Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

He signalled me to a chair when I entered his office. When I had sat down he tapped a sheet of paper that was lying in front of him, on his desk, and said: I’m sorry to disturb you at this time, but there is a very serious matter at hand. Expulsion, if not rustication, is also possible. This is a very serious matter. After all, there is the medical angle to be considered.

Ridiculous though he was, I was alarmed by the tone of his voice: he had the power to destroy whatever chances I had of an academic career.

What exactly is the matter, sir? I said.

We have received information, he said, tapping the sheet of paper again, that you have been visiting prostitutes in houses of ill repute. It says that for your own good you should be expelled forthwith and sent back to Calcutta.

I was so taken aback that for a while I could only stare at him dumbly. Then I managed to say: Who has given you this information, sir?

Your own grandmother, he said, handing me the sheet of paper. You can see for yourself.

The letter was just three lines long. The writing was very shaky, but unmistakably my grandmother’s. It said that she knew I visited whores in Delhi, that she had spoken to me and I had shown no signs of repentance, and that as a schoolteacher herself she thought that my college, if it had any self-respect at all, would see to it that I was sent home.

I was so shaken by the sight of her resurrected hand, reaching out to me after her death, as it had all through my childhood, that it was some time before I could collect myself enough to offer an explanation to the dean. I told him, looking him in the eye, that in all my years in college I had visited no place more disreputable than the Chanakya cinema and the Khyber restaurant at Kashmeri Gate; I said that my grandmother had been very ill indeed when she wrote that letter, and that in her illness her mind had become prey to delusions.

The situation was so fantastic that soon the dean lost faith in the letter and let me go. But he warned me that he would be keeping an eye on me during my last few weeks in college.

When I got up to go, I cast a glance at the letter. She had even written the date in the top right-hand corner, as she always did. Later, thinking back, tallying the dates, I realised that she had written the letter the day before she died.

I have never understood how she learnt of the women I had visited a couple of times, with my friends; nor do I know how she saw that I was in love with Ila so long before I dared to admit it to myself.

At some time late in my first autumn in London, when the trees of the Embankment were already bare, I realised I could no longer hide the truth from myself.

I would find myself wandering through Soho or around Trafalgar Square, and I would pretend to myself that I was walking for the mere pleasure of it, discovering the city. But soon I would find myself walking along the Embankment. I would lean on the parapet and gaze across the dark breadth of the Thames at the concrete hillocks of the South Bank; I would stop to run my hands over the cast-iron lamps, over the pouting lips of the moulded fish, and often, to my surprise, I would discover that somewhere at the back of my throat I was softly humming the tune of an old Hindi film song — beqaraar karke hame yun na jaiyen … I don’t know why it was that tune: I hadn’t seen the film, nor ever possessed the record, but it was always that one and no other. It would appear unannounced, for no apparent reason, and though it was always the same tune there were times when it sounded quite different. At times it was a happy, lilting kind of tune, and then, whether it was a wet, cold night or a cool, crisp one, I would find myself marching cheerfully along the deserted Embankment, singing out loud when the cars went roaring past me in packs. I would walk across to the other pavement, take a pencil out of my pocket and hold it beside me so that I could hear it clicking against the railings as I walked, drumming in time with the tune. But there were times when the tune became eerily sombre: I would find myself shying away from the patches of shadow on the pavements, and the dark masses of the tall buildings that lined the Embankment would begin to seem somehow menacing. I would try to keep to the pools of light under the lamps, and I wouldn’t look down at the silky blackness of the Thames; I would lower my head and hurry, with my chin buried in my scarf, not daring to look at the other overcoated figures walking past me. On nights like that I would pray for the tune to go away, to leave me alone. At times I would even think that I had beaten it, that it had gone: I would drop on to a bench and listen hard, to make sure, and then, invariably, I would hear it again, buzzing softly at the back of my throat.

Sooner or later on those evenings I would find myself standing at Lambeth Bridge. I would look across the bridge at the weathered red-brick castellations of the Palace, and in genuine surprise I would say to myself: Why, here I am, at Lambeth Bridge. Since I’ve come this far I may as well walk to Stockwell and visit Ila.

Then I would walk half-way across the bridge, lean on the railing and think of reasons why I should not go on: that it was too far, the rain would get worse before I got there, I had already been there twice that week, Ila wouldn’t be at home anyway … I would carry on this argument with perfect disingenuousness, as though I were merely eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends. All the while the sceptical part of my mind, the part that knew perfectly well why I happened to be on Lambeth Bridge, would be silent: I would not allow myself to listen to it.

But once I had decided — especially if it happened to be after a period in which I had successfully kept myself away from Stockwell for more than three days — a great weight would lift from my heart, and I would hurry across the bridge and walk, faster and faster, till I was almost running, all the way to her house in Stockwell.

As I walked, to drown the buzzing of that tune, I would play with numbers in my head. I would try to work out how many miles I had walked and how much time it had taken me: six and a half miles, I would say to myself, or 11,440 yards, or, better still, 34,320 feet, or 10,461 metres. The numbers would occupy and exhaust my mind so that I could abandon myself to the marvellous happiness that was driving me on, faster and faster, towards Stockwell.

Later, sometimes I would look at the advertisements for diamonds and jewellery in the British Sunday magazines, or I would read their accounts of film-star romances, and I would wonder why it so happens that it is in this state, the state we call love, that people are most driven to enumerate and quantify, when the state itself, or so those very magazines tell us, is the obverse, the antithesis, of the notions of number and quantity. I would wonder what the circumstances could be that would prompt a man to tell a journalist exactly how much money he had spent, down to the last pound or dollar, on buying a car or an island for the woman he loved; I would wonder why the advertisements hinted so carefully at the exact price of the jewellery they urged men to buy for their girlfriends and lovers; why a girl had attempted suicide exactly nine times to get back the man she loved; why I had been driven to count all the yards that I had walked when I went to see Ila. I could think of no answer, except that it is because that state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings — the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horror from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite: it is as though we say to ourselves — he bought her a diamond worth exactly so much, or she gave up a career that would have earned her precisely so much, in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. And yet between that state and its metaphors there is no more connection than there is between a word, such as mat, and the thing itself: they are utterly indifferent to each other, so that we may heap the metaphors — the diamonds, the suicides, the miles, the suffering — till the end of our abilities, and yet find no trace at all of the state itself. And equally we may find the opposite.