The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

It was 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized America to use military force against North Vietnam. There was a military coup in Brazil.

Like so many, Udayan blamed the United Front, the left-wing coalition led by Ajoy Mukherjee that was now running West Bengal.

People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can’t shoot back.

Your generation didn’t solve anything, Udayan said. We built a nation. We’re independent. The country is ours. It’s not enough. Where did it get us? Who has it helped?

He was sick of the fear that always rose up in him: that he would cease to exist, and that he and Udayan would cease to be brothers, were Subhash to resist him.

Kanu Sanyal, just released from prison, stood at a rostrum, and addressed the exuberant crowd. With great pride and boundless joy I wish to announce today at this meeting that we have formed a genuine Communist Party. The official name was the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. The CPI(ML).

Charu Majumdar wasn’t present at the rally. But Sanyal called for allegiance to him, comparing him to Mao in his wisdom, warning against those who challenged Majumdar’s doctrine.

Richard opposed the war, but he wasn’t a communist. He told Subhash that Gandhi was a hero to him. Udayan would have scoffed, saying that Gandhi had sided with enemies of the people. That he had disarmed India in the name of liberation.

He’d been invited to America as Nixon’s guest. Here, each day, he remembered how he’d felt those evenings he and Udayan had snuck into the Tolly Club. This time he’d been admitted officially, and yet he remained vigilant, at the threshold. He knew that the door could close just as arbitrarily as it had opened. He knew that he could be sent back to where he’d come from, and that there would be plenty to take his place.

Subhash found that he could be honest with Richard. Richard listened to him instead of contradicting him. He didn’t merely try to convert him.

He felt their loyalty to one another, their affection, stretched halfway across the world. Stretched to the breaking point by all that now stood between them, but at the same time refusing to break.

As strange as it sounds, when the sky is overcast, when the clouds are low, something about the coastal landscape here, the water and the grass, the smell of bacteria when I visit the mudflats, takes me home. I think of the lowland, of paddy fields. Of course, no rice grows here. Only mussels and quahogs, which are among the types of shellfish Americans like to eat.

Around men she’d felt invisible. She knew she was not the type they turned to look at on the street, or to notice across the room at a cousin’s wedding. She’d not been asked after and married off a few months later, as some of her sisters had been. She was a disappointment to herself, in this regard. Aside from her complexion, deep enough to be considered a flaw, perhaps there was nothing wrong with her. And yet, whenever she stopped to consider what made her appearance distinctive, she objected to it, thinking the shape of her face was too long, that her features were too severe. Wishing she could alter herself, believing that any other face would have been preferable.

Udayan paused, and glanced at her. He looked at her face as he always did, absorbing its details as if for the first time.

He returns to bed, still looking out the window at the sky, the stars. He is startled anew by the fact that their beauty, even in daytime, is there. He is awash with the gratitude of his advancing years, for the timeless splendors of the earth, for the opportunity to behold them.