The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri Read Free Book Online

he’d decided to become a professor. He’d traveled to the South when he was in college, to protest the segregation of public transportation. He’d spent two weeks in a Mississippi jail.
    He invited Subhash to go with him to the campus pub, where they shared a pitcher of beer and watched the television reports of Vietnam. Richard opposed the war, but he wasn’t a communist. He told Subhash that Gandhi was a hero to him. Udayan would have scoffed, saying that Gandhi had sided with enemies of the people. That he had disarmed India in the name of liberation.
    One day, walking past the quadrangle, Subhash saw Richard at the center of a group of students and faculty. He was wearing a black armband, standing on top of a van that had been driven onto the grass.
    Speaking through a megaphone, Richard said Vietnam was a mistake, and that the American government had had no right to intervene. He said innocent people in Vietnam were suffering.
    Some people called out or cheered, but most of them just listened and clapped, as they might at the theatre. They sprawled back on their elbows, sunning their faces on the grass in Rhode Island, listening to Richard protest a war that was being fought thousands of miles away.
    Subhash was the only foreigner. No students from other parts of Asia were there. It was nothing like the demonstrations that erupted now in Calcutta. Disorganized mobs representing rival communist parties, running helter-skelter through the streets. Chanting, unrelenting. They were demonstrations that almost always turned violent in the end.
    After listening to Richard for a few minutes, Subhash drifted away. He knew how much Udayan would have mocked him at that moment, for his desire to protect himself.
    He didn’t support the war in Vietnam, either. But like his father, he knew he had to be careful. He knew he could get arrested in America for denouncing the government, perhaps even for holding up a sign. He was here courtesy of a student visa, studying thanks to a fellowship. He’d been invited to America as Nixon’s guest.
    Here, each day, he remembered how he’d felt those evenings he and Udayan had snuck into the Tolly Club. This time he’d been admitted officially, and yet he remained vigilant, at the threshold. He knew that the door could close just as arbitrarily as it had opened. He knew that he could be sent back to where he’d come from, and that there would be plenty to take his place.
    There were a few other Indians at the university, but as far as Subhash could tell he was the only one from Calcutta. One day he met an economics professor named Narasimhan, from Madras. He had an American wife and two tanned, light-eyed sons who looked like neither of their parents.
    Narasimhan wore heavy sideburns, bell-bottomed jeans. His wife had a pretty neck, long beaded earrings, short red hair. Subhash saw them all for the first time one weekend on the quadrangle. They were the only people that afternoon in the square green enclosure at the center of campus, rimmed with trees.
    The boys were kicking a ball on the grass with their father. As Subhash and Udayan used to do, on the field on the other side of the lowland, though their father had never joined them. The wife was lying on a blanket on the grass, on her side, smoking, sketching something in a notebook.
    This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family had wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family had reacted to her. He wondered if she’d ever been to India. If she had, he wondered whether she’d liked it or hated it. He could not guess from looking at her.
    The ball rolled over in Subhash’s direction, and he kicked it back to them, preparing to continue on his way.
    You must be the new student in marine chemistry, Narasimhan said, walking toward him, shaking his hand. Subhash Mitra?
    Yes.
    From Calcutta?
    He nodded.
    I’m supposed to keep an eye out for you.