Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

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.