The Lowland Read Free Page A

south in the early 1930s. It was to facilitate their journey to the Tolly Club, to escape the city’s commotion, and to be among their own.
    In high school the brothers studied optics and forces, the atomic numbers of the elements, the properties of light and sound. They learned about Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, and Marconi’s experiments with wireless transmissions. Jagadish Chandra Bose, a Bengali, in a demonstration in Calcutta’s town hall, had shown that electromagnetic waves could ignite gunpowder, and cause a bell to ring from a distance.
    Each evening, at opposite sides of a metal study table, they sat with their textbooks, copybooks, pencils and erasers, a chess game that would be in progress at the same time. They stayed up late, working on equations and formulas. It was quiet enough at night to hear the jackals howling in the Tolly Club. At times they were still awake when the crows began quarreling in near unison, signaling the start of another day.
    Udayan wasn’t afraid to contradict their teachers about hydraulics, about plate tectonics. He gesticulated to illustrate his points, to emphasize his opinions, the interplay of his hands suggesting that molecules and particles were within his grasp. At times he was asked by their Sirs to step outside the room, told that he was holding up his classmates, when in fact he’d moved beyond them.
    At a certain point a tutor was hired to prepare them for their college entrance exams, their mother taking in extra sewing to offset the expense. He was a humorless man, with palsied eyelids, held open with clips on his glasses. He could not keep them open otherwise. Every evening he came to the house to review wave-particle duality, the laws of refraction and reflection. They memorized Fermat’s principle: The path traversed by light in passing between two points is that which will take the least time .
    After studying basic circuitry, Udayan familiarized himself with the wiring system of their home. Acquiring a set of tools, he figured out how to repair defective cords and switches, to knot wires, to file away the rust that compromised the contact points of the table fan. He teased their mother for always wrapping her finger in the material of her sari because she was terrified to touch a switch with her bare skin.
    When a fuse blew, Udayan, wearing a pair of rubber slippers, never flinching, would check the resistors and unscrew the fuses, while Subhash, holding the flashlight, stood to one side.
    One day, coming home with a length of wire, Udayan set about installing a buzzer for the house, for the convenience of visitors. He mounted a transformer on the fuse box, and a black button to push by the main door. Hammering a hole in the wall, he fed the new wires through.
    Once the buzzer was installed, Udayan said they should use it to practice Morse code. Finding a book about telegraphy at a library, he wrote out two copies of the dots and dashes that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, one for each of them to consult.
    A dash was three times as long as a dot. Each dot or dash was followed by silence. There were three dots between letters, seven dots between words. They identified themselves simply by initial. The letter s , which Marconi had received across the Atlantic Ocean, was three quick dots. U was two dots and a dash.
    They took turns, one of them standing by the door, the other inside, signaling to one another, deciphering words. They got good enough to send coded messages that their parents couldn’t understand. Cinema , one of them would suggest. No, tram depot, cigarettes .
    They concocted scenarios, pretending to be soldiers or spies in distress. Covertly communicating from a mountain pass in China, a Russian forest, a cane field in Cuba.
    Ready?
    Clear.
    Coordinates?
    Unknown.
    Survivors?
    Two.
    Losses?
    Pressing the buzzer, they would tell each other that they were hungry, that they should play football, that a pretty girl had just