The Lowland

of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.
    Udayan is beside him. They are walking together in Tollygunge, across the lowland, over the hyacinth leaves. They carry a putting iron, some golf balls in their hands.
    In Ireland, too, the ground is drenched, uneven. He takes it in a final time, knowing he will never visit this place again. He walks toward another stone and stumbles, reaching out to it, steadying himself. A marker, toward the end of his journey, of what is given, what is taken away.
    2.
    He didn’t hear the van entering the enclave. He only saw it approach. He happened to be on the roof. The house was tall enough now. As long as he kept to the back no one else could see him.
    It was just as well to keep away from the parapet. Since the explosion the exterior world was no longer stable. The soles of his feet no longer anchored him. The ground below now beckoned, now menaced, if he happened to look down.
    He saw that there were too many of them; that there were three paramilitary in the courtyard alone. He glanced at the neighboring rooftops. In sections of North Calcutta it might have been possible to leap, to span the gap between buildings. The vertigo made it impossible; he could no longer gauge simple distances. In any case, in Tollygunge, the homes were built too far apart.
    Before his father went to unlock the gate, to let them in, he ran back down the stairwell. Hunching over as he made the turns, careful not to be spotted through the terrace grille. Through the new part of the house and into the old. There was a door at the back of the room he and Subhash had once shared, narrow double doors leading to the garden.
    He climbed over the rear wall of the courtyard as he used to when he was a child, to escape the house without his mother noticing. Unable to do it quickly because of his hand, but managing, stepping over the kerosene tin. The evening was warm, the smell of sulfur strong.
    He moved quickly, cutting past the ponds, over to the lowland. He entered the section where the water hyacinth was thickest, taking one step, then another, the water receiving him until his body was concealed.
    He took a deep breath, closed his mouth, and went under. He tried not to move. With the fingertips of his uninjured hand he was pinching his nostrils shut.
    After the first few seconds the pressure mounted and burned in his lungs, as if all the weight of his body were centered there. The breath he was holding was turning solid, crowding his chest. This was normal, not for a lack of oxygen, but because carbon dioxide was building up in his blood.
    If one could fight the instinct at that point to take a breath, the body could survive up to six minutes. Blood would begin to ebb from his liver and his intestines, flowing to his heart and his brain. The doctor who’d treated his hand, whom he’d asked, had explained this to him.
    He monitored his pulse, ministering to himself. It would have been better if he hadn’t been running. If his pulse had been slower as he’d entered the water. He began to count. He counted ten seconds. Fighting the urge to surface, forcing himself to bear it a few seconds more.
    Underwater there was the freedom of not having to struggle to listen to anything. He was spared the frustration of misunderstanding, of asking people to repeat things. The doctor said the hearing might improve, that the distortion and the ringing in his ears might subside over time. He would have to wait and see.
    The silence underwater was not absolute. Rather, a toneless exhalation that penetrated his skull. It was different from the partial deafness he’d been experiencing since the explosion. Water, a better conductor of sound than air.
    He wondered if this deafness was what it was like to visit a country where one did not understand the language. To absorb nothing of what was said. He had never been to another country. Never been to China or to Cuba. He remembered something he’d read recently, the final words Che had written to his children: Remember that the revolution is the important thing and that each one of us alone is worth nothing.
    But in this case it had boiled down to fixing nothing, to helping no one. In this case there was to be no revolution. He knew this now.
    If he was worth nothing, then why was he so desperate to save himself? Why, in the end, did the body not obey the brain?
    All at once his