Page 63 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 6: Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines:Characterisation

he never lived in the world of fantasy. He was much more contemptuous of fairylands than Notes
anybody else could be. He believed that we could not see without inventing what we saw.
However, he does not find favour with Tha’mma who wants that her grand child should not
associate himself in any way with him. According to her, he is a loafer and a wastrel who does not
do any proper work and lives off his father’s money. He wasted his time, and for grandmother
this was the biggest sin that any one could have committed. He was often spotted at Gole Bazaar
Adda where he would be the center of attraction and would command the boys with his gossips.
The wasted time began to stink according to her but narrator did not find Tridib’s time, which
could stink though he wasted it. Tha’mma believed that with his connections he could have got a
high positions job and could have ruled the country like a lord. But he wasted his time in self-
indulgence. Whatever the case may be, Tha’mma does like him in her own little way. Whenever
he visited her house she went out of her way to give him a welcome by making an omelet herself
that she rarely did for anybody else and made him comfortable. But she made it a point that he did
not stay there for a long because a baneful object had the power of casting its influence even from
a distance. Though he might not have been able to get started on his own career, he has a lot of
influence on the lives of those around him. From Tridib, the narrator learns about snakes and Irish
myths, about Indian archeology and London gossip. He fires narrator’s imagination with a desire
to know everything not by the middle class mentality of qualifying the examinations in good
grades but by the use of his powerful imagination.
Tridib had told him of the desire that can carry one beyond the limit of one’s mind to other times
and other places and if one was lucky to a place where there was no border between oneself and
one’s image in the mirror. This strikes another theme of The Shadow Lines where the time and the
distance are coalesced. The novel moves back and forth and the events do not follow sequentially.
Tridib had met May as a child in England when he had gone there to stay in 1940. Thereafter he
had been sending Mrs. Price regular greetings but he sent a separate one for May when he was 27
and May 19. After the first three chatty letters, he writes a long and pornographic one giving an
account of a child’s view of a couple making love in war-torn London. He had expected May to
meet — as a stranger in a ruin. He wanted them to meet as the completest of strangers—strangers
across the seas. He wanted them to meet far from their friends and relatives— in a place without
a past, without history, free, really free, two people coming together with the utter freedom of
strangers. However, when May Price does come to visit him in India it results in his death, a
tragedy.
Both Tha’mma and May are responsible for his tragic death as much as he himself is for his. He is
a shy man who is able to write bold letters to May but on her arrival is like a young, diffident and
shy by. The pangs of the violent death of his great grand uncle, the 90–year–old uncle of his
mother would not move him when the mob runs after him but a few sarcastic, inciting words of
May did. His male ego was prompted and he left the car to run after her. The zeal of Tha’mma to
save her uncle from the trouble torn Dhaka and bring him to India despite the warnings given to
her by Sahib brings her to her native place in Jindabahar Lane in old Dhaka. On their return they
are surrounded by a mob when May Price unlocks the door of the car and runs out to save the old
man from being cut to pieces.
It would be unfair to term his action as only rash. He must have had a determination, gravity and
basic courage when he ran after May and pushed her and instead of pulling her back to the car,
went forward and fell on the people’s back to get to his grand uncle. He is cut from ear to ear. For
a long time (17 years) May is not able to overcome this ghastly scene and accuses herself of his
murder. She tells it to the narrator that if she had not got out of the car he would not have followed
her and if only she knew what she was doing, the tragedy could have been averted. But later she
changes her stand and says that nobody could have touched her as she was an English Memshahib,
but he must have known he was going to die. Thus towards the end, May Price shifts the blame

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