Free The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri Page A

people. He wanted to see China one day.
    He mentioned certain friends who had already left Calcutta, to live among the peasants. Would you understand, if I ever needed to do something like that? Udayan asked her.
    She was aware that he was testing her. That he would lose respect if she turned sentimental, if she was unwilling to face certain risks. And so, though she did not want him to be away from her, did not want any harm to come to him, she told him that she would.
    Without him she was reminded of herself again. A person most at ease with her books, spending afternoons filling her notebooks in the cool high-ceilinged reading room of Presidency’s library. But this was a person she was beginning to question after meeting Udayan. A person that Udayan, with his unsteady fingers, was firmly pushing aside, wiping clean. So that she began to see herself more clearly, as a thin film of dust was wiped from a sheet of glass.
    In childhood, aware of her accidental arrival, she had not known who she was, where or to whom she’d belonged. With the exception of Manash she had not been able to define herself in relation to hersiblings, nor to see herself as a part of them. She had no memory of spending a moment, even in a house in such an isolated place, ever, alone with her mother or father. Always at the end of a queue, in the shadow of others, she believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own.
    Around men she’d felt invisible. She knew she was not the type they turned to look at on the street, or to notice across the room at a cousin’s wedding. She’d not been asked after and married off a few months later, as some of her sisters had been. She was a disappointment to herself, in this regard.
    Aside from her complexion, deep enough to be considered a flaw, perhaps there was nothing wrong with her. And yet, whenever she stopped to consider what made her appearance distinctive, she objected to it, thinking the shape of her face was too long, that her features were too severe. Wishing she could alter herself, believing that any other face would have been preferable.
    But Udayan regarded her as if no other woman in the city existed. Gauri never doubted, when they were together, that she had an effect on him. That it excited him to stand beside her, turning his face toward her, his gaze never wavering. He noticed the day she switched the parting in her hair, saying it suited her.
    One day, inside one of the books he’d given her, there was a note asking her to meet him at the cinema. A matinee showing—a hall close to Park Street.
    She was afraid to go, afraid not to. It was one thing to fall into conversations with him on the portico, or at the Coffee House, or to walk over to College Square to watch the swimmers in the pool. They had not yet strayed from that immediate neighborhood, where they were simply fellow students, where it was always reasonable for them to be.
    The afternoon of the film she hesitated, and she ended up being so late that she didn’t arrive until the interval, flustered, worried that he’d changed his mind or had given up on her, almost daring him to do this. But he had dared her, too, to show up.
    He was there, outside the theatre, smoking a cigarette, standing apart from the groups of people already discussing the first partof the film. The sun was beating down and he lifted his hand as she approached, angling his head toward her face, forming a little canopy over their heads. The gesture made her feel alone with him, sheltered in that great crowd. Distinct from the pedestrians, afloat on the city’s swell.
    She saw no sign of irritation or impatience in his expression when he spotted her. She saw only his pleasure in seeing her. As if he knew she would come; as if he knew, even, that she would deliberate, and be as ridiculously late as she was. When she asked what had happened in the film so far, he shook his head.
    I don’t know, he said, handing her the ticket. He’d been