Instead, the police accompanied the dead man to the cremation ground, along with a few chosen members, as though the attentions they had paid the prisoner had brought them as close to Charu Mazumdar as his own family.
Two years after, Mahasweta Devi wrote about Sujata, mother to the corpse of prisoner number 1084. Sujata's story was commonplace in a time of vanishing men. The boys and men, farmers, peasants, intellectuals, professors, fledgling revolutionaries who shaped the Naxal years were "disappeared". Often even their bodies vanished. Mother of 1084 has had a long afterlife, never quite forgotten, and in this era of encounters and Operation Green Hunts, never quite out of date.
In 2010, another revolutionary killed himself. "A seventy-eight-year-old man, wearing an undershirt and cotton pajamas, hanging from a nylon rope… His head was cocked to the right, the back of his neck exposed above the undershirt. The sides of his feet were touching the floor. As if all he had to do was straighten his shoulders and move on." Jhumpa Lahiri's fourth book, The Lowland, comes out three years after the suicide of Kanu Sanyal. As with Mazumdar, Sanyal had suffered lung trouble, as though one of the legacies of being a Naxal was that it became hard to breathe anything but the air of revolution.
To write about the brothers who live near the lowland and the hyacinth ponds outside Calcutta's Tollygunge, Ms Lahiri has had to bridge great distances, writing across time and geography. But the first few pages of The Lowland stand among the best opening chapters of recent times.
Ms Lahiri has been accused of overwriting, a lazy claim, as unfair as accusing Tomas Transtromer or Adonis of writing too poetically. On the contrary, her prose here and in the final chapters is rich, precise and moving. The lives of Udayan and Subhash are lived outside the high walls of the Tolly Club. Egrets, water buffalos, an egg fallen from a warbler's nest, along with the dank air that rises from the hyacinth leaves, mark both the areas forbidden to the boys and the familiar roads of their own homes. They commit a minor crime - trespassing - and a major one - aspiring to the lives of those above them - by trying to play golf with a discarded putting iron, and are crudely chastised by a policeman.
Subhash goes to America, to study marine chemistry, Udayan becomes a Naxalite. His blue aerogrammes carry slogans to Subhash that are now old and tired, but that shone for a brief while in the 1970s, before the worst of the violence had consumed both the revolutionaries and the state. "War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war." Udayan marries Gauri, a young woman who shares his beliefs; when he is killed, his body not handed back to his family, he leaves behind a pregnant wife. She marries Subhash, and starts a new life in America, and it is on this scaffolding that Ms Lahiri builds The Lowland.
The middle passages of The Lowland sag; the Naxal years and their aftermath are conveyed in clipped, short bursts, as if to underline the safe distance between Subhash, Gauri, his brother's child and that period. Gauri's life is somewhat airless, and Ms Lahiri mirrors this airlessness with such precision that she almost suffocates her readers.
None of the characters are as vivid as Udayan; despite the quiet force of Ms Lahiri's prose, it is the Bengal landscape that dominates the novel, rather than the more familiar stories of estrangement and middle-aged griefs offered by the lives of the characters in America.
Thirty years ago, Mahasweta Devi wrote with an immediacy and an urgency, and The Lowland lacks the towering imaginative power of Mother of 1084 or Dopdi Mejhen. But Ms Lahiri marries her instinctive compassion for her characters with a frighteningly pitiless gaze; what she does in The Lowland is to change the rules.
The classic revolutionary novel ends with redemption, or with an evocation of loss, or with visions of future change. Ms Lahiri clinically removes every possibility of redemption from the survivors: love, parenthood, the life of the mind, other revolutions, none of these things will shape their lives as starkly as the absence of Udayan has. In a time when it may no longer be possible to believe in revolution, after failed Occupations and murky Arab Springs, she refuses to offer easy solace.
Instead, The Lowland hints that if grace is to be found, it might be in the small, fleeting moments of our lives. Two brothers, golf balls heavy in their pockets, climbing a wall. The sight of a heron in flight, the beat of its wings forcing a kind of helpless love on the spectator. The last thing a man about to die sees; the sight of the bookish girl he had married, and then the bullets end that story. There may be novels more dazzling, but few writers have Ms Lahiri's gift for creating stark, unforgettable meaning out of shades of grey, failed revolutions and ambiguous lives.
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