The Lowland, Page 2

  In the courtyard of their family’s house was the most enduring legacy of Udayan’s transgressions. A trail of his footprints, created the day the dirt surface was paved. A day they’d been instructed to remain indoors until it had set.

  All morning they’d watched the mason preparing the concrete in a wheelbarrow, spreading and smoothing the wet mixture with his tools. Twenty-four hours, the mason had warned them, before leaving.

  Subhash had listened. He had watched through the window, he had not gone out. But when their mother’s back was turned, Udayan ran down the long wooden plank temporarily set up to get from the door to the street.

  Halfway across the plank he lost his balance, the evidence of his path forming impressions of the soles of his feet, tapering like an hourglass at the center, the pads of the toes disconnected.

  The following day the mason was called back. By then the surface had dried, and the impressions left by Udayan’s feet were permanent. The only way to repair the flaw was to apply another layer. Subhash wondered whether this time his brother had gone too far.

  But to the mason their father said, Leave it be. Not for the expense or effort involved, but because he believed it was wrong to erase steps that his son had taken.

  And so the imperfection became a mark of distinction about their home. Something visitors noticed, the first family anecdote that was told.

  Subhash might have started school a year earlier. But for the sake of convenience—also because Udayan protested at the notion of Subhash going without him—they were put into the same class at the same time. A Bengali medium school for boys from ordinary families, beyond the tram depot, past the Christian Cemetery.

  In matching notebooks they summarized the history of India, the founding of Calcutta. They drew maps to learn the geography of the world.

  They learned that Tollygunge had been built on reclaimed land. Centuries ago, when the Bay of Bengal’s current was stronger, it had been a swamp dense with mangroves. The ponds and the paddy fields, the lowland, were remnants of this.

  As part of their life-science lesson they drew pictures of mangrove trees. Their tangled roots above the waterline, their special pores for obtaining air. Their elongated seedlings, called propagules, shaped like cigars.

  They learned that if the propagules dropped at low tide they reproduced alongside the parents, spearing themselves in brackish marsh. But at high water they drifted from their source of origin, for up to a year, before maturing in a suitable environment.

  The English started clearing the waterlogged jungle, laying down streets. In 1770, beyond the southern limits of Calcutta, they established a suburb whose first population was more European than Indian. A place where spotted deer roamed, and kingfishers darted across the horizon.

  Major William Tolly, for whom the area was named, excavated and desilted a portion of the Adi Ganga, which came also to be known as Tolly’s Nullah. He’d made shipping trade possible between Calcutta and East Bengal.

  The grounds of the Tolly Club had originally belonged to Richard Johnson, a chairman of the General Bank of India. In 1785, he’d built a Palladian villa. He’d imported foreign trees to Tollygunge, from all over the subtropical world.

  In the early nineteenth century, on Johnson’s estate, the British East India Company imprisoned the widows and sons of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, after Tipu was killed in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War.

  The deposed family was transplanted from Srirangapatna, in the distant southwest of India. After their release, they were granted plots in Tollygunge to live on. And as the English began to shift back to the center of Calcutta, Tollygunge became a predominantly Muslim town.

  Though Partition had turned Muslims again into a minority, the names of so many streets were the legacy of Tipu’s displaced dynasty: Sultan Alam Road, Prince Bakhtiar Shah Road, Prince Golam Mohammad Shah Road, Prince Rahimuddin Lane.

  Golam Mohammad had built the great mosque at Dharmatala in his father’s memory. For a time he’d been permitted to live in Johnson’s villa. But by 1895, when a Scotsman named William Cruickshank stumbled across it on horseback, looking for his lost dog, the great house was abandoned, colonized by civets, sheathed in vines.

  Thanks to Cruickshank the villa was restored, and a country club was established in its place. Cruickshank was named the first president. It was for the British that the city’s tramline was extended so far south in the early 1930s. It was to facilitate their journey to the Tolly Club, to escape the city’s commotion, and to be among their own.

  In high school the brothers studied optics and forces, the atomic numbers of the elements, the properties of light and sound. They learned about Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, and Marconi’s experiments with wireless transmissions. Jagadish Chandra Bose, a Bengali, in a demonstration in Calcutta’s town hall, had shown that electromagnetic waves could ignite gunpowder, and cause a bell to ring from a distance.

  Each evening, at opposite sides of a metal study table, they sat with their textbooks, copybooks, pencils and erasers, a chess game that would be in progress at the same time. They stayed up late, working on equations and formulas. It was quiet enough at night to hear the jackals howling in the Tolly Club. At times they were still awake when the crows began quarreling in near unison, signaling the start of another day.

  Udayan wasn’t afraid to contradict their teachers about hydraulics, about plate tectonics. He gesticulated to illustrate his points, to emphasize his opinions, the interplay of his hands suggesting that molecules and particles were within his grasp. At times he was asked by their Sirs to step outside the room, told that he was holding up his classmates, when in fact he’d moved beyond them.

  At a certain point a tutor was hired to prepare them for their college entrance exams, their mother taking in extra sewing to offset the expense. He was a humorless man, with palsied eyelids, held open with clips on his glasses. He could not keep them open otherwise. Every evening he came to the house to review wave-particle duality, the laws of refraction and reflection. They memorized Fermat’s principle: The path traversed by light in passing between two points is that which will take the least time.

  After studying basic circuitry, Udayan familiarized himself with the wiring system of their home. Acquiring a set of tools, he figured out how to repair defective cords and switches, to knot wires, to file away the rust that compromised the contact points of the table fan. He teased their mother for always wrapping her finger in the material of her sari because she was terrified to touch a switch with her bare skin.

  When a fuse blew, Udayan, wearing a pair of rubber slippers, never flinching, would check the resistors and unscrew the fuses, while Subhash, holding the flashlight, stood to one side.

  One day, coming home with a length of wire, Udayan set about installing a buzzer for the house, for the convenience of visitors. He mounted a transformer on the fuse box, and a black button to push by the main door. Hammering a hole in the wall, he fed the new wires through.

  Once the buzzer was installed, Udayan said they should use it to practice Morse code. Finding a book about telegraphy at a library, he wrote out two copies of the dots and dashes that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, one for each of them to consult.

  A dash was three times as long as a dot. Each dot or dash was followed by silence. There were three dots between letters, seven dots between words. They identified themselves simply by initial. The letter s, which Marconi had received across the Atlantic Ocean, was three quick dots. U was two dots and a dash.

  They took turns, one of them standing by the door, the other inside, signaling to one another, deciphering words. They got good enough to send coded messages that their parents couldn’t understand. Cinema, one of them would suggest. No, tram depot, cigarettes.

  They concocted scenarios, pretending to be soldiers or spies in distress. Covertly communicating from a mountain pass in China, a Russian forest, a cane field in Cuba.

  Ready?

&nbs
p; Clear.

  Coordinates?

  Unknown.

  Survivors?

  Two.

  Losses?

  Pressing the buzzer, they would tell each other that they were hungry, that they should play football, that a pretty girl had just passed by the house. It was their private back-and-forth, the way two players passed a ball between them as they advanced together toward the goal. If one of them saw their tutor approaching, they pressed SOS. Three dots, three dashes, three dots again.

  They were admitted to two of the city’s best colleges. Udayan would go to Presidency to study physics. Subhash, for chemical engineering, to Jadavpur. They were the only boys in their neighborhood, the only students from their unremarkable high school, to have done so well.

  To celebrate, their father went to the market, bringing back cashews and rosewater for pulao, half a kilo of the most expensive prawns. Their father had started working at nineteen to help support his family. Not having a college degree was his sole regret. He had a clerical position with the Indian Railways. As word spread of his sons’ success, he said he could no longer step outside the house without being stopped and congratulated.

  It had had nothing to do with him, he told these people. His sons had worked hard, they’d distinguished themselves. What they’d accomplished, they’d accomplished on their own.

  Asked what they wanted as a gift, Subhash suggested a marble chess set to replace the worn wooden pieces they’d always had. But Udayan wanted a shortwave radio. He wanted more news of the world than what came through their parents’ old valve radio, encased in its wooden cabinet, or what was printed in the daily Bengali paper, rolled slim as a twig, thrown over the courtyard wall in the mornings.

  They put it together themselves, searching in New Market, in junk shops, finding parts from Indian Army surplus. They followed a set of complicated instructions, a worn-out circuit diagram. They laid out the pieces on the bed: the chassis, the capacitors, the various resistors, the speaker. Soldering the wires, working together on the task. When it was finally assembled, it looked like a little suitcase, with a squared-off handle. Made of metal, bound in black.

  The reception was often better in winter than in summer. Generally better at night. This was when the sun’s photons weren’t breaking up molecules in the ionosphere. When positive and negative particles in the air quickly recombined.

  They took turns sitting by the window, holding the receiver in their hands, in various positions, adjusting the antenna, manipulating two controls at once. Rotating the tuning dial as slowly as possible, they grew familiar with the frequency bands.

  They searched for any foreign signal. News bulletins from Radio Moscow, Voice of America, Radio Peking, the BBC. They heard arbitrary information, snippets from thousands of miles away, emerging from great thickets of interference that tossed like an ocean, that wavered like a wind. Weather conditions over Central Europe, folk songs from Athens, a speech by Abdel Nasser. Reports in languages they could only guess at: Finnish, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese.

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

  In Calcutta Charulata was released in cinema halls. Another wave of riots between Muslims and Hindus killed over one hundred people after a relic was stolen from a mosque in Srinagar. Among the communists in India there was dissent over the border war with China two years before. A breakaway group, sympathetic to China, called itself the Communist Party of India, Marxist: the CPI(M).

  Congress was still running the central government in Delhi. After Nehru died of a heart attack that spring his daughter, Indira, entered the cabinet. Within two years, she would become the Prime Minister.

  In the mornings, now that Subhash and Udayan were beginning to shave, they held up a hand mirror and a pan of warm water for one another in the courtyard. After plates of steaming rice and dal and matchstick potatoes they walked to the mosque at the corner, leaving their enclave behind. They continued together down the busy main road, as far as the tram depot, then boarded different busses to their colleges.

  On separate sides of the city, they made different friends, mixing with boys who’d gone to English medium schools. Though some of their science courses were similar, they took exams on different schedules, studying with different professors, running different experiments in their labs.

  Because Udayan’s campus was farther away, it took him longer to get home. Because he started to befriend students from North Calcutta, the chessboard stood neglected on the study table, so that Subhash started to play against himself. Still, each day of his life began and ended with Udayan beside him.

  One evening in the summer of 1966, on the shortwave, they listened to England play Germany in the World Cup at Wembley. It was the famous final, the ghost goal that was to be disputed for years. They took notes as the lineup was announced, diagramming the formation on a sheet of paper. They trailed their index fingers to mimic the moves being relayed, as if the bed were the playing field.

  Germany scored first; in the eighteenth minute came Geoff Hurst’s equalizer. Toward the end of the second half, with England leading two to one, Udayan turned off the radio.

  What are you doing?

  Improving the reception.

  It’s good enough. We’re missing the end of the match.

  It’s not over.

  Udayan reached under the mattress, which was where they stashed their odds and ends. Notebooks, compasses and rulers, razor blades to sharpen their pencils, sports magazines. The instructions for putting the radio together. Some spare nuts and bolts, the screwdriver and pliers they’d needed for the task.

  Using the screwdriver, he started taking the radio apart again.

  The wiring to one of the coils or switches must be loose, he said.

  You need to fix that now?

  He didn’t stop to answer. He’d already removed the cover, his nimble fingers unthreading the screws.

  It took us days to put that together, Subhash said.

  I know what I’m doing.

  Udayan isolated the chassis, realigning some wires. Then he put the receiver back together again.

  The game was still going on, the crackle less distracting. While Udayan had been fiddling with the radio, Germany had scored late in the second half, to force overtime.

  Then they heard Hurst score again for England. The ball had hit the underside of the crossbar, and bounced down over the line. When the referee gave him the goal, the German team immediately contested. Everything came to a halt as the referee consulted with a Soviet linesman. The goal stood.

  England’s won it, Udayan said.

  There were still some minutes left, Germany desperate to tie. But Udayan was right, Hurst even scored a fourth goal at the end of the match. And by then the English spectators, triumphant before the final whistle, were already spilling onto the field.

  Chapter 4

  In 1967, in the papers and on All India Radio, they started hearing about Naxalbari. It was a place they’d never heard of before.

  It was one of a string of villages in the Darjeeling District, a narrow corridor at the northern tip of West Bengal. Tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas, nearly four hundred miles from Calcutta, closer to Tibet than to Tollygunge.

  Most of the villagers were tribal peasants who worked on tea plantations and large estates. For generations they’d lived under a feudal system that hadn’t substantially changed.

  They were manipulated by wealthy landowners. They were pushed off fields they’d cultivated, denied revenue from crops they’d grown. They were preyed upon by moneylenders. Deprived of subsistence wages, some died from lack of food.

  That March, when a sharecropper in Naxalbari tried to plough land from which he’d been illegally evicted, his landlord sent thugs to beat him. They took away his plough and bullock. The police had refused to intervene.

  After this, groups of sharecroppers began retaliat
ing. They started burning deeds and records that cheated them. Forcibly occupying land.

  It wasn’t the first instance of peasants in the Darjeeling District revolting. But this time their tactics were militant. Armed with primitive weapons, carrying red flags, shouting Long Live Mao Tse-tung.

  Two Bengali communists, Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, were helping to organize what was happening. They’d been raised in towns close to Naxalbari. They’d met in prison. They were younger than most of the communist leadership in India—men who’d been born in the late 1800s. Majumdar and Sanyal were contemptuous of those leaders. They were dissidents of the CPI(M).

  They were demanding ownership rights for sharecroppers. They were telling peasants to till for themselves.

  Charu Majumdar was a college dropout from a landowning family, a lawyer’s son. In the papers there were pictures of a frail man with a bony face, a hooked nose, bushy hair. He was an asthmatic, a Marxist-Leninist theoretician. Some of the senior communists called him a madman. At the time of the uprising, though not yet fifty, he was suffering a heart ailment, confined to his bed.

  Kanu Sanyal was a disciple of Majumdar’s, in his thirties. He was a Brahmin who’d learned the tribal dialects. He refused to own property. He was devoted to the rural poor.

  As the rebellion spread, the police started patrolling the area. Imposing undeclared curfews, making arbitrary arrests.

  The state government in Calcutta appealed to Sanyal. They were hoping he’d get the peasants to surrender. At first, assured that he wouldn’t be arrested, he met with the land revenue minister. He promised a negotiation. At the last minute he backed out.

  In May it was reported that a group of peasants, male and female, attacked a police inspector with bows and arrows, killing him. The next day the local police force encountered a rioting crowd on the road. An arrow struck one of the sergeants in the arm, and the crowd was told to disband. When it didn’t, the police fired. Eleven people were killed. Eight of them were women.