In the name of the
brother
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.
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.
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.