The Shadow Lines

I just finished reading The Shadow Lines, another Amitav Ghosh book. Like most of his other books, this also meanders around the life of multiple characters, slowly building them layer by layer (so slowly that you don’t even realise how strongly you start identifying with them), and then ending on a dramatic and poignant climax, which would have never hit you that deep down within had the story not meandered along for that long. (Something akin to what I wrote about Munich in one of my previous blogs).

The Glass Palace was like that, this one’s only much much much better. I picked up this book from Crossword because it was ofcourse Ghosh’s book, but even more so because of the Khushwant Singh’s review, who wrote ‘This is how the language should be used.. This is how a novel should be written.’ He wasn’t too wrong at all. This is how a character should be built, this is how an emotion or idea should be communicated.

Amitav Ghosh is a brilliant author, probably India’s finest along with Rushdie, and this is undoubtedly his best work I have read. It is a non-linear story, in which the narrator fluidly travels back and forth in his memories, in time and space, from his childhood to the present, from India to London to Dhaka, from Thamma to Ila to ofcourse Tridib, and creates a web of intricate personalities and interconnected events, and leaves it to the reader to interpret it all. The beauty of the book is that it doesn’t tell you anything, but instead lets you interpret it yourself.

So what are these ‘shadow lines’. From what I interpret, they are those lines which we create between two people, two countries, two continents, two religions and what not. They are real and yet not so real after all; they exist and yet can vanish in a second if you flash light on them.

When I first heard John Lennon’s Imagine, I was flabbergasted.

‘Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace.’

This cant be better put, I thought. But The Shadow Lines does that, and much more. While Lennon directly tells you to imagine this, Ghosh, as I said before, doesn’t tell you anything. Instead, in this lyrical work, he creates the entire cast in front of you, with the heaven, the hell, the people, the countries and the religions. He shows these shadow lines appearing and disappearing along the entire course of the narrative, and then literally makes you imagine all that Lennon talks about, without ever mentioning it directly himself, save for a couple of times.

Inception, as Leonardo di Caprio put it, is the most difficult to achieve, almost impossible. Ghosh manages to do that in this book. A must read, folks.

PS: There is a 3 page passage in the book, in which Tridib writes a letter to May beautifully describing an erotic scene, and tells her how he would like to meet her. That letter is a sort of mini Shadow Lines in itself, a masterpiece. It ends with ‘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.’ Wow!!!

PPS: Perhaps the book struck a deep chord with me because I anyway think a lot on the Kashmir issue nowadays, which is similar in nature. Who knows, if I read it dispassionately sometime later, I might have a lesser opinion, or an entirely different interpretation of it altogether!