Shadow Lines Part-2 Coming Home

               The second section of the novel entitled “Coming Home” begins in the year 1962, and Tha’mma opens the door of her grown-up home in Dhaka to the narrator as well as to the reader, sitting at the new home in Southern Avenue with the distaste of the retirement days. It was a big joint family   with parents, grandparents, Mayadebi, father’s older brother, Jethamoshai and his family. Meanwhile, the death of grandpa leads to the failure of Jethamoshai as a leading patriarch of the family and they divide the house with a ‘wooden partition wall’ between the two brothers. After her marriage, she has returned to Dhaka twice and the partition (1947) made her stuck at Calcutta. She has not met Jethamoshai and her aunt since then. Tha’mma is again ready to meet Jethamoshai, who lives still in that old house with the help of refugee Muslims from India.

            All of a sudden, narrator drips into the memory of a pornographic letter of Tridib to May and she lies to her mother that the letter is an invitation to India. After this, narrator reveals Mayadebi’s letter to Tha’mma by inviting her to Dhaka. Father arranges plane ticket to Dhaka on third January, 1964.  She enquires whether she can see the border line between India and East Pakistan from the plane. As part of entering another country, East Pakistan, she was instructed to fill the columns of nationality, date of birth, and place of birth. This made her eyes widen in embarrassment, pushing her over to the state of in between ‘coming home’ or ‘going home’. Later, she gets a letter from Mayadebi informing that May will visit her at Dhaka. Tridib announces his plan to be with Tha’mma and May in Dhaka. Narrator often slips into the memory of May, Tridib, Ila’s wedding, and his visit to London. All of a sudden, narrator remembers May’s first visit to India and her wanderings here. Instantly, he remembers ila and their meeting after her marriage. She tells the story of Nick Price and Magda. Meanwhile, Mayadebi writes to Tha’mma informing her that she has not been to the ancestral house yet and she has met a mechanic named Saifuddin who lives in the house at present. Tha’mma along with May, Tridib and Robi leave for Dhaka. At this time, exemplifying narrator's remark, the ‘city had turned against them’ the city of Calcutta witness a mutiny in 1964.

        Years later, Robi shares their Dhaka experience with the narrator. Before they meet Jethamoshai, they meet Saifuddin and Khalil, a ‘rikshawala’, the one who takes care of Jethamoshai and all of them visit Jethamoshai. He could not recognize Tha’mma and Mayadebi. He ignores Tha’mma and talks to May. Suddenly, the driver notices trouble in the street and informs them. They leave the house and Khalil follows them with the old man in rickshaw. Back in Calcutta, narrator remarks the riot of 1964 while his friend Malik is unaware of it and neglects it characterizing it as local. To prove Malik wrong, narrator reaches to the old newspaper and books. But the riot has been disappeared from the books along with a small piece of news column in the January 11th paper. Slowly, narrator realizes that the riot had broken out the day after Tha’mma left.  

       Narrator finds that Tha’mma has donated her favorite chain to fund the war. This makes him weary and his mother consoles him telling Tha’mma is very interested in the war with Pakistan from Tridib’s death onwards. This shakes narrator’s belief that Tridib met with his death in a car accident. May and Rubi tell him the truth that Tridib died in the riot of 1964 while they were returning from their ancestral home. One of the rioters attack the windshield of the car they are travelling and the rioters turn toward the rickshaw when a security personnel shoots. May approaches rickshaw calling them (Robi and Tridib) cowards. Tridib runs after her and Robi fails to make him stay in the car. In their last dinner at London, May confesses to the narrator that she rushed towards the rickshaw like a heroine while Tridib pushed her down and reached there and tried to rescue Jethamoshai out of the mob, but the mob surrounded them. Tridib, Khalil and Jethamoshai lay there when the mob relinquishes from the scene.

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Shadow Lines Part-1, Going Away

          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.