The Lowland

that the injury to his hand made him conspicuous, that the police might put it all together now.
    Gauri did not know where he was, whether it was one safe house or several. Occasionally there was a note, retrieved at the stationer’s on the main road. A sign that he was still alive, a request for fresh clothes, his thyroid pills. There was still enough of a network in the neighborhood to arrange for this. At the end of the two weeks, because there was no other place to shelter him, he returned to their enclave.
    Once he was home again he was unable to leave. His parents, anxious for his return, preferred him there than anywhere else. They made sure no one saw him. No neighbor, no workman, no visitor to the house. The houseboy was sworn to secrecy. They got rid of his things, as if he were already dead. His books hidden, his clothes stored in a trunk under the bed.
    He kept to the back rooms. Never showing his face from a terrace or a window. Never speaking above a whisper. His only freedom was to go up to the rooftop in the middle of the night, to sit against the parapet and smoke under the stars. Because of his hand he needed help dressing and bathing. He was like a child, needing to be fed.
    He had trouble hearing, asking Gauri to repeat herself. There had been damage to one of his eardrums from the explosion. He complained of dizziness, a high-pitched sound that would not go away. He said he could not hear the shortwave, when she could hear it perfectly well.
    He worried that he might not be able to hear the buzzer, if it rang, or the approach of a military jeep. He complained of feeling alone even though they were together. Feeling isolated in the most basic way.
    Nearly a week passed. Perhaps the police had not connected the dots, perhaps they’d lost track of him. Perhaps they would be diverted by the approaching festival, he said. He was the one who’d convinced Gauri and his mother to leave the house for the day, to do what they had put off. To distract themselves, to appear normal to their neighbors, to do some holiday shopping.
    The body was not returned to them. They were never told where it had been burned. When her father-in-law went to the police station, seeking information, seeking some explanation, they denied any knowledge of the incident. After taking him in full view, his captors had left no trace.
    For ten days after his death there were rules to follow. She did not wash her clothes or wear slippers or comb her hair. She shut the door and the shutters to preserve whatever invisible particles of him floated in the atmosphere. She slept on the bed, on the pillow Udayan had used and that continued to smell for a few days of him, until it was replaced by her own odor, her greasy skin and hair.
    No one bothered her. She was aware of holding her body very still, as if posing for a photograph that was never taken. In spite of the stillness, she felt at times as if she were falling, the bed seeming to give way. She was unable to cry. There were only the tears disconnected to feeling, that gathered and sometimes fell from the corners of her eyes in the morning, after sleep.
    The days of Pujo arrived and began to pass: Shashthi, Saptami, Ashtami, Navami. Days of worship and celebration across the city. Of mourning and seclusion inside the house. The vermillion was washed clean from her hair, the iron bangle removed from her wrist. The absence of these ornaments marked her as a widow. She was twenty-three years old.
    After eleven days a priest came for the final rites, and a cook to prepare the ceremonial meal. Inside the house, Udayan’s portrait was propped against the wall in a frame, behind glass, wreathed with tuberoses. She was unable to look at his face in the photograph. She sat for the ceremony, her wrists bare.
    If anything happens to me, don’t let them waste money on my funeral, he’d once told her. But a funeral took place, the house filled with people who’d known him, family members and party members coming to pay their respects. To eat dishes made in his honor, the particular foods that he had loved.
    After the mourning period ended her in-laws began to eat fish and meat again, but not Gauri. She was given white saris to wear in place of colored ones, so that she resembled the other widows in the family. Women three times her age.
    Dashami came: the end of Pujo, the day of Durga’s return to Shiva. At night the effigies that had stood in the small pandal in