Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland

About the Book

Two brothers bound by tragedy; a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past; a country torn by revolution: the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times best-selling author gives us a powerful new novelset in both India and Americathat explores the price of idealism and a love that can last long past death.

Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, and Udayancharismatic and impulsivefinds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty: he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brothers political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their familys home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behindincluding those seared in the heart of his brothers wife.

Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies. This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic.

Published by Knopf, September 2013

About the Author

JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of three previous works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, and most recently, Unaccustomed Earth. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.

ALSO BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

Unaccustomed Earth

The Namesake

Interpreter of Maladies

This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright 2013 by Jhumpa Lahiri

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lahiri, Jhumpa.
The lowland : a novel / Jhumpa Lahiri. First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-26574-6
1. BrothersFiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)Fiction. 3. Naxalite MovementFiction. 4. IndiaFiction. I. Title.
PS 3562. A 316 L 69 2013
813.54dc23 2012043878

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
[to come; ISBN 978-0-676-97936-7]

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Front-of-jacket photograph tk
Jacket design by tk

Manufactured in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

For Carin, who believed from the beginning, and Alberto, who saw me to the end

CONTENTS

lascia chio torni al mio paese sepolto nellerba come in un mare caldo e pesante.

let me return to my home town entombed in grass as in a warm and high sea.

GIORGIO BASSANI , Saluto a Roma

I

East of the Tolly Club, after Deshapran Sashmal Road splits in two, there is a small mosque. A turn leads to a quiet enclave. A warren of narrow lanes and modest middle-class homes.

Once, within this enclave, there were two ponds, oblong, side by side. Behind them was a lowland spanning a few acres.

After the monsoon the height of the ponds would rise so that the embankment built between them could not be seen. The lowland also filled with rain, three or four feet deep, the water remaining for a portion of the year.

The flooded plain was thick with water hyacinth. The floating weed grew aggressively. Its leaves caused the surface to appear solid. Green in contrast to the blue of the sky.

Simple huts stood here and there along the periphery. The poor waded in to forage for what was edible. In autumn egrets arrived, their white feathers darkened from the citys soot, waiting motionless for their prey.

In the humid climate of Calcutta, evaporation was slow. But eventually the sun burned off most of the floodwater, exposing damp ground again.

So many times Subhash and Udayan had walked across the lowland. It was a shortcut to a field on the outskirts of the neighborhood, where they went to play football. Avoiding puddles, stepping over mats of hyacinth leaves that remained in place. Breathing the dank air.

Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain.

Theyd never set foot in the Tolly Club. Like most people in the vicinity, theyd passed by its wooden gate, its brick walls, hundreds of times.

Until the mid-forties, from behind the wall, their father used to watch horses racing around the track. Hed watched from the street, standing among the bettors and other spectators unable to afford a ticket, or to enter the clubs grounds. But after the Second World War, around the time Subhash and Udayan were born, the height of the wall was raised, so that the public could no longer see in.

Bismillah, a neighbor, worked as a caddy at the club. He was a Muslim who had stayed on in Tollygunge after Partition. For a few paisas he sold them golf balls that had been lost or abandoned on the course. Some were sliced like a gash in ones skin, revealing a pink rubbery interior.

At first they hit the dimpled balls back and forth with sticks. Then Bismillah also sold them a putting iron with a shaft that was slightly bent. A frustrated player had damaged it, striking it against a tree.

Bismillah showed them how to bend forward, where to place their hands. Loosely determining the objective of the game, they dug holes in the dirt, and tried to coax the balls in. Though a different iron was needed to drive the ball greater distances, they used the putter anyway. But golf wasnt like football or cricket. Not a sport the brothers could satisfactorily improvise.

In the dirt of the playing field, Bismillah scratched out a map of the Tolly Club. He told them that closer to the clubhouse there was a swimming pool, stables, a tennis court. Restaurants where tea was poured from silver pots, special rooms for billiards and bridge. Gramophones playing music. Bartenders in white coats who prepared drinks called pink lady and gin fizz.

The clubs management had recently put up more boundary walls, to keep intruders away. But Bismillah said that there were still sections of wire fencing where one might enter, along the western edge.

They waited until close to dusk, when the golfers headed off the course to avoid the mosquitoes, and retreated to the clubhouse to drink their cocktails. They kept the plan to themselves, not mentioning it to other boys in the neighborhood. They walked to the mosque at their corner, its red-and-white minarets distinct from the surrounding buildings. They turned onto the main road carrying the putting iron, two kerosene tins.