Out Of Lahiri's Muddy 'Lowland,' An Ambitious Story Soars
As a college student in the late '60s, Subhash's younger, more daredevil brother, Udayan, becomes involved in the Maoist "Naxalite" political movement, set on bettering the living conditions of India's poor through violent uprising. Subhash, in contrast, dutifully dedicates himself to personal, rather than collective, improvement: He earns a scholarship to study science in America and moves to Rhode Island. For a couple of lonely years in a student boarding house, he learns to live without the voices of his family. But when Udayan is executed by the police in that very same marsh between the ponds, Subhash races back to Calcutta. He goes to comfort his parents; but, as it turns out, he also rescues his murdered brother's pregnant wife, Gauri, from her own diminished future as a widowed (and unwelcome) daughter-in-law.
The Lowland is buoyantly ambitious in both its story (I've only summarized the first quarter of the novel here) and its form. Subhash, his parents, Gauri and the daughter she eventually bears are all reticent people — at one point, Subhash thinks of them as "a family of solitaries" — so it's necessary for our narrator to constantly eavesdrop on their various thoughts and relay them to us. For instance, Subhash proposes to Gauri by stressing the practicalities of their union: He woos her by saying in America she could pursue her studies in philosophy. But his unspoken words are those of a lovesick poet: "[Subhash] had tried to deny the attraction he felt for Gauri. But it was like the light of the fireflies that swam up to the house at night, random points that surrounded him, that glowed and then receded without a trail." Hastily enough, the two do wind up marrying and raising Gauri's daughter in America, but the memory of Udayan — his fierce politics and his terrible death — has corrosive aftereffects.
Book Reviews
With Controlled, Clinical Prose Lahiri Explores Love And Sacrifice