Page 60 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes 6.1.2 Ila
Ila is the grand daughter of Maya Devi and Tridib’s niece. Her father keeps getting transferred
from one country to another and as such she is raised all over the world. She is ultra modern in
looks, behaviour and thinking. Tha’mma and she stand on two extreme ends of a bar. She lives in
the present. With the memories of the past and the imagination of the future she does not have to
do anything. Ila is an unimaginative realist. She could not be persuaded to believe that a place did
not merely exist but it had to be invented in one’s imagination. That is why although she had lived
in many places she had never traveled at all. For her, current was the real. She attaches no value
to the past and does not have any good reminisces. That is why her boy friends change as quickly
as one changes the toothbrush. It was also because of this and her lack of roots in one culture that
she is unable to think of the compatibility of her relationship or subsequent marriage with Nick
Price and it ends in failure. She functions as the obverse of the imaginative traveler. She is the
globe-trotting daughter of a diplomat who himself is a world traveler. She has traveled a lot in her
young age but experienced nothing. For her, the traveling of the world wide countries stay in her
memory as nothing but the pictures of airport lounges and the locations of the toilets. For her the
London Underground is just a mode of transportation. Here she stands in a total contrast to the
narrator who believes passionately that a place does not merely exist but it has to be invented in
one’s imagination. She is also a victim of cultural dislocation and mal-adjustment for being raised
all over the world. She fails of cultivate roots and sense of belonging for any place. Ila’s
cosmopolitanism is superfluous, as it is not rooted in any of the cultures. For Tha’mma, Ila is
firmly outside the pale of sobriety and decent living. What ever it may be , Ila is honest about what
she is and does not have to do the double speak. She does not like Roby when he refuses to drink
in the Grand Hotel. ‘Drink!’ cried Roby, ‘In a place like that?’ She said sharply, ‘what is the matter
you do drink, don’t you? What about that story you were telling me about the send off you got
from your fans in college. You are a little hypocrite.’ For Ila morality if it existed could only be in
absolute. She could understand and admire someone who never ate meat on principle but a
person who was vegetarian only at home was to her, the worst kind of hypocrite. She also knew
that Roby was quite happy to risk expulsion occasionally by smuggling bottles of rum into his
college room and drinking the nights away with his friends. But she could not feel the difference
between the two locales and the circumstances. There was a kind of difference between the monastic
life of college where the students often played truant or indulged in one nasty thing or the other
for they would often revel in observing the rules more by its breach. But there was nothing wrong
in it. These differences would not come to her straightforward nature. Her looks and her clothes
are inappropriate to her Bengali middle class origins. Tha’mma quips, “... Her hair cut short like
the bristles on the toothbrush wearing tight trousers like a free school street whore. According to
her she stays in London because she wants to be free, free of everybody. But it is not the freedom
she wants, she wants to be left alone to do as she pleases, that is all that any whore would want.
She will find it easily enough over there, that is what those places have to offer. But that is not
what it means to be free.” The same thing is reflected when along with Robi and the narrator she
goes to the nightclub in the Calcutta’s Grand Hotel where the three of them go drinking and she
wants to dance with a businessman. Robi stops her and pushes the businessmen away. She get
furious and says what did you think you were doing? Robi says that girls do not behave like that
over her. She could do what she liked in England but there are certain things she couldn’t do.
‘That is our culture that is how we live’, adds he. She breaks away from them and shouts to the
narrator, ‘Do you see why I have chosen to live in London. Do you see, it is only because I want
to be free–free of your bloody culture and free of you?’ Her Childhood relationship with Nick is
founded on an illusion of infallibility and decency of the British society. When the adult narrator
discovers that Nick sleeps with other women even after being married to Ila, it does not surprise
him much. The cultural or racial divides do the work here and the burden of indivisible Shadow
Lines is borne greatest by her. Her marriage with Nick Price is a total disaster but she hides the

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