The Shadow Lines

by Amitav Ghosh

  Listening to Tridib that evening, I thought I understood what Nick had meant when he had said to my father, with such untroubled certainty, that yes, of course he knew what he wanted to do, he wanted to travel around the world like Lionel Tresawsen, to live in faraway places half-way around the globe, to walk through the streets of La Paz and Cairo. At that moment, looking up at the smoggy night sky above Gole Park, wondering how the stars looked in London, I thought I had found at last the kindred spirit whom I had never been able to discover among my friends.

  I couldn’t hold my questions back any more after I had shown

  May the footrest under the immense table, where Ila had been sitting when she first introduced me to Nick Price. Is his hair really yellow? I cried. And does it really fall over his eyes?

  May gave this a bit of thought and said, no, yellow was not quite the word she would use, it was sort of straw-coloured hair, but yes, it did fall over his eyes.

  And what was he like? I found myself asking her. Did he like school, and what was he going to do afterwards?

  I was being clever. I didn’t want her to know that I already knew.

  She found an upturned chair, righted it, and sat down. Oh, he’s a very grown-up little boy, she said. He knows exactly what he’s going to do after school.

  What?

  He’s going to join a firm of chartered accountants, and once they’ve trained him he’s going to get a nice job with a huge salary preferably abroad, not in England. England’s gone down the drain, he says. It can’t afford to pay anyone properly except old-age pensioners.

  What’s a chartered accountant? I said.

  She smiled and wiped the back of her hand across his face, leaving a dark smudge on her cheek.

  I don’t know, she said, with a snort of laughter. I think they have big books full of numbers on which they make little marks with red pencils.

  I steadied myself against her chair. But May, I said, doesn’t he want to travel – like your grandfather …?

  Oh, travel doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, she said. She gave me a long speculative look, narrowing her eyes, and said: I wonder whether you’d like him.

  Of course I’d like him, I cried. I like him already.

  You don’t know him, she said. He’s not at all like us, you know.

  What do you mean ‘us’? I said.

  Not much like me, she said. Nor like our parents, or Tridib, or you, or anyone …

  She stood up, dusted her shirt and said, under her breath, to herself, as though in reproof: But all the same he’s a dear old chap.

  I hope I’ll meet him some day, I said.

  I’m sure you will, she said, smiling. I wonder what you’ll have to say to him when you do?

  I met him seventeen years later, in London.

  The day before Robi was to leave for Boston, Ila arranged to take the two of us to meet Mrs Price. I was delighted: I had been planning to visit her ever since I arrived in London, four weeks before, but somehow I had not quite picked up the courage to go on my own.

  Ila and Robi met me at the Indian Students’ Hostel in Bloomsbury where I was staying temporarily. They arrived late in the afternoon when I was in the dining hall, drinking tea and eating dum aloo and puris, while listening to a bearded student leader from Allahabad who was campaigning to be elected president of the hostel union.

  The moment I saw Ila coming through the door, I could tell from her pursed lips and shining eyes that she was nursing a secret. But when I asked her what it was, on the way to the Goodge Street tube station, she shook her head and hurried on ahead of us.

  It was not till the red sign of the Mornington Crescent tube station had flashed past my window like a palmed card that Ila sprang her surprise.

  Do you know who’s going to be waiting for us at the station when we get there? she said.

  May? said Robi.

  No, not May, said Ila. May’s away touring with her orchestra.

  Then who? Go on, tell us.

  Nick, she said, her eyes shining. Nick Price. I haven’t seen him in, it must be all of ten years. He was a pimply youth of nineteen then, and I was a buck-toothed belle with braces.

  But I thought he was away in Kuwait, said Robi. Getting rich, doing chartered accountancy or whatever.

  He was, said Ila. He’s been away for a very long time. But he came back unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago – I don’t know why. Mrs Price didn’t talk about it much.

  She looked out at the black walls of the tunnel, smiling to herself.

  I’ll tell you what, she said presently. After we’ve been to see Mrs Price, I’ll treat you two to dinner at my favourite Indian restaurant – it’s a small Bangladeshi place in Clapham. You’ll like it. We can ask Nick too – maybe he’d like to come.

  I knew him the moment I saw him. He was at the far end of the platform, standing under a ‘Way Out’ sign. He was wearing a blue suit, a striped institutional tie and a dark overcoat. He looked very tall and broad to me at first, just as I had imagined him. But when he and Robi met half-way and shook hands, I saw that I was wrong, that my eyes had been deceived by the distorted perspectives of the long, straight lines of the platform: I saw that most of his breadth lay in the thickness of his overcoat and that his head reached no higher up Robi’s shoulder than did mine.

  When he turned to Ila, and stuck out his hand, I wondered whether he looked older than he ought because his face had been burnt and coarsened by the desert sun. But it wasn’t that: it was because of a premature, slightly suspicious gravity that made him wrinkle up his eyes appraisingly when he talked, like a banker who has seen too many good debts turn bad.

  Ila laughed, looking at his outstretched hand, and raising herself on tiptoe she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, full on the mouth. The blood rushed to his face and he laughed too, awkwardly, and his face suddenly unwrinkled, and throwing his arms around her he hugged her to his chest, and then, when he was kissing her, I saw that his hair had fallen over his eyes in exactly the way Ila had described on that long-ago October morning.

  So, when he walked up to me, flicking his straw-coloured hair back, and said: How nice to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you from my mother and May and everyone … what could I say? I said: I’m not meeting you for the first time; I’ve grown up with you.

  He was taken aback.

  That must have taken some doing, he said drily, since I grew up right here, in boring suburban old West Hampstead.

  I’ve known the streets around here for a long time too, I said.

  And then I began to show off.

  When we came out of the tube station I stopped them and pointed down the road. Since this is West End Lane, I said, that must be Sumatra Road over there. So that corner must be where the air-raid shelter was, the same one that Robi’s mother and your mother and your uncle Alan ducked into on their way back from Mill Lane, when one of those huge, high-calibre bombs exploded on Solent Road, around the corner, blowing up most of the houses there. And that house, that one, just down the road, over there, on the corner of Lymington Road, I know what it’s called: it’s called Lymington Mansions, and an incendiary bomb fell on it, and burned down two floors. That was on the first of October 1940, two days before your uncle died.

  Nick Price inclined his head at me, in polite incredulity. He turned to Ila and they walked on ahead, cutting me short. Robi fell into step beside me and, jabbing me in the ribs, told me not to bullshit; didn’t I know that the Germans hadn’t developed high-calibre bombs till much later in the war? In 1940 they simply hadn’t possessed a bomb that was powerful enough to knock down a whole street.

  But that’s what happened, I said.

  How do you know? Robi said.

  Because Tridib told me.

  How was he to know? He was just a kid, nine years old. Every little bomb probably seemed like an earthquake to him.

  Look, I said, that’s what happened.

  OK, Robi said. Since you’re so sure, let’s
go and take a look at that road of yours and see what it’s like now.

  All right, I said. I called out to Nick and Ila: We’re going over there to take a look at Solent Road, where the bomb fell.

  Ila made an impatient face. You and your silly bombs, she said. We’re late already; hurry up. We’ll wait for you at the corner.

  Solent Road’s over there, said Nick, laughing. Do tell us if you find it all bombed out.

  He did not have to tell me where it was. I knew already, for the map was in my head: down Sumatra Road, fourth turning to the right.

  Here we are, said Robi, when we got there. That’s your bombed-out road.

  It was a short road, lined with trees and hedges on either side. The trees were a pale honey-green – the colour of English greenery – but gentler still now, gilded by the steep afternoon sunlight. The red brick houses were all exactly the same, on both sides of the road: with sharply pointed tiled roofs and white window frames and doorways, each with its own patch of garden hidden behind a hedge. There were rows of small cars parked on either side of the road. Right beside us was a small blue Citroën with a sticker on the windshield which said: Save the Whales. On the back seat there was a pile of oddly shaped green bottles and next to them a kind of plastic bucket strapped to the seat.

  I found myself suddenly absorbed in the trappings of the lives that went with that car.

  Are those wine bottles? I asked Robi.

  No, you fool, he laughed. Those are mineral water bottles.

  And that; what’s that? I asked, pointing to the plastic bucket.

  That’s a seat for a baby, he said impatiently. Haven’t you seen one before? It’s to keep a baby safe inside a car.

  I could not take my eyes off the Citroën.

  Enough of that bloody car, said Robi. Take a look at your bombed-out Solent Road now.

  I looked up at the quiet, pretty houses on that tranquil road. I caught his eye and we both burst into laughter.

  Not exactly what you had expected, Robi said.

  I did not tell him then, but he was wrong.

  I had not expected to see what Tridib had seen. Of course not. I had not expected to see rubble sloping down from burnt-out houses like scree in a mountain quarry, with a miraculously undamaged bathtub balanced precariously at the top; nor had I expected to find the road barricaded by policemen while the men from the Heavy Rescue Service tried to dig beneath the rubble for the lost pensioner. I had known that I would not see uprooted trees or splintered windows or buckled flagstones: I had expected nothing of all that, knowing it to be lost in a forty-year-old past.

  But despite that, I still could not believe in the truth of what I did see: the gold-green trees, the old lady walking her Pekinese, the children who darted out of a house and ran to the postbox at the corner, their cries hanging like thistles in the autumn air. I could see all of that, and yet, despite the clear testimony of my eyes, it seemed to me still that Tridib had shown me something truer about Solent Road a long time ago in Calcutta, something I could not have seen had I waited at that corner for years – just as one may watch a tree for months and yet know nothing at all about it if one happens to miss that one week when it bursts into bloom.

  I wanted to know England not as I saw her, but in her finest hour – every place chooses its own, and to me it did not seem an accident that England had chosen hers in a war.

  Nick and Ila were waiting for us where we had left them, at the corner where Sumatra Road joined West End Lane. Nick was talking and he did not notice us.

  One can’t really like Kuwait, we heard him say. There’s nothing to do there except drink and watch video films. I’m quite relieved to be back.

  So have you got yourself a new job? Ila asked.

  Oh, I’ll start looking around soon, he said. It shouldn’t be a problem; I have a lot of experience.

  He stopped to run his fingers through his hair.

  You may say what you like about Kuwait, he said. But there’s serious money to be made out there. Really serious money. Nothing like the chickenfeed I’d get working for some tuppenny company in the Midlands.

  Then he saw us and exclaimed: Ah, there you are. So did you find your bombed-out road?

  He found it all right, said Robi. But instead of the remains of some dreadful battlefield, all he got to see was a little old lady with a blue rinse, out walking her Pekinese.

  But still, said Nick, you did find your way there. Now would you like to have a go at finding your way to 44 Lymington Road?

  I could try, I said.

  Go ahead then.

  It was easy enough on the A to Z street atlas of London that my father had brought me. I knew page 43, square 2, by heart: Lymington Road ought to have been right across the road from where we were. But now that we had reached the place I knew best, I was suddenly uncertain. The road opposite us was lined with terraces of cheerfully grimy red-brick houses, stretching all the way down the length of the road. The houses were not as high or as angular as I had expected.

  But still, as far as I could tell that was where Lymington Road should have been, so I pointed to it and asked whether that was it.

  Yes! said Nick. Good boy: got it first time.

  We crossed West End Lane at a zebra crossing and I went ahead of the others, absorbed in taking in the details of the woodwork over the doorways, the angles of the bow windows that jutted out into the little patches of garden, the patterns of the wrought-iron gates. Then I caught a glimpse of a cricket field in the distance and at once I knew where number 44 was. I shouted to the others, pointing at the house. They smiled to see me so excited and when they caught up with me Nick burst into laughter.

  Well, he said, following my pointing finger, you’re positively a mystic from the east. You’ve done it again.

  When we reached the house, I leaned over the hedge to look into the garden before Nick could unlatch the little gate. The cherry tree in the garden was much taller than I had expected.

  The front door opened when we were half-way down the path that led through the little patch of garden. Mrs Price had seen us coming; she stood framed in the doorway. She was a small woman, very thin and stooped with age. Her face was small too, but she had large, prominent eyes, like May’s. She had a tight wreath of silver curls, and a short-sighted, slightly worried frown was etched into the lines of her forehead. She was wearing a severe military-green skirt, a white blouse and a grey cardigan. I had seen many pictures of her, but they had not prepared me for the transparent, almost translucent quality of her complexion: even at a distance, I could see an intricate circuitry of veins filigreed on her skin.

  She met us half-way up the path and kissed Ila, and shook hands with Robi and me. She was glad, she said to me, that we had met at last, it was such a pity May was away, she would very much have liked to meet me, she spoke so often of the kindness my family had shown her in Calcutta …

  Nick, hugely amused, told her how I had shown them the way to the house, and how I had known that they had a cherry tree.

  I’ve heard so much about it, you see, I said awkwardly. I was embarrassed now.

  Well, said Mrs Price, smiling, we must give you a guided tour, but come and have a glass of sherry first.

  She led us into the hall, showed me where to hang my coat, and ushered us into a large, sunny room.

  Well, here we are, she said, turning to a tray that had a decanter and several glasses on it. And what will you have to drink?

  She had to repeat herself twice before I heard her; I was absorbed in looking around the room.

  Tridib had once shown me pictures of that room.

  Soon after he and his parents went to stay at 44 Lymington Road in 1939, Mrs Price invited her brother Alan and the three friends with whom he shared a house in Brick Lane to come to tea with her. The Shaheb was still on his feet at the time; he was to have his operation a month later. He had recently bought a camera, and that afternoon he took a number of pictures.

  There is something
strikingly different about the quality of the photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of the paper. May remarked on it at once when Tridib took the two of us up to his room and opened his old scrapbook.

  It’s nothing to do with fading or anything, she said, pointing at a picture of, her parents. It has to do with the way the camera looked at people then.

  In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they like to think of as informal. But in the pictures of that time the camera is still a public and alien eye faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which is enough to suggest a public face.

  For example, in the foreground of one of those pictures, there is a large, shallow pit. Snipe has been digging that pit for the last two weeks in the back garden. This pit is intended to be the foundation of an Anderson air-raid shelter, his second line of defence against the expected German bombs. It is a serious pit therefore. But in the picture it looks anything but that; it looks like a dishevelled flowerbed. It was probably as some kind of joke that they decided to stand beside it; one of Tresawsen’s friends must have thought of it. Perhaps moments before the picture was taken they were doubled up with laughter, looking down at this pathetic would-be shelter. But now that the camera is upon them only one of them is laughing, defying the lens. The rest have composed their faces.

  Snipe is at the far left of the group. He is dressed in a crumpled corduroy jacket and a woollen tie that is somewhat askew. He is not a big man, but he has broad shoulders which he does not carry well. He is stooping slightly, his head inclined towards the camera, so that the light has fallen on the bald patch on his crown. He looks a great deal older than everyone else in the photograph, which of course he is, but not so much as he looks. He is holding a spade in his hands, perhaps in an attempt to enter into the spirit of the joke. But the spade looks comic in his hands in a way he has not intended. It is evident from the gingerly way in which he is holding it that it is an unfamiliar instrument in his hands: he is cradling it like a baby. He is unmistakably an academic. For the moment, however, he has temporarily left his job as a lecturer in Middle English at a Hampstead college, and has been assigned to the Ministry of Food ‘for the duration’.