The Lowland

who’d opened the doors.
    Manash was born into one of these homes. He barely remembered, but her sisters still spoke of that phase of their upbringing, their shared past. The teachers who would come to give them dance and singing lessons, the marble tables on which they ate meals, the broad verandahs on which they played, a separate room in the house that was just for their dolls.
    In 1946 those postings ended, and the family came back to Calcutta. But after a few months her father said he did not want to live out his retirement there. After a lifetime outside it, he had no patience for city life, especially when its people were butchering each other, when entire neighborhoods were going up in flames.
    One morning during the riots, from the same balcony Gauri and Udayan were standing on now, her parents had witnessed a scene: a mob surrounding the Muslim man who delivered their milk on his bicycle. They were seeking revenge; it was reported that a cousin of the milkman had been involved in an attack on Hindus in some other part of the city. They watched one of the Hindus plunge a knife into the ribs of the milkman. They saw the milk the family would have drunk that day spilling onto the street, turning pink with his blood.
    So the family moved to a village west of Calcutta, a few hours away. In an uneventful place, removed from their relatives, protected from turmoil, her parents preferred to establish their final domain. There was a pond to fish and wade in, chickens for their eggs, a garden her father liked to tend. Nothing but farmland, dirt roads, sky and trees. The closest movie theatre was twenty miles away. A fair brought booksellers once a year. The darkness at night was absolute.
    By the time Gauri was born, in 1948, her mother was already preoccupied with settling the marriages of her older sisters. Her sisters belonged almost to another generation: teenaged girls when she was an infant, young women when she was a child. She was an aunt to children her own age.
    How long did you live in the countryside?
    Until I was five.
    Her mother was bedridden around that time. She’d had tuberculosis in her spine. Gauri’s older sisters had been useful, helping with household chores, but she and Manash were only a complication. So they were sent away to the city, cared for by their grandparents, in the company of their aunts and uncles.
    After her mother was on her feet again they had stayed on. Manash had enrolled at Calcutta Boys’ School, and Gauri didn’t want to be without Manash. When it was her turn to start school, given that the city’s schools were better, it made sense for her to remain.
    There had always been the option to return to her parents’ village. But though she visited, taking the train to see them for holidays, rural life held no appeal for her. She didn’t think she resented her parents for not raising her. It was the way of many large families, and given the circumstances, it was not so strange. Really, she appreciated them for letting her go her own way.
    That was their gift to you, Udayan said. Autonomy.
    A motor accident on a mountain road had killed them. They were traveling in bad weather to a hill station, for a change of scene. Gauri had been sixteen. The house was sold, no trace of her family in that quiet place remained. It was a blow to lose them suddenly, but her grandparents’ deaths, more recently, had saddened her more. She’d grown up in their home, slept on a bed between them. She’d seen them day after day, watched them turn ill and frail. It was her grandfather, who’d been a professor at the Sanskrit College, who’d died with a book on his chest, who’d inspired her to study what she did.
    She saw that the unremarkable journey of her life thus far was fascinating to him: her birth in the countryside, her willingness to live apart from her parents, her estrangement from most of her family, her independence in this regard.
    He lit another cigarette. He told her his childhood was different. There was only himself and a brother. It had been only the two of them and their parents, in a house in Tollygunge.
    What does your brother do?
    He talks these days of going to America.
    Will you go, too?
    No. He turned to look at her. And you? Will you miss all this, when you get married?
    She saw that his mouth never fully closed, that there was a diamond-shaped aperture at the center.
    I’m not getting married.
    Your relatives