The Lowland

was an alternative. Still, in the beginning it had mainly been a matter of opinion. Of attending meetings and rallies, of continuing to educate himself. Putting up posters, painting slogans in the middle of the night. Reading the leaflets of Charu Majumdar, trusting Kanu Sanyal. Believing a solution was at hand.
    In Calcutta, just after the party was formed, Subhash left, going to America. He was critical of the party’s objectives, disapproving, in fact. His brother’s disapproval had angered Udayan, but their parting had filled him with a fear, though he tried to shake it off, that they would never see one another again. A few months later he married Gauri.
    With Subhash gone Udayan’s only friends were his comrades. Slowly the missions turned more purposeful. Gasoline poured in the registrar’s office of a government college. Bomb-making instructions studied, ingredients stolen from labs. Among the squad members of the neighborhood, a discussion of potential targets. The Tolly Club, for what it represented. A policeman, for the authority he embodied, and for his gun.
    After the party was declared he began living two lives. Dwelling in two dimensions, obeying two sets of laws. In one world he was married to Gauri, living with his parents, coming and going so as not to arouse suspicion, teaching his students, guiding them through simple experiments at the school. Writing cheerful letters to Subhash in America, pretending the movement was behind him, pretending his commitment had cooled. Lying to his brother, hoping that it would bring them closer again. Lying to his parents, not wanting to concern them.
    But in the world of the party it had also been expected for him to help kill a policeman. They were symbols of brutality, trained by foreigners. They are not Indians, they do not belong to India, Charu Majumdar said. Each annihilation would spread the revolution. Each would be a forward step.
    He’d shown up at the appointed time, guarding the alley where the action was to take place. The attack occurred in the early afternoon, when the policeman was on his way to pick up his son from school. A day he was off duty. A day, thanks to Gauri, they knew he would not be armed.
    In meetings Udayan and his squad members had studied where in the abdomen the dagger should be directed, at what point below the ribs. They remembered what Sinha had told them before he was arrested: that revolutionary violence opposed oppression. That it was a force of liberation, humane.
    In the alley he’d felt calm and purposeful. He’d watched the constable’s clothing darken, the look of astonishment, the bulge of the eyes, the grimace of pain that seized his face. And then the enemy was no longer a policeman. No longer a husband, or a father. No longer a version of someone who’d once stricken Subhash with a broken putter outside the Tolly Club. No longer alive.
    A simple dagger was enough to kill him. A tool intended to cut up fruit. Not the loaded gun being aimed now behind Udayan’s head.
    He had not been the one to wield the dagger, only to stand watch. But his part in it had been crucial. He had gone as close as he could, he had dipped his hand in the fresh blood of that enemy, writing the party’s initials on the wall as the blood leaked down his wrists, into the crook of his arm, before he ran from the scene.
    Now he stood at the edge of a lowland, in the enclave where he’d lived all his life. It was an October evening, Tollygunge at dusk, the week before Durga Pujo.
    His parents were pleading with the police, insisting he was innocent. But it was they who were innocent of the things he’d done.
    His hands were bound behind him, the rope chafing his skin. This discomfort preoccupied him. He was told to turn around.
    It was too late to run or to fight. So he stood and waited, his back to his family, picturing but not seeing them.
    The last he’d seen of his parents was the ground at their feet, as he’d bent down to ask for their pardon. The softened rubber slippers his father wore around the house. The dark brown border of his mother’s sari, the end of it draped over her face and wrapped around her shoulders, held by her fingers at her throat.
    It was only Gauri he’d managed to look in the face, at the moment his hands were being restrained. He could not have turned away from her without having done that.
    He knew that he was no hero to her. He had lied to her and