The Lowland

conceive Subhash, more than she’d longed for anything in her life. She had been married for almost five years when it happened, already in her mid-twenties, beginning to think that perhaps she was unable to bear children, that perhaps she and her husband were not meant to have a family. That they had invested in the property and built their home in vain.
    But at the end of 1943 he was born. Tollygunge had been a separate municipality back then. The new Howrah Bridge had opened to traffic, but horse-drawn carts were still taking people to the train station. Gandhi had fasted against the British, and the British were fighting the Axis powers, so that the trees of Tollygunge were filled with foreign soldiers prepared to shoot down Japanese planes.
    The summer she was pregnant, villagers began spilling out at Ballygunge Station. They were skeletal, half-crazed. They were farmers, fishermen. People who had once produced and procured food for others, now dying from the lack of it. They lay on the streets of South Calcutta, beneath the shade of the trees.
    A cyclone the year before had destroyed paddy crops along the coast. But everyone knew that the famine that followed was a man-made calamity. The government distracted by military concerns, distribution compromised, the cost of war turning rice unaffordable.
    She remembers dead bodies turning fetid under the sun, covered with flies, rotting on the road until they were carted away. She remembers some women’s arms so thin that their wedding bangles, their only adornment, were pushed up past the elbow to prevent them from sliding off.
    Those with energy accosted people on the street, tapping strangers on the shoulder as they begged for the clouded starchy water that trickled out of a strained pot of rice and was normally thrown away. Phen.
    Bijoli used to save this water, giving it to groups of delirious people who gathered at mealtimes outside the swinging doors of her house. Heavy with Subhash, she had gone to volunteer kitchens to serve bowls of gruel. The sound of their begging could be heard at night, like an animal’s intermittent bleating. Like the jackals in the Tolly Club, startling her in the same way.
    In the ponds across from their house, and in the flooded water of the lowland, she saw people searching for nourishment. Eating insects, eating soil, eating grubs that crawled in the ground. In that year of ubiquitous suffering, she had first brought life into the world.
    Fifteen months later, not long before the war ended and Japan surrendered, Udayan arrived. In her memory it had been one long pregnancy. They had occupied Bijoli’s body one after the other, Udayan’s cells beginning to divide and multiply before Subhash had taken his first step, before he had been given a proper name. In essence it was the three months between their birthdays that seemed to separate them, not the fifteen that had elapsed in real time.
    She’d fed them by hand, rice and dal mixed together on the same plate. She’d extracted the bones from a single piece of fish, lining them up at the side of the plate like a set of her sewing needles.
    From the beginning Udayan was more demanding. For some reason he had not been secure in her love for him. Crying out, protesting, from the very instant he was born. Crying out if she happened to hand him to someone else, or left the room for a moment. The effort to reassure him had entwined them. Though he’d exasperated her, his need for her was plain.
    Perhaps for this reason she still feels closer to Udayan than to Subhash. Both had defied her, running off and marrying Gauri. In Udayan’s case, at first, she’d tried to be accepting. She’d hoped having a wife would settle him, that it would distract him from his politics. She’ll go on with her studies, he’d told them. Don’t turn her into a housewife. Don’t stand in her way.
    He came home with gifts for Gauri, he took her to restaurants and films, to visit his friends. When Bijoli and her husband heard about what the students were doing after Naxalbari, what they were destroying, whom they were killing, they told themselves Udayan was married. That he had a future to consider, a family one day to raise. That he wouldn’t be mixed up with them.
    Without discussing it they’d been prepared to hide him, to lie to the police if they came. They’d assumed it was simply a matter of protecting him.
    Without asking where he went