THE LOWLAND BY JHUMPA LAHIRI
In April, in New York, I went into a bookstore on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side and picked up Lahiri’s second novel (in a handsome, somehow perfectly dimensioned paperback edition) and stood there and read the opening sentences:
East of the Tolly Club, after Deshapran Sashmal Road splits in two, there is a small mosque. A turn leads to a quiet enclave. A warren of narrow lanes and modest middle-class homes.
Once, within this enclave, there were two ponds, oblong, side by side. Behind them was a lowland spanning a few acres.
After the monsoon, the ponds would rise so that the embankment built between them could not be seen. The lowland also filled with rain, three or four feet deep, the water remaining for a portion of the year.
I bought the book. I can remember nodding and thinking O yes in response to these sentences—it is their sober calm, maybe; the quality they have that’s somehow akin to beats on a resting line. I think I once told a tableful of students that reading Lahiri was like driving through ice cream; that is what I meant. Reading The Lowland I learned things—about the Naxalite movement in India, parenthood, and philosophy. But what’s most beautifully arresting to me is the way it holds onto and surrounds the central image introduced here.
(The bookstore I wandered into was P&T Knitwear. The publisher of The Lowland in this edition is Vintage [2014]. I also bought a postcard of Jodie Foster in a red dress.)