The Shadow Lines

by Amitav Ghosh

  And since there was something just a little improbable about the son of a diplomat, scion of a rich and powerful family, turning up at those street corners for years on end, it was the latter kind of story that people tended to believe. Sometimes I would try to tell them the truth. But I was just a boy and I happened to have a reputation for being wide-eyed and gullible. Besides, they all knew we lived in a small flat down the lane; if I had tried too hard to persuade them that we had rich and powerful relatives they would only have thought that I was giving myself airs.

  When I was about nine Tridib once stayed away from his haunts in Gole Park for so long that the regulars began to wonder what had happened to him. I was the only one who knew, because I had stopped by at his house once (as I often did in those days) on my way to my maths tutor’s house, in the afternoon. This was during the time he was telling me the story of his journey to England in instalments.

  I had found him, as always, lying on a mat in his room at the top of the house, reading, with a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray beside him. When I told him that people were asking about him at Gole Park, he put a finger to his lips.

  Shh, he said. Don’t tell them a thing. Do you know what? I think I may have discovered the mound where the kings of the Sena dynasty used to bury their treasure. If the government finds out, they’ll take everything. Don’t say a word to anyone and don’t come here again for a while – you may be followed by secret agents.

  I was thrilled: I hugged the secret to my chest every time I was asked about him. He’d gone, I would say. He’s vanished.

  Then, one evening, on my way to the park, I heard he’d surfaced at Gole Park again. I doubled back and found him at his favourite adda, on the steps of an old house, surrounded by his acquaintances. I waved to him, from between someone’s legs, but he was busy answering their questions and didn’t see me.

  Where have you been all this while, Tridib-da? somebody said. It must be three or four months …

  I’ve been away, I heard him say, and nodded secretly to myself.

  Away? Where?

  I’ve been to London, he said. To visit my relatives. His face was grave, his voice steady.

  What relatives?

  I have English relatives through marriage, he said. A family called Price. I thought I’d go and visit them.

  Ignoring their sceptical grunts, he told them that he had been to stay with old Mrs Price, who was a widow. Her husband had died recently. She lived in north London, he said, on a street called Lymington Road; the number of their house was 44 and the tube station was West Hampstead. Mrs Price had a daughter, who was called May.

  And what’s she like? a voice asked. Sexy?

  He reflected on that for a moment, and said, no, she wasn’t sexy, not in the ordinary way – she was thick-set, with broad shoulders, and not very tall. She wasn’t beautiful or even pretty in the usual sense, for she had a strong face and a square jaw, but she had thick straight hair which came down to her shoulders in a glossy black screen, like a head-dress in an Egyptian frieze, and she had a wonderful, warm smile which lit up her blue eyes and gave her a quality all her own, set her apart.

  And what does she do? someone sneered. Is she a wrestler or a hairdresser?

  She’s a student, said Tridib. At least, a kind of student – she’s studying at the Royal College of Music. She plays the oboe, and one day she’s going to join an orchestra.

  It was then, I think, that I could restrain myself no longer. I thrust myself forward through the thicket of trousered legs and cried: Tridib-da, you’ve made a mistake! I met you last month, don’t you remember? You were in your room, lying on your mat, smoking a cigarette. You were looking for …

  There was a howl of laughter and a chorus of exclamations: You fraud, you liar, you were just making it all up, you haven’t been anywhere …

  Tridib did not seem to be at all put out, either by what I had said or by their laughter. He laughed too, shrugging good-naturedly, and said: If you believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all …

  Leaning towards me, he pinched my cheek and grinned. Isn’t that so? he said, with an interrogatory nod, his spectacles glinting in the lamplight.

  His aplomb gave an uneasy edge to the laughter and the comments around him: it seemed now that he had made them the victims of a complicated private joke. There was an edgy hostility in their voices when he left. You can’t believe a word he says, somebody exclaimed, he just likes to bamboozle people and play jokes on them. But another, sharper voice broke in and said: Joke? He wasn’t joking, he believed everything he said: it was no joke, the fact is that he’s a nut – he’s never been anywhere outside Calcutta.

  I was furious with myself now for having exposed Tridib to their ridicule. You don’t know what you’re talking about, I cried. I was shouting at the top of my voice, so they listened.

  Still shouting, I told them the truth as I knew it: that Tridib had been to London, with his parents, many years ago, when he was a boy. They had taken his father there for an operation, which couldn’t be done in India. They had had to go, even though it was 1939 and they knew there might be a war. His brother Jatin had been left behind in Calcutta with his grandparents because he was older and couldn’t be away from school for so long. And yes, there was a family called Price, who lived in West Hampstead, but they weren’t relatives – they were very, very old friends of Tridib’s family, because Mrs Price’s father, Lionel Tresawsen, had lived in India when the British were here, and he and Tridib’s grandfather, who was a very important man, a judge in the Calcutta High Court, had been friends. Long after Lionel Tresawsen went back to England his daughter had married a man who had taught her in college, whom everyone called Snipe because his name was S. N. I. Price. When she’d heard that Tridib’s father was ill she had written to them and sent telegrams to say that they must stay with her in London, because she’d bought a big house, and she’d been wanting to take in lodgers anyway. And it was true that she had a daughter called May, but she was a little baby when Tridib was in London, and as far as I knew he hadn’t seen her since. And Mrs Price had had a brother too, called Alan, who had been in Germany before the war …

  I gave up, exhausted.

  That’s an even better version than Tridib’s, somebody said, with a snort of laughter.

  It’s true, I shouted back at him. If you don’t believe me, ask …

  Tridib? A voice prompted, and they doubled up with laughter.

  I pushed my way out and ran all the way down the lane and up the two flights of stairs to our flat. I was an hour late, and my grandmother was very angry. In her controlled, headmistress’s voice she asked me where I had been, and when I didn’t answer she raised her hand, drew it back and slapped me. Where have you been? she asked again, and this time I blurted out that I’d been down at the corner. She slapped me again, really hard. Haven’t I told you, she said, you’re not to go there and waste your time? Time is not for wasting, time is for work.

  I met May Price for the first time two years after that incident, when she came to Calcutta on a visit. The next time I met her was seventeen years later, when I went to London myself.

  I went to England on a year’s research grant, to collect material from the India Office Library, where all the old colonial records were kept, for a PhD thesis on the textile trade between India and England in the nineteenth century. More than a month passed after I arrived in London, before I could meet May again.

  I had to go to a great deal of trouble to find her. She was playing in an orchestra and living on her own in a bedsit in Islington. Mrs Price gave me her phone number and I called her several times, but she was never in. And then, one morning, while looking through the entertainment page of the Guardian, I saw a notice which said that her orchestra would be playing the Dvorák Cello Concerto that evening at the Royal Festival Hall.

  I went there early that evening: I could only afford a ticket for a place on one of the benches behind the orch
estra, and I had heard they sometimes sold out very early. But as it turned out I managed to get a seat quite easily: the soloist was a Swedish cellist who clearly did not have much drawing power.

  When I went in, I discovered that my seat was directly behind the woodwind section. Soon I saw her; she was fussing with her music-stand, dressed, like all the other women in the orchestra, in a black skirt and white blouse. I watched her as she arranged her music and chatted with an elderly horn player who was sitting in front of her. Her hair was still cut exactly as I remembered it from the time she had stayed with us in Calcutta: falling thick and straight to her shoulders, mantling her neck and the sides of her face; but where I remembered it as dark and shiny, it was streaked now with bands of grey which shimmered when they caught the light. Her shoulders, always broad for her height, had thickened; she seemed almost top-heavy now, for she hadn’t added an inch to her waist. I caught a glimpse of her face when she turned to say something to a woman who was sitting in the row behind. She had deep lines running from the corner of her mouth to her nose, and her eyes, which had once been a clear, bright blue, had grown pale and prominent.

  Watching her through that concert, I thought of her as she was when she came to stay with us in Calcutta, all those years ago. We had moved to a much larger house then, and she had been given the guest room, downstairs. In the evenings, whenever I managed to elude my mother and grandmother (who didn’t want me to bother her), I would slip into her room, sit on the floor and listen to her playing scales on the recorder she had brought to practice on. Often she would blush with embarrassment, put her recorder down and say: Look, this must be so boring for you, all these horrible scales.

  But I wouldn’t let her stop. I would insist that she go on playing, and I would sit there entranced, and watch her blowing into her recorder, frowning, the muscles in her cheeks knotting in concentration.

  She was not frowning when she played in that concert in the Festival Hall: it was evident that her mastery of her instrument was so complete now that she had to give little thought to the music. All through that concert she, and most of the other musicians around her, performed with a bored mechanical precision, very much like veteran soldiers going through a familiar exercise at their sergeantmajor’s command.

  When the concert was over I waited in my seat until the audience had left and the members of the orchestra were busy packing their instruments. Then I leant over the railing and called out her name. She looked up, narrowing her eyes. She saw me and gave me a politely puzzled smile. Then, to my surprise, she recognised me, and her face lit up and she waved. Pointing at the exit she mouthed the words: I’ll see you outside.

  I went out into the plush, chandeliered foyer and waited. Five minutes later, I saw her, picking her way through the last stragglers, her shoulders rolling, like a boxer’s, as she walked towards me. We met half-way down the foyer and froze in mutual embarrassment. She put out a tentative hand, and then suddenly she smiled, rose on tiptoe, pulled my head down and kissed me on the cheeks, her oboe clattering against my neck in its leather case.

  As we made our way out, I asked her how she had recognised me, after all those years. She gave it a moment’s thought and said: I put two and two together I suppose – I knew you were in London; Mother told me.

  She stopped to give me a quick, appraising look. And besides, she said, it’s not as though you don’t bear a family resemblance to the boy I met in Calcutta – and I remember him very well.

  Her voice had a deep, gravelly, almost masculine texture; I couldn’t decide whether it had always been like that or whether it had changed.

  While she was leading me towards Waterloo tube station through a maze of concrete walkways, she stopped to ask: Have you got anything planned for the rest of the evening?

  I shook my head, trying not to look too eager.

  Well, she said, pausing to think; you could always come back with me to my bedsit, for dinner. I can’t offer you very much – just a beansprout salad and some grilled fish. I don’t know whether you care for that kind of thing?

  Yes, I said, nodding. That would be very nice.

  She gave me a quick smile. If it’s any consolation, she said, remember I sprouted the beans myself.

  In the tube, on our way to Islington, I told her how bored she had looked through the concert. She nodded sheepishly. Yes, she said; you’ve guessed my guilty secret. I only stay on with the orchestra because I’ve got to make a living somehow …

  She cleared her throat, hesitated, and went on to add: You know – I spend most of my time working for Amnesty and Oxfam and a couple of other relief agencies, small ones, you won’t have heard of them.

  I asked her a few questions and she described the project she was working on just then with a businesslike briskness: it was something to do with providing housing for the survivors of an earthquake in Central America. It was evident that she found a great deal of satisfaction in her work.

  Her room was on the first floor of a house that looked out on Islington Green. As she stepped in and switched on the lights, a television set near her bed lit up too, automatically. She hurried across the room and switched it off.

  Turning to face me she said, guiltily, as though she were making a confession: I leave it on all the time. It’s my only real indulgence. It fills up the room – it feels a bit empty otherwise.

  It was a large, pleasant room, full of plants; its windows looked out over the trees on the Green. There was very little furniture in it – an armchair, a desk, and a large bed, pushed up against the wall at the far end of the room. There were also a few cushions, with bright Gujarati mirrorwork covers, scattered on the floor, but they looked as though they had been thrown there more to fill up empty space than to be sat on: it did not look like a room where visitors were often expected.

  With a formal, faintly ironic little bow May invited me to amuse myself by looking through her bookshelf while she made our dinner. Glancing through her collection of Russian novels in paperback, miniature music scores and illustrated health books, I came upon an old photograph. It was pinned, along with a dozen other scraps of paper, on to one of those large boards that I had seen hanging over many student desks in London. It was a picture of her, taken a long time ago.

  While I was looking at it she darted out of her cupboard-like kitchenette to fetch something from the refrigerator. She noticed me standing in front of her board and came and stood beside me. When she saw what I was looking at she gave me a quick glance and opened her mouth to say something. But then, changing her mind, she whipped around again and went back to the kitchenette. Curious now, I followed her there and stood leaning against the wall, watching her as she bent down to look under the grill. I remarked casually that the picture must have been taken a long time ago: that was exactly how she had looked, if my memory served me right, when she had stayed with us in Calcutta.

  Not quite exactly, she said, watching the grill, her voice ironically precise; it was taken at least a couple of years before that.

  She looked at me, dusting her hands, raising her eyebrows as though in surprise. That was the picture, she said, a copy of which I was once privileged to send to Tridib.

  Later, when we were eating our dinner, I discovered that in 1959, when he was twenty-seven and she nineteen, they had begun a long correspondence. Tridib had written first, she told me. He had always sent Mrs Price cards at Christmas, ever since they left London in 1940. But that year he had sent two, one to Mrs Price and one to her. He had inscribed a little note in her card saying that he remembered her very well, though she could not possibly remember him, that it would be a great pity if they lost touch altogether, and he hoped that some day she would find time to write to him. She was both touched and intrigued: she had already heard a great deal about him.

  Smiling at the memory, she told me how his card had reached her just when she was trying to get over an adolescent crush on a schoolboy trombonist, who had had no time for her at all and had not been overly
delicate about making that clear. It was nice to feel that someone wanted to befriend her. She had written back, and after that they had written to each other regularly – short, chatty letters, usually. Soon, penfriend-like, they had exchanged photographs.

  I like to think that Tridib received May’s photograph the day he came to Gole Park and told us that made-up story.

  Actually my grandmother was wrong about Tridib: he was nothing at all like the hardened gossip-lovers who spent most of their time hanging around the street corners at Gole Park. He was often maliciously dismissive of those people; marine mammals, he would say of them, creatures who sink to the bottom of the sea of heartbreak when they lose sight of the herd.

  The truth was that, in his own way, Tridib was something of a recluse: even as a child I could tell that he was happiest in that book-lined room of his, right at the top of their old family house. It was that Tridib whom I liked best; I was a bit unsure of the Tridib of the street corners.

  His niece Ila and I used to disagree about this. We talked about it once, when we were about sixteen. I was soon to leave to go to college in Delhi, I remember, and Ila and her parents had just flown in from Indonesia for a short holiday.

  Soon after they arrived in Calcutta, they came to visit us. I still remember how my grandmother gasped when Ila climbed out of the car, the tasselled end of her long thick braid swinging freely in front of her. Even my grandmother, who was very critical in all matters to do with appearance, especially where Ila and her family were concerned, pinched her chin and said: Our Ila is growing into a real beauty – she’s taken after Maya.