The Shadow Lines

by Amitav Ghosh

  Later that evening, she announced that she wanted me to spend the night in her room: she was already missing me, she said. I was hoping she would ask me to: I liked sharing her bed and listening to her stories. But tonight there was another, more serious matter at hand too. When I had her to myself, I had decided, I would go over all my instructions about the plane once again. I had an uneasy feeling she had not been listening the last time.

  So, as soon as I saw her climbing into bed beside me, I started at the top of my list: did she remember about buckling her seat belt? And keeping an air-sickness bag close at hand? Not to speak of the parachutes under the pilot’s seat, did she remember? She laughed and told me to go to sleep, but I said no, I wouldn’t, not without a story. So she began on one of her Dhaka stories, one about the old house and the people who lived down the lane. But her voice trailed away slowly, and when she got to Kana-babu’s sweet-shop, she forgot all about me and climbed out of the mosquito-netted bed and drew her favourite armchair up to her window. When I fell asleep she was still there, staring out at the smudged blackness of the lake.

  When I woke up, our house was already convulsed with the preparations for their departure: my mother was in the kitchen, supervising the packing of the three different kinds of shandesh we were sending with them; my grandmother was in a fever of excitement, choosing a sari for Saifuddin’s wife, locking her cupboards and making sure she’d taken all her medicines with her. Only May seemed to be untouched by the excitement. I couldn’t understand how she could sit in her room playing her recorder like that, as though it were an ordinary morning.

  We left for Dum Dum airport at noon. By the time we arrived at Ballygunge Place to pick up Tridib my grandmother was giggling like a schoolgirl. She couldn’t believe she was really going to fly off into the sky.

  At Dum Dum, after we had said our goodbyes and they had been swallowed into Immigration and Customs, we went up to the terrace on the roof to watch their plane take off. We had to wait half an hour before we saw them, three tiny figures on the tarmac. They knew we were watching and they walked towards the plane with all the shy self-consciousness of amateur actors making an entry on a big stage. When they reached the stairs that led up to their brand new Fokker Friendship aircraft, my grandmother turned and waved in our direction, her sari a white blur against the black tarmac. We waved back, although we knew she wouldn’t be able to see us. Then a hostess bowed them through a hatch-like door and they vanished from sight. But minutes later I saw a face appear in one of the windows, like a smudged cameo, and waved wildly at it, certain it was my grandmother. The door was slammed shut, the stairs were wheeled away, and the plane began to move. It turned slowly and trundled down the runway with an ungainly, waddling motion. I stopped waving: it was hard to believe that this graceless, plodding thing would actually have the temerity to thrust itself into the sky. It came to a wide apron, turned again, and pointed its nose down the runway. It was stationary for a long moment; its energy seemed to seep away. A hush fell over the airport. Then the propellers started up; in an instant they were spinning so fast they melted into the shimmer of the heat on the tarmac. I was still watching my grandmother’s window – it was the third from the door at the back. I was sure I could see her, smiling, waving into the glass. Then the whole plane shook as a shudder ran down the fuselage. It began to roll down the runway, engines screaming, its silver body flashing back the glare of the midday sun. Its gracelessness was gone; the power of the engines had given the long fuselage the lean muscular tautness of the neck of a heron in full flight. It was shooting down the runway now; my grandmother’s window lengthened into a long, white blur. Its nose lifted, very gently, and then, suddenly, unbelievably, the whole of its huge metal body was riding the sky.

  As the plane circled above us, my mother allowed herself, at last, to breathe a long, deep sigh of relief: till that moment she had not really believed that my grandmother would really go to Dhaka.

  My father sighed too, but in a different sort of way, and said: Yes, it’s a good thing they’ve gone.

  There was something in his voice that made my mother ask: Why? Why particularly?

  He scratched his ear and said: People say there’s going to be trouble here. I’m glad they’ve gone abroad – especially May – they’ll be far away from it over there.

  What trouble? I asked.

  My mother gave him a frown and a quick shake of the head, so he turned me around, pointed at the plane and said: Nothing. Nothing that you would understand.

  We watched the plane until it disappeared over the horizon.

  Years afterwards, Robi told me that the first thing my grandmother said to Mayadebi when they met at the airport was: Where’s Dhaka? I can’t see Dhaka.

  I tried then to see Dhaka as she must have seen it that night, sitting by her window. But I hadn’t been to Dhaka, and in any case her Dhaka had long since vanished into the past. I had only her memories to go on, and those put together could give me only a faint, sepia-tinted picture of her other arrivals in Dhaka, decades ago: a picture in which I could see dimly in the middle distance, a black steam engine, puffing smoke, and a long line of carriages vanishing into the right-hand corner; in the foreground a deeply shaded platform, porters and vendors, and a crowd of relatives jostling to meet the new arrivals as they step out of their carriage; in the background, perhaps, a glimpse of the minarets of a mosque. I can guess at the outlines of the image that lived in her mind, but I have no inkling at all of the sounds and smells she remembered. Perhaps they were no different from those in any of the thousands of railway stations in the subcontinent. Perhaps, on the other hand, they consisted of some unique alchemical mixture of the sounds of the dialect and the smell of vast, mile-wide rivers, which alone had the power to bring upon her that comfortable lassitude which we call a sense of home-coming.

  At any rate, the one thing she was completely unprepared for was the bare glass-and-linoleum airport, so like the one she had just left. Nor was she prepared for the drive to the Shaheb’s house, along a straight road, flanked by tall eucalypti and the occasional suburban bungalow.

  May liked it. She said: What a pretty road, it’s so much more open than Calcutta. But as for my grandmother, she kept saying: I’ve never seen any of this. Where’s Dhaka?

  The Dhaka she was thinking of was the city that had surrounded their old house.

  She had talked to me often about that house and that lane. I could see them myself, though only in patches, for her memory had shone upon them with the interrupted brilliance of a lighthouse beam. So, for example, I could see Kana-babu’s sweet-shop at the end of their lane with absolute clarity, I could even see the pink cham-chams stacked in their trays, the freshly pressed shandesh heaped in orderly mounds beneath the cracked, discoloured glass of the counter; I could hear the buzzing of the flies, and I could see Kana-babu sitting hunched behind his cash-box, scratching his stomach, the same Kana-babu who had once caught their cousin stealing a rosogolla and poured a whole potful of sticky syrup down the front of his shorts: I could see all that, because people like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection. For me, Kana-babu’s sweet-shop at the end of the lane was as real as the one down our own road, and yet I could not tell whether the lane itself was paved or unpaved, straight or curved, or even whether it had drains running along it.

  Mayadebi’s new house was at the other end of the city. It was in Dhanmundi.

  Because of everything Robi told me about it, that name, Dhanmundi, became one of the secret sounds of my childhood, like the drumming of the monkey-man’s dug-dugi, and the tinkling of the bells of the Magnolia ice-cream cart in the stillness of hot afternoons; it became a part of my own secret map of the world, a map of which only I knew the keys and the co-ordinates, but which was not for that reason any more imaginary than the code of a safe is to a banker.

  I could not have escaped the name Dhanmundi even if I had wanted to; in the early seven
ties it was everywhere, in books, in newspapers. Sometimes it seemed to me that everything that happened in the capital of new-born Bangladesh happened in Dhanmundi: that was where ministers issued their statements, and unnamed but reliable Western diplomats confided in reporters; that was where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman lived and it was there that he died, one morning, when he stepped out on to a balcony to confront his uniformed assassins, unable to believe that they, clad in the uniforms he had given them, would turn their guns upon him, their Liberator. Reading those reports in the newspapers, I used to wonder whether, if Robi had still been there, thirteen years old, he would have heard those first bursts of gunfire which brought down the Sheikh’s bodyguard, and have run to the roof and seen the old man’s body crashing to the driveway, leaking blood, before Nityananda or his mother came running up the stairs behind him, and clapped their hands over his eyes and whispered breathlessly in his ears: Don’t look, don’t look – it’s just a game.

  But in 1964 Dhanmundi was barely a blueprint for the fashionable suburb it was later to become. It was a nearempty wasteland of flooded foundation trenches, boundary walls that enclosed nothing but dust and grass, and a few huge walled-in houses that rose like catafalques above streets which existed only by common consent since they had no surfaces to mark them out from the fields that surrounded them. And so my grandmother, looking, perhaps, for sweet-shops and lanes, could not help exclaiming when she saw the Shaheb’s house in Dhanmundi: But this is for foreigners; where’s Dhaka? And Tridib could not resist the malicious pleasure of pointing out: But you are a foreigner now, you’re as foreign here as May – much more than May, for look at her, she doesn’t even need a visa to come here. At that, my grandmother gave May a long wondering look and said: Yes, I really am a foreigner here – as foreign as May in India or Tagore in Argentina. Then she caught another glimpse of the house and shook her head and said: But whatever you may say, this isn’t Dhaka.

  Still, it was a good house to be thirteen in: a wonderful place for Robi. It had a large roof, wide open and breezy, as good a place for flying kites as any one could wish for; you had only to hold up a kite on that roof and the wind would snatch it out of your hands, its glass-coated string singing, and in an instant it would be so far away you would hardly be able to see it and wouldn’t have the time to try, because it was all you could do to hold on to the string.

  Like all the other houses in Dhanmundi, theirs had a high wall, running all the way around it. At the back, just outside the wall, there was a pond where fishermen would come in the afternoons to try their luck. Usually it was a quiet, tame little pond, but in the monsoons, when the great cyclones of the Bay of Bengal struck Dhaka, that pond would turn purple, mirroring the sky, and it would rise with the wind and hurl itself on the house and go shooting through the driveway, out into the streets beyond. And when that happened, Nityananda, their cook, would run out into the flooded driveway, armed with an old sari, and drive the fish into the puddles in the garage and scoop them up. Sometimes he would keep the fish there for days, in an earthenware pot, and run into the garage and pick out a fresh one whenever he wanted.

  At the back was an enclosed courtyard, ringed with coconut palms and papaya plants. Nityananda kept a few ducks and chickens there, and once a week he would act out a play for Robi in that courtyard. This one’s been a bad boy this week, he would say, grabbing a chicken by the neck. Then he would raise his sickle and shout an invocation – Joi Ma Jagad-janani – and the blade would flash and the chicken’s head would jump off its neck and lie at Robi’s feet, its beak open in surprise. Robi would run upstairs then, but, unable to resist, he would stick his head through the railings of the veranda at the back, and watch spellbound as the headless chicken flapped around the courtyard. Nityananda would know that Robi was watching, and he would rock back on his heels, squatting on his haunches, and stroke his moustache and puff at his biri, and after a while he would look up at Robi, his bright, black eyes twinkling, and point at the spinning carcass, and say. Do you see – that’s what comes of being a bad boy.

  It was Nityananda too who introduced Robi to the garden in front: showed him how to suck the watery nectar from the stems of canna lilies, and taught him the trick of catching dragonflies, by pinching their wings together between finger and thumb. But best of all, he taught Robi to climb the mango tree in the middle of the garden. It was a big tree, very difficult to climb, with a trunk that grew straight and smooth out of the earth for a good eight feet or so before it divided into branches. It took a lot of work, but he mastered the trick just in time. And the first thing he did, when he and his parents got back from the airport with their visitors, was scramble up the tree. When he had climbed into the highest branches he shouted down to my grandmother: Look, mashi; look where I am!

  She looked up, and when she saw him she said wistfully: I wish I could do that too – maybe I’d be able to see Dhaka from up there.

  That evening, sitting out in the garden before dinner, my grandmother asked Mayadebi when they were going to the old house to fetch their uncle.

  Whenever you like, said Mayadebi, and my grandmother, eagerly, cried: Tomorrow – we’ll go tomorrow! The sooner the better.

  But then, to her surprise, the Shaheb interrupted: No, he said. This isn’t a good time to go there. The house is in the heart of the old city and in the Chancery we’ve heard there’s going to be trouble there. I don’t think you should go there now.

  My grandmother would have despised herself if she had given in to the Shaheb. She leant forward, shook his knee and said: If there’s going to be trouble, that’s all the more reason to get him out while there’s still time. I’ve come all the way to Dhaka for his sake and I’m not going to put up with any delays now. I’m not going to be scared off by a little trouble. We have to get it done as soon as possible.

  But really, the Shaheb protested, spilling his whisky in his agitation. Really – it’s not safe to go there now. I can’t permit it. You must wait a few days.

  He appealed mutely to Mayadebi to reason with her.

  Of course we’ll go soon, said Mayadebi calmly. We’ll go a few days later. A week won’t make any difference to anyone.

  My grandmother thought this over. We’ll wait till next week, she said. Until Thursday. Thursday is a good day. But that’s all – not one day later.

  I do not remember how long they had been gone when I discovered, one morning, that there was trouble in Calcutta.

  I remember my mother had a busy morning that day; perhaps it was one of those days when my father had to leave early for work. Whatever it was, she did not have time to listen to the morning news on the radio and she sent me down to the corner, with my satchel and water bottle, to wait, as usual, for the school bus.

  Years later, I used to wonder at my mother’s odd relationship with her little transistor radio. It was given a place of singular honour in her room: it stood on the same shelf on which she kept her framed pictures of her dead parents. She never missed the morning news if she could help it: those bulletins were the liturgy of the ritual of our breakfast. In college I used to say proudly to my friends: my mother’s really interested in politics – she hasn’t missed the morning news in years. Of course, I was merely trying to impress them; I knew perfectly well, even then, that she had no interest at all in the kind of politics that is spoken of over radios. Only I did not recognise that quality as a virtue then, and I could not have brought myself to admit, fattened as I was on promises of bureaucratic progress, like everybody else of my age, that for her, listening to he news was a simple rule of survival. But she missed the news that morning, so I went out to wait for my bus, as usual.

  I had to wait a long time. I remember I was jealous when the other two boys who usually caught the bus with me did not turn up. I wasn’t surprised, however, because that was the day the first cricket test match of the 1964 series against England was to begin at Madras. I assumed that they had been able to persuade their parents to let them stay back to
listen to the radio commentary. Knowing my mother, I hadn’t even bothered to ask.

  I paced up and down the pavement as I waited: I was worried about the match. The morning newspaper had said that Farouk Engineer was injured and would not be playing; in his place they had included someone called Budhi Kunderan. This was worrying news: Engineer was our hero, the swashbuckler of our side. I’d never heard of Kunderan: without Engineer I couldn’t see that we had a ghost of a chance. It was infuriating to wait when I was so eager to talk about the match with my friends on the bus.

  Then there it was, our large blue schoolbus, making its stately way towards me, down the avenue. In my impatience, I ran towards it, waving my water bottle. But then, as it drew nearer, something about it began to puzzle me and I stopped. I knew it was the right bus – I could see the name of my school painted boldly on its side – but I could tell there was something wrong. Then it struck me: usually, by the time it reached me, the bus was full, and there were heads and arms sticking out of every window. But today the bus seemed curiously empty: there were no heads outlined against the windows.

  The bus stopped and I climbed in. There were only a dozen other boys in it, and they were sitting on a bench at the back, huddled together against the emptiness of the bus. They seemed relieved to see me, although they were none of them my friends. Normally we wouldn’t have so much as acknowledged one another, but today they moved up as soon as they saw me and made room for me beside them.

  No sooner had I sat down than I noticed that their eyes, all dozen pairs, had strayed towards my shoulder. What’s the matter? I said uneasily. What are you staring at? I looked back quickly and saw that it was my water bottle that had attracted their attention.

  On my right was a plump boy called Tublu who sometimes played cricket with us in the park. What’s the matter? I said to him. Haven’t you seen a water bottle before?