Shadow Lines (1988) is a Sahitya Academy Award-winning novel by Amitav Ghosh. The story is narrated by an unnamed character and he compiles fragmented thoughts, memories and images and cast them into a novel without any proper order of the time and space. Relying on memory, the story spans old and new Calcutta, London and Dhaka and juxtaposes past and present.
The novel has two parts; the first part is titled ‘Going Away’ and the second ‘Coming Home’. The first part begins with an incident which took place in 1939, thirteen years before the narrator’s birth. This incident records Tridib’s visit to London with his mother Mayadebi and father. The narrator was born in 1953; as a boy of eight, he adores Tridib, the twenty-one year old PhD scholar in archaeology. Tridib is good at telling stories of his experiences and the narrator sees the unseen world through these stories. Following the oral narrative of Tridib, the narrator visualizes unseen places and people. He remembers each and every word of Tridib and he wants to be like him. His grandmother Tha’mma criticizes Tridib for wasting youth and wealth of the predecessors. According to the narrator, “He never seemed to use his time, but his time didn’t sink”. Tridib spends his time doing research work, visiting Gole Park and telling stories. Narrator has fallen for Tridib’s knowledge and personality.
In another instance, the narrator tells us about his visit to London and his meeting with the daughter of Mrs Price, an orchestra player named May Price. He had met May seventeen years before. She is familiar to him through Tridib’s stories. May Price identifies him easily even though so many years have passed since their first meeting. He gets a photograph of Tridib from her apartment and understands the depth of their relationship. At this time, he is reminded of his cousin, Ila. The narrator loves her but she doesn’t respond. Unlike the narrator, Ila is not impressed by Tridib and wonders how he could remember each and every word uttered by Tridib. Being born into a wealthy Indian family, she is proud of her origin and always tries to identify with the western way of living though she is often subject to discrimination by her European friends. Ila testifies her superior western cultural identity to the narrator by presenting photographs of her European friends in the yearbook, though the narrator sees through the photograph and realizes the kind of marginalization she is subjected to. During this visit, the narrator meets the real experience of the city of London which is contrary to the image of the city Tridib has narrated.
Narrator returns to Calcutta recollecting Ila’s visit to his home with her parents and grandmother Mayadebi. Here, he mainly focuses on Robi, Tridib’s brother and grandmother’s spirit of nationalism as well as her animosity and contempt towards the British rule. Meanwhile, grandmother recollects a brave boy in her college, who was not afraid of British officials and was sent to prison for planning to assassinate the English magistrate. Nick, Mrs. Price’s son and brother of May Price is introduced by Ila to the narrator at the time of a game. Ila has a thousand tongues when she talks of Nick. This irritates the narrator and he later realizes that Nick was her playmate and she loves him
Seventeen years later, he meets Nick again in London. Robi accompanies Nick and the narrator is tensed of the meeting. While they take a stroll, the narrator claims that he knows that street and explains that some high- calibre bomb incident the street witnessed during the time of world war second. But Robi corrects him telling that Germans didn’t use such kind of bombs in 1940s and Tridib was a nine years old boy at that time. Nevertheless, Tridib’s stories help him to figure out every nook and corner of May Price’s house. Then, his memory shifts to their childhood game under the table. They enact the role of father and mother and treat Ila’s doll named Magda as their child and she weaves a story in which the child/doll is humiliated and Nick appears as a saviour. After three years, narrator realizes that it was her own story but Nick wasn’t the hero she presented. Years later, when narrator tells this story to his patriot grandmother Tha’mma, he tries to present Ila as a patriot.
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