The Lowland

to listen to the oratorio as light crept into the sky, invoking Durga as she descended to earth with her four children.
    Every year at this time, Hindu Bengalis believed, she came to stay with her father, Himalaya. For the days of Pujo, she relinquished her husband, Shiva, before returning once more to married life. The hymns recounted the story of Durga being formed, and the weapons that were provided for each of her ten arms: sword and shield, bow and arrow, axe and mace. A conch shell and discus. Indra’s thunderbolt, Shiva’s trident. A flaming dart, a garland of snakes.
    This year no parcel came from his family. Only a telegram. The message consisted of two sentences, lifeless, drifting at the top of a sea.
    Udayan killed. Come back if you can.

III
    1.
    He left behind the brief winter days, the obscure place where he’d grieved alone. Where another Christmas was coming, where in December the doorways and windows of small shops and homes were decorated with beaded frames of light.
    He took a bus to Boston and boarded a night flight to Europe. The second flight involved a layover in the Middle East. He waited in the terminals, he walked from gate to gate. At last he landed in Delhi. From there he boarded an overnight train to Howrah Station.
    As he traveled halfway across India, from companions on the train, he heard a bit about what had been taking place in Calcutta during the time he’d been away. Information that neither Udayan nor his parents had mentioned in letters. Events Subhash had not come across in any newspaper in Rhode Island, or heard on the AM radio in his car.
    By 1970, people told him, things had taken a turn. By then the Naxalites were operating underground. Members surfaced only to carry out dramatic attacks.
    They ransacked schools and colleges across the city. In the middle of the night they burned records and defaced portraits, raising red flags. They plastered Calcutta with images of Mao.
    They intimidated voters, hoping to disrupt the elections. They fired pipe guns on the streets. They hid bombs in public places, so that people were nervous to sit in a cinema hall, or stand in line at a bank.
    Then the targets turned specific. Unarmed traffic constables in busy intersections. Wealthy businessmen, certain educators. Members of the rival party, the CPI(M).
    The killings were sadistic, gruesome, intended to shock. The wife of the French consul was murdered in her sleep. They’d assassinated Gopal Sen, the vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University. They’d killed him on campus while he was taking his evening walk. It was the day before he planned to retire. They’d bludgeoned him with steel bars, stabbing him four times.
    They took control of certain neighborhoods, calling them Red Zones. They took control of Tollygunge. They set up makeshift hospitals, safe houses. People began avoiding these neighborhoods. Policemen started chaining their rifles to their belts.
    But then new legislation was passed, and an old law was renewed. Laws that authorized the police and the paramilitary to enter homes without a warrant, to arrest young men without charges. The old law had been created by the British, to counter Independence, to cut off its legs.
    After that, the police started to cordon and search the neighborhoods of the city. Sealing off exits, knocking on doors, interrogating Calcutta’s young men. The police had killed Udayan. This much Subhash was able to surmise.
    He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcutta. The people filling the platform, passengers and coolies, and vagrants for whom the station was merely a shelter, were bundled in woolen caps and shawls.
    Only two people had come to receive him. A younger cousin of his father’s, Biren Kaka, and his wife. They were standing by a fruit vendor, unable to smile when they spotted him. He understood this diminished welcome, but he could not understand why after over two days of travel, after more than two years away, his parents were unwilling to come even this far to acknowledge his return. When he’d left India his mother had promised a hero’s welcome, a garland of flowers draped around his neck when he stepped off the train.
    It was here, at the station, that Subhash had last seen Udayan. He’d arrived late on the evening of his departure,