The Lowland

the shorts and sandals he would wear to her class, no string of shells around his neck. A striped cotton shirt now, loafers, belted trousers covering his legs. He’d gone to Nebraska for graduate school, Buffalo for his first job. He was glad to be in California again. He took out his iPhone, showing her pictures of his twins, a boy and girl, in the arms of his American wife.
    She congratulated him. She wondered if Bela really was married by now. If she’d also had a child.
    They ordered their food. She had an hour, she told Dipankar, before she needed to get back to campus. Tell me, what’s this book about?
    You were at Presidency in the late sixties, right?
    He’d gotten a contract from an academic press, to write a history of students at the college when the Naxalite movement was at its height. The idea was to compare it to the SDS in America. He was hoping to write it as an oral history. He wanted to interview her.
    Her eyelid twitched. It was a nervous tic she’d developed at some point. She wondered if it was noticeable. She wondered if Dipankar could detect the nerve firing.
    I wasn’t involved, she said. Her mouth felt dry.
    She lifted her glass to her lips. She drank some water. She felt tiny cubes of ice, slipping down her throat before she could catch them.
    It doesn’t matter, Dipankar said. I want to know what the atmosphere was like. What students were thinking and doing. What you observed.
    I’m sorry, I don’t want to be interviewed.
    Not even if we protect your identity?
    She was suddenly afraid that he knew something. That maybe her name was on a list. That an old file had been opened, an investigation of a long-ago occurrence under way. She put a hand over her eyelid, to steady it.
    But no, she saw that he’d simply been counting on her. That she was just a convenient source. There was a pause as their food was brought to the table.
    Listen, I can tell you what I know. But I don’t want to be part of the book.
    Fair enough, Professor.
    He asked her permission, and turned on a small recording device. But it was Gauri who posed the first question.
    What got you interested in this?
    He told her his own father’s brother had been involved. A college student who’d gotten in over his head, who’d been imprisoned. Dipankar’s grandparents had managed to get him out. They’d sent him to London.
    What does he do now?
    He’s an engineer. He’s the subject of the first chapter of the book. Under an alias, of course.
    She nodded, wondering what the fate had been of so many others. If they’d been as fortunate. There was so much she might have said.
    He talked to me about the rally the day the party was declared, Dipankar continued.
    She remembered standing in the heat on May Day, under the Monument. Watching Kanu Sanyal at the rostrum, set free.
    She and Udayan had been among thousands on the Maidan, listening to his speech. She remembered the sea of bodies, the fluted white column, with its two balconies at the top, rising into the sky. The rostrum, decorated with a life-sized portrait of Mao.
    She remembered Kanu Sanyal’s voice, emitted through the loudspeaker. A young man with glasses, ordinary-looking, charismatic nevertheless. Comrades and friends! she still heard him calling out, greeting them. She remembered the single emotion she’d felt a part of. She remembered being thrilled by the things he’d said.
    Her impressions were flickering, from a lifetime ago. But they were vivid inside Dipankar. All the names, the events of those years, were at his fingertips. He could quote from the writings of Charu Majumdar. He knew about the rift, toward the end, between Majumdar and Sanyal, Sanyal objecting to the annihilation line.
    Dipankar had studied the movement’s self-defeating tactics, its lack of coordination, its unrealistic ideology. He’d understood, without ever having been a part of things, far better than Gauri, why it had surged and failed.
    My uncle was still there when Sanyal got arrested again. He was sent away to London soon after.
    This, too, she remembered. His followers had begun rioting. It was after Sanyal’s arrest, after the party’s declaration, that the worst violence in Calcutta had begun.
    I was married that year.
    And your husband? Was he affected?
    He was in America, studying, she said. He had nothing to do with it. She was grateful that the second reality could paper over the