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Published in The Free Press Journal: Weekend on October 6, 2013.


Read the article here.


                          Courtesy: Flipkart.com

With Inputs by Arnesh Ghose

Not too far from their house, there were two ponds set beside each other. Behind the ponds was a lowland, which never had much significance to the siblings Udayan and Subhash. It was just something you cross on your way to Tolly Club. It was in the floodwater of this lowland, submerged among the hyacinths, that Udayan now lay crouched, hiding from the policemen on the prowl.

The doctor had said that even if you didn’t breathe, you would still survive for about six minutes. Udayan could feel the breath he was holding going solid. But he was prepared to slug it out. There was only one small issue. His wife and his parents were held at gunpoint by a horde of policemen. Those khaki-clad symbols of institutional brutality. And they were training their guns at his father.

At this height of this nail-biting mise-en-scéne you see breathlessly building up, you hear a conch shell blowing. The sounds are carried in from another neighbourhood. Someone, somewhere, oblivious of the tumult barely a stone’s throw away, is making an offering at a temple. Within moments, you are whisked back to Udayan. The police take their aim. The clean shots fired are followed by the sound of crows, coarsely calling, scattering.

It is such contrasts that run naked throughout Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel ‘The Lowland’, when the dignity of a conch-shell is juxtaposed against the raw call of crows’ feast. Their presence make the events jump through the pages so that you see and hear the silence, now suffocating, so vivid.

Her previous works have concentrated on themes of nostalgia, the constant feeling of being ‘Nixon’s guests’ no matter how many years you live in the country; themes that often overlap. The American writer of Indian descent is comfortable with her middle-class characters and creating their solitude. You will find them everywhere – in the supermarket aisle comparing the price labels, on the beach ready to freeze the moment in their Kodak film rolls, laying out mats in the garden and throwing a Frisbee. They are not loud. They don’t believe in excesses. You won’t find them chilling at old Gatsby’s parties. They are a type – rooted in their culture, probably feeling more at ease striking up a conversation with the brown taxi driver than their white work colleagues.

Except for the rare moments like the one above, it is the mind is where the action lies.

So we have the Mitras- Subhash and Udayan, residents of Tollygunge in Calcutta. Born 15 months apart, they share a bond that extends all the way to America when Subhash decides to go there for higher studies. By then, Udayan has been deeply influenced by the Maoist movement. He takes up a teaching job at the university. When in shadows, he is one of the foot soldiers of the movement, attending Sanyal’s fiery speeches and going down to that little shop on the corner to buy banned literature. He has found love and a wife in Gauri, a philosophy student at the university.

As the air thickens with the red of the flags, a darker hue carpets the streets. Blood flows, revolutionaries and law-makers alike. With time, among them is Udayan’s. Subhash is appalled by the white-saree Gauri has been reduced to, ‘...so that she resembled other widows in her family. Women three times her age’. Even though she is now pregnant, Subhash unable to stifle a forbidden affection that rises in him. He offers to take her to America to start life anew.

Once in Rhode Island, one might think that Lahiri enters the familiar terrain. I expected another Ashima in Gauri, intimidated by everything around her before slowly building a cosy life as in The Namesake. But Gauri is a firebrand. She doesn’t flinch while raising her hand in the class nor is there any stutter in her speech. Her only weakness is her past. Udayan’s ghost looms large over the novel. And with that undercurrent, Lahiri creates a vast, deeply intimate drama spanning from the time of Nehru’s midnight speech to Obama bumper stickers.

‘The Lowland’ unfurls like a reel with Lahiri creating imagery that is as visible as it is audible. Sample her rains: the ‘avalanche of gravel on the thin, membrane like roof,’ the drops falling from the leaves ‘like a scattered applause’ while the rains recede, deliciously plugged in moments after Subhash makes love. Her novels were hardly political but Lahiri deftly manages the broader canvas with elegance, never sterilizing it. In one sentence, she captures all her characters’ conflicts: ‘The future haunted, but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.’

That Lahiri’s book would create waves all the way from the Pacific was a given. Ever since her Pulitzer-marked debut, Lahiri’s reputation preceded her work. Thus whether or not it had made it to the Booker Prize shortlist, The Lowland took birth in a world where it would go on to be the new book to read and be snooty about. So don’t be surprised to hear about Fox Studios coughing up a bomb to buy the movie rights of The Lowland. If made with as much love as The Namesake, there are lots of olive branches to be seen on the poster.



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