Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

My desk was next to a window. Half-way through the lesson, I thought I heard a noise, somewhere in the distance: It was faint and scattered, like the crackling of a short-wave radio-station. I wasn’t quite sure I had heard anything at all, when I saw Tublu, who was sitting next to me, looking up too. I mouthed the words: What is it? But he didn’t know either: he made a face and shrugged. Surreptitiously, keeping an eye on Mrs Anderson, I raised my head and looked out of the window. The noise was louder now. It sounded like voices, many voices, but it wasn’t the orderly roar of a demonstration. We were used to demonstrations going past our school; it happened every other day and we never gave them a thought. But this was different — a shout followed by another and another, in a jaggedly random succession, and then, suddenly, silence, and just when they seemed to have died away, there they were, one voice, followed by a dozen, and then again a moment of silence.

There is a uniquely frightening note in the sound of those voices — not elemental, not powerful, like the roar of an angry crowd — rather, a torn, ragged quality; a crescendo of discords which you know, because of the slippery formlessness of the fear it creates within you, to be the authentic sound of chaos the moment you hear it.

The others could hear it too now; every head in the class had turned to look out of the windows.

By an effort of will, Mrs Anderson tried to shut the noise out. She began to read louder, rapping on her desk for our attention, filling the room with her voice. But those other voices had grown louder too now; we could hear them surging past the high walls of our school.

Mrs Anderson could no longer ignore them. She laid down her book and marched around the room shutting the windows. The glass panes of our windows had been painted green to keep out the summer sun. Now we sat trapped in a verdant darkness while Mrs Anderson’s voice boomed and echoed through our classroom, explaining the principles of algebra.

Mrs Anderson was visibly relieved when the bell rang. She told us sternly to look through our history books, and not to make any noise at all, and then she hurried out of the class.

We threw the windows open as soon as she had left. We couldn’t see far because our school had very high walls. The mob had gone away; everything seemed quiet. Then we heard the bells of a fire engine, and a minute later it sped past us. Somebody pointed into the distance and, looking up, we saw a column of grey smoke rising into the sky. We couldn’t tell where the fire was.

Wonder who’s batting? someone said. Nobody answered: we had forgotten about the match.

Then Mrs Anderson’s voice bellowed at us and we dashed back to our desks. She glared at us, with her hands on her hips, but we could tell she wasn’t really angry, as she ought to have been. Rapping on her desk, she told us that our classes were being cancelled for the rest of the day; we were going to be sent home in buses.

Why? someone asked. She frowned at him and said: Don’t you want a holiday?

We left the room in silence and filed into the playground. The whole school had lined up outside. The massive steel gates swung open. At once, there was a ripple of excitement at the head of the line; the boys in front were craning their heads, looking around in surprise. When we reached the gates we saw that a contingent of armed policemen had surrounded the school.

What are they doing here? I muttered to Tublu.

You idiot, he said. Can’t you see. They’re guarding us.

We climbed into the buses in awestruck silence. This time, automatically, each of us picked a seat beside a window. As soon as the bus pulled away from the school we could tell that something on those streets had changed in the couple of hours since we had last driven through them: we saw that street twice every day, but now it seemed somehow unfamiliar. The pavements, usually thronged with vendors and passers-by, were eerily empty now — except for squads of patrolling policemen. All the shops were shut, even the paan-stalls at the corners: none of us had ever seen those shut before. Then the bus turned off into another, narrower street which we didn’t know. The pavements were not quite as empty now; we could see knots of men hanging around at corners. They would look at our bus speculatively as we passed by. They were quiet, watchful; they seemed to be waiting for something.

Thank God, I said to myself, that Th’amma and May aren’t here.

Tublu shook my elbow and pointed at a rickshaw that had been pulled across the mouth of a narrow lane. The others saw it too and turned to stare. We couldn’t take our eyes off it, even after we had left it far behind. There was no reason for us to stare: we saw rickshaws standing at untidy angles in the streets every time we went out. And yet we could not help staring at it: there was something about the angle at which it had been placed that was eloquent of an intent we could not fathom: had it been put there to keep Muslims in or Hindus out? At that moment we could read the disarrangement of our universe in the perfectly ordinary angle of an abandoned rickshaw.

Then our bus turned towards Park Circus, and suddenly those voices were all around us, those same ragged bursts of noise, but much louder now. Looking ahead through the windscreen, I saw a scattered mob milling around the Circus. As I watched, one limb of the mob broke away from the main body and snaked out towards us. And then I was thrown off my feet as our bus, brakes screeching, came to an abrupt halt.

Wrestling with the wheel, the driver spun the clumsy old bus around. The bus lurched as two of its wheels climbed the pavement, and then it was back on the road again. The gears meshed with a loud metallic screech, and slowly the bus began to move ahead.

The men who were racing after us were no more than a few feet from the back of the bus now. We ducked under our seats as stones began to rattle against our windows. Then the bus picked up speed and we left them behind. When we got up and looked back, some of them were laughing, with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

At the next corner the driver swung the bus into a street that none of us recognised. Tublu, who was the nearest to the driver, got to his feet and told the driver that that wasn’t the way to his house, he wouldn’t be able to find his way back.

Without checking his speed, the driver shot out an arm and shoved Tublu back into his seat.

None of us looked at each other. We could not recognise the streets we were careering through. We did not know whether we were going home or not. The streets had turned themselves inside out: our city had turned against us.

Tublu began to cry. One by one the rest of us gathered around him. At any other time we would have laughed, but now we listened to him in silence, appalled. He was really crying; we could tell — not for attention, nor because he was hurt. There was an ocean of desolation in his sobs. He cried like that all the way home, for all of us.

It would not be enough to say we were afraid: we were stupefied with fear.

That particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy, for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of the violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world — not language, not food, not music — it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.