Free The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri Page B

standing there all the while on the sidewalk, waiting for her. Waiting, until they were in the darkness of the theatre, to take her hand.

Chapter 2
    In the second year of his Ph.D. Subhash lived on his own, now that Richard, who’d found a teaching job in Chicago, was gone.
    In the spring semester, for three weeks, he boarded a research vessel with a group of students and professors. As the ship pulled away, the water cleaved a foaming trail that vanished even as it was being formed. The shoreline receded, resting calmly like a thin brown snake upon the water. He saw the earth’s mass shrinking, turning faint.
    Under the sun’s glare, as they picked up speed, he felt the wind’s motion on his face, the wild turbulence of the atmosphere. They docked first in Buzzards Bay. A barge had hit rocks off the coast of Falmouth two years before, running aground on a foggy night, spilling nearly two hundred thousand gallons of fuel oil. The wind had pushed it into Wild Harbor. The hydrocarbons had killed off the marsh grass. Fiddler crabs, unable to bury themselves, had frozen in place.
    They lowered nets for trawling fish and coffee cans for sampling the sediment. They learned that the contamination could persist indefinitely.
    They continued on to survey Georges Bank, where the phytoplankton was in bloom, the population of diatoms exploding in great swirls of peacock blue. But on cloudy days the ocean looked opaque, as dark as tar.
    He watched the life that circled the ship, gannets with creamy heads and black-and-white wings, dolphins that leaped in pairs. Humpback whales spouted mists as they breathed, playfully breaching in the water, sometimes swimming beneath the ship without disturbing it, emerging on the other side.
    Sailing even slightly east reminded Subhash of how far away he was from his family. He thought of the time it took to cross even a tiny portion of the earth’s surface.
    Isolated on the ship with the scientists and other students andcrew, he felt doubly alone. Unable to fathom his future, severed from his past.
    For a year and a half he had not seen his family. Not sat down with them, at the end of the day, to share a meal. In Tollygunge his family did not have a phone line. He’d sent a telegram to let them know he’d arrived. He was learning to live without hearing their voices, to receive news of them only in writing.
    Udayan’s letters no longer referred to Naxalbari, or ended with slogans. He didn’t mention politics at all. Instead he wrote about football scores, or about this or that in the neighborhood—a certain store closing down, a family they’d known moving away. The latest film by Mrinal Sen.
    He asked Subhash how his studies were going, and how he spent his days in Rhode Island. He wanted to know when Subhash would return to Calcutta, asking him, in one of the letters, if he planned to get married.
    Subhash saved a few of these letters, since it no longer seemed necessary to throw them away. But their blandness puzzled him. Though the handwriting was the same, it was almost as if they’d been written by a different person. He wondered what was happening in Calcutta, what Udayan might be masking. He wondered how he and his parents were getting along.
    Letters from his parents referred only obliquely to Gauri, and only as an example of what not to do. We hope, when the time comes, you will trust us to settle your future, to choose your wife and to be present at your wedding. We hope you will not disregard our wishes, as your brother did .
    He replied, reassuring his mother and father that his marriage was up to them to arrange. He sent a portion of his stipend to help pay for the work on the house, and wrote that he was eager to see them. And yet, day after day, cut off from them, he ignored them.
    Udayan was not alone; he’d remained in Tollygunge, attached to the place, the way of life he’d always known. He’d provoked his parents but was still protected by them. The only difference