Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

There was only one small chink in the armour of austerity that had sat so heavily on my grandmother ever since I could remember: she had a secret fondness for jewellery. There’d been nothing secret about this weakness of hers when she was a girl: it had been a passion.

I know this because I sometimes heard relatives — people who had known her in Dhaka — teasing her about her love of jewellery; asking her what had become of all those necklaces and bangles she had made my grandfather buy her.

Their teasing didn’t bother my grandmother at all.

It was a good thing I had something to fall back on, she would say quietly. How do you think I managed, all those years when I was living in that slum, when all of you’d forgotten about me? How do you think I would have survived if I hadn’t had my jewellery to fall back on?

The offending relative would be stung into silence. But later, when we were out of her hearing, they would explain to me, chuckling, that her love of jewellery had been a family joke when she was a girl. She would often be seen at the little gold-merchant’s shop at the corner of Jindabahar Lane, peering in through the bars, staring at the goldsmiths working inside. She took so much delight in exclaiming over her married cousins’ jewellery cases that they had kept the keys ready on the ends of their saris whenever she went visiting. At weddings, knowing old housewives would ask her for her opinion on the jewellery the bride had been given, as though she were a gold-merchant’s grandmother, rather than a chit of a girl.

She had stopped wearing jewellery publicly, of course, after she was widowed, and later, when my father married my mother, she had given her all the jewellery she hadn’t yet sold. She loved to see my mother wearing the bangles and necklaces she had given her. But my mother didn’t particularly care for jewellery and rarely wore any — even to weddings.

This never failed to infuriate my grandmother. So you’re going to a wedding with your neck bare? she would snap at my mother. I suppose you want to give everybody the impression that you’re starving here.

But it’s horrible to be weighed down with gold in this heat, my mother would protest.

So then what did I save all this stuff for? my grandmother would say, glaring at her. I could have sold it off, along with all the rest — God knows I needed the money — but I saved it so that my daughter-in-law wouldn’t have anything to complain about. And now you tell me you’re too fashionable to wear gold at a wedding. The problem is that your generation of girls has grown too used to luxury — you’ve forgotten the value of things. I’d just like to see you bringing up that spoilt son of yours in a one-room tenement in a slum; I’d just like to see it.

So, to mollify her, my mother would open the steel box in her cupboard, take out one of the necklaces she had been given and put it on.

My grandmother would pretend not to notice for a while, but in fact, of course, she was always delighted. After a decent interval she would summon my mother and run her fingers over the necklace, smiling to herself and reminiscing about the place where she had bought it, trying to remember the name of the shop.

My mother would take it off and slip it into her handbag as soon as she was out of the house (horrible heavy thing!), but my grandmother was not to know, and the mere sight of the necklace would leave her contented.

But there was one piece of jewellery that she had never parted with. It was a long, thin gold chain with a tiny ruby pendant. It was so much a part of her that I hardly noticed it: she had never taken it off, at least not in my recollection.

But all the same, she was very ashamed of wearing it, and went to great lengths to hide it under her blouse, spreading it out over her shoulders, with the pendant tucked deep inside so that nobody would see it. She believed that our relatives would gossip if they saw her wearing it.

I know what they’d say, she would mutter. They’d say: Look at her — she’s been a widow for years and she’s still wearing jewellery as though she were a girl. Why, I’m sure even your father thinks that, deep down in his heart.

Of course she did not neglect to inform my father of her views. He, for his part, would try to persuade her that he didn’t mind about her necklace at all, that, indeed, he would have been happy if she’d worn more jewellery. And perhaps in a way he would have been; perhaps it really would have pleased him to see her, all dressed up, like his fashionable colleagues’ mothers, who went to clubs with their sons wearing just the right touches of gold around their necks and wrists, laying claim to chicdom through their defiance of the ancient, but sadly démodé , proscriptions.

But my grandmother didn’t believe my father when he said he didn’t mind, and perhaps she was right: maybe my father, despite his protestations, did mind her wearing even that thin gold chain; maybe somewhere deep in his heart he did really think of it as a sign of disrespect to his dead father.

But my grandmother didn’t intend any disrespect to his memory; far from it.

I wear it because He gave it to me, she explained to me once. You know — your grandfather. It was the first thing He ever gave me — in Rangoon, soon after we were married. They have wonderful rubies there. I couldn’t bear to give it away now — He wouldn’t like it. I haven’t taken it off once in these thirty-two years — not even when I had my gall-bladder operation. They wanted me to take it off, but I made them sterilise it instead. I wasn’t going to have my operation without it. It’s become a part of me now.

Sometimes, while massaging her neck, or when she had fallen asleep in her chair, I would pull the chain out of her blouse and run it through my fingers. It was so scratched and discoloured it didn’t look like gold any more. It smelt exactly like her, of soap and starch and powder, but in a sharpened, metallic kind of way. It really was a part of her.

And then, one day in the year 1965, more than one and a half years after her trip to Dhaka, she gave it away.

One afternoon I came home from school to find the radio blaring at top volume in my grandmother’s room, upstairs. It was so loud I could hear it on the pavement, where the schoolbus had left me. I ran in and found my mother lying prostrate on her bed, with her fingers jabbed against her temples and a wet cloth draped over her eyes.

What’s going on? I asked her.

Who’s to know but God? she said. Your Tha’mma went out of the house at ten this morning and came back a couple of hours later. She wouldn’t have anything to eat — I asked her myself, I said, you’ll fall ill if you don’t eat, but who’s listening to whom? — and instead she went upstairs and turned on her radio and it’s been going like that ever since. She turns it even higher when the news comes on; it’s happened three times already.

Where did she go? I said. I was very surprised, because at that time my grandmother hardly ever left her room: we could count the number of times she had been out of the house in the last year on the fingers of one hand.

My mother shrugged again and pulled a face. Who knows where she went? she said. Who cares?

Didn’t you go up and ask? I said, knowing that the answer would be no, because at that time I was the only person in the house whom she would allow into her room.

Why don’t you go and tell her to turn it down now? my mother said. She might listen to you. It’s no use my asking her.

I ran upstairs and pushed my grandmother’s door open. I could only see her back. She was crouching over the radio, with both her arms around it, as though she were waiting for the noise to blow a hole through her.