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The Lowland

Titel: The Lowland Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Jhumpa Lahiri
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in the evenings, without knowing whom he went to meet, they’d been prepared to forgive him. They were his parents. They’d not been prepared, that evening, not to be his parents anymore.
    She can no longer picture it. Nor can she picture the life Subhash and Gauri lead in America, in the place called Rhode Island. The child, named Bela, whom they are raising as husband and wife. But now Subhash has lost his father. For the second time since he left India, for the sake of a second death, he is obliged to face her.
    One morning, watching from the terrace, Bijoli has an idea. She goes down the staircase and walks through the swinging doors of the courtyard, into the enclave, and then out onto the street. Schoolchildren in uniforms are walking past, in white socks and black shoes, satchels heavy with their books. Sky-colored skirts for the girls, shorts and ties for the boys.
    They laugh until they see her, stepping out of her way. Her sari is stained and her bones have turned soft, her teeth no longer firm in her gums. She has forgotten how old she is, but she knows without having to stop to think that Udayan turned thirty-nine this spring.
    She carries a large shallow basket meant to store extra coal. She walks over to the lowland, hoisting up her sari so that her calves are revealed, speckled like some eggshells with a fine brown spray. She wades into a puddle and bends over, stirring things around with a stick. Then, using her hands, she starts picking things out of the murky green water. A little bit, a few minutes each day; this is her plan, to keep the area by Udayan’s stone uncluttered.
    She piles the things into the basket, empties the basket a little ways off, and then begins to fill it again. With bare hands she sorts through the empty bottles of Dettol, Sunsilk shampoo. Things rats don’t eat, that crows don’t bother to carry away. Cigarette packets tossed in by passing strangers. A bloodied sanitary pad.
    She knows she will never remove it all. But each day she goes out and fills up her basket, once, then a few times more. She does not care when some people tell her, when they stop to notice what she’s doing, that it is pointless. That it is disgusting and beneath her dignity. That it could cause her to contract some sort of disease. She’s used to neighbors not knowing what to make of her. She’s used to ignoring them.
    Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.
    One day there are some unexpected items piled up by Udayan’s memorial stone. Heaps of dirtied banana leaves, stained with food. Soiled paper napkins bearing a caterer’s name, and broken vessels from which guests have sipped their filtered water and tea. Garlands of dead flowers, used for decorating the entryway of a house.
    They are remnants of a marriage somewhere in the neighborhood. Evidence of an auspicious union, a celebration. A mess that repels her, that she refuses to touch or to clean.
    Neither of her sons was married this way. They had not celebrated, guests had not feasted. It was not until Udayan’s funeral that they had fed people at the house, banana leaves with heaps of salt and wedges of lemon lined on the rooftop, relatives and comrades waiting single file on the landing for their turn to climb the steps and eat the meal.
    She wonders which family it is, whose child has been married off. The neighborhood’s boundaries have been expanding; she no longer has a sense of where things begin and end. Once she could have knocked on their doors and been recognized, welcomed, treated to a cup of tea. She would have been handed an invitation to the wedding, beseeched to attend. But there are new homes now, new people who prefer their televisions, who never talk to her.
    She wants to know who has done this. Who has desecrated this place? Who has insulted Udayan’s memory this way?
    She calls out to the neighbors. Who was responsible? Why did they not come forward? Had they already forgotten what happened? Or were they unaware that it was here that her son had once hidden? Just beyond, in what used to be an empty field, where he’d been killed?
    She begs, cupping her hands, just as starving people used to, entering the

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