The Lowland

“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.” 

Udayan is the adventurous brother who is not afraid to innovate and try new things. Contrarily, Subhash is reserved and hesitant to step outside of his comfort zone. In the presence of his brother, Subhash is emboldened to watch and sometimes participate in Udayan’s charades. Subhash will continue to feel a lack of individualism and belonging.

“You’re the other side of me, Subhash. It’s without you that I’m nothing. Don’t go. It was the only time he’d admitted such a thing. He’d said it with love in his voice. With need. But Subhash heard it as a command, one of so many he’d capitulated to all his life. Another exhortation to do as Udayan did, to follow him.” 

This is the last time that Subhash and Udayan will see each other. They had been growing apart due to Udayan’s frustration with Subhash’s disapproval of the Naxalite movement. In this conversation, Udayan admits that despite their ideological differences, they need each other. However, Subhash wants to find his own way and does not heed his brother’s wishes. 

“She was aware that he was testing her. That he would lose respect if she turned sentimental, if she was unwilling to face certain risks. And so, though she did not want him to be away from her, did not want any harm to come to him, she told him she would.” 

The theme of duty is presented as Udayan confronts Gauri: He wants her to stay with him even if he must leave to fight with the Naxalite movement for some time. Despite her hesitations, she knows that she is far too in love with him to walk away; she needs him. 

“The letter consoled Subhash, also confused him. Invoking codes and signals, games of the past, the singular bond he and Subhash had shared. Invoking Castro, but describing quiet evenings at home with his wife. He wondered if Udayan had traded one passion for another, and his commitment was to Gauri now.” 

As Udayan’s letters are no longer political, Subhash hopes that Udayan’s duty has switched from the Naxalite party to Gauri. This is not the case though; in fact, the less that Udayan talks politics, the deeper entrenched he becomes. 

“He and Udayan had posed side by side in the courtyard. Subhash saw an inch of his own shoulder, pressed up beside Udayan’s. The rest of him, in order to make the death portrait, had been cut away.” 

This quote refers to the memorial photo that is hanging up when Subhash travels back home after Udayan’s death. Cutting Subhash out of the photo is symbolic of how death has separated these two brothers. 

“Among the names the investigator had gone over, there was only one that Udayan had never mentioned. Only one, truthfully, she did not know. Nirmal Dey. And yet something told her she was not in ignorance of this man.” 

Udayan’s duty was never to Gauri, it was to the Naxalite movement and his ideological beliefs. As she becomes deeper entrenched in loving Udayan and his belief system, Gauri distances herself from her own identity. At the end of the book, we learn that Nirmal Dey was the police officer that Udayan had a hand in murdering, and Gauri had also helped by tracking and recording the police officer’s movements. 

“She looked back at the set of footprints they had made in the damp sand. Unlike Udayan’s steps from childhood, which endured in the courtyard in Tollygunge, theirs were already vanishing, washed clean by the encroaching tide.” 

Just like Udayan’s permanent footprints in the cement patio at his childhood home, so is Udayan’s print on Gauri’s heart. She will forever love him and be scarred by his death. On the other hand, her relationship with Subhash is fleeting and will end, just like Gauri and Subhash's footprints in the sand as they walk along the beach in Providence. 

“She remembered the fog on the way to the airport, the night she was leaving Calcutta. That night she had been desperate to move through it, to get out. Now, in spite of the pain, in spite of the urgency, part of her wanted the car to stop.” 

The weather remains symbolic throughout the novel. When Gauri was leaving India for Rhode Island, the fog felt oppressive, as if she would not be able to cut through it. Now in the rain, driving to the hospital to give birth to Bela, she wishes she could stop time. 

“The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.” 

Gauri’s doctoral dissertation is on the topic of time. Education is Gauri’s only link to the present, and her studies sustain her. Throughout the novel, Gauri is haunted by time and her inability to change it or understand it. 

“She slept with him because it had become more of an effort not to. She wanted to terminate the expectation she’d begun to sense from him. Also to extinguish Udayan’s ghost. To smother what haunted her.” 

Gauri allows a sexual relationship to start between her and Subhash, but not out of love and affection. She is trying to forget her love of Udayan, the pain she has from losing him, and the pain of having his child. She feels a duty to try and become a wife but is not able to do so in the end. 

“Subhash stared at her. She saw fear in his eyes. She remembered when Udayan was hidden behind the water hyacinth, and the gun was at her throat. She realized the weapon was in her hands now. Everything that mattered to him, she could take away.” 

Gauri threatens to tell Bela that Subhash is not Bela’s biological father. Gauri is upset that Bela doesn’t like her, and for a moment, Gauri believes that ruining Subhash’s relationship with Bela will make it better. Nonetheless, Gauri decides not to follow through. Subhash is afraid of losing the only relationship that remains true to him, along with his role as a father. 

“Bijoli understands that she scares these children; that to them she, too is a kind of ghostly presence in the neighborhood, a specter watching over them from the terrace, always emerging at the same time every day.” 

Stricken with grief after seeing her son shot to death in the lowland, Bijoli starts to bring flowers to his memorial stone. The neighbors do not understand this daily ritual, and it also scares the children. The lowland symbolizes Bijoli’s connections with her two sons. 

“But Gauri’s mind had saved her. It had enabled her to stand upright. It had cleared a path for her. It had prepared her to walk away.” 

Education is a symbol of freedom for Gauri. It is the only thing outside of Udayan and Manash that she loves and is passionate about. 

“She said this to him not without some disdain. It was the closest she came to rejecting how both he and Gauri lived. And he remembered Udayan, suddenly turning cold to his education, just as Bela had.” 

Bela decides not to pursue higher education, stating that it is a waste of time and effort and that she never wants to live like her parents. For Bela, education is not a symbol of freedom like it is for her mother; it is a symbol of the unproductivity of the system. In this moment, Subhash realizes how similar Bela is to Udayan. 

“He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he’d landed and made his life, was not his. Like Bela, it had accepted him, while at the same time keeping a distance. Among its people, its trees, its particular geography he had studied and grown to love, he was still a visitor. Perhaps the worst form of visitor: one who had refused to leave.” 

Throughout his life, Subhash constantly feels out of place. After a trip to India, he struggles to feel like he belongs in Providence; wherever he goes, he feels like a mere visitor, not a resident. Assimilation into American culture is not something Subhash is able to do even though he desires it. 

“He began expecting it to leak through the bricks around the fireplace, to drip through the ceiling, to seep in below the doors. He thought of the monsoon coming every year in Tollygunge. The two ponds flooding, the embankment between them turning invisible.” 

While in his house in Providence, Rhode Island, Subhash is confronted by the sounds of the rain. Water is a constant symbol throughout the novel and in this case, the sound brings him back to monsoon days in India. He thinks back to when the two ponds would flood to create one lake; the weather invoking nostalgia.

“Around Bela her mother had never pretended. She had transmitted an unhappiness that was steady, an ambient signal that was fixed. It was transmitted without words. And yet Bela was aware of it, as one is aware of a mountain. Immovable, insurmountable.” 

Even as a child, Bela is aware of her mother’s unhappiness and senses that there is nothing she can do to make her mother happy.

“Like Udayan, Bela is nowhere. Her name in the search engine leads to nothing. No university, no company, no social media site yields any information. Gauri finds no image, no trace of her.” 

Gauri starts to use the Internet more for her work, and she craves information from her past. Even though Gauri once had the chance to connect with Bela in person, she now tries to check up on Bela anonymously from a distance via the Internet. 

“She’d been linked into a chain she could not see. It was like performing in a brief play, with fellow actors who never identified themselves, simple lines and actions that were scripted, controlled. She wondered exactly how she was contributing, who might be watching her. She asked Udayan but he would not tell her, saying this was how she was being most useful. Saying it was better for her not to know.” 

It was only after Udayan’s death, when the police questioned her, that Gauri realized she had helped Udayan commit murder; he betrayed her and kept Gauri’s role hidden from her. Gauri realizes that Udayan’s duty was to the Naxalite party, not to her.

“Bela told Drew that her mother was dead. It was what she always said when people asked. In her imagination she returned Gauri to India, saying her mother had gone back for a visit and contracted an illness. Over the years Bela had come to believe this herself.” 

Bela adjusts to life by believing that her mother is dead, for this is easier for Bela to accept than the truth of intentional abandonment. 

“You’re as dead to me as he is. The only difference is that you left me by choice.” 

When Gauri shows up at Subhash’s house and Bela answers the door, Bela does not feel any connection to her mother, just as her mother had felt no connection with Bela as a child. 

“The man thinks of another stone in a distant country clear in his mind. A simple tablet, like a road marker, bearing his brother’s name. Its surroundings slowly sullied, the watery place where it once stood now indifferent to the seasons, converted to more practical means.”

Though death now separates the two brothers, Udayan lives on in Subhash’s memory. Udayan will always be a part of Subhash, and Subhash finds reminders of Udayan everywhere he goes. 

“He walks toward another stone and stumbles, reaching out to it, steadying himself. A marker, toward the end of his journey, of what is given, what is taken away.”

Subhash is reaching for acceptance. He understands that at the end of his journey, life gives and takes away. The stones that symbolize his brother’s memorial stone invoke nostalgia and love for his brother.