The Lowland (20 page)

But for Bela, three months ago and the day before were the same.

She was frustrated with Gauri for contradicting her. Disappointment traveled like a dark cloud across her face. There was no obvious trace in it of Gauri or of Udayan. How was it that her forehead was faintly convex, that the inner corners of her eyes dipped down? The placement of the eyes was distinctive. Gauri was aware of the contrast of her own toffee skin to Bela’s lighter complexion, a creamy fairness she had received from Gauri’s mother-in-law.

Where is my other jacket? Bela asked another day, as Gauri handed her a new one. They were on their way to school.

Which?

The yellow one from yesterday.

It was true, there had been a yellow one the previous spring, with a hood trimmed in fur. Too small for her now, given away to a church on campus that took in used clothes.

That was last year’s jacket. It fit you when you were three.

Yesterday I was three.

She was waiting for Bela to stop marching this way and that in the corridor. To stand still so that Gauri could put her arms into the sleeves of the jacket, so that they could be on their way. When Bela resisted, she gripped her by the shoulders.

That hurt. You hurt me.

Bela, we’re in a hurry.

The jacket was on now, unfastened. Bela wanted to pull up the zipper. Her fumbling attempt to do this was delaying them further, and after a moment Gauri could not bear it, she pried Bela’s fingers away.

Baba lets me do it myself.

Your father’s not here.

She tugged the zipper shut at the base of Bela’s throat, perhaps a bit harder than she should have, almost catching the skin. She chided herself for being impatient. She wondered when her daughter would know the full meaning of what Gauri had just said.

After dropping off Bela she bought a cup of coffee at the student union. Every summer and again every winter, at the start of each term, hundreds of students stood in long lines, registering for classes. From time to time Gauri would pick up a catalogue abandoned on the floor. She looked at the offerings in the philosophy department, circling classes that appealed to her. She remembered sitting in on the ancient philosophy class, secretly, after she’d first arrived in Rhode Island.

There were no classes that term during the time Bela was at school. Instead Gauri walked over to the library, to sit and read. The effort of concentration eliminated, if only for an hour or two, the obligation of anything else. It eliminated her awareness of those hours passing.

She saw time; now she sought to understand it. She filled notebooks with her questions, observations. Did it exist independently, in the physical world, or in the mind’s apprehension? Was it perceived only by humans? What caused certain moments to swell up like hours, certain years to dwindle to a number of days? Did animals have a sense of it passing, when they lost a mate, or killed their prey?

In Hindu philosophy the three tenses—past, present, future—were said to exist simultaneously in God. God was timeless, but time was personified as the god of death.

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance.

On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away.

In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan’s hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton’s theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein’s contribution, that time and space were intertwined.

He’d described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time reversal invariance, in which there was no fundamental distinction between forward and backward, when the motions of particles were precisely defined.

The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. Each year began with an unmarked diary. A version of a clock, printed and bound. She never recorded her impressions in them. Instead she used them to write rough drafts of compositions, or work out sums. Even when she was a child, each page of a diary she had yet to turn, containing events yet to be experienced, filled her with apprehension. Like walking up a staircase in darkness. What proof was there that another December would come?

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things
that weren’t the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.

The Greeks had had no clear notion of it. For them the future had been indeterminable. In Aristotle’s teaching, a man could never say for certain if there would be a sea battle tomorrow.

Willfully anticipating, in ignorance and in hope—this was how most people lived. Her in-laws had expected Subhash and Udayan to grow old in the house they had built for them. They had wanted Subhash to return to Tollygunge and marry someone else. Udayan had given his life for the future, expecting society itself to change. Gauri had expected to stay married to him, not for less than two years but always. In Rhode Island, Subhash was expecting him and Gauri and Bela to carry on as a family. For Gauri to be a mother to Bela, and to remain a wife to him.

At times Gauri derived comfort from Bela’s version of history. According to Bela, Udayan might still have been living the day before, and Gauri might still be married to him, when really almost five years had passed since he was killed. Almost five years, she’d been married to Subhash.

What she’d seen from the terrace, the evening the police came for Udayan, now formed a hole in her vision. Space shielded her more effectively than time: the great distance between Rhode Island and Tollygunge. As if her gaze had to span an ocean and continents to see. It had caused those moments to recede, to turn less and less visible, then invisible. But she knew they were there. What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.

Bela’s birth, on the other hand, remained its own yesterday for Gauri. That summer evening formed a vivid tableau that seemed just to have occurred. She recalled the rain on the way to the hospital, the face of the nurse who’d stood at her side, the view of the marina out the window. The feel of the hospital gown against her skin, a needle inserted into the top of her hand. Just yesterday, it seemed, she had held Bela and looked at her for the first time. She remembered the ballast of pregnancy, suddenly missing. She remembered astonishment
that such a specific-looking being, contained for so long within her, had emerged.

At noon she went back to the nursery school to fetch Bela, a duty that was always hers, never Subhash’s. He had a postdoc in New Bedford, nearly fifty miles away. It was understood that he left the house at a certain hour, and returned at a certain hour, and that Gauri was responsible for Bela all the hours in between.

She would find Bela sitting in her cubby, an enclosure that looked to Gauri like a tiny upright coffin. Her jacket on, waiting, lined up with her classmates. She did not rush into Gauri’s arms like some of the other children, seeking praise for the crinkled paintings they’d made, the leaves they’d gathered and glued onto sheets of paper. She walked over, her pace measured, asking what Gauri would make her for lunch, sometimes asking why Subhash hadn’t come. Reports of her activities at school, details that overflowed from the mouths of her classmates as soon as they saw their parents, were kept to herself.

Together they returned to their apartment building. In the lobby Gauri unlocked the mailbox labeled Mitra that she and Subhash shared.

In Calcutta the names were painted onto wooden boxes with the careful strokes of a fine brush. But here they were hastily scribbled, one or two of the scuffed metal doors left blank. She pulled out the bills, an issue of a scientific journal that Subhash subscribed to. Coupons from a grocery store.

There was seldom anything addressed to her. Only an occasional letter from Manash. She resisted reading them, given what they reminded her of. Manash and Udayan, studying together in her grandparents’ flat, and Udayan and Gauri, getting to know one another as a result. A time she’d crushed between her fingertips, leaving no substance, only a protective residue on the skin.

From Manash, also from international papers that came to the library, she received some news. At first she tried to picture what might be happening. But the pieces were too fragmentary. The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.

Kanu Sanyal was alive but in prison. Charu Majumdar had been
arrested in his hideout, put into the lockup at Lal Bazar. He had died in police custody in Calcutta, the same summer Bela was born.

So many of Udayan’s comrades were still being tortured in prisons. Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the current chief minister in Calcutta, was backed by Congress. He was refusing to hold enquiries on those who had died.

News of the movement had by now attracted the attention of some prominent intellectuals in the West. Simone de Beauvoir and Noam Chomsky had sent a letter to Nehru’s daughter, demanding the prisoners’ release. But in the face of rising protest, against corruption, against failed government policies, Indira Gandhi had declared the Emergency. Censoring the press, so that what was happening was not being told.

Even now, part of Gauri continued to expect some news from Udayan. For him to acknowledge Bela, and the family they might have been. At the very least to acknowledge that their lives, aware of him, unaware of him, had gone on.

Chapter 5

It had been two years since he’d written and defended his thesis, an analysis of eutrophication in the Narrow River. Nineteen seventy-six, the year of America’s bicentennial. Seven years since he’d first arrived.

In almost five years he had not returned to Calcutta. Though his parents wrote now of wanting to meet Bela, Subhash told them that she was too young to make such a long journey, and that the pressures of his work were too great. He sent pictures from time to time, and he still sent his parents money, now that his father had retired. He sensed that they had softened, but he was not ready to face them again. In this matter, he and Gauri were allied.

But his motivation was his own. He didn’t want to be around the only other people in the world who knew that he was not Bela’s father. They would remind him of his place, they would regard him as her uncle, they would never acknowledge that he was anything more.

He was finishing up his postdoc in New Bedford. He’d been invited to participate in an environmental inventory. In the evenings, to earn some extra money, he taught a chemistry class at a community college in Providence.

He’d considered moving to southern Massachusetts to be closer to his work. But his fellowship would end soon, and he’d already found a larger apartment in Rhode Island, one that was still walking distance from the main campus. There was the possibility of a lab in Narragansett hiring him. Now that Bela was attending the university nursery school, now that life there had become familiar to him, it felt simpler to stay.

It took him about an hour to return, driving past the mills and factories in Fall River, past Tiverton, crossing the series of bridges over the bay. He crossed to the mainland, then another ten minutes or so to the quiet leafy complex, behind a row of fraternities, where they lived. Each evening when he saw Bela, she seemed slightly altered—her bones and teeth more solid, her husky voice having turned more emphatic in the hours that he’d been away.

She’d begun to write her name, to spread the butter on her toast. Her legs were growing long, though her belly was still rounded. Her back was soft with hair, an elegant line of it running along the length of her spine. There was a perfect loop of it at the center, like the whorls of her fingertips, or in the bark of a tree. Whenever he traced it, as he washed Bela in the soapy tub before bed, the hairs rearranged themselves, and the pattern dissolved.

Though she’d learned to tie her laces she could not tell her left foot from her right. Other gestures of her infancy lingered—the way she reached out and opened and closed her fist when she wanted something. A glass of water, for example, that was out of reach.

She was afraid of thunder, and even when there was none, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, calling out for him, or simply walking into the room he shared with Gauri and tucking herself beside him in bed. In the mornings, on the verge of waking, she would lie on her stomach, legs tucked in, crouched over like a little frog.

Every night, at Bela’s insistence, he lay with her until she fell asleep. It was a reminder of their connection to each other, a connection at once false and true. And so night after night, after helping her brush her teeth and changing her into her pajamas, he switched off the light and lay beside her. Bela instructed him to turn and face her, to lock eyes with her so that their breath mingled. Look at me, Baba, she whispered, with an intensity, an innocence, that overwhelmed him. Sometimes she held his face in her hands.

Do you love me?

Yes, Bela.

I love you more.

More than what?

I love you more than you love me.

That’s impossible. That’s my job.

But I love you more than anybody loves anybody.

He wondered how such powerful emotions, such superlative devotion, could exist in such a small child. Patiently he waited until she lowered her eyelids and became still. Her body always twitching a little; this was the sign that deep sleep, within seconds, was near.

Every night, though the same thing happened, it came as a shock.
A few minutes ago Bela would have been leaping off the bed, her laughter filling up the room. But when she closed her eyes that cessation of activity felt as unsettling, as final, as death.