Page 27 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 2: Amitav Ghosh; Shadow Lines: Detailed Study of Part—I (A Bird’s Eye View)

locked and stagnated pools. Where Tha’mma could not foresee or imagine the border in its reality, Notes
Ila made a mess everywhere she went because of the lack of her power to anticipate, to imagine.
One evening when they were sitting out in the garden Tha’mma wanted to know whether she
would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane. When the
Narrator’s father laughed and said, why, did she really think the border was a long black line with
green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was in a school atlas, she was not so much
offended as puzzled.
‘No that wasn’t what I meant, she said, Of course not. But surely there’s something—trenches
perhaps, or soliders, or guns pointing at each other, or even just barren strips of land, Don’t they
call it no-man’s land?’
This is because of the two reasons, the first is her inability to imagine and the second is because of
her traditional or conservative approach where she would rather like her things clearly chalked
out and defined.
The grandmother thought this over for a while, and then she said: But if there aren’t any trenches
or anything, how are people to know? I mean where’s the difference then And if there’s no
difference both sides will be the same; it’ll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch
a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without any body stopping us. What was it
all for then—partition and all the killing and everything—if there isn’t something in between?
The Narrator’s father got a bit perplexed on this and did not know what his mother actually
expected and told her that it was the modern world. The border did not exist on the frontiers
rather it was right inside the airport. She would cross it when she would fill in all those forms
about her nationality, place of birth etc.
The answer confounded her and she slumped into the chair. She had not known all these things
neither did she expect them.
Painfully the novelist deseribes her inability to come to terms with partition and accept the fact
that her place of birth was now a foreign city and she would have to go to the place instead of
coming as she earlier used to say.
The narrator puts it very subtly. ‘It was not till many years later that I realized it had suddenly
occurred to her then that she would have to fill in Dhaka as her place of birth on that form, and
that the prospect of this had worried her in the same way that dirty schoolbooks worried her
because she liked things to be neat and in place—and at that moment she had not been able to
quite understand how her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality. If
she happened to say she was going to teach me Bengali grammar for example, I would laugh and
say: But Tha’mma, how can you teach me grammar? Eventually the phrase passed on to the whole
family and became a part of its secret lore.’
Slowly and gradually, disenchantment of Tha’mma with the place across the border coverts into
hideousness. After the post partition blues and the death of Tridib in one of such riots in Dhaka,
which is also the sensational event of the novel, her perspective changes. Now she has aversion for
the inhabitants of the other side of the border. She gives away the most cherished gift of her
husband, a necklace that she was presented with in a foreign country and with which she had
never parted.
‘It was the first thing, he ever game me—in Rangoon, soon after we were married. They have
wonderful rubies there. I couldn’t bear to give it away. He wouldn’t like it. I haven’t taken if off
once in these thirty-two years—not even when I had my gallbladder operation. They wanted me
to take it off, but I made them sterilize it instead. I wasn’t going to have my operation without it.
It’s become a part of me now’, Tha’mma explains to the narrator.
And then one day in the 1965, more than one and a half years after her trip to Dhaka, she gave it
away.
The narrator playfully asks her about her chain one day, ‘Tha’mma! I shouted, what’s happened
to your chain? What have you done with it?

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