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Unit 6: Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines:Characterisation

facts as age goes on to believe that one day it would be all right. She tells the narrator, ‘I wouldn’t Notes
leave him if he moves a whole bloody message parlor from Bangkok into the house. He knows
that perfectly well. He knows that I love him so much that I would never leave him’. She definitely
wins our admiration for her total surrender to Nick and her boundless love for him. Towards the
end, the Narrator said, Ila had called up a few days before his departure saying that she would
be too willing to help him but a day before he actually left for India, the narrator phoned her up,
she expressed her inability as Nick and she were going on a holiday after a brief fight and told him
not to believe anything she had said about Nick‘s infidelity the other day i.e. he was sleeping with
other women in the house.
Calcutta’s social environment is stifling for her and she escapes to London. She marries an
Englishman, buys a house, finds a job, tries to settle down but fails. She lives in London because
she wanted to be free , a freedom that is really shallow.
Ila shares a house in London with a group of people who are activists in various movements like
the Forth International and the Anti-Nazi League. She is regarded as an upper class Asian Marxist.
She grandly imagines that their endeavor will become a part of history, that in the future everyone
will look to them quite in Nigeria, India, Malaysia etc.
Whatever the case may be she is more of a sympathetic character than an object of scorn or
repulsion.
6.1.3 Narrator
The Shadow Lines come to us through the narration but the narrator remains unnamed and
undescribed. In spite of that he is decisively placed in the novel. He is Tha’mma’s grandson and
is greatly influenced by her uncle Tridib in every way and superimposes his identity on his own.
From him, the narrator learns about tropical snakes, Irish myths, Indian archeology and the
London gossip. Tridib fires the boy’s imagination with a longing to know, to experience and know
the world not through passing the examinations but by the use of powerful and precise imagination.
Tridib had told him of the desire, real desire which was pure, painful and primitive that could
carry one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other places and other times and if one was lucky,
even to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror. The
narrator, as if almost by Divine revelation finds the house of Prices at Lymington Road in London
unaided as he had conjured it up with concrete precision as Tridib and Ila had told him. This
made Nick remark ‘you are positively a mystic from the East. You have done it again.’ In the same
way narrator is able to tell about the inside of the house and lead his way himself until he finds a
Cherry tree about which he had made a mention. Thus we find that Tridib had given him the
worlds to travel in by telling him the stories and pointing out places in the Bartholomew’s Atlas
and had given him eyes also to see them with , so that long before the Narrator actually moves out
of Calcutta his world had included Cairo, Madrid, Colombo etc. and he had infused life into them
by his precise imagination.
In the beginning, he says Tridib went to England when he was eight, ‘I have come to believe that
I was eight too when Tridib first talked to me about the journey. I had decided that he looked like
me’. Tridib becomes his mentor and guiding force. Despite his grandmother’s disapproval of him
and his ills, he stuck to him if not directly then furtively. Tridib has a shaping influence on him
and has made him toe his line unconsciously. The narrator carries Tridib’s talisman all through his
life and wins wide appreciation for his remarkable power to see and imagine. He meets Tridib at
the adda where he often used to come and the local lads would stick around him. He used to wield
considerable influence over them because of his lively ways and enchanting personality and the
narrator was thankful to him for the petty favours which his present secured for him. Narrator as
a boy had not been more than a few hundred miles from Calcutta but had traveled infinite
distance with Tridib in his room. He used to tell him about his experiences and stories and pointed

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