dots and a dash.
    They took turns, one of them standing by the door, the other inside, signaling to one another, deciphering words. They got good enough to send coded messages that their parents couldn’t understand. Cinema, one of them would suggest. No, tram depot, cigarettes.
    They concocted scenarios, pretending to be soldiers or spies in distress. Covertly communicating from a mountain pass in China, a Russian forest, a cane field in Cuba.
    Ready?
    Clear.
    Coordinates?
    Unknown.
    Survivors?
    Two.
    Losses?
    Pressing the buzzer, they would tell each other that they were hungry, that they should play football, that a pretty girl had just passed by the house. It was their private back-and-forth, the way two players passed a ball between them as they advanced together toward the goal. If one of them saw their tutor approaching, they pressed SOS. Three dots, three dashes, three dots again.
    They were admitted to two of the city’s best colleges. Udayan would go to Presidency to study physics. Subhash, for chemical engineering, to Jadavpur. They were the only boys in their neighborhood, the only students from their unremarkable high school, to have done so well.
    To celebrate, their father went to the market, bringing back cashews and rosewater for pullao, half a kilo of the most expensive prawns. Their father had started working at nineteen to help support his family. Not having a college degree was his sole regret. He had a clerical position with the Indian Railways. As word spread of his sons’ success, he said he could no longer step outside the house without being stopped and congratulated.
    It had had nothing to do with him, he told these people. His sons had worked hard, they’d distinguished themselves. What they’d accomplished, they’d accomplished on their own.
    Asked what they wanted as a gift, Subhash suggested a marble chess set to replace the worn wooden pieces they’d always had. But