//THE SHADOW LINES//

 

Let me take you to the belief that The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh isn't a book.

The Shadow Lines are those narrow lanes, where you would get all sort of heritage walks, funs, laughs and activities in your childhood, where your mother never dreaded your venturing out with your friends, where local people stopped to see new houses and foreign visitors stopped to see old cramped little houses.

The Shadow Lines is that sound of the milkman's canister which always brought you off the bed every morning, and that newspaper-man, where his skills of tossing newspapers up your terrace continued to fancy you.

The Shadow Lines is that single public tap where you always cringed at the thought of getting stuck behind in an extremely slow-moving queue for the drinking water.

The Shadow Lines is that corner of your house's roof where you were learning about everything often from your beloved cousins before joining the school, where your imaginations were cultivated through the gentility of children's games and wonderful stories, read by your grandparents.

The Shadow Lines is that friend who lived in the neighbors and you were determined to propose to her on her 14th birthday. Because time flew like your RC plane, and you did not realize when childlike kissing on her wounds became kissing on her mouth. Intimately. Passionately. Surreptitiously.

The Shadow Lines is that thin atmosphere of division, you observed in your family while growing up. With time it spread with whispers, withering of mutual delights and generic conflicts. But you grew up and grew on with that air. There were no outlines of partitioning walls or anything but your mother still denied you crossing that unseen lines. The Shadow lines.

The Shadow Lines is that blindness of eyes - where they see those ossified exposures of race, colour, religion, caste, status and class but abnegate the harmony of aliveness. Where, they blink open only to see those indecent exposures, patterns of chaos, selective marginalized possibilities but not humanity, community and unity. Where, they only enjoy the vision of violence of borders, of that little experiment of drawing lines. The Shadow Lines.

"That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed."

A work of bisecting web of memories and literary poignancy, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines is a moving tale of love, suffering, hope and loss. Winner of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the narrative moves across people and places while weaving a tale rich and clear in its purpose. The book is divided into two sections and follows the journey of our unnamed narrator who is a boy growing up in Calcutta and later moves to Delhi and London. On his way to school one day he witnesses an apparently random act of violence which continues to haunt him till his adulthood. Years later, fragments of stories gather in his mind and lead him to a grim image of the world he calls home.

The language is sensitive, lyrical and at times inflammatory. Ghosh builds a powerful and picturesque story which travels through the planes of time and memory. It deals with themes of migration, postcolonial experiences, communal and political violence, family ties, society, caste and religion. A raw depiction of the horrors of Partition, the work simultaneously explores human desire and desperation in the face of hardships. The tone often gets autobiographical which adds to the collective emotional impact. By the time I  reached the end, I couldn't help but agree with what Khushwant Singh once said about the book, "This is how a novel should be written".

Truly, these are the very books you continue to think about for days. The story, the characters and the feelings they once evoked in you stay and call you back to them.

Lastly, the book reminds us of a time period we need to know about, India after British rule. It blatantly shows us a time we left behind, a time which is smeared by the blood of the departed innocents, a time heavy with the sound of helpless screams and a time which should not be forgotten.