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Unlike most of Lahiri’s previous work, though, The Lowland mostly concentrates on the immigrants themselves, rather than their children, in this case, Subhash and Gauri, who arrive in Rhode Island in the early 1970s. Though in the end, they will live longer in America than they ever did in India, the most crucial incident in their lives is already behind them, in the lowland of the title, an empty lot behind the house where Subhash and his brother Udayan grew up.
“Once, within this enclave,” Lahiri writes on the first page, “there were two ponds, oblong, side by side. . . . After the monsoon the ponds would rise so that the embankment built between them could not be seen.”
Years later, on a visit to Calcutta, Subhash takes his daughter to the golf club (legally this time). “They stopped under an enormous banyan. Her father explained that it was a tree that began life attached to another, sprouting from its crown. The mass of twisted strands, hanging down like ropes, were aerial roots surrounding the host. Over time, the coalesced, forming additional trunks, encircling a hollow core if the host happened to die.”
