The Lowland: Part 8, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The narrative flashes back to the evening Udayan was killed. When the police vans approach his house, he sees them coming—he is on the roof. Ever since the explosion, he has felt a sense of both physical and emotional instability, and he is suddenly seized with a terrible vertigo. As he watches the paramilitary officers flood the courtyard of his home, he knows that he is too weak to leap from the roof to that of another building—instead, he runs back down the stairs, through the new part of the house and into the old, and out the narrow doors to the back garden.

Udayan runs quickly through the yard out back towards the lowland and enters the flooded pool where the water hyacinth is thickest—where it might hide him best. He takes a deep breath and goes under, pinching his nostrils closed with the fingers of his good hand. He feels pressure mounting in his lungs—he knows that the sensation he is feeling is carbon dioxide building up in his blood. He also knows that if he is able to fight the instinct to take a breath, his body can survive for up to six minutes underwater, as blood will flow to his vital organs; the doctor who treated his hand explained all of this to Udayan when he asked.

Underwater, Udayan feels a strange freedom—the freedom of not having to struggle to listen to anything. Since the explosion, his ears have been ringing constantly, causing him to have difficulty hearing. It is not silent, though, and Udayan can hear a “toneless exhalation” as sound conducts itself through the water. He wonders if the “deafness” he is feeling underwater is what it is like to visit a country where one does not understand the language.

Udayan mourns the fact that he has never been to China or Cuba and hears the final words Che Guevara had written to his children echoing in his head: “Remember that the revolution is the important thing, and that each one of us alone is worth nothing.” Thinking of these words now, Udayan laments that his own revolution “fixed nothing, helped no one.” He knows now that there will be no real revolution, and also wonders why his body is so desperate to save itself if he is “worth nothing” on his own.

Udayan’s body overcomes his mind and he surfaces involuntarily, gasping and choking. Two paramilitary officers have guns pointed at him, and one shouts into a megaphone, ordering him to surrender or face his family’s death. Udayan stands up in the weedy, shallow water of the lowland, still coughing. He feels unsteady and dizzy, and as he walks out of the water with his hands above his head, he is disappointed to realize that Bijoli and Gauri have returned from shopping to witness his capture.

Udayan remembers how his involvement with the Naxalites began. He and his fellow students lamented their country’s stagnant economy and deterioration of living standards. Independence, they felt, was a “travesty” which left half of India “still in chains.” After the 1966 strike at Presidency, Udayan and his group had successfully shut down Calcutta University for sixty-nine days.

After the strike at school, Udayan went to the countryside to “further indoctrinate himself.” He met desperate farmers, starving peasants, and witnessed the tragic effects of poverty. Udayan himself suffered during this time, never feeling well-fed or watered, and enduring terrible stomach cramps, but in miserable moments he reminded himself that his deprivation was only temporary.

Back in Calcutta, the CPI(M-L) formed. Subhash left for America, disapproving of the party’s objectives. His brother’s disdain filled Udayan with a “foreboding” feeling that the two would never meet again, but he shook it off. In Subhash’s absence, Udayan had only his comrades for friends, and filled his time with carrying out “missions” alongside them. As the missions grew increasingly dangerous, Udayan “began living two lives.” In one life, he was married to Gauri, living with his parents, working as a teacher, and pretending that the movement was behind him. In his life as a party member, however, he’d been enlisted in a mission to kill Nirmal Dey.

Udayan was not the one to stab Nirmal Dey in an alleyway, but he was the lookout, and he watched as the policeman bled out and died after his comrade’s attack. Udayan dipped his hand in the policeman’s blood and wrote the party’s initials on the alley wall once the deed was done, making his part in the act a “crucial” one.

At the edge of the lowland, Udayan listens as his parents plead with the police, professing their son’s innocence, having no knowledge of the truth of the things he has done. Udayan is brought over to beg at his family’s feet for their forgiveness and is able to look only Gauri in the eye. He knows that he has used her and involved her in his party’s plots, but he still loves her. He sees Gauri look at him with “disillusion,” and knows that she has already begun to revise everything they once shared.

The police put Udayan into the back of the van and start it up, but then cut the engine and pull him out again after a short drive. In the field where Udayan used to play with Subhash as a boy, the paramilitary officers untie Udayan’s hands from behind his back and tell him to walk in the opposite direction, reminding him to pause after every step. Though the officers are telling Udayan he can return to his family, he knows that they are not telling the truth.

Udayan feels the bullets rip through him and hears only silence as he is pulled out of the world. He is not alone, though; Gauri is in front of him, in the peach-colored sari she wore to meet him at the cinema. Udayan sees Gauri coming towards him, her hair shimmering. He knows she is speaking to him but cannot hear what she is saying. He takes a step towards her, mesmerized by the sunlight on her hair.