Book Review -- The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

                      In the name of the brother

“It was another example of Newton’s second law of motion. Force equals mass times acceleration”, Udayan explains to a friend. They are discussing insurgencies erupting all over the world. In Latin American countries, in East Pakistan, closer home in Naxalbari, situated in the foothills of the Himalayas. Ensconced in their youth, with tea and tobacco for company, the friends passionately argue how movements led by students are gaining ground, venting to the authoritarian systems. In his mind, Udayan is certain the time to stay inert is long past. Unbeknownst to him, the ripples of his actions will travel far, converting many lives.

The Lowland opens in a middle class neighborhood of Calcutta of the 50s. Udayan and his older brother Subhash are inseparable in their escapades but worlds apart as individuals.  They pass their time studying history and physics, practicing Morse code with the home buzzer, gazing at Bengali actresses emerging from the nearby studio, sneaking into the coveted Tolly Club and passing high school exams with flying colors. Often during their wanderings, the brothers cut across a low lying patch of land behind their home, that remains flooded most of the year.

They go separate ways in college, making new friends, absorbing a fast changing world around them. Subhash, the reticent academic wants to pursue Oceanography in an American university. Udayan—the enfant terrible, is drawn towards radical Marxism and wants to renovate the world and its systems. Both pay scant regard to the early signs of stress their diverging paths convey --- much like the lowland, hidden from view but not absent. Life in this modest Tollygunge home traces a largely anticipated curve till hit by the maelstrom that is the Naxal movement. 

The Lowland is Jhumpa Lahiri’s most assured work till date. It is also immensely different from her earlier compositions on diaspora and identity strife. Keeping the notorious revolution (that devours Udayan) as her polestar, sweeping generations and reaching far-flung corners of the earth, Lahiri records the ill-fated journey that Gauri and Subhash undertake in the wake of Udayan’s death: A journey that renders both of them depleted and devastated.

Following the protracted course of the story, we are visited upon by snatches of Udayan’s memory. For Gauri, he is an apparition toying with her unbridled mind—a chimera that both deludes and enthralls her. For Bijoli, he is the departed hero whose impression does not fade (even as the world becomes a haze around her) with the distance in time. But the most telling effect is on Subhash: In death, Udayan assumes the role of an observer or perhaps a metronome, around which his brother must calibrate his existence. Udayan’s hold on him is total not least due to the terrible secret Subhash carries inside.

For a tale that hurtles from one crisis to another, the book is gratifying thanks to the dexterity of Lahiri’s script. Veering from pastiche to meditative, hectoring to hypnotic, the prose is sublime and achingly beautiful. Although the pace flounders here and there, the wealth of narrative detail evokes the blight of a fractured family. A family where each forges a “rootless path”, creating distance between them that is not “merely physical or emotional, but intractable”. Where endeavor merges with ideology and makes the isolation complete. 

Lahiri acknowledged in an interview to New York Times that the character of Gauri “was key to her exploration of how the events haunt and shape the others for the rest of their lives”. For a young girl who watches her husband’s execution, Gauri shows remarkable determination to attempt a new life in another corner of the world. But the relationship, both with Udayan and his revolution has altered her permanently, making her efforts at repair cause more tumult – exposing her “ineptitude, her inability to abide herself”.

The Lowland is not for the casual reader. Those looking for a formulaic saga of displacement, affiliation and assertion will most likely be disappointed. Here, a set of of emotional have-nots dart around an inky landscape, refusing to play along, making queries, raising doubts that reverberate long after the last word has been read.