Page 41 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 3: Amitav Ghosh—Shadow Lines: Detailed Study—II (Plot and Criticisms)

The very place of birth can become alien to them that to go there would mean the possession of a Notes
passport or visa and couple of other paper work, may not just be acceptable. The old man when
persuaded to come to India says, ‘Once your start moving you never stop. That is what I told my
sons when they took the trains. I don’t believe in this India shindia. It is all very well. You are
going away now but suppose when you get there, they decide to draw another line somewhere?
What will you do then? Where will you move to? No one will ever have you anywhere. As for me,
I was born here and I will die here.’
The Narrator finds a hero in Tridib and superimposes his personality over him. He has made him
his star, a guide and motivating spirit. Tridib has given him worlds to travel in and eyes to see
them with and has taught him well to use his imagination with precision. The narrator takes it
down well and is always engaged in the imaginative renewal of times, places, events and past
peoples. He often gets lost sitting under his grandmother’s watchful eyes pretending to do his
homework in what Tridib had told him about the sloping roofs of Colombo. The pattern they
made, how sharply they rose if one looked at them from below, the mossiness of their tiles when
one saw them close up, from a first floor window, and soon he felt that he too could see how much
more interesting they were than the snake and the lizard, in the very ordinariness of their difference.

The story of The Shadow Lines is told by an unnamed and undescribed narrator
who despite this handicap is distinctly placed in the novel.

The narrator soon developed this into an uncanny ability and becomes potently armed with his
newfound possession and when he goes to London he picks his way to Mrs.Price’s house unaided.
In the same way he also locates the Left Book Club where Alan Tresawsen had worked before the
war. Tridib had once told him about that. And he is quite right. Similarly coming out of the tube
station in London, he asks for Sumatra Road and guesses that the air raid shelter should be near
by where Maya Devi, Mrs. Price and uncle Alan ducked into on their way back from Mill Lane,
when one of those high caliber bombs exploded on Solent Road around the corner, blowing up
most of the houses there. He precisely remembers that it was first of October 1940, two days before
uncle Alan died. The narrator readily accepts with pride that Tridib had shown him something
truer about Solent road, a bomb-devastated picture a long time ago in Calcutta, which had
undergone fruitful change.
Once Ila, Robi and the narrator go for a couple of beers in the Grand Hotel in Calcutta. After a
drink Ila wished to dance but both narrator and Robi refuse. She says that if they don’t dance with
her she would dance with somebody else and picks up a businessman.
Robi restrains her saying that girls didn’t behave like that there. When she actually leaves for the
businessman, Robi gets up and knocks him down. They come out and Ila shouts at him for
behaving so violently, and says that she would do what she likes and that is why she had chosen
to live in London. It’s only because she wanted to be free, free for their culture, free of all of them.
This incident adds an important dimension to her character to be reviewed only afterwards. Later
when author discusses something about Ila’s stay in London with Tha’mma, she says it is not
freedom she wants, she wants to be left along to do what she pleases that is all any whore would
want. She will find it easy enough over there, that is what those places have to offer. But that is not
what it means to be free.
Narrator’s grandmother is quite perverse to the idea of narrator’s association with Ila in any way
other than an ordinary friendship. But she had guessed it correctly that he was in love with her
whom she regarded a whore and had been visiting prostitutes in Delhi. Just before a day of her
death she writes a letter to the Dean of narrator’s college in Delhi that he be thrown out because

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