The Lowland: Part 4, Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

At four years old, Bela is developing a memory. When she uses the word “yesterday,” though, she is referring to the whole of her life that has become before the present moment. Bela is a precocious child, and Gauri often finds herself losing her patience with her daughter. One day, when Gauri is zipping Bela’s jacket, Bela protests that Subhash lets her do it herself—“Your father’s not here,” Gauri replies, and is chilled by the double meaning of the sentence.

After dropping Bela at school, Gauri goes to the library each day to read. She is becoming more and more engaged with philosophy, filling notebooks with her own questions and observations about the nature of time—how it is perceived, how strangely it passes, whether animals are aware of it too. Gauri, who has been married to Subhash for five years now, feels more guarded by space than by time. She has, deliberately or otherwise, forgotten the things she saw from the terrace the night Udayan was killed, and believes it is because she physically removed herself from Tollygunge that she has been able to move on and go back to “willfully anticipating [the future] in ignorance and in hope.”

Each day at noon, Gauri collects Bela from nursery school. Subhash is attending a postdoctoral program fifty miles away and is gone each day. Gauri checks the mail with Bela each day at this time; she rarely gets any, but sometimes a letter from her brother Manash arrives with news of what’s happening in Calcutta. Kanu Sanyal is alive but in prison; Charu Majumdar died in police custody the same summer Bela was born. Many of Udayan’s comrades are still being tortured in prison. Though the Naxalite movement has attracted the attention of some Westerners, and many have written the Indian government demanding the prisoners’ release, Indira Gandhi has declared an Emergency and begun censoring the press. Reading these letters, Gauri can’t stop herself from expecting some news from Udayan.