The Lowland

change.
    I’ve already lived through change in this country, their father said. I know what it takes for one system to replace another. Not you.
    But Udayan persisted. He started challenging their father, the way he used to challenge their teachers at school. If he was so proud that India was independent, why hadn’t he protested the British at the time? Why had he never joined a labor union? Given that he voted communist in elections, why had he never taken a stand?
    Both Subhash and Udayan knew the answer. Because their father was a government employee, he was barred from joining any party or union. During Independence he was forbidden to speak out; those were the terms of his job. Though some ignored the rules, their father had never taken such risks.
    It was for our sake. He was being responsible, Subhash said.
    But Udayan didn’t see it that way.
    Among Udayan’s physics texts there were now other books he was studying. They were marked up with little scraps of paper. The Wretched of the Earth. What Is to Be Done? A book sheathed in a red plastic cover, hardly larger than a deck of cards, containing aphorisms of Mao.
    When Subhash asked where he was getting the money to buy these materials, Udayan said they were common property, circulated among a group of boys at Presidency with whom he’d been growing friendly.
    Under the mattress Udayan stored some pamphlets he’d obtained, written by Charu Majumdar. Most of them had been written before the Naxalbari uprising, while Majumdar was in prison. Our Tasks in the Present Situation. Take This Opportunity. What Possibility the Year 1965 Is Indicating?
    One day, needing a break from his studies, Subhash reached under the mattress to read one. The essays were brief, bombastic. Majumdar said India had turned into a nation of beggars and foreigners. The reactionary government of India has adopted the tactics of killing the masses; they are killing them through starvation, with bullets.
    He accused India of turning to the United States to solve its problems. He accused the United States of turning India into its pawn. He accused the Soviet Union of supporting India’s ruling class.
    He called for the building of a secret party. He called for cadres in the villages. He compared the method of active resistance to the fight for civil rights in the United States.
    Throughout the essays, he invoked the example of China. If we can realize the truth that the Indian revolution will invariably take the form of civil war, the tactic of area-wise seizure of power can be the only tactic.
    You think it can work? Subhash asked Udayan one day. What Majumdar is proposing?
    They’d both just finished sitting for the last of their college exams. They were cutting through the neighborhood, going to play football with some of their old school friends.
    Before heading toward the field they’d gone to the corner, so that Udayan could buy a newspaper. He’d folded it to an article pertaining to Naxalbari, absorbed by it as they walked.
    They proceeded down the curving walled-off lanes, passing people who’d watched them grow up. The two ponds were calm and green. The lowland was still flooded, so they had to skirt around it instead of across.
    At one point Udayan stopped, taking in the ramshackle huts that surrounded the lowland, the bright water hyacinth that teemed on its surface.
    It’s already worked, he replied. Mao changed China.
    India isn’t China.
    No. But it could be, Udayan said.
    Now if they happened to pass the Tolly Club together on their way to or from the tram depot, Udayan called it an affront. People still filled slums all over the city, children were born and raised on the streets. Why were a hundred acres walled off for the enjoyment of a few?
    Subhash remembered the imported trees, the jackals, the bird cries. The golf balls heavy in their pockets, the undulating green of the course. He remembered Udayan going over the wall first, challenging him to follow. Crouching on the ground the last evening they were there, trying to shield him.
    But Udayan said that golf was the pastime of the comprador bourgeoisie. He said the Tolly Club was proof that India was still a semicolonial country, behaving as if the British had never left.
    He pointed out that Che, who had worked as a caddy on a golf course in Argentina, had come to the same conclusion. That after the Cuban revolution, getting rid of the golf courses was one of the first