The Lowland

Subhash understands why Gauri is withdrawn and feels sorry for her sadness. When the baby arrives, he hopes that she will begin to feel better and maybe even become more of a wife to him: “That the child would bring them together, first as parents, then as husband and wife” (138).

Subhash once again runs into Narasimhan who invites Subhash and Gauri to a dinner party at his house. While Subhash talks with the husbands, Gauri mingles with the wives; this pleases Subhash. They leave the party; Gauri explains that she does not have anything in common with the women at the party and does not want to see them again.

Later in the week, Gauri is not home when Subhash returns. Gauri had cut her long hair off, torn apart her saris, and gone shopping for American style clothing: “For the first time, he was angry at her” (141). That night, he has a dream that they are having sex: he wakes up feeling guilty and yet also longing for her as a wife. 

Spending the summer in the library, Gauri is reading when she goes into labor. She returns home, waiting for Subhash to come home from work, and then they drive through the rain to the hospital. When Bela is born, Gauri “was relieved that her hope had been fulfilled, and that a younger version of Udayan had not come back to her” (144).

Gauri needs Subhash’s help in keeping up with the demands of a newborn. Although she gratefully accepts his help, she also does not like feeling dependent on him or Bela’s dependence on her. She feels impulses of fear that she will drop her child, either accidentally or deliberately.

One night, Subhash falls asleep on Gauri’s bed while caring for Bela, and Gauri invites him to stay. They start a sexual relationship that is passive on her part, yet inviting: “At first she expressed no obvious desire, only a willingness” (147).

Bela is four years old and does not yet understand time; yesterday could be any day in the past: “Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction” (149). Bela becomes frustrated with her mother when Gauri doesn’t understand what Bela means. Gauri is harsh and short with Bela.

Gauri starts to write and research the concept of time when Bela is at day school on campus. Just like Bela, Gauri has a displaced sense of time and seeks to make sense of it all. Her relationship with Bela does not appear to be very close, and Bela is aware of the distance even at her young age. 

Subhash defends his dissertation during his seventh year in Rhode Island. He has not been back to see his parents since Udayan was killed because he is anxious: “He didn’t want to be around the only other people in the world who knew he was not Bela’s father” (155). Subhash tries to spend as much time with Bela as possible; he’s always the one to put her to bed and lies with her until she falls asleep.

During Gauri and Subhash’s weekly Saturday trip to the supermarket, they run into Holly and her husband. They have a cordial exchange, and the encounter leaves Subhash feeling jealous. He is in an unhappy relationship and believes that Gauri isn’t happy with him or with being a mother. Subhash craves a real family and a sibling for Bela. While he doesn’t regret marrying Gauri, he does wish that she would warm to the idea of having a child with him: “He believed it would correct the imbalance, if they were four instead of three” (158).

Instead of paying attention to Bela, Gauri is always focused on her books. With Subhash, Gauri is happy with the physical satisfaction of their sexual relationship, but she is emotionally detached: “With Subhash she learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it” (162).

When Gauri asks to hire a sitter so that she can take a German philosophy course, Subhash becomes mad that she is shirking her duties as a mother. As a compromise, he rearranges his schedule so that he can watch Bela while Gauri takes the class. Gauri becomes increasingly unsatisfied with being a stay-at-home mother, feeling trapped and jealous of Subhash’s freedom. Anytime that Subhash is home, Gauri goes to the library: “But Gauri feared she had already descended to a place where it was no longer possible to swim up to Bela, to hold on to her” (164). Gauri is haunted by her inability to love, her inability to forget and forgive Udayan for dying, and her inability to find any joy in her situation.

Gauri’s joy is in taking classes and discussing philosophy. One professor, Otto Weiss, makes an impression on her for having lived through Nazi Germany in a camp and finding meaning in his new life in America. He calls her to his office after submitting her final paper, critiquing her writing. He tells her to study German and French and then apply for a doctoral program. He offers to get her into a program at a nearby university so that she can commute. 

Bela is in school, and Gauri starts to let her walk to the bus stop by herself. One morning, Bela doesn’t want to go to school because there are lots of earthworms on the ground after a hard rain, and she is frightened. Gauri has a flashback to dead bodies being littered on the ground in Tollygunge—the bodies of party members left to shock people. Gauri drags Bela crying to the bus stop: “I’ll never like you for the rest of my life” (170), Bela cries out as she boards the bus.

Gauri asks Subhash to tell Bela about Udayan. At six years old, Subhash doesn’t think she is ready, and he never wants to tell her. They don’t tell Bela but agree to tell her together one day. Gauri realizes that this could “compromise the alliance between Subhash and Bela she’d come to depend on” (171).

One afternoon, Gauri notices a man looking at her on campus. She sees him occasionally and starts to fantasize that she is having sex with him instead of Subhash. On her way to pick up Bela one afternoon, she sees him and follows him on campus. After she watches him kiss a woman on campus, she runs into a bathroom and masturbates. She avoids running into him in the future.

Gauri runs to the store and leaves Bela at home. She tells Bela that she is going down to get the mail, but she goes to the corner store two minutes away. In this moment, Gauri feels a thrill that she starts to seek more often, spending 10 or 15 minutes at a time wandering campus, dropping a book at the library, or getting a newspaper. Arriving early from work one day, Subhash finds Bela on her own.

Subhash ignores Gauri for days and then tells her she is unfit to be a mother. His anger gives her the freedom to break free from pretending in their marriage; they stop sleeping together, and he stops asking to have a child with Gauri. Gauri starts a PhD program in Boston, commuting two days a week while a student watches Bela.