The Lowland

don’t pressure you?
    I’m not their responsibility. They have their own children to worry about.
    What would you do instead?
    I could teach philosophy at a college or a school.
    And stay here?
    Why not?
    That’s good. For you, I mean. Why should you leave a place you love, and stop doing what you love to do, for the sake of a man?
    He was flirting with her. She felt him forming an opinion even as he stood there looking and talking to her. An aspect of her, in his mind, that he already possessed. He’d plucked it from her without permission, a transaction no other man had attempted, one that she could not object to, because it was him.
    After a moment, pointing toward the intersection, he said:
    If you married someone who lived on one of these other three corners, if you only had to move to one of the other balconies, would it be all right then?
    She couldn’t help herself; she smiled at this, at first hiding the smile with her hand. Then laughing, looking away.
    They began meeting at his campus, and at hers. But now, even when they hadn’t arranged a meeting, they kept running into each other. He would walk through the gates over to Presidency, watching as she came down the great staircase after a class. They sat along the portico, draped with banners the student union put up. When speeches were delivered on the quadrangle, about the continuing rise in food prices, about the growing population, about the shortage of jobs, they listened to them together. When marches sprouted along College Street, he brought her along.
    He started giving her things to read. From the bookstalls he bought her Marx’s Manifesto, and Rousseau’s Confessions. A banned copy of Felix Greene’s book on Vietnam.
    She saw that she impressed him, not only by reading what he gave her, but by talking to him about it. They exchanged opinions about the limits of political freedom, and whether freedom and power meant the same thing. About individualism, leading to hierarchies. About what society happened to be at the moment, and what it might become.
    She felt her mind sharpening, focusing. Wrestling with the concrete mechanisms of the world, instead of doubting its existence. She felt closer to Udayan on the days she did not see him, thinking about the things that mattered to him.
    At first they tried to keep things a secret from Manash, only to find out that Manash had been quietly plotting it; that he’d been certain the two of them would get along. He made it easier for Gauri to spend time with Udayan, explaining away to the rest of the family where she’d gone.
    Their partings were abrupt, the attention he paid her suddenly coming to an end because there was somewhere he had to go. Some meeting, some study session, he never fully explained. He never looked back at her but always paused in a spot where she was sure to see him, raising his hand in farewell before cupping it to light a cigarette, and then she watched his long legs carrying him away from her, across campus, or across the wide and busy street.
    He talked sometimes about traveling, going to one of the villages where she might have been raised had she not fled. Where after Naxalbari, she gathered, life was not so quiet anymore.
    He wanted to see more of India, he said, the way Che had traveled through South America. He wanted to understand the circumstances of its people. He wanted to see China one day.
    He mentioned certain friends who had already left Calcutta, to live among the peasants. Would you understand, if I ever needed to do something like that? Udayan asked her.
    She was aware that he was testing her. That he would lose respect if she turned sentimental, if she was unwilling to face certain risks. And so, though she did not want him to be away from her, did not want any harm to come to him, she told him that she would.
    Without him she was reminded of herself again. A person most at ease with her books, spending afternoons filling her notebooks in the cool high-ceilinged reading room of Presidency’s library. But this was a person she was beginning to question after meeting Udayan. A person that Udayan, with his unsteady fingers, was firmly pushing aside, wiping clean. So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.
    In childhood, aware of her accidental arrival, she had not known who she was, where or to whom she’d belonged. With the exception of Manash she had not