Page 12 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes It is the fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that
surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can suddenly and without warning become as hostile
as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the
subcontinent from the rest of the world-not language, not food, not music-it is the special quality
of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.
The house trope used in the novel is for obvious reasons of making the reader see through such an
act when it comen to the country : what is ironic is that Tha’mma who should have seen through it
is blissfully oblivious of the strategy.
Perhaps this oblivion is tantamount to a deliberate non-admission of facts that are deeply disturbing
to her. Here the two reactions of madness that we examined earlier can be compared to the non
admission of events, a denial that the individual resorts to in order to avoid the madness that is
bound to follow later. The oblivion of Tha’mma therefore becomes her survival strategy. However
an indicator of this deep complex does surface later. Her decision to go to Dhaka in order to bring
back her old sick uncle is a very upsetting time for her. Routine activity of furnishing her personal
details while finishing the documentation for her visa forms raise fundamental doubts within her
about her identity. The sane formulations of her life are threatened by some dull looking External
Affairs Ministry forms. For the first time the sure shot, unruffled Tha’mma goes through pangs of
some fundamentally disturbing introspection. She wonders as to how the ‘place of her birth had
come to be messily at odds with her nationality’. She cannot resolve the chaos that surfaces in the
patterns that are so essential to her identity. The narrator at this point cleverly talks of certain
language constructions in the Bengali language: You see, in our family we don’t know whether we
are coming or going- It’s all my grandmother’s fault… But of course the fault wasn’t hers at all: it
lay in the language. Every language assumes a centrality fixed and settled point to go away and
come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not
coming or going at all : a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the
proper use of verbs of movement. According to Nivedita Bagchi there is ‘ a peculiar construction
in the Bengali language which allows the speaker to say “aaschi” (coming) instead of “jachchhi”
(going)’…which is ‘especially used as an equivalent to “good-bye”.
Thus a Bengali speaker while leaving a place is apt to say, “I am coming (back) instead of “I am
going.”‘ The grandmother’s Bengali verbs that confuse the simple acts of coming and going become
a part of the family’s lore. Young people in the family joke about this language feature that
confuses movement of two opposite kinds. But interestingly, within this feature of the Bengali
language lies a critique of the migration of populations during the Partition of 1947. If, therefore
Tha’mma says “aaschi” (I am coming) before leaving for Dhaka, it is to be read as an announcement
of her arrival to her erstwhile home rather than a faux pas that confuses coming and going. All
going away therefore culminates only in a coming of a very different kind. The fault therefore
obliquely points at the chaos of coming and going that there is in Tha’mma’s world rather than in
her language. This claim is further confirmed by the fact that the book has two sub-sections: Going
Away and Coming home. Both phrases indicate the queer sense of home and homelessness that the
Partition victims have experienced that allows them to dispense with a fixed point that signifies a
point of departure. It is also interesting to note why a common language feature should invite
ridicule from the speakers themselves. It is foregrounded to draw the reader’s attention towards
the fault of Partition, neither that of the language nor that of Tha’mma. Specific addresses are
remarkably highlighted in The Shadow Lines, the house at Raibajar, the narrator’s house in Gole
Park, Lymington Road, the Price household, the Shodor bazaar in Dhaka and the feud-ridden
Dhaka house. All these are real enough to be plotted on a street atlas. These intricate addresses
have a strong power of evocation and add to the verisimilitude of the narrative. Infact these
specific addresses have a power that emanates from their permanence. These addresses are more
than a mere assistance in discovering location, they are the units that survive civil political and
private strife and yet remain unchanged. In this way if compared to nations as entities, specific
locations outdo them in endurance. Nations are born, nations die, the cartographers and politicians
rearrange political spaces but these locations are remarkably immune to these designs. They thus
become the fixities and entities with ‘semiotic signification’ that provide meaning to several
characters, their concerns and their identities. This further becomes an instance of a personal space

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