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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes evident in his extraordinary reactions to the space of London during his visit. He not only recognizes
old buildings that Tridib had merely mentioned to him as a child, but with the same eloquence
questions missing ones, the ones bombed out in action and the like. The old club building that
Tridib had fondly talked about to the narrator years ago is intact in his imagination decades later
while on a visit to London. His suggestions of its existence are brushed aside by his cousin Ila
whose opinion is supported by the club’s absence, however the external evidence fails to satisfy
him and after much effort they find out from an old timer that the club had indeed existed at the
exact spot that he had pointed out and that it had been targetted during a war and reduced to
rubble. The author’s theoretical knowledge, therefore, of the existence of the building beats the
Ila’s very real but thoughtless existence. Tridib’s vision works, at the same time he has the historian’s
itch to classify and know events completely rather than experience them spontaneously as Ila does.
Tridib as a young man falls in love with May who is the daughter of the Price family of England.
The friendship of the Datta- Chaudhary family and the Prices goes back to the Colonial times
when their English grandfather, Tresawsen had come to Calcutta as an agent of a steel-
manufacturing company and had later become a factory owner. The relationship between Tridib
and May starts from exchange of friendly letters till the one that Tridib writes. In his letter he
proposes to her by elaborately describing an intimate lovemaking episode between two people in
a war ravaged theatre house in London. He proposes to meet her ‘as a stranger in a ruin…. as
completest of strangers, strangers-across seas’ without context or history. May is initially perplexed
but cannot resist his ‘invitation’ and finally reaches India to see him. However soon the romance
in the relationship is replaced by discord. They assign meanings to happenings and things around
them differently. While driving along with the child narrator towards Diamond Harbour they
come across an injured, profusely bleeding and badly mauled dog. While the narrator shuts his
eyes to escape the ugly sight, Tridib drives on with a nonchalance that shocks May completely. She
asks him to drive back to the mangled animal after which follows her extraordinary show of
endurance and fortitude with which she relieves the animal of its pain by assisting it to a peaceful
death. Exasperated by the whole experience she tells Tridib in a huff that he is worth words alone.
The quality of activism that we see in May resurfaces in London years later when she collects
donations for destitute children. This is in sharp contrast to Tridib who is an armchair historian
and lives and feeds on ideas alone. A similar situation arises in Dhaka while they along with
Tha’mma, Mayadebi and child Robi are trapped in the communal frenzy that takes place while
they are bringing back the old uncle left behind in Dhaka since Independence. While they meander
through the riot ravaged streets of the city in their chauffeur driven car, the old uncle is following
them in a rickshaw steered by the Muslim who looks after him. May observes how the mob which
first turned to them, on being repulsed, attacked the old man on the rickshaw and instead of
saving him, Tha’mma displays the same non-chalance that Tridib had earlier shown towards the
dog and asks the driver to drive on without looking back. May is struck with the old impulse and
getting out of the car, she heads towards the mob to save the old man. Tridib cannot allow her to
embrace death and therefore follows her. In the melee, the mob attacks Tridib and he is killed. The
incident powerfully evokes the earlier dog episode and the promise that Tridib gets from May at
that time, about giving him too the peaceful death like the dog if a situation ever arose, uncannily
turns true. Of this incident the narrator gets to know only in the end when dissatisfied with other
people’s versions, he asks May to recount to him the cause of Tridib’s death. The incident as
recounted by May becomes like that missing part of the jigsaw puzzle of Tridib’s death that the
author is trying to look for. Ila, the narrator’s cousin is another important influence on the young,
impressionable narrator. She, owing to her father’s job is a globetrotter and comes to settle in
London. Her experience of places as diverse as Colombo and Cairo and her school years at all
these exotic places woven into delightful anecdotes for the child narrator initiate for the latter his
first ever flights of imagination. Along with Tridib’s encyclopedic knowledge, it is cousin Ila’s
descriptions of her vibrant life abroad that give the narrator a flight outside the confines of his
drab Gole Park flat. The cousin’s colourful Annual Schoolbooks become his initiators into an
unseen but alluring world outside. For Ila the immediacy of experience –personal/political is so
overwhelmingly important that its context and historicity remains suspended in the background.
Earlier the mere description of the city of Cairo brings to the mind of the atlas educated, historically

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