The Lowland: Part 6, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Gauri has a dream—or a nightmare—of sitting in her and Udayan’s bedroom in Tollygunge with Udayan. In the dream, Udayan tells Gauri that Sinha has been arrested, and then begins undressing her. As he removes Gauri’s hair from its braid, she realizes it has gone gray—she has aged, but Udayan is still in his twenties, yet is “blind to this disjuncture.” Gauri tries to tell Udayan that she is married to Subhash, but he does not listen and continues to undress her.  As Gauri wakes from the dream, she wonders what Udayan would look like now, and reflects on the secrets she has kept for him all these years.

When Gauri first arrived in California, it was the living that haunted her—not the dead. She feared Subhash or Bela turning up on her new campus and confronting her or exposing her. In twenty years, though, no one from her past has come to her, and she has not been summoned back to Rhode Island.

Gauri left because she felt she had made errors during the early years of Bela’s life that she could never fix. Because she’d failed to build a good foundation with her daughter, she believed no attempt to build a relationship with her would succeed. She had also convinced herself that she and Subhash were rivals for Bela’s attention and affection, though she now sees that she had “painted herself into a corner” with her own hands.

After moving around California to take various teaching jobs over the years, Gauri has at last settled in Southern California, where she teaches philosophy and forges close relationships with her students. Though initially Gauri wanted to live an anonymous life, she has found comfort in her relationships with her loyal, admiring students and colleagues. Gauri has published three books in her life, one of which grew out of the first essay she wrote for Otto Weiss’s class. Gauri is fluent in German now, and attends conferences around the world a few times a year. On each plane ride, she brings the turquoise shawl Subhash gave to her back in Calcutta.

Gauri has lived a mostly isolated life and has steered clear of romance and physical intimacy alike—for the most part. She has had some dalliances with fellow academics but has never been “unraveled” by anyone other than Lorna, a female graduate student who came to Gauri’s office one day, expressing her admiration for Gauri’s work and asking her to serve as a reader on her dissertation. As Gauri and Lorna began working together, Gauri began experiencing an attraction to Lorna. She never acted on any of her desires, though, until one evening when Lorna showed up at Gauri’s office with wine and cheese, ready to celebrate the completion of her dissertation. Lorna kissed Gauri, and the two began a physical relationship. After Lorna’s dissertation defense, however, she was offered a job in Toronto, and moved away. The two still see each other occasionally at conferences, but their relationship is now strictly professional.

Gauri lives a simple life; she owns few things and sticks to a strict routine. She does not have many indulgences, feeling that her existence as it is now is indulgence enough.

One afternoon, Gauri receives a piece of patio furniture she’d ordered out of a catalog. When she removes it from its box, the smell of teak reminds her of the smell of her bedroom furniture back in Tollygunge. Gauri feels the smell breaks through the time and distance that have separated her from her memories of her previous life. She begins wondering about Bela, and why her daughter has never contacted her, but ultimately concludes the silence between them is “just punishment for her crime.”

Gauri knows that what she has done to Bela is “a crime worse than anything Udayan had committed,” and can never be undone. She hopes that Subhash has found happiness—she is grateful to him for having taken her away from Tollygunge, and, too, for releasing her when it was time.