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Unit 1: Amitav Ghosh; Shadow Lines: Introduction to the Text

aware narrator, the first pointed arch in the history of mankind whereas for Ila ‘Cairo is merely a Notes
place to piss in.’ She flits from experience to experience with a heightened sensual gusto but
failing to ‘arrive’ at any stage in the novel to 16 a state of greater knowledge, insight or evolution.
Tridib often said of her that ‘the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had
lived in many places she had not travelled at all.’ ‘For Ila the current was the real: it was as though
she lived in a present which was like an airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of past
and future by steel flood gates.’ However this uninhibited flow of experience in her throws up
certain questions that the other narratives have either suppressed, not acknowledged or either
failed to account for. This realm does not have history’s linear progression of and no casts to
mould and reshape experience.
Her experience as an Indian in London becomes another model of citizenship that the book explores
along with Partition Diaspora and the modern Calcutta Middle class. However her personal
experience first as a student in London and later that of marrying a white man throws up an entire
polemics about the diasporic communities. When she narrates the story about the fantasy child
Magda to the narrator, it is quite evident that the child is a consequence of her mixed marriage
(owing to the child’s blue eyes and fair complexion). The absolute dread that she associates with
the imagined classroom of the child betrays her own sense of complexity as a woman faced with
questions about race in a mixed marriage. In this regard it is important that Ila in this conversation
displays a hyper emotionality, enough indication of some deep complex of feelings within her
about race. Finally when Nick betrays her, her insecurity as a woman and especially as a one
disadvantaged due to her race comes out in the open. Her life comes full circle from that anxious
schoolgirl boasting about nonexistent boyfriends to the distraught adult finding it difficult to
come to terms with an unfaithful husband. ‘You see you’ve never understood; you’ve always been
taken in by the way I used to talk in college. I only talked like that to shock you and because you
seemed to expect it of me somehow. I never did any of those things: I’m about as chaste …as any
woman you’ll ever meet.’ The narrator is introduced as an eight-year-old child who is ensconced
in a genteel middle-class existence where young children are concerned only with doing well in
studies. However the narrator finds means to escape it through his uncle Tridib who sensitizes
him to the exciting enterprise of acquiring knowledge. The narrator is gifted an Atlas as a birthday
gift and that becomes a symbol of sorts for the ‘transference of knowledge’ that takes place between
the two. What the narrator acquires from Tridib is an extraordinary sensitivity towards knowledge,
which later becomes crucial to the role of narration that he undertakes. The narrator is not only a
storyteller but also the strand that brings together other available versions in order to make a
complete picture. It is significant that the author himself comes across as more of a storyteller than
a historian or an anecdote teller. Stories in this book are in circuitry, without definite beginnings
and endings, they are indiscrete and seem to belong to no one. Here it is pertinent to point out that
the author, inspite of his omniscience, is unnamed and his stories are mostly in the form of
renderings of the other characters. These stories become more intelligible when the narrator joins
them into meaningful wholes after collecting all the possible versions of the incident described
from various sources. A case in point is the truth behind Tridib’s death in Dhaka. Tha’mma,
Mayadebi, Tridib’s girlfriend May and Robi are the eyewitnesses to the lynching of Tridib during
the Dhaka riots. His death, its cause and manner is however not made known to the narrator in its
entirety: the parents are reluctant to reveal anything just like middle class people are used to
avoiding all the talk of death in front of young children. The child Robi talks of the experience
with a hyper emotionality characteristic of a traumatic childhood experience that he hasn’t let go
off even as an adult. At a later time Robi as an adult recounts all that happens while on an evening
out with the narrator and Ila. His account is complete to the extent that he as a child can only observe
partially. His partial perception is not only a result of his intellectual inadequacy but also due to the
fact that he is physically limited- ‘an effect of that difference in perspective which causes all objects
recalled from childhood to undergo an illusory enlargement of scale’- this makes him incapable of
even observing the incident objectively. His account of the incident is therefore more of a cathartic
outburst because it has been long repressed than an informative or insightful reconstruction of the
past. The last strand in the experience is May to whom the narrator then turns for an adequate
explanation. It is in London that the narrator gets to know the truth behind the death.

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