The Lowland

city, who has five siblings to help support. Bijoli has given Deepa her costume jewelry and colorful things, the keys to her house. Deepa washes and combs Bijoli’s hair, arranging it so that the thinning parts are less obvious. She sleeps in the house with Bijoli at night, in the prayer room where Bijoli no longer prays.
    She handles the money, goes to the market, cooks the meals, fetches the mail. In the mornings she draws the drinking water from the tube well. At night, she makes sure that the gate is locked.
    If something needs to be hemmed she operates the sewing machine that Udayan used to oil, that he would repair with his tools so that Bijoli never had to take it into a shop. Bijoli tells Deepa to use the sewing machine as often as she likes, and by now it has become a source of extra income for her, as it used to be for Bijoli, hemming frocks and trousers, taking in or letting out blouses for women in the neighborhood.
    In the afternoons, on the terrace, Deepa reads Bijoli articles from the newspaper. Never the whole story, just a few lines, skipping over the difficult words. She tells her that a film star is the president of America. That the CPI(M) has been running West Bengal again. That Jyoti Basu, whom Udayan used to revile, is the chief minister.
    Deepa has replaced everyone: her husband, her daughter-in-law, her sons. She believes Udayan arranged for this.
    She remembers him sitting with a piece of chalk in the courtyard, teaching the boys and girls who used to work for them, who’d not gone to school, to write and read. He befriended these children, eating beside them, involving them in his games, giving them the meat from his own plate if Bijoli hadn’t set enough aside. He would come to their defense, if she happened to scold them.
    When he was older he collected worn-out items, old bedding and pots and pans, to distribute to families living in colonies, in slums. He would accompany a maid to her home, into the poorest sections of the city, to bring medicine. To summon a doctor if a member of her family was ill, to see to a funeral if someone died.
    But the police had called him a miscreant, an extremist. A member of an illegal political party. A boy who did not know right from wrong.
    She lives on her husband’s pension, and the income from the downstairs rooms that they began to rent to another family after Gauri moved away. Once in a while a check written out in dollars arrives from Subhash, something that takes months to cash. She does not ask for his help, but she is in no position to refuse it.
    In all it is enough to buy her food and to pay Deepa, even to have a small refrigerator, to install a telephone line. The lines are unpredictable, but on the first try she had picked up the phone and dialed Subhash’s number and transmitted her voice to America, conveying the news of her husband’s death. It was a few days after the fact. It came as a surprise, yes, but how deeply had it affected her?
    For over a decade they’d lived in separate rooms. For over a decade her husband had not spoken of what had happened to Udayan. He refused to talk about it with Bijoli, with anyone. Every morning he boarded a tram, he went for his bath in the river, occasionally he picked up fruit at the market, he stopped on his way home to speak to neighbors about this and that. Together, never speaking, the two of them had taken their evening meals, sitting on the floor under Udayan’s death portrait, never acknowledging it.
    They had loved this house; in a sense it had been their first child. They’d been proud of each detail, caring for it together, excited by every change.
    When it was first built, when it had been only two rooms, electricity was just coming to the area, lanterns lit to prepare the evening meal. The iron streetlamp outside their house, an elegant example of British city planning, had not yet been converted. Someone from the Corporation came each day before sunset, and again at daybreak, climbing a ladder, switching the gas on and off by hand.
    The plot was twenty-five feet wide, sixty feet deep. The house itself was narrow, sixteen feet across. There was a mandatory passageway of four feet on either side of the building, then the boundary wall.
    Bijoli had contributed her only resource. She’d sold off the gold she’d been given when she became a wife. For her husband had insisted, even before having children, that building a home for their family,