The Lowland Quotes
"let me return to my home town entombed in grass as in a warm and high sea."
"The flooded plain was thick with water hyacinth. The floating weed grew aggressively. Its leaves caused the surface to appear solid."
"Simple huts stood here and there along the periphery. The poor waded in to forage for what was edible."
"In the humid climate of Calcutta, evaporation was slow. But eventually the sun burned off most of the floodwater, exposing damp ground again."
"They’d never set foot in the Tolly Club. Like most people in the vicinity, they’d passed by its wooden gate, its brick walls, hundreds of times."
"If you were born into that life, what would you do?"
"People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can’t shoot back."
"I don’t think wanting to make a difference is selfish, no."
"His hands seemed an extension of his voice, always in motion, embellishing the things he said."
"Thinking is superior to seeing? For Descartes, yes."
"Nothing but farmland, dirt roads, sky and trees. The closest movie theatre was twenty miles away."
"That was their gift to you, Udayan said. Autonomy."
"She felt her mind sharpening, focusing. Wrestling with the concrete mechanisms of the world, instead of doubting its existence."
"She was an aunt to children her own age."
"She didn’t think she resented her parents for not raising her. It was the way of many large families, and considering the circumstances, it was not so strange."
"Why should you leave a place you love, and stop doing what you love to do, for the sake of a man?"
"She saw that his mouth never fully closed, that there was a diamond-shaped aperture at the center."
"He talks these days of going to America."
"For the first time they kissed each other good night but nothing more."
"It was the presence of Joshua, always with them, always between them, that continued to motivate him to seek Holly out."
"He thought of the Mahalaya playing on All India Radio. Throughout Tollygunge, across Calcutta and the whole of West Bengal, people were waking up in darkness to listen to the oratorio as light crept into the sky, invoking Durga as she descended to earth with her four children."
"She was unable to cry. There were only the tears disconnected to feeling, that gathered and sometimes fell from the corners of her eyes in the morning, after sleep."
"Her strongest image was always of time, both past and future; it was an immediate horizon, at once orienting and containing her."
"Only the present moment, lacking any perspective, eluded her grasp. It was like a blind spot, just over her shoulder."
"There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would."
"It was like holding her breath, as Udayan had tried to do in the lowland. And yet somehow she was breathing."
"She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end."
"It means everything. It’s the only thing he’s left us, his mother said."
"The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator."
"The more his involvement had deepened, the more evasive he’d turned."
"She began to imagine scenarios, unbidden but persistent. Grotesque images of Bela’s head snapping back, her neck breaking."
"I hate how my parents treat you, he said."
"Subhash had never suggested it, perhaps because he knew that the idea wouldn’t appeal to Gauri."
"That night, asleep on the couch, he dreamed of Gauri for the first time."
"The day after speaking to Gauri, Subhash went out, alone, into the city for the first time."
"He was unable to move forward. And it was too late to avoid her now."
"Do not pity me, though the rest of his family had perished before the camp was liberated; though there was an identification number on his lower arm, the tattoo concealed beneath his clothing."
"She wanted to please him, to salute him somehow."
"This is ambitious material. One might say presumptuous."
"I have finished with this class. And I suggest you put this paper in a drawer and not look at it for a few years."
"My first husband was killed, she said. I watched it happen. I married his brother, to get away."
"With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before."
"Around Bela I am only reminded of all the ways I’ve failed her."
"But there had never been a conversation in which she expressed a wish to leave."
"You have left her with me and yet you have taken her away."
"She was like any other intelligent doctor, examining the patient and already knowing the underlying disease."
"The descending sun pours a shaft of light over the water, wider at the horizon, tapering toward land."
"The wind no longer opposing her but at her back, thrusting her into the world."
"She had mentioned nothing to him. She had bought the supplies, kept them hidden, maturing on her own."
"He understood that perhaps he no longer existed in his mother’s mind, that she’d already let go of him."
"The only company he longed for was Bela’s."
"In spite of her Western clothes, her Western academic interests, a woman who spoke English with a foreign accent."
"The obligation to be open to others, to forge these alliances, had initially been an unexpected strain."
"Her life had been pared down to its solitary components, its self-reliant code."
"Her ideology was isolated from practice, neutered by its long tenure in the academy."
"The three hours on her watch that separated her from Bela and Subhash were like a physical barrier, as massive as the mountains she’d flown over to get here."
"The only cold of the place was visual, on the mountaintops, the abbreviated patches of white that collected among their peaks."
"Her existence all these years, after Udayan, without Bela or Subhash, remained indulgence enough."
"A connection she had severed, resulting in a death that applied only to the two of them."
"He remembered the drive to meet Gauri at the airport, in 1972, believing he would spend his life with her."
"The presence of another generation within her was forcing a new beginning, also demanding an end."
"At the same time he had never felt more pathetic, more frail."
"All the sleepless nights, ever since Richard’s death, were crushing him."
"Part of him knew she would be, that the only way to keep her in the house after what he’d told her would be to tie her to it."
"The facts of her paternity had changed. Two instead of one."
"She’d been lied to all her life. But the lie refused to accommodate the truth."
"Around Bela her mother had never pretended. She had transmitted an unhappiness that was steady, an ambient signal that was fixed."
"In its place was a heavy stone, like certain stones embedded deep in the sand when she dug on the beach."
"For a few days he called in sick to the lab."
"He wanted to call Gauri, to lash out at her, to tell her she had defeated him utterly."
"At every moment the past is there, appended to the present."
"He’d worked as a CPI(M) organizer in Darjeeling, then broken with the party after the Naxalbari uprising."
"The courtyard had been decorated with patterns in her honor, painted by hand."
"I was popular once, I have lost my popularity."
"She went home, to her desk, and switched on the computer."
"The semester went on, she taught her last classes, turned in her grades."
"Bela was washing dishes when Meghna came up to her, tugging on the edge of her sweater."
"She sat in the car, in snarled traffic, the atmosphere heavy with smog."
"The night before they came for him he fell asleep, as he had been unable to do for days."
"She put her hand over his chest, feeling its rise and fall."
"Whatever happened, he told her, he regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life."
"As the morning steadily brightened, he did not let it go."
"She lay in darkness. Eventually, for a few hours, she slept."
"The milky dawn was opaque, as if she were high in the mountains and not at the base of a sprawling delta, the world’s largest delta, at the level of the sea."
"The morning had begun, another day. Mothers taking uniformed children to school, men and women hurrying to their jobs."
"He is overwhelmed by the sky’s clarity, the number of stars."
"He is awash with the gratitude of his advancing years, for the timeless splendors of the earth, for the opportunity to behold them."
"The years the couple have together are a shared conclusion to lives separately built, separately lived."
"They stop when they tire, to admire the views, to sit and eat biscuits, pieces of cheese."
"He looks up and sees the brooding gray sky stretching over the earth. The ceaseless movement of the atmosphere, low clouds drifting for miles."
"She’d arrived to meet him in the middle of the day, still more stranger than wife, about to sit with him in the dark."