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Two people have made London so very real to him - Tridib, the second son of his father's aunt, his real mentor and inspirer, and Ila his beautiful cousin who has travelled all over the world but has seen little compared to what the narrator has seen through his mental eye. London is also a very real place because of Tridib's and Ila's friends - Mrs. Price, her daughter May, and son Nick. Like London comes alive due to the stories related by Ila and Tridib, Dhaka comes alive because of all the stories of her childhood told to him by his incomparable grandmother who was born there. The tragedy is that though the narrator spends almost a year in London and thus has ample opportunity to come to terms with its role in his life, it is Dhaka which he never visits that affects him most by the violent drama that takes place on its roads, taking Tridib away as one of its most unfortunate victims. Violence has many faces in this novel - it is as much present in the marriage of Ila to Nick doomed to failure even before the "yes" word was spoken, as it is present on the riot torn streets of Calcutta or Dhaka. But the speciality of this novel is that this violence is very subtle till almost the end. When violence is dealt with, the idea is not to describe it explicitly like a voyeur but to look at it to comprehend its total senselessness. Thus the way "violence" is brought into the picture is extraordinarily sensitive: The narrator says, talking of the day riots tore Calcutta apart in 1964, "I opened my mouth to answer and found I had nothing to say. All I could have told them was of the sound of voices running past the walls of my school, and of a glimpse of a mob in Park Circus." I have never experienced such a sound, but God, how these sentences get under the skin, how easy it is to hear that sound, how the heart beats faster on reading these sentences! There are many other reasons why "The Shadow Lines" is so special a book. It has many of the characteristics that elevate a book to the level of unforgettable literature. First of all there is this simple language. These days when doing acrobatics with words and language has become equivalent to paving new directions in the literary scene, it is heart warming to read a book in which straight forward language is used to convey what the author wants to say. And what messages are conveyed, what new ideas are unearthed! I am one of those readers who likes reading because of the power inherent in words. Whenever I read a new book, I always hope that the book contains sentences and words - at least a couple of them - that illuminate the heart and mind for a long time after reading, sentences which simply make life easier to live. There is a treasure of such sentences to be discovered in "The Shadow Lines". For example, look at what Ghosh says about knowledge and ignorance: "...he knew the clarity of that image in his mind was merely the seductive clarity of ignorance; an illusion of knowledge created by a deceptive weight of remembered detail." And there is this most beautiful of all sentences I have read for a long, long time - "And yet, when I look at her (the grandmother), lying crumpled in front of me, her white thinning hair matted with her invalid's sweat, my heart fills with love for her - love and that other thing, which is not pity but something else, something the English language knows only in its absence - ruth - a tenderness which is not merely pity and not only love." |