The Lowland

It is a new millennium. Subhash spends his weekends taking walks through town, and as he does he marvels at how he has moved from a city with so little space to a city with so much of it. On one walk one day, through a new nature trail, he sees a sign saying that the ground he is standing on was the site of a 1675 battle between the Narragansett tribe and a colonial militia. Subhash researches the battle online and learns that there is a granite marker somewhere in the nature preserve commemorating the battle. On the day he sets out to find it, however, Subhash gets lost. Standing in the swamp, he is profoundly aware of his age—he is over sixty, now—and of how alone he is.

One day, on the nature path, Subhash is surprised when a man on a bicycle pulls up next to him and addresses him by name. Subhash recognizes the man as Richard, his old roommate. The two are surprised but thrilled to see each another, and they sit and talk for a while, catching up and telling the stories of their lives. Richard has a wife and grandchildren, and his life is full of work and travel. Subhash feels his own life is sparse in comparison.

Subhash and Richard begin meeting frequently to walk the nature trails or have a beer in town. One weekend, the phone rings—it is Richard’s wife, telling Subhash that Richard has died suddenly from a blood clot. Subhash is devastated. He attends Richard’s funeral, and then the reception at Richard’s home; there, he meets a woman named Elise Silva, one of Richard’s neighbors. Subhash is attracted to Elise, and as the two begin talking, they discover another strange connection—Elise was one of Bela’s high school teachers. Elise now works part-time at the historical society. She is a widow. When Subhash asks her a question about the battle which took place on the nature path, Elise offers Subhash a spot on a tour of a house the historical society has been recently restored, and offers him her card. He accepts it.

For several nights after the funeral, Subhash cannot sleep. He is kept awake by his anxiety—he feels “a disproportionate awareness of being alive.” He is assaulted by memories of his childhood and cannot stop thinking of Udayan. He realizes that what is disturbing him so deeply that he is “still too weak to tell Bela what she deserve[s]” to know—in other words, the truth that Udayan is her father. It is “the great unfinished business of his life.” Subhash is still frightened to come clean to Bela, but knows that one day he will die—and he wants to have told her the truth before he does.

Subhash attends the tour of the historical society’s restored house and is shocked by the coincidence he discovers when he gets there—it is the house he used to share with Richard many years ago. As Subhash navigates the completely redone house, he feels that his presence on earth is being denied; he believes that his own past is refusing to admit him. He feels that Providence, the “arbitrary place” he landed after leaving Calcutta, is not, and has never been, his. He thinks of his childhood home in Tollygunge, which he still owns, and wonders if its current tenants are aware of that house’s own history.

A few days after the tour, Elise calls Subhash and asks if he’s all right—she noticed he seemed “shaken” on the tour. He tells her that she is fine. Elise then invites Subhash to join her hiking club on a trek through the Great Swamp—the site of the battle that has so interested Subhash.