The Shadow Lines

“Likes and dislikes were unimportant compared to the business of fending for oneself in the world.”

In Indian society, one is born to a certain class. Likes and dislikes that are unrelated to one’s class are not worth bothering with. The quote also highlights how rigid the caste system is and how people have to fight just to survive in a system that defines their worth despite their potential.

“You can’t build a strong country without building a strong body.”

Tha’mma says this when pushing the Narrator outside to play. She sees even the act of a child playing as an opportunity to work for the state. Tha’mma also believes that a country consists of people with allegiance to making said country a success. People must therefore be strong to uphold a strong country.

“If you believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all.” 

Although Tridib is perhaps the most erudite figure in the novel, he is also in some ways the most cynical. His vast studies have given him a profound understanding of human nature. Sadly, this has made him aware that as long as people can be exploited, someone will exploit them. Trust is a commodity to be used sparingly.

“I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination.” 

Tridib and the Narrator see travel as an act of imagination, as well as the act of actually taking a trip. The Narrator believes that his imagined version of London is more real than the version Ila has actually seen, because she merely passes through places without reflecting on them. The act of imagining forces the mind to reflect.

“Although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all.” 

Ila’s travels have left her uncultured because she takes no time to notice things. When she visits a new city or country, it is as if it is merely her body that exists. She takes no joy in the activities comprising what is typically known as travel for pleasure. The quote underscores how freedom and access don’t necessarily equate to knowledge and understanding.

“One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same 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 a mirror.” 

Desire is one of the reasons why Tridib never settles on a specific discipline or job for long. He follows his desires, which are always changing. Desire, for him, is a type of knowledge that cannot be acquired in another way. Desire is also catchy for Tridib because borders cannot contain desire, meaning that Tridib himself can escape life’s borders if he carries desire.

“Need is not transitive…one may have need without oneself being needed.” 

This is a clear example of the Narrator’s passivity. He is aware that no one truly needs him. He acknowledges his own needs, and yet he does relatively little to bring his desires into being. This viewpoint does change by the end of the narrative when he needs to know what really happened to Tridib. He then changes his plans to stay with May, who asks him to remain with her, and is therefore “needed.”

“You can’t play Houses out in the garden, she said. It has to be somewhere dark and secret…” 

Ila views home life as something that, even in play, will always contain secrets and shames. The life of a family, whatever they may show in public, takes place in private, and the home is a place where things can go terribly wrong.

“Something about those lines had begun to disturb me.”

The Narrator is uneasy about the dust lines Ila draws of the house’s floor plan. This is the first sign that there is something about borders and boundaries that will always unsettle him. The quote also hints at how the Narrator’s memory will soon begin to unsettle him with questions of its veracity.

“Her morality could only be an absolute. She could understand and admire someone who never ate meat on principle, but a person who was a vegetarian only at home was, to her, the worst kind of hypocrite.” 

Ila is the opposite of Tridib in that she sees everything in black and white. She has a reductive, simple view of the world that allows her to have an answer for everything. Tridib, on the other hand, continues to study and has more questions than answers.

“His authority grew out of that subterranean realm of judgement which we call morality, the condition of whose success is that its rulings be always shrouded from argument.” 

Robi is admired because he is decisive. He refuses to compromise his beliefs and understands his own mind and opinions. This elevates him to near-mythical status among those who have no authority or conviction of their own. Robi, who the Narrator feels isn’t good anything, represents the power of inner strength and inner truth versus the power of outward strength or physical strength.

“Because a rule’s a rule; if you break one you have to be willing to pay the price.” 

Much of the progress that would have benefited India during the times in the novel relied on people being willing to break rules or to break from tradition. Because they were often unwilling to pay the price for doing so, progress was stunted.

“You can do what you like in England, he said. But here there are certain things you cannot do. That’s our culture; that’s how we live.” 

Robi shows the obstacles to progress in Indian society. He would not have been hurt by allowing Ila to dance at the nightclub, but he felt a need to protect the culture as a whole. There is no room for negotiation. His morality is absolute, even if it is misguided.

“It’s not freedom she wants, said my grandmother, her bloodshot eyes glowing in the hollows of her withered face. She wants to be left alone to do what she pleases; that’s all that any whore would want. She’ll find it easily enough over there; that’s what those places have to offer. But that is not what it means to be free.” 

Tha’mma views Ila’s desire to live as she chooses as tantamount to whoredom. She cannot conceive of any good reason why a woman would want to be alone and independent. She also passes judgment easily on the whole of England, showing both her devotion to India, and her reductive worldview.

“Ila often seemed to be as ignorant and uninterested in the backgrounds of those arguments as I was. Indeed it was soon evident to me that she played a bit role in their collective political life: it was often apparent that they had made their decisions long before they asked her for her opinion.” 

Ila longs to be taken seriously as a sophisticated, political mind, but when she is living with a group of intellectuals, the Narrator can see that she does not have much to contribute. The fact that no one relies on her opinions to influence their own shows another reason for her frustration and tendency to drift from group to group, always looking for someone to validate her.

“I have nowhere to invent stories about and nowhere to escape to.”

Tha’mma provides another example of the value of imagination. When she is unable to imagine, to invent stories, she suffers. The quote also suggests longing: Tha’mma can no longer visit her birthplace, Dhaka, where many of her memories take place. Her suffering here is also ironic because Tha’mma limits her existence to traditional roles that others consider constricting.

“All you’re good for is words. Can’t you ever do anything?” 

May criticizes Tridib after they find the injured dog, implying that his love of words and education has not turned him into a truly useful person.

“The truth was that she was kind—so kind that she had not spared herself the sight of herself seen through my eyes.” 

May put up with attention from the Narrator when he was a child, even though she was uncomfortable being adored. In this way, he sometimes helped her acknowledge her own worth, even when she was filled with self-doubt.

“The Dhaka she was thinking of was the city that had surrounded their old house.” 

Tha’mma’s identification with Dhaka is so limited that she cannot accept that anything outside of her old neighborhood can be part of the same city. The quote reveals how time and memory affect places and people. Tha’mma lived with a static memory of home, not realizing that time changes everything.

“This silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words.” 

If the Narrator brings a memory to the surface by straining at it, it is difficult to trust the memory. The fact that he must tolerate gaps in the record of his own life frustrates him, but he is more content to tolerate the gaps than to invent lies for his own relief.

“The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings—so it follows, inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world.”

Objective truth is difficult to reach consensus on outside of the scientific realm. Because all people must create their own individual meaning, meaning will always have differing definitions.

“An accident was such a petty way to die.”

The version of Tridib’s death that the Narrator had known—that it was an accident—had seemed beneath someone as important to him as Tridib had been. Learning that Tridib sacrificed himself restores Tridib to an elevated status for the Narrator.

“Nick wouldn’t dream of doing anything that might upset me, really, believe me. You mustn’t believe a word I said. I made it all up. That’s what I did, I made it all up. That’s the truth of it.” 

Ila is not trying to convince the Narrator, but herself. She is trying to create new memories through the reinforcement of a falsehood. This is what she calls the “truth.” Whatever feels real. Ironically, Ila chastised the Narrator earlier for believing falsehoods spoken by Tridib as truths. This quote points out her hypocrisy, and underscores how desperate people can be to construct a truth that isn’t painful.