The Lowland

body overcame him and he surfaced, his head and chest exposed, his nostrils burning, his lungs gasping for air.
    Two paramilitary stood facing him, their guns raised. One of them was shouting into a megaphone, so that Udayan had no trouble hearing what was said.
    They’d surrounded the lowland. He saw that a soldier stood at a distance behind him, two more to either side. They’d captured his family. They would start shooting them if he did not surrender, the voice announced. A threat loud enough not only for his own benefit but for the entire neighborhood to hear.
    Carefully he stood up in thick weedy water that came to his waist. He was spitting up what he’d swallowed, coughing so violently that his organs seized. They were telling him to walk forward, to raise his hands above his head.
    Again the unsteadiness, the dizziness. The surface of the water at an angle, the sky lower than it should be, the horizon unfixed. He wanted a shawl for his shoulders. The soft maroon one Gauri always kept hanging on a rod in their room, that enveloped him in her smell some mornings when he wrapped it around himself to smoke his first cigarette on the roof.
    He had hoped that she and his mother were still out shopping. But when he emerged from the water, he saw that they had returned in time for this.
    It had begun in college, in Gauri’s neighborhood, on the campus just down the street from the flat where she lived. There was always talk during labs, during meals at the canteen, about the country and all that was wrong with it. The stagnant economy, the deterioration of living standards. The latest rice shortage, pushing tens of thousands to the verge of starvation. The travesty of Independence, half of India still in chains. Only it was Indians chaining themselves now.
    He got to know some members of the Marxist student wing. They’d talked of the example of Vietnam. He started cutting classes, wandering with them through Calcutta. Visiting factories, visiting slums.
    In 1966 they’d launched a strike at Presidency, over the maladministration of hostels. They’d demanded that the superintendent resign. They’d risked expulsion. They’d shut down all of Calcutta University, for sixty-nine days.
    He’d gone to the countryside to further indoctrinate himself. He’d been instructed to move from place to place, to walk fifteen miles each day before sundown. He met tenant farmers living in desperation. People who resorted to eating what they fed their animals. Children who ate one meal a day.
    Those with less sometimes killed their families, he was told, before ending their own lives.
    Their subsistence was contingent on arrangements with landowners, moneylenders. On people who took advantage of them. On forces beyond their control. He saw how the system coerced them, how it humiliated them. How it had stripped their dignity away.
    He ate what he was given. Coarse grains of rice, thinned lentils. Water that never quenched his thirst. In some villages there was no tea. He seldom bathed, he’d had to defecate in fields. No place to suffer with any privacy the violent cramps that ripped through his bowels, through the stinging aperture of his skin. For him it was a temporary deprivation. But too many knew nothing else.
    At night they were hidden on beds of string, on sacks of grain. They were tormented by mosquitoes, slow-moving swarms that bit them to the bone. Some of the boys came from wealthy families. One or two left within a matter of days. At night, in that collective silence, upset by the things he’d seen and heard, Udayan allowed himself to think of a single comfort. Gauri. He imagined seeing her again, talking to her. He wondered if she’d be willing to be his wife.
    One day, visiting a clinic, he confronted the corpse of a young woman. She was around Gauri’s age, already the mother of numerous children. It was unclear, from her appearance, why she’d died. No one in the group answered correctly when the doctor asked. Trying to obtain cheap rice for her family, they were told, she had been trampled in a stampede. Her lungs crushed to death.
    Ironically, her face was full, her belly slack. He imagined the other people pushing behind her, determined enough to knock her down. People she might have known from her village, might have called neighbors and friends. Here was more proof that the system was failing, that such poverty was a crime.
    They were told that there