The Lowland

mattress. Their content has been deemed seditious, and possessing them might now be used as evidence of a crime.
    Ranjit Gupta is the new police commissioner, and the prisons are swelling. The police seize comrades from their homes, from their campuses, from safe houses. They confine them in lockups throughout the city, extracting confessions. Some emerge after a few days. Others are detained indefinitely. Cigarette butts are pressed into their backs, hot wax is poured into their ears. Metal rods pushed into their rectums. People who live near Calcutta’s prisons cannot sleep.
    One day, within a few hours, four students are shot dead near College Street. One of them had nothing to do with the party. He’d been passing through the gates of the university, to attend a class.
    Udayan turns off the radio. Do you regret your decision? he asks.
    Which decision?
    Becoming a wife?
    She holds the comb still for a moment, glancing at his reflection in the mirror, unable to see his face clearly through the mosquito netting. No.
    Becoming my wife?
    She gets up and lifts the netting, sitting on the edge of the bed. She stretches out beside him.
    No, she says once more.
    They’ve arrested Sinha.
    When?
    A few days ago.
    He says this without discouragement. As if it has nothing to do with him.
    What does it mean?
    It means either they’ll get him to talk, or they’ll kill him.
    She sits up again. She starts braiding her hair for sleep.
    But he draws her fingers away. He undrapes her sari, letting the material fall from her breasts, revealing the skin between her blouse and petticoat. He drapes her hair around her shoulders.
    Leave it like this tonight.
    The hair sheds into his hands, strands of it scattering onto the bed. Then the weight is gone, it turns short again, of a coarser texture, streaked with gray.
    But in the dream Udayan remains a boy in his twenties. Three decades younger than Gauri is now, almost a decade younger than Bela. His wavy hair is swept back from his forehead. The hair on his arms dark and generous, his waist narrow compared to his shoulders. But she is a woman of fifty-six, the years made present by virtue of the resilience they have taken away.
    Udayan is blind to this disjuncture. He pulls her to him, unhooking her blouse, seeking pleasure from her dormant body, her neglected breasts. She tries to resist, telling him that he should have nothing to do with her. She tells him that she has married Subhash.
    The information has no effect. He removes the rest of her clothes, the touch of her husband feeling forbidden. For she is coupled naked with a boy who appears as youthful as a son.
    When she was married to Udayan, her recurring nightmare was that they had not met, that he had not come into her life. In those moments returned the fear she had felt until she knew him, that she would live her life alone. She had hated those first disorienting moments after waking up in their bed in Tollygunge, inches away from him, still captive to an alternate world in which they had nothing to do with one another, even as he clasped her in his arms.
    She’d known him only a few years. Only beginning to discover who he was. But in another way she had known him practically all her life. After his death began the internal knowledge that came from remembering him, still trying to make sense of him. Of both missing and resenting him. Without that there would be nothing to haunt her. No grief.
    She wonders what he might have looked like now. How he would have aged, the illnesses he might have suffered, the diseases to which he might have succumbed. She tries to imagine the flat stomach softening. Gray hairs on his chest.
    In all her life, apart from when Subhash asked, and the day she told Professor Weiss, she has not spoken to a single person about what had happened to him. No one else knows to ask. What had happened in Calcutta in the last years of his life. What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. What she’d done for him, because he’d asked.
    In California, in the beginning, it was the living that haunted her, not the dead. She used to fear that Bela or Subhash would materialize, seated in a lecture hall, or walking into a meeting. She used to look up from the podium to scan the room on the first day of a new class, half expecting one of them to be occupying a chair.
    She used to fear that they would find her on the sunny campus, on one of the sidewalks that led her from one