The Lowland

approaching the house after a long day at college. He walks through the swinging doors into the courtyard, a book bag over his shoulder. Still clean-shaven, focused on his studies, eager to settle down at his desk. Telling her he’s hungry, thirsty for tea, asking why she hasn’t already put the kettle on.
    She hears his footsteps on the stairs, the fan in his bedroom spinning. Static on the shortwave that stopped working years ago. The brief sound his match makes, the flame raging, then ebbing, when it strikes the edge of the box.
    As a final disgrace to their family, his body was never returned. They were denied even the comfort of honoring his bullet-ridden corpse. They had been unable to anoint it, to drape it with flowers. It had not been carried out of the enclave, hoisted on the shoulders of his comrades, carried into the next world to shouts of hari bol.
    After his death there was no recourse to the law. It was the law, at the time, that had made it possible for the police to kill him. For a while she and her husband had looked for his name in the papers. Needing proof even after what they’d seen. But no notice was printed. No admission of what had been done. The small stone tablet that his party comrades thought to put up is the only acknowledgment.
    They had named him after the sun. The giver of life, receiving nothing in return.
    The year after Udayan’s death, the year Subhash took Gauri to America, Bijoli’s husband had retired. He woke before dawn and took the first tram north, to Babu Ghat, where he bathed in the Ganges. For the rest of the day, after his breakfast, he sequestered himself in his room and read. He refused rice for lunch, telling her to cut up fruit, to warm a bowl of milk instead.
    This routine, these small deprivations, structured his days. He’d stopped reading the papers. He’d stopped sitting with Bijoli on the terrace, complaining that the breeze was too damp, that it settled in his chest. He read the Mahabharata in Bengali translation, a few pages at a time. Losing himself in familiar tales, in ancient conflicts that had not afflicted them. When his eyes began to give him trouble, cloudy with cataracts, he did not bother getting them checked. Instead he used a magnifying glass.
    At a certain point he suggested selling the house and moving away from Tollygunge, leaving Calcutta altogether. Perhaps moving to another part of India, to some restful mountain town. Or perhaps applying for visas, and going to America to stay with Subhash and Gauri. Nothing, he said, bound them to this place. The house stood practically empty. A mockery of the future they’d assumed would unfold.
    Briefly she’d considered it. Traveling, making amends with Subhash, accepting Gauri, getting to know Udayan’s child.
    But it wasn’t possible for Bijoli to abandon the house where Udayan had lived since birth, the neighborhood where he died. The terrace from which she’d last seen him, at a distance. The field past the lowland, where they’d taken him.
    The field is no longer empty. A block of new houses sits on it now, their rooftops crowded with television antennas. In the mornings, close by, a new market sets up, where Deepa says the prices for vegetables are better.
    A month ago, before going to bed, her husband tied his mosquito netting to the nails in the wall and wound his watch to mark the hours of the following day. In the morning Bijoli noticed that the door to his room, next to hers, was still shut. That he had not gone for his bath.
    She didn’t knock on his door. She went to the terrace, to sit and view the sky and sip her tea. There were a few clouds in the sky but no rain. She told Deepa to bring her husband his tea, to rouse him.
    A few minutes later, after Deepa entered the room, Bijoli heard the cup and saucer break into pieces against the floor. Before Deepa came to find her on the terrace, to tell her he’d died in his sleep, Bijoli already knew.
    She became a widow, as Gauri had become. Bijoli now wears white saris, without a pattern or a border. She’s removed her bangles, and stopped eating fish. Vermillion no longer marks the parting of her hair.
    But Gauri is married again, to Subhash, a turn of events that still stupefies her. In some ways it was less expected, more shocking, than Udayan’s death. In some ways, just as devastating.
    Deepa does everything now. A capable teenaged girl whose family lives outside the