The Lowland Read Free Page B

passed by the house. It was their private back-and-forth, the way two players passed a ball between them as they advanced together toward the goal. If one of them saw their tutor approaching, they pressed SOS. Three dots, three dashes, three dots again.
    They were admitted to two of the city’s best colleges. Udayan would go to Presidency to study physics. Subhash, for chemical engineering, to Jadavpur. They were the only boys in their neighborhood, the only students from their unremarkable high school, to have done so well.
    To celebrate, their father went to the market, bringing back cashews and rosewater for pulao, half a kilo of the most expensive prawns. Their father had started working at nineteen to help support his family. Not having a college degree was his sole regret. He had a clerical position with the Indian Railways. As word spread of his sons’ success, he said he could no longer step outside the house without being stopped and congratulated.
    It had had nothing to do with him, he told these people. His sons had worked hard, they’d distinguished themselves. What they’d accomplished, they’d accomplished on their own.
    Asked what they wanted as a gift, Subhash suggested a marble chess set to replace the worn wooden pieces they’d always had. But Udayan wanted a shortwave radio. He wanted more news of the world than what came through their parents’ old valve radio, encased in its wooden cabinet, or what was printed in the daily Bengali paper, rolled slim as a twig, thrown over the courtyard wall in the mornings.
    They put it together themselves, searching in New Market, in junk shops, finding parts from Indian Army surplus. They followed a set of complicated instructions, a worn-out circuit diagram. They laid out the pieces on the bed: the chassis, the capacitors, the various resistors, the speaker. Soldering the wires, working together on the task. When it was finally assembled, it looked like a little suitcase, with a squared-off handle. Made of metal, bound in black.
    The reception was often better in winter than in summer. Generally better at night. This was when the sun’s photons weren’t breakingup molecules in the ionosphere. When positive and negative particles in the air quickly recombined.
    They took turns sitting by the window, holding the receiver in their hands, in various positions, adjusting the antenna, manipulating two controls at once. Rotating the tuning dial as slowly as possible, they grew familiar with the frequency bands.
    They searched for any foreign signal. News bulletins from Radio Moscow, Voice of America, Radio Peking, the BBC. They heard arbitrary information, snippets from thousands of miles away, emerging from great thickets of interference that tossed like an ocean, that wavered like a wind. Weather conditions over Central Europe, folk songs from Athens, a speech by Abdel Nasser. Reports in languages they could only guess at: Finnish, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese.
    It was 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized America to use military force against North Vietnam. There was a military coup in Brazil.
    In Calcutta Charulata was released in cinema halls. Another wave of riots between Muslims and Hindus killed over one hundred people after a relic was stolen from a mosque in Srinagar. Among the communists in India there was dissent over the border war with China two years before. A breakaway group, sympathetic to China, called itself the Communist Party of India, Marxist: the CPI(M).
    Congress was still running the central government in Delhi. After Nehru died of a heart attack that spring his daughter, Indira, entered the cabinet. Within two years, she would become the Prime Minister.
    In the mornings, now that Subhash and Udayan were beginning to shave, they held up a hand mirror and a pan of warm water for one another in the courtyard. After plates of steaming rice and dal and matchstick potatoes they walked to the mosque at the corner, leaving their enclave