Recently, as we flew over the length of India on a pair of flights from Delhi to Mangalore, I raced through Amitav Ghosh's classic The Shadow Lines. It was not my first reading of the book; though, coincidentally, my first read was also on a journey (by train, however) between the same two destination points. I remember finishing the book then, in one single, exhilarating sweep, in the dim yellow-light of the vestibule. It was late in the night-- the lights in the rest of compartment were long gone off. I remember being unable to sleep for some while afterwards, as characters and scenes flitted through my head.
In January, I discovered Kuvempu's collection of poems-- Koneya Tene Mattu Vishwamanava Sandesha-- at the Sapna Book Store in Bangalore's Basham Circle. The poems are witty, incisive, markedly progressive and honest; the poetry is light but never delicate. While there's not a single overarching theme that binds the poems together, I found one poem-- Nere-- heart-wrenching; but, more interestingly, its core idea finds a mirror in The Shadow Lines, a novel written more than fifty years later.
The Shadow Lines is about many things: the illusory nature of time, of space, of borders ("... the ghostliness was merely the absence of time and distance-- for that is all that a ghost is, a presence displaced in time"); it is about bonds that bind memories and people (and bind people to memories).
At another level--a less abstract one perhaps-- The Shadow Lines is a novel about sacrifice. In what is easily the book's most engaging sequence, Tridib, the narrator's uncle and childhood idol, is murdered in a riot. Tridib walks straight into a mob of deranged men involved in the act of killing a senile grand-uncle of his. The men are armed, possessed by that crazy frenzy that grips people in riots, a frenzy located brilliantly, courtesy its inverse, in a passage from the book: "... for the madness of the riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore a reminder, of that indivisible sanity that binds people to each other independently of their governments". Tridib must have known, as May later testifies, that he was walking to his death, just as certainly as you'd know you wouldn't be attacked by the man walking down the street in normal civil life.
Why does he do it? The Shadow Lines, like life, offers no straight answers.
Nere is a story within a story-- the story that Manjanna, an old man of the hills of the Western Ghats, tells the narrator and his friends. On a dark, stormy night, by a fire that blazes and warms, Manjanna speaks of another dark, stormy night when it rained so much that the water flooded in. It took the household dog's incessant barking (referred to simply as "bitch") to wake the sleeping residents up (they sleep so soundly that they "forget their bodies"-- mai marethu-- a common Kannada phrase). Quickly, the narrator and his parents hop onto a raft and sail through the storm to safety. It is only then that they realize that they've left the bitch behind. His father pauses to think, before he decides to row back to save it; his mother begs him to reconsider. But the man is firm, arguing, somewhat unconvincingly: "Do we let go of it just because it is dumb?"
Three days later, the bodies of both, bitch and man are found. Manjanna weeps as he retells the tale-- not for his dead father, Kuvempu informs us, but for his dead father's neeti, his morals. To the discerning mind-- indeed, perhaps even to Manjanna seventy years later (we are never told if he's shedding tears of pride or sorrow)-- the choice his father makes is clearly flawed: he must have known the waters were fierce, he is even told so explicitly by his wife. What's more, the choice is not made on impulse for Manjanna describes the moments preceding the decision thus: "Father stood thinking for a while/ What would have raced through his mind?". He's clearly weighing the trade-off: on one hand was his own life and the prospect that his wife and son were left, almost certainly, husband- and father-less respectively; and on the other was the life of the dog that saved their lives, the chances of rescuing which were already minuscule.
What would drive seemingly intelligent men to jump straight into the jaws of death? What did they achieve? Something that approaches an answer is found in The Shadow Lines, when May says: "He gave himself up; it was a sacrifice. I know I can't understand it. I know I mustn't try, for any real sacrifice is a mystery" [Emphasis mine].
I found the premise fascinating-- that a real sacrifice crosses over into the realm of mystery; the idea that, usually, sacrifices involve giving up something valuable for a cause or an object deemed worthier, but when one discusses real sacrifices, the worthier object is beyond comprehension. Indeed, stripped of its aura of nobility (one every sacrifice possesses by default), every real sacrifice borders on the plain stupid. Moreover, seen this way, all questions about such sacrifices become redundant, because they possess an amorphous quality that never lets a third-person grasp their fundamental essence; because, by definition, we cannot know.
I am specifically kicked by the idea that both authors-- both Sahitya Akademi winners, but separated geographically, linguistically and chronologically-- choose to resolve the question by not resolving it. By adopting an open-ended conclusion, it forces us, as readers, to remain agnostic about the choices made during the sacrifices.
