The Lowland

owning however ordinary a property in Calcutta, was more important. He’d believed no security was greater.
    The roof was originally covered with tiles of dried clay, replaced later by corrugated asbestos. For a time Subhash and Udayan slept in a room without any bars on the windows. Burlap was tacked up at night because the shutters had not been installed. Rain blew in at times.
    She remembers her husband polishing hinges and latches with pieces of her old saris. Beating mattresses to release dust. Once a week, after a private bathroom was built, he’d clean it before he cleaned himself, pouring phenyle into the corners and eliminating cobwebs as soon as they formed.
    Within the rooms, each day, Bijoli had taken a meticulous inventory of their possessions. Lifting, dusting, replacing. Precisely aware of where everything was. Under her watch, the bedsheets had been tautly spread. The mirror free from smudges. The interiors of teacups unmarred by rings.
    Water was pumped manually from the tube well, a series of buckets filled up for the day’s use, drinking water stored in urns. Sometime in the fifties they’d gotten a septic tank. Before that there had been an outhouse by the entrance, and a man had come to carry their daily waste away on his head.
    Mejo Sahib, the second of three Nawab brothers, had owned the parcel that formed their enclave, and had sold them their plot. He was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, whom the British had killed, whose kingdom was divided, whose offspring were sequestered for a time in the Tolly Club. A visitor to England, Bijoli had once heard, could see Tipu’s sword and slippers, pieces of his tent and throne, displayed as trophies of conquest in one of Queen Elizabeth’s homes.
    During the first years of Subhash’s and Udayan’s lifetimes, when it was still unclear whether Calcutta would belong to India or Pakistan, these royal-blooded families had lived among them. They had been kind to Bijoli, inviting her to step off the street into their pillared homes, offering her sherbet to drink. Subhash and Udayan had stroked the rabbits they’d kept as pets, in cages in their courtyards. Together they’d swung on a wooden plank, beneath a bower of bougainvillea.
    In 1946 she and her husband had worried that the violence would spread to Tollygunge, and that perhaps their Muslim neighbors would turn against them. They had considered packing up the house, living for a while in another part of the city, where Hindus were the majority. But a nephew of Mejo Sahib’s had been outspoken. He had gone out of his way to protect them. Anyone who enters this enclave to threaten a Hindu will have to kill me first, he’d said.
    But after Partition, Mejo Sahib’s family, along with so many, had fled. Their native soil turning corrosive, like salt water invading the roots of a plant. Their gracious homes abandoned, most of them occupied or razed.
    Bijoli’s home feels just as forsaken, its course just as diverted. Udayan has not lived to inherit it, and Subhash refuses to come back. He should have been a comfort; the one son remaining when the other was taken away. But she was unable to love one without the other. He had only added to the loss.
    The moment he returned to them after Udayan’s death, the moment he stood before them, she’d felt only rage. Rage at Subhash for reminding her so strongly of Udayan, for sounding like him, for remaining a spare version of him. She’d overheard him talking with Gauri, paying attention to her, being kind.
    She’d told him, when he announced that he was going to marry Gauri, that the decision was not his to make. When he insisted, she told him that he was risking everything, and that they were never to enter the house as husband and wife.
    She’d said it to hurt them. She’d said it because a girl she did not like to begin with, did not want in her family, was going to become her daughter-in-law twice over. She’d said it because it was Gauri, not Bijoli, who contained a piece of Udayan in her womb.
    She’d not fully meant what she said. But for twelve years both Subhash and Gauri have held up their end of the bargain. They have not returned, either together or separately, to Tollygunge; they have stayed far from it, away. So that she feels the deepest shame a mother can feel, of not only surviving one child but losing another, still living.
    Forty-one years ago Bijoli had longed to