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The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh: Into the Labyrinthine Text
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While going through the convoluted storyline of Amitav
Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines”, I was reminded of something that I had once studied
in an entirely different context. It was about the structured third generation
computer language which was designed to enable writing of “Go-to-free”
programs. What does that mean? It simply means that computer programs should be
readable, and that for readability consideration, their implementation trace should
not allow a one-way transfer of control by an abrupt commandline statement “goto”,
say by abandoning a traceable computing point in favour of certain remote or
rather unconnected point back and forth. By this act of abruptness, the control
of a program is just deflected to flounder in the maze of code with no promise
of return to the line of code from where the digression takes place. Prior to
that, the style of programming used “go-to” quite facilely and sometimes with
fatal computing fiascos and as such computer scientists simply rejected that
style. The instant novel of Amitav Ghosh, like those messy ‘go-to’-ridden programs,
goes through too many context shifts, and the return to the point of digression
is not always seamless. Back stories dominate with patches of text unexpectedly
importing fresh characters and remotely connected events, so much so that it is
but natural for the readers to often forget the principal storyline. There are
far too many tense shifts, and the punctuational distinction between plain
narratives and the dialogues has been consciously omitted for stylistic reason,
perhaps. The POV is first person, a fact that makes it difficult to distinguish
if the particular text in first person is the version of the narrator or the
statement of some other character. The confusion persists despite the speech
tags provided as elements of clarity in the text. The timeline is not
sequentially drawn and unless one is ready with a notebook to jot down dates of
happenings and connect them manually, he is bound to resort to frequent regressions.
In a way the opus, despite the lucidity of its prose, evocative similes and
brilliant appositives, is not meant just for any reader but for the experienced
ones who have the ability to remember the context howsoever abrupt the shifts
may be and for those who have the homing instinct of coming back to the origin
at will.
One can see through the compulsion of the writer
though. The narrator starts the story from the middle and traces the events of
the past that he has not himself witnessed. It is a first-person narrative and,
as such, past materials and the materials about happenings in his absence are
culled from the versions of others and reproduced to supplement what the
narrator has personally experienced or felt about them. Again, Amitav Ghosh not
only narrates what he has gathered but also states how he has done that. All in
all he is not an all-knowing observer of the events; he was just an actor in it
doing the difficult job of recapitulation of others’ experience.
The story begins with the narrator’s grandmother’s
sister Mayadevi going to England with her husband and son Tridib in the year
1939, thirteen years before the narrator is born. Tridib, the protagonist of
the story was just a seven-year old boy then.
The narrator’s grandmother is a widow, struggling as a
school teacher in Calcutta to give financial support to her family consisting
of one son, his wife and the narrator. She hails from Dhaka, and her bag of
life experience is full of multifarious exposures. As a girl groomed in a joint
family she has witnessed fierce legal battles for lands, an experience that
makes her attribute a special meaning to the euphemism called brotherly
relationship. As a student in Dhaka she used to feel romantically attached to
or rather sympathized with the cause of patriots who took to the path of
violence against the British colonial rulers, yet as a girl she had no way to
give vent to such feeling. On the other hand, like any other girl of her time,
she was fond of jewelries. She is shown to be extremely strict with her
grandson in study matters, a stickler of discipline. With her husband dead, she
grows even stricter cultivating a fiercely self-respecting image, a person who has
spurned the offer of anybody among her relatives to come to her rescue at her
times of need. Especially she is strict in this matter with her own sister
Mayadevi, a rich and famous lady, foreclosing any option of help from her.
Sibling rivalry is the basis of such distrust, or maybe she has taken her
affairs to be her exclusive domain, enjoying every inch her struggle for
respectful existence.
Tridib, Mayadevi’s son, related to the narrator as
uncle, is a fellow of bohemian temperament, one that does not have any
inhibition to go to street corner at Gole Park and start lecturing on random
topics to people who are willing to listen to just anything. Otherwise, he is
into some archeological research for his Ph. D. when his parents move about
foreign lands in pursuance of a career in Foreign Service. And as a person
eminently accessible to the narrator in his childhood, Tridib is the latter’s
primary source of knowledge about England. Earlier. Tridib had accompanied his
parents to England in 1939 when his father went there for his treatment, stayed
there for a year, at a time when England was going through a very crucial
period of her history. And as such his account is unassailably authentic in the
eyes of the narrator. As Tridib shares his experience, the narrator’s
imagination is whetted to an extent that he begins to carry mental picture of
the places
Mayadevi’s husband Mr Himangshusekhar Dattachaudhury alias
Saheb has a close family friendship with one Mrs Price of West Hampstead,
London. The friendship dates back to the British days when Mrs Price’s father
Tresawsen actually lived in India cultivating an intimate friendship with
Mayadevi’s father-in-law who was a judge of the Calcutta High Court.
Tresawsen’s daughter, after her marriage with one Mr Price, became Mrs Price.
That is how Trdib as a seven-year old boy goes to London with his parents and
stays in the house of Mr Price. There he has the chance to see May, the baby
daughter of Mrs and Mr Price. Back in Calcutta, he keeps contact with Mrs Price
through a Christmas card every year and after nineteen years of such formal
friendship suddenly starts to include May into its fold. The pen friendship
continues for at least two years and then there is an exchange of photographs.
Then after two years that is in December 1963, May pays a visit to Calcutta on
the request of Tridib, when the narrator is only an eleven-year old boy. There develops
a peculiar kind of love between them, a kind of feeling that blends curiosity
with condescension.
There is another important character in the novel. She
is Ila, the granddaughter of Mayadevi. Since Ila’s father Jatin has a
globe-trotting career, Ila has the multi-cultural exposure. She is a votary of
western way of life, quite mercurial in her temperament. The narrator and Ila
are the two cousins, for Ila’s grandmother and that of the narrator are the sisters
hailing from a family of advocates in Dhaka. She is an exquisitely beautiful
lady, permissive in her attitude to sex and alcohol etc but her most important
role in the novel is that she is responsible for whetting sexual fantasy in the
narrator’s mind. There are occasions the cousins go very close to the acts of
sex thanks to the seduction of Ila, say for example once when they are under a
huge table of British provenance in the cellar of Jatin’s Rajabazar mansion and
on another occasion when they stay overnight in the cellar of Mrs Price’s house
in London, but on both the occasions the matter does not advance owing to the
indecisiveness and timidity of the narrator. Maybe Amitav Ghosh has stopped
short of incest as he is conscious that what he is writing has abundant
correlation with actual happenings in his life. However, the narrator’s
upbringing as an imaginative boy owes in a substantial measure to Ila who
shares her foreign way of living through the photographs and yearbooks and by
narrating the many interesting episodes. Whether it is through her description
of her encounter with the monitor lizard in her bungalow of Colombo or her
intimate childhood games with Nick, she exercises an intense stimulating
experience. She gets some smalltime job and loves Nick, the son of Mrs Price
and finally enters the wedlock. The narrator is left in the midst of a peculiar
feeling of loss, losing something that he is not prepared to own.
Then there is one May, the daughter of Mrs Elizabeth Price
and Mr S. N. Price. She is a musician, but at her heart she is an altruist,
helping Amnesty and Oxfam as a Good Worker in their philanthropic effort in the
famine-stricken areas of Africa. The love between Trdib, the narrator’s uncle
and May Price has a peculiar tinge. It is neither a love at first sight, nor a feeling
of fondness born out of longstanding association, nor a result of mutual
dependence. This has nothing to do with mutual appreciation, nor with
gratefulness. It is rather a love born out of careless fantasy, the maiden overtures
of which is made by Tridib. Amitav Ghosh makes May narrate her own love in the
following words: ‘I don’t know whether any of it was real, whether I was in
love with him, or merely fascinated by the sense of defeat that surrounded him [Tridib]’.
An eight-year old boy happens to meet one-year old baby girl and thereafter a long
nineteen year elapses with neither contact nor remembrance. Suddenly the
contact is revived through pen-friendship followed by a series of one-sided
smutty letters and then she visits India to meet her friend. The invitation to
visit India is extended by Tridib, though. Here in Calcutta she searches for
the ruins where the smutty letters of Tridib have pen-pictured their sexual
encounters and the Victoria Memorial where Tridib takes her for a sight-seeing does
not match her mental picture. May is shown to be honest, kind and affectionate.
It is not the way she snaps the vein of a severely injured dog on the road to
save him from pain alone that shows her compassion. Rather she maintains her
magnanimity even against the gravest of provocations. The day Ila and May’s
brother Nick get married, a mood of frustration comes over the narrator who goes
dead drunk. May takes pity on him and takes him to her house at Islington to
stay overnight and get sober before he can go to his house at Fulham. But the
narrator does not stop himself from molesting May. Despite that May maintains
her notional relationship—I’m old enough to be your spinster aunt—and excuses
him the next day when he wakes up to a feeling of remorse.
We have another character in the novel with serious
role in shaping the story. He is Robi, the younger brother of Tridib. He is
physically stout to an extent that he likens the toughness of those extremists
among the freedom fighters of Dhaka in the eyes of the narrator’s grandmother. He
is sanctimonious as seen from the way he prevents his niece Ila from dancing in
a cabaret organized in Grand Hotel, Calcutta. He is successful in clicking a
premium job in the Indian Administrative Service. He has the experience of
staying abroad with his parents, of a hostel life in early childhood. And finally
he is the eyewitness of the tragic death of his elder brother Tridib in Dhaka.
The story ends in January 1964. Earlier in 1962 the
grandmother of the narrator retires from her job of a Principal of the school
in Deshapriya Park in Calcutta. Initially she suffers from her ennui but soon
she gets something important to accomplish. Her father’s elder brother,
Jethamoshai, is now left in Jindabahar Lane, Dhaka and living a life of
helplessness, almost at the mercy of a refugee family that has squatted in his
house. So she wants to rescue him and afford him a life of comfort for the rest
of his life. By January 1964 she was ready to embark upon that job. It is
exactly at that time that May Price comes to Calcutta to meet Trdib. And a
further coincidence is that Mr Himangshusekhar alias Saheb, the husband of
Mayadevi comes to Dhaka on promotion as the Counsellor in the deputy high commission.
And all three of them, May, Tridib and the narrator’s grandmother, set out for
Dhaka on 3rd January 1964. The law and order situation in Dhaka is
not calm at all, yet they accompanied by Robi who is already in Dhaka, go to
Jindabahar Lane in Shador-bajar leaving their safe diplomatic enclave of Dhanmundi.
The CD-plated diplomatic car is spotted by the hooligans and they wait in the
middle with a view to intercepting the car in its return trip and to harm the passengers.
While they return the car drives slowly so that Jethamoshai, the rescued old
man riding a rickshaw can follow them. And in the middle the hooligans attack
the car but the driver tries his best to steer clear. Then the hooligans attack
the rickshaw fellow and the old man and around that time May, in an act of
foolhardy, goes to save the old man. Trdib follows him just to be hacked to
death.
The novel is in the form of a first-person narrative.
If we take into consideration the birth of Amitav Ghosh in 1956 and of the
narrator in 1952—almost around the same time, his scholarship trip to Oxford
similar to that of the narrator in the novel, we will find in the novel much
that seems to have been taken from the author’s life, mutatis mutandis. There is
an adage, widely prevalent in literary circle: everybody can pen at least one
novel in his or her life. Well, autobiographical stuff ever appears immensely
authentic—its tone says it all.
Amitav Ghosh has a penchant for propounding theories
in course of his fictional narratives. I remember in his “Hungry Tides” he says
that a sweet called ledkin was launched by a sweetmeat vendor of
Calcutta naming it after Lady Canning! In this book, too, he says that there is
a happening circle centring Khulna in Bangladesh with a radius of 1200 miles,
the one with Srinagar in its circumference, its circumference line further cutting
through the Pakistan half of the Punjab, through the tip of Rajasthan, through
the Rann of Kutch across the Arabian Sea, through the southernmost tip of Indian
peninsula, through Kandy in Sri Lanka, and out into the Indian Ocean until it
emerges to touch upon the northernmost finger
of Sumatra, then straight through the tail of Thailand, running through a
little north of Phnom Penh, into the hills of Laos, past Hue in Vietnam,
dipping into the Gulf of Tonking, then swinging up again through the Chinese
province of Yunnan, past Chungking, across the Yangtze Kiang, passing within
sight of the Great Wall of China, through Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang, until
with a final leap over the Karakoram Mountains to drop into the valley of
Kashmir. No other 1200-mile circle on the atlas can have more happening than
the above circle that centres Khulna. The boundary line is a line of
enchantment where any event in one spot can have its ripples on the other
spots. Other 1200-mile circles can be drawn in the map but there one can see
only states and citizens whereas the circle with Khulna as the centre has
people within it. Quite interesting—we may await Amitav Ghosh to elaborate on
it in his future novels!
Sometimes,
this novel of Amitav Ghosh is taken to be his voice against the folly of creating
several nation states on the basis of religion. Well, there is much in the text
that points to such a conclusion, but then, in my reading it is more a fiction based
on human relationship than a voice against the folly of separation in the
subcontinent. When we compare this novel of Ghosh with Khushwant Singh’s “Train
to Pakistan” this point gets even clearer. The author has relied on the riots in the
erstwhile East Pakistan to help him reach a readable denouement, and that is
all about that. Much before that, the predominant human-relation tone of the
novel has been set and nowhere in its intial chapters we get such a hint that the novel is going
to assume a political overtone.
All in all, the element of incompatible love is the
mainstay of the theme in the novel. The narrator and Ila cannot go any deeper
in their relationship because they are cousins. There are some touch-and-go
scenes though. The relationship between the narrator and May has no support of
the latter as she thinks herself to be the spinster aunt of the former. There is
an invasion of modesty yet nothing far-reaching emerges out of that. Tridib’s
love is only a fantasy: it however creates curiosity in the mind of May but
Tridib is too timid to carry it forward. The love between Ila and Nick Price
goes to some extent; they enter into holy matrimony but Nick is too fickle and by
the time the novel runs short of words Ila is poised to assert her freedom. There
seems to be a sort of exchange acrimony between Nick and May, the brother-sister
duo on the one hand and the narrator and Ila, the cousins on the other. Nick
Price marries the sister of the narrator and the narrators harbours a romantic felling
for May Price, the sister of Nick. Passion is given voice through this
incompatibility of souls and situations…and for this reason alone, it turns out
to be an immensely evocative reading at that. And everything is for an
experienced reader alone.
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By
A N Nanda
Coimbatore
12-08-2012
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