The Lowland
"Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night." That's pretty much the tone of this novel. The Lowland happened to me by accident - one I have no qualms about. While vacating my beloved flat in Gurugram last month, I chanced upon this novel on an abandoned bookshelf in the living room I shared with my flatmates. Since there was nobody to claim it, I decided to make it mine! The Lowland is a story of an ordinary Bengali family torn by the Naxal movement back in the 1960s when life, supposedly, used to be simpler. It narrates the story of two brothers who, inseparable as kids, grew up to be polar opposites of each other. While the elder one, Subhash, moves to the US to build his own identity, the younger one, Udayan,...