Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

Then the shadow rippled, and this time she looked up properly and saw scales glinting on a long muscular body.

She screamed, and the book dropped out of her hands. It hit the edge of her chair and tumbled off, and she heard a dull, fleshy thud as it struck scales and muscle.

The whole length of the snake’s body flashed past under the chair with an angry rustle, and then, somewhere behind her, she heard a slow prolonged hiss. She turned, slowly, stiffly, in the way one has to when one knows that one’s lungs are suddenly empty and one’s muscles have gone rigid with fear.

The snake’s head was about a foot from her back. Its body lay curled, in tight regular coils, flat on the earth, while its head had reared up, higher than the back of the chair. She was whimpering now, trying to call out, but at the same time, looking at the snake’s head, she saw it more clearly than she’d ever seen anything before, with the telescopic clarity of absolute concentration. She could see its tiny eyes, the flaring nostrils at the end of the sharply pointed head, the tongue, no longer flickering, drawn into the soft pink mouth in readiness, the fangs, erect now, and dripping.

Then she heard another sound at the far end of the garden and dimly, without turning her head, she saw the thala-goya thrashing at the end of its rope, battering the tree it was tied to with its tail. The snake heard it too, and it hesitated for a moment with its body arched. Its eyes settled upon Ila again and its neck bent still further back till it was like a drawn bow. Then its head flashed forward.

At that moment, reflexively, Ila turned her body, a very small movement, but enough to overbalance the chair. She fell, the chair tumbled over with her, and the snake’s fangs glanced off its steel legs.

It reared back again like a snapping whiplash. Ila tried to push herself up, but her hands slipped and she fell back. And then, with all the suddenness of a knot springing undone, the coiled snake dropped its head on the grass and shot away towards the wall. She looked up to see the thala-goya lumbering after it. It had bitten through the rope. But the snake was quicker and it had slithered over the wall long before the thala-goya could cross the lawn.

So, young chap, Queen Victoria said, patting my head, her eyes twinkling. What do you make of that?

I glanced instinctively towards Tridib. He was looking at me, eyes narrowed, head cocked. I was nervous now: I could see that he was waiting to hear what I’d have to say, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. My mother and grandmother were exclaiming with horror about the snake, asking Queen Victoria how big it was, whether it was poisonous or not. Taking my cue from them, I chose a safe course: hoping to earn Tridib’s approval by showing him how well I remembered everything he told us, I asked Queen Victoria whether the snake was of the species Boidae or Elapidae.

Queen Victoria goggled at me and mumbled something to the effect of: Well that’s a bit of an uppercut, young chap; I don’t think I could tell you in a month of Sundays.

While she was mumbling I stole a glance at Tridib. He had pursed his lips and was shaking his head in disappointment. I sat out the rest of their visit in crestfallen silence.

On the stairs, when I was going down to see them off, while Ila and her mother lingered over their goodbyes, Tridib said to me casually that, if one thought about it, there was nothing really very interesting about snakes — after all, if I saw one in the lake, for example, what would I do? I’d come back home and tell everyone, but in a few minutes I’d forget about it and get back to my homework: the snake would have nothing whatever to do with my real life.

I did not particularly care for the suggestion that my homework was my real life, but I kept quiet anyway: I could see he was leading up to something else.

When we had almost reached the ground floor, he said: Did you notice that Ila’s house had a sloping roof?

I shook my head: the detail had escaped me. I could not see that it had any relevance at all to the story. He must have seen the puzzlement on my face, for he put his hands on my shoulders, turned me around and asked me whether I could imagine what it would be like to live under a sloping roof — no place to fly kites, nowhere to hide when one wanted to sulk, nowhere to shout across to one’s friends.

He got into the car, stuck his hand out through the window and gave me a punch on my chest, leaving me more puzzled than ever.

But later that evening, and for many evenings afterwards, while I sat under my grandmother’s watchful eyes, pretending to do my homework, I puzzled over what Tridib had said, and in a while I began to imagine the sloping roofs of Colombo for myself: the pattern they made if one wheeled in the sky above them, how sharply they rose if one looked at them from below, the mossiness of their tiles when one saw them close up, from a first-floor window, and soon I felt that I too could see how much more interesting they were than the snake and the lizard, in the very ordinariness of their difference.

And still, I knew that the sights Tridib saw in his imagination were infinitely more detailed, more precise than anything I would ever see. He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.

I listened to him bewildered, wondering whether I would ever know anything at all, for I was not sure whether I would ever experience desire of that kind.

What could I say of this to Ila as she sipped her whisky in the Kembles Head? Ila lived so intensely in the present that she would not have believed that there really were people like Tridib, who could experience the world as concretely in their imaginations as she did through her senses, more so if anything, since to them those experiences were permanently available in their memories, whereas with her, when she spoke of her last lover’s legs, the words had nothing to do with an excitement stored in her senses, but were just a string of words that she would remember while they sounded funny and then forget as completely as she had the lover and his legs.

For Ila the current was the real: it was as though she lived in a present which was like an airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates.

Once, a couple of days after I arrived in London, she took me to Covent Garden to see the sights. We met at the tube station and she led me eagerly into the vast, steel-roofed piazza and took me around the used-clothes stalls and the vegetable market. But she must have seen that I was bored, for she soon decided that she had had enough of showing me around, and stalked off across the paved square, and disappeared into one of the roads that leads to Charing Cross.

Hurrying after her to make amends, I happened to look up and spotted a window with a sign painted on it. I sprinted down the road, caught up with her, brought her back and showed her the sign.

It says Victor Gollancz, she said. So what?

In answer I took her arm and led her through the door. There was an office inside with a wooden counter at one end and a few cabinets full of books along the walls. An elderly woman was sitting behind the counter, looking at me nervously over the top of her spectacles.

Can I help you at all? she said.

Could you tell me, please, I said, whether this is where the Left Book Club used to be, before the war?