The Lowland

toward the house, arms raised over his head.
    Gauri remembered all the times she’d watched him from her grandparents’ balcony in North Calcutta, crossing the busy street, coming to visit her.
    For a moment it was as if they were letting him go. But then a gun was fired, the bullet aimed at his back. The sound of the shot was brief, unambiguous. There was a second shot, then a third.
    She watched his arms flapping, his body leaping forward, seizing up before falling to the ground. There was the clean sound of the shots, followed by the sound of so many crows, coarsely calling, scattering.
    It wasn’t possible to see where he’d been wounded, where exactly the bullets had gone. It was too distant to see how much blood had spilled.
    The soldiers dragged his body by the legs, then tossed him into the back of the van.
    They heard the doors slam shut, the engine starting up again. The van containing the body, driving away.
    In their bedroom, under the mattress, forgotten among folded sections of newspaper they’d not bothered to toss, was a diary the police had discovered. It contained all the proof they needed. Among the equations and notes on routine formulas and experiments was a page of instructions for how to put together a Molotov cocktail, a homemade bomb. Notes on the difference in effect between methanol and gasoline. Potassium chlorate versus nitric acid. Storm matches versus a kerosene wick.
    In the diary there was also a map he’d sketched, of the layout of the Tolly Club. The locations and names of the buildings, the stables, the caretaker’s cottage. The arrangement of the driveway, the configuration of the walking paths.
    Certain times of day had been jotted down, a schedule of when the guards moved around, when employees went on and off duty. When the restaurants and bars opened and closed, when the gardeners clipped and watered the grass. Various places where a person might enter and exit the premises, targets where one might throw an explosive, or leave a timed device behind.
    A few months ago he’d been brought in for questioning. It had become routine by then, for the city’s young men. At the time they believed what he’d told them. That he was a high school teacher, married, living in Tollygunge. No ties to the CPI(ML).
    He was asked if he’d known anything about an incident of vandalism in the school’s library: who had broken into it one night to slash the portraits of Tagore and Vidyasagar hanging on the walls. At the time they were satisfied with his answers. Concluding that he’d had nothing to do with it, they asked him nothing else.
    Then one night, about a month before he was killed, he did not come home. He returned early the next morning, not entering through the courtyard, not ringing the bell. He went around to the back, climbing over the wall that was shoulder high.
    He waited in the garden, behind the shed filled with coal and broken wood to light the stove. He tossed up bits of terra-cotta from a broken flowerpot, until Gauri opened the shutters to their bedroom and looked down.
    His right hand was bandaged, his arm in a sling. He and his squad members had been trying to assemble a pipe bomb, using a firecracker as an explosive. Udayan, with the slight tremor that had never fully left his fingers, should not have been the one to attempt it.
    The blast had occurred at a remote location, at a safe house. He’d managed to get away.
    He told his parents it had happened in the course of a routine experiment at school. That a bit of sodium hydroxide had spilled on his skin. He told them not to worry, that the hand would heal in a few weeks. But he told Gauri what had really happened. The two comrades who’d been helping him had stepped away in time, but not Udayan, and below his bandage there was now a useless paw. The bandage would come off, but the fingers were gone.
    By then, in the course of raids in Tollygunge, the police had discovered ammunitions in the film studios. In makeup rooms, in editing rooms. They’d shut down New Theatres more than once.
    They were conducting searches at random, harassing young men on the streets. Arresting them, torturing them. Filling the morgues, the crematoriums. In the mornings, dumping corpses on the streets, as a warning.
    For two weeks Udayan was gone. He told his parents he was simply taking precautions, though by then they, too, must have known. And he told Gauri that he was afraid,