The Lowland

their neighborhood were taken to the river to be immersed. It was done without fanfare this year, out of respect for Udayan.
    But in North Calcutta, below the balcony where they had first spoken to one another, the processions would continue throughout the night. People lined up on the sidewalks for a final glimpse, the noise so great it would have been impossible to sleep. She will come back, she will return to us, people chanted as they marched on the street, accompanying the goddess to the river, bidding her another year’s farewell.
    One morning, after the first month had passed, she was unable to go to the kitchen to help her mother-in-law with the day’s preparations, as she was once again expected to do. Feeling drained of energy, dizzy when she tried to stand up, she remained in bed.
    Five minutes passed, another ten. Her mother-in-law entered the room and told her it was late. She opened the shutters and looked down at Gauri’s face. She held a cup of tea in her hands but did not offer it right away. For a moment she only stood there, staring at her. Gauri sat up slowly, to take the tea from her hands.
    I’ll be upstairs in a moment.
    Don’t bother today, her mother-in-law said.
    Why not?
    You won’t be of help.
    She shook her head, confused.
    An intelligent girl. This is what he told us after he married you. And yet, incapable of understanding simple things.
    What haven’t I understood?
    Her mother-in-law had already turned to leave the room. At the door she paused. Careful from now on, not to slip in the bathroom, or on the stairs.
    From now on?
    You’re going to be a mother, Gauri heard her say.
    From the beginning of their marriage he did not touch her for one week out of every month. He had asked her to keep track of her periods in the pages of her diary, telling him when it was safe.
    After the revolution was successful, he’d told her, they’d bring children into the world. Only then. But in the final weeks before his death, when he was hiding at the house, they had both lost track of the days.
    She had been born with a map of time in her mind. She pictured other abstractions as well, numbers and the letters of the alphabet, both in English and in Bengali. Numbers and letters were like links on a chain. Months were arrayed as if along an orbit in space.
    Each concept existed in its own topography, three-dimensional, physical. So that ever since she was a child it was impossible for her to calculate a sum, to spell a word she was unsure of, to access a memory or await something in the coming months, without retrieving it from a specific location in her mind.
    Her strongest image was always of time, both past and future; it was an immediate horizon, at once orienting and containing her. Across the limitless band of years, the brief tenancy of her own life was superimposed. To the right was the recent past: the year she’d met Udayan, and before that, all the years she’d lived without knowing him. There was the year she was born, 1948, prefaced by all the years and centuries that came before.
    To the left was the future, the place where her death, unknown but certain, was an end point. In less than nine months a baby would come. But its life had already started, its heart already beating, represented by a separate line creeping forward. She saw Udayan’s life, no longer accompanying her own as she’d assumed it would, but ceasing in October 1971. This formed a grave in her mind’s eye.
    Only the present moment, lacking any perspective, eluded her grasp. It was like a blind spot, just over her shoulder. A hole in her vision. But the future was visible, unspooling incrementally.
    She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipate it against her will.
    There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would. It was like holding her breath, as Udayan had tried to do in the lowland. And yet somehow she was breathing. Just as time stood still but was also passing, some other part of her body that she was unaware of was now drawing oxygen, forcing her to stay alive.
    3.
    A few days after speaking to Gauri, Subhash went out, alone, into the city for the first time. He took the material his parents had given him, his share and Udayan’s, to a men’s