Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

Perhaps those miles and yards were my own living metaphors, my attempt to claim a share of justice. For I had already thrown everything else I had on the scales; not insubstantial things, after all, for I was a human being too, with my own worth and weight, not ugly, not without substance, educated, and with other qualities too, like patience and good humour — what more could a human being have , in fairness — I had thrown in all of that, everything I had, and by not so much as a tremor had the scales acknowledged their weight.

That was why I walked those miles, in the hope that the sheer force of those numbers would speak to Ila, tell her all the things I dared not say for fear of losing even her friendship; that somehow the weight of those accumulated yards would tip those inscrutable scales towards me. But when Ila did happen to be at home, she would open the door and say: Nice to see you, come in, but I hope you’re not expecting any dinner, and I would tell her, smiling brightly: I’ve walked eight miles, it took me exactly two hours and ten minutes, and she would arch her eyebrows in surprise and say: Why? Is it some kind of health kick?

The people Ila shared her house with spent their evenings in the kitchen whenever they were in. They consisted of a bearded Irish computer scientist, a girl from Leicestershire who had dropped out in her second year at the North London Polytechnic to work with the Fourth International, and a morose young Ghanaian who was very active in the Anti-Nazi League. They would spend their evenings sitting around the deal table in the kitchen drinking mugs of tea, or sometimes, when they could afford it, beer. Their conversations were almost always severely practical. For hours on end they would argue about which kind of pen was better for drawing posters with, or over how they ought to make the arrangements for lunch or tea at their next picket. There were no explosive arguments nor any shouting as there would have been among like-minded people in Calcutta or Delhi. When they did argue, it was usually about small points of tactics and strategy, and the arguments usually consisted of a series of increasingly oblique statements, loaded with references to a long history of personal political decisions. These dialogues were so controlled at first I did not recognise them as arguments at all. But in fact there was a frightening quality about them; a seriousness of intent that was all the more deadly for being so quiet.

Ila often seemed to be as ignorant and uninterested in the backgrounds of those arguments as I was. Indeed it was soon evident to me that she played a bit role in their collective political life: it was often apparent that they had made their decisions long before they asked her for her opinion. They were all clearly very fond of her, but they seemed to regard her as a kind of guest, a decoration almost. Nor did they seem to resent in her the signs of cosmopolitanism they were always so quick to criticise in themselves and their other comrades. In a way they were proud of her: they would often ask about her family’s wealth, how many servants she had ‘at home’ in India, and so on, and they would listen intently as she told them — with many exaggerations, usually. They would talk of her as ‘our own upper-class Asian Marxist’. This seemed to please them: they had an acute sense of history and perhaps they saw Ila as a link with the Fabians. Or perhaps the thought that their lives and ideas might have some influence on another continent was some compensation for their impotence at home. At any rate they, who were not otherwise friendly people, were tolerant, even encouraging, towards Ila’s friends. As a rule they were dismissive, even suspicious of outsiders. But ‘Ila’s friends’ were a special case: even when they did not pay them much attention, they seemed quite happy to have them sitting around their kitchen table.

Often I would find Nick Price in the kitchen when I arrived. He was always very well dressed. I would ask him the secret of his sartorial success and he would explain that his shirt was from Turnbull & Asser and his jacket from Armani, and smile when he saw that the names meant nothing to me. He should have seemed incongruous in that kitchen, but in fact he fitted in much better there than I did. There was a practical, do-it-yourself side to his nature which meshed neatly with the ambience of that house: he was genuinely interested in poster paints and printing ink. From their conversations I discovered that he often spent the whole day in their house — he certainly had the time, for he had still not taken, or found, a job. He would run the occasional errand for them and help them at whatever they were doing — like proof-correcting pamphlets and painting posters. He even went to their demonstrations and stood with them in their pickets. I gathered that he had become something of a minor celebrity among them, because he always went dressed in a suit and a tie, and so, since he made a good impression, he was often deputed to deal with the police when there was trouble. And since politics, in any sense that I could understand, was never talked about in that house, there was never any reason for him to disagree with them anyway.

On one such evening, when I had walked all the way from Charing Cross to Stockwell, Ila looked at me, sitting beside Nick, and wrinkled her nose at my grubby blue anorak and fading corduroy jeans. She said: We should do something about getting you some proper clothes.

I reminded her that my fellowship, while perfectly adequate for my needs, wasn’t quite generous enough to provide me with a new wardrobe, but she shrugged aside my objections and said: I know just the place where you could do your shopping.

Where?

You wouldn’t know it, she said. It’s a place where there are lots of cheap retail shops run by Indians and Bangladeshis.

Where is it? I said.

It’s a place called Brick Lane, she said.

She cut herself short when she saw my face.

What’s the matter? she said, raising her eyebrows. Have you heard of it?

I shook my head quickly and asked her when we could go. We arranged to meet two days later at lunch-time, in the Kembles Head.

I arrived late. I saw Ila at once, in the far corner of the room. And then I saw Nick, sitting beside her. He was wearing a tweed jacket and silk tie, she a pullover and jeans. She said something to him, but he was reading the Financial Times , which he had folded into a small square. He turned away from her, very slightly, and she slumped back again, raising her face to the ceiling. They were sitting apart, a good distance from each other, at different ends of a long wooden seat. They could have been strangers — it ought to have been easy to take them for that — but I could tell at once, from the way the crowd had arranged itself around them, that even they could sense that the two of them had come there together. I wanted to stand at the bar and watch them, not for a minute but for hours; I wanted to learn the language of their affinity. But the man behind the bar wanted to know what I would like, and by the time the warm, tawny beer had trickled out of the brass spigot and filled my glass, Ila had already seen me.

Where have you been? said Ila when I went up to their table, and Nick shook his hair out of his eyes with a toss of his fine golden head and held out his hand, smiling. I began to recite an explanation, but Ila interrupted me.

Nick decided to come along too, she said, with a faint trace of apology in her voice. Can you guess why?

She looked at me solemnly for a moment and then her face crumpled into laughter. She said: He’s thinking of going into business. The import-export business — trading in ready-made Indian garments.

She made room for me beside her and for the next quarter of an hour Nick explained the details of his scheme. I was barely listening, but I understood that it had something to do with Ila and her family investing some money at the Indian end and Nick doing the wholesaling in London.