The Lowland

were permanent. The only way to repair the flaw was to apply another layer. Subhash wondered whether this time his brother had gone too far.
    But to the mason their father said, Leave it be. Not for the expense or effort involved, but because he believed it was wrong to erase steps that his son had taken.
    And so the imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.
    Subhash might have started school a year earlier. But for the sake of convenience—also because Udayan protested at the notion of Subhash going without him—they were put into the same class at the same time. A Bengali medium school for boys from ordinary families, beyond the tram depot, past the Christian Cemetery.
    In matching notebooks they summarized the history of India, the founding of Calcutta. They drew maps to learn the geography of the world.
    They learned that Tollygunge had been built on reclaimed land. Centuries ago, when the Bay of Bengal’s current was stronger, it had been a swamp dense with mangroves. The ponds and the paddy fields, the lowland, were remnants of this.
    As part of their life-science lesson they drew pictures of mangrove trees. Their tangled roots above the waterline, their special pores for obtaining air. Their elongated seedlings, called propagules, shaped like cigars.
    They learned that if the propagules dropped at low tide they reproduced alongside the parents, spearing themselves in brackish marsh. But at high water they drifted from their source of origin, for up to a year, before maturing in a suitable environment.
    The English started clearing the waterlogged jungle, laying down streets. In 1770, beyond the southern limits of Calcutta, they established a suburb whose first population was more European than Indian. A place where spotted deer roamed, and kingfishers darted across the horizon.
    Major William Tolly, for whom the area was named, excavated and desilted a portion of the Adi Ganga, which came also to be known as Tolly’s Nullah. He’d made shipping trade possible between Calcutta and East Bengal.
    The grounds of the Tolly Club had originally belonged to Richard Johnson, a chairman of the General Bank of India. In 1785, he’d built a Palladian villa. He’d imported foreign trees to Tollygunge, from all over the subtropical world.
    In the early nineteenth century, on Johnson’s estate, the British East India Company imprisoned the widows and sons of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, after Tipu was killed in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War.
    The deposed family was transplanted from Srirangapatna, in the distant southwest of India. After their release, they were granted plots in Tollygunge to live on. And as the English began to shift back to the center of Calcutta, Tollygunge became a predominantly Muslim town.
    Though Partition had turned them again into a minority, the names of so many streets were the legacy of Tipu’s displaced dynasty: Sultan Alam Road, Prince Bakhtiar Shah Road, Prince Golam Mohammad Shah Road, Prince Rahimuddin Lane.
    Golam Mohammad had built the great mosque at Dharmatala in his father’s memory. For a time he’d been permitted to live in Johnson’s villa. But by 1895, when a Scotsman named William Cruickshank stumbled across it on horseback, looking for his lost dog, the great house was abandoned, colonized by civets, sheathed in vines.
    Thanks to Cruickshank the villa was restored, and a country club was established in its place. Cruickshank was named the first president. It was for the British that the city’s tramline was extended so far south in the early 1930s. It was to facilitate their journey to the Tolly Club, to escape the city’s commotion, and to be among their own.
    In high school the brothers studied optics and forces, the atomic numbers of the elements, the properties of light and sound. They learned about Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, and Marconi’s experiments with wireless transmissions. Jagadish Chandra Bose, a Bengali, in a demonstration in Calcutta’s town hall, had shown that electromagnetic waves could ignite gunpowder, and cause a bell to ring from a distance.
    Each evening, at opposite sides of a metal study table, they sat with their textbooks, copybooks, pencils and erasers, a chess game that would be in progress at the same time. They stayed up late, working on equations and formulas. It was quiet