Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

Then the men begin to move towards us — they’re not running, they’re gliding, like skaters in a race. They fan out and begin to close in on us. It’s all silent, I can’t hear a single thing, no sound at all.

The security guard pushes me down and reaches back to make sure our doors are locked. I can only see his blue uniform now, from where I am. I can’t see his face and I can’t look outside. I see him reaching under his shirt, and when he pulls out his hand there’s a revolver in it, a very small one. It’s got an odd colour, sort of slate-grey. I can see it in detail because it’s right next to my face.

Then the car veers away, and suddenly there’s a huge thump on the bonnet, and somebody screams at the back. I look up then, lifting my head just a little, until it’s level with the bottom of the windscreen, and there’s a face there, on the other side of the glass, the nose flattened, the eyes looking in. It’s the man with the crooked mouth; he’s lying flat on the bonnet, and he’s seen me. He raises his arm and swings it back; there’s something in it, but I don’t know what it is, I can never see it. His arm comes swinging down, over his head in an arc, and suddenly the windscreen clouds over and crashes in. When I look up at the driver there’s a cut across his face, and he’s clutching a flap of skin trying to hold it in place, on his cheek. He doesn’t have either hand on the steering wheel. The car lurches, rolls forward, and stalls, with its front wheel in a gutter.

The security guard pushes me down again, and then he throws the door open and jumps out, with the revolver ready in his hand. He shouts something, I don’t know what, and then he shouts again, and there’s a crash, and I know he’s fired a shot. I look out then, out of the window, and I see the men, circling around us, drawing back, and the sound of the shot is still echoing off those closed windows and empty balconies.

There’s a moment of absolute quiet as they watch us and we watch them. It’s so still I can hear the sound of the driver’s blood dripping on the steering wheel. And then the silence is broken: there’s a creak somewhere behind us — it’s a small sound, but in the quiet it sounds like a thunderclap. We all turn: we in the car, they outside. And do you know what it is? It’s the rickshaw — Khalil’s rickshaw — with the old man, our grand-uncle, whom we’d gone to rescue, sitting at the back, all dressed up in his lawyer’s coat.

And as I watch, the rickshaw begins to grow. It becomes huge, that rickshaw, it grows till it’s bigger than the shops and the houses; so big that I can’t see the old man sitting on top. But those men are running towards it, as fast as it grows, they’re scrambling up its wheels, up its poles, along the sides. They’ve forgotten us now; there’s no one around us — they’re all busy climbing up the rickshaw. The security guard jumps in, grinning, and shouts something to the driver: he’s telling him to start the car and get going while he can — to think about his face later. And they’re shouting at the back too, telling the driver to be quick, to get going. The driver reaches for the key, he’s stretched his arm all the way out, as far as it’ll go, but it doesn’t reach, no matter how hard he tries. And while he’s straining to reach the key, somebody gets out at the back; I hear the door slamming shut. When I look around I see May: she’s tiny, shrunken, and behind her is that rickshaw, reaching heavenwards, like a gigantic anthill, and its sides are seething with hundreds of little men.

May is screaming at us; I can’t hear a word, but I know what she’s saying. She’s saying: Those two are going to be killed because of you — you’re cowards, murderers, to abandon them here like this.

The door opens again, and I know in my heart that Tridib is going to get out too. I stretch out a hand to pull him back into the car, but my hand won’t reach him; I try to shout, but I have no voice left, I cannot make a single sound.

And that is when I wake up, gagging, trying to scream.

Robi shook another cigarette out of his pack and tried to strike a match. The first match broke, and he threw it away and struck another, held it steady and lit his cigarette.

I’ve never been able to rid myself of that dream, he said. Ever since it first happened. When I was a child I used to pray that it would go away: if it had, there would have been nothing else really, to remind me of that day. But it wouldn’t go; it stayed. I used to think: if only that dream would go away, I would be like other people; I would be free. I would have given anything to be free of that memory.

He laughed, looking at the glowing tip of his cigarette.

Free, he said laughing. You know, if you look at the pictures on the front pages of the newspapers at home now, all those pictures of dead people — in Assam, the northeast, Punjab, Sri Lanka, Tripura — people shot by terrorists and separatists and the army and the police, you’ll find somewhere behind it all that single word; everyone’s doing it to be free. When I was running a district I used to look at those pictures and wonder sometimes what I would do if it were happening in my area. I know what I’d have to do; I’d have to go out and make speeches to my policemen, saying: You have to be firm, you have to do your duty. You have to kill whole villages if necessary — we have nothing against the people, it’s the terrorists we want to get, but we have to be willing to pay a price for our unity and freedom. And when I went back home, I would find an anonymous note waiting for me, saying: We’re going to get you, nothing personal, we have to kill you for our freedom. It would be like reading my own speech transcribed on a mirror. And then I think to myself, why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It’s a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide a memory? If freedom were possible, surely Tridib’s death would have set me free. And yet, all it takes to set my hand shaking like a leaf, fifteen years later, thousands of miles away, at the other end of another continent, is a chance remark by a waiter in a restaurant.

He shrugged, threw away his cigarette, and stood up. I suppose we should be going, he said.

Then Ila, who had been sitting beside him, stood up too and put an arm around his shoulders and another around mine, and held us together. We stood a long time like that, on the steps of that derelict church in Clapham, three children of a free state together, clinging.

I had hoped to spend my last day in London visiting my old haunts — West End Lane, Lymington Road, Stockwell and the Embankment — one last time before leaving for India. In the evening I was to go to Islington because May had invited me to dinner.

But, as it turned out, the day went past in a breathless rush, and I almost forgot about dinner.

I had to make the journey from Fulham to the West End twice, with my suitcase still unpacked: once when I discovered that I had merely overlooked two of the names I thought I had already ticked on my list of presents. I ran all the way from the house to the tube station at Putney Bridge, sweat pouring down my face, my shirt clammy on my back. Then I pushed my way out into the crowds on Oxford Street, into teeming, confused shops, and then out again, clutching morose little parcels — brushed-denim jeans of just the right length and colour for a friend in Delhi, and a digital watch for a family friend in Calcutta — and back into the bowels of the tube station and into the first train, drumming on the armrest of my seat, trying to avoid the glare of the Walkman-ed skinhead opposite me. Back to my room, to pull everything out of my suitcase and start all over again, only to find a note I had left for myself in my ticket folder, which told me that my ticket had not yet been confirmed. So back again then, all the way to Regent Street, the chilly wind grafting my shirt to my back, running all the way to the airline office, and of course, when I get there, the girl in the uniform, behind the counter, tells me, smiling kindly, seeing me mopping the sweat off my forehead: You could have done it over the phone, luv. Back again to Fulham, my feet aching, nothing done yet, so much left to do, and no time to do it in.