Brief Biography of Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh's family is Bengali Hindu, and his father was an officer in
the pre-independence Indian Army. Growing up, Ghosh attended an all-
boys school and then earned degrees in India and the UK at Delhi
University, the Delhi School of Economics, St. Stephen's College, and
Oxford. He worked briefly at a New Delhi newspaper called the Indian
Express before beginning to write novels. His 1986 debut novel, The Circle
of Reason, won a top literary award in France, and The Shadow Lines also
won several awards in India. As of 2018, Ghosh has written eight novels
and six nonfiction works, including several essay collections. His writing
has also appeared in a number of publications in India and around the
world. He lives with his wife, the author Deborah Baker, in New York, and
the couple has two children. Ghosh has taught literature at several
colleges and universities, including Queens College and Harvard. In 2015,
he was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, which is an award
that recognizes artists and cultural leaders based in the US who
demonstrate a commitment to social justice.

Historical Context of The Shadow Lines

Though the Partition of British India is mostly a background event in The

Shadow Lines, it is partially responsible for the conflicts that the narrator
and his family experience over the course of the novel. Many European
powers developed colonies and established trading relationships with
India from its "discovery" in the fifteenth century onward. Great Britain
gained control over most of the Indian subcontinent in the early
nineteenth century, which led to it being known as British India or the
British Raj. Indian people, however, began pushing for independence,
especially in the early twentieth century. Great Britain promised India
freedom in exchange for fighting for them in the two world wars, and
Great Britain only followed through after the second. This resulted in
Partition, during which British India split into East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh), West Pakistan (now Pakistan), and India. The Partition
happened in August of 1947, and though the British, Indian, and Pakistani
governments took religion into account, the new borders created
minorities of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs where there hadn't been before.
This caused extreme violence, especially in the region of Punjab, which
was split between West Pakistan and India. This religious animosity
continued (and still does to this day), and it's partly what led to the riots
that the narrator and Tridib experience in 1963-1964 in Calcutta and
Dhaka, which became the capital of East Pakistan. The riots began when
an important religious relic—a lock of hair that is believed to be the
Prophet Muhammad's—mysteriously disappeared from the Kashmir region
of India. Though the relic had been respected by all three religions
(Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam), adherents of each religion soon turned on
each other in various cities in India and Pakistan, which resulted in
extreme violence.

Other Books Related to The Shadow Lines

Like much of Amitav Ghosh's work, The Shadow Lines is a work of

historical fiction that deals with the geographical area around the Bay of
Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean—an area that Ghosh has
expressed special interest in. Most notably, his Ibis trilogy (Sea of
Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire) explores the colonial history of
the area. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things takes place in much
the same time period as The Shadow Lines (1960s-1990s) and is told in a
similarly fragmented and nonlinear style. Khushwant Singh's Train to
Pakistan is a historical novel that focuses on the human costs of the
Partition of India in 1947. In addition, in The Shadow Lines, Queen
Victoria's cook makes a direct reference to The Ramayana, a classic epic
poem from the ancient Kosala Kingdom in India.
Plot

While in London in the early 1980s, the unnamed narrator recounts a series of stories and
memories to his cousin Ila and his uncle Robi. The stories and memories belong to the
narrator; his uncle Tridib; and his grandmother, Tha'mma. The memories begin in the early
twentieth century when Tridib's grandfather, Mr. Justice Chandrashekhar Datta-
Chaudhuri, befriends Lionel Tresawsen at séances in London.

Tha'mma was born in 1902 in Dhaka, British India. As a young girl, Tha’mma’s father and
her uncle, Jethamoshai, begin feuding, so they split their huge communal house in half with
a wall. The two sides of the family stop speaking to each other, and Tha'mma tells her
younger sister, Mayadebi, that Jethamoshai's family lives in "the upside-down house," where
they do everything upside down and backwards. After Tha'mma and Mayadebi marry
(Mayadebi marries the Shaheb, Justice Datta-Chaudhuri's son), they lose contact with
Jethamoshai. Tha'mma follows her husband as he works on the railroad until he dies in 1936.
At this point, her son, the narrator's father, is still a child. Tha’mma becomes a teacher and
refuses to accept help of any sort from her family. Though Tha'mma had been very interested
in the terrorist movements against British rule in her youth, when the Partition happens in
1947, it means little to her. However, she never returns to Dhaka since it becomes the capital
of the Muslim country East Pakistan.

The Shaheb is a wealthy diplomat, and in 1939, he ends up needing a special medical
operation that can't be performed in India. Mrs. Price, Lionel Tresawson's daughter, invites
the Shaheb and his family to live with her in London so that he can receive medical attention
there. Tridib, who is nine years old, accompanies his father, while his older brother, Jatin,
stays in school in India. Tridib loves London and is fascinated by Alan Tresawsen, Mrs.
Price's brother, and his friends Dan, Mike, and Francesca. In the time leading up to World
War II and the early days of the Blitz, Tridib spends his days exploring bombsites and
listening to Snipe, Mrs. Price's husband, tell stories. In 1940, a bomb hits Alan's house on
Brick Lane, killing him and Dan. Later that year, Tridib's family returns to India.
Over the next decade, Mayadebi and the Shaheb have a third son, Robi. The narrator's father
marries the narrator's mother, who soon gives birth to a son, the narrator. Jatin marries a
woman affectionately known as Queen Victoria, and the couple has a daughter named Ila,
who is the narrator's age. Mrs. Price, whose daughter May was an infant when Tridib was in
London, has a son named Nick. Ila's parents are wealthy, and she spends her childhood
traveling around the world for her father's work. The narrator, on the other hand, never gets
far outside of Calcutta. Instead, he spends his time listening to Tridib tell stories about
London and other faraway lands. Tridib teaches the narrator to use his imagination and
explains that the world in one's imagination can be just as real as the outside world. Ila
doesn't understand this—she sees too much of the world to understand how one's imagination
can be anywhere as good.

For a time, Ila's family lives with the Prices in London. When she's eight, her family visits
Calcutta for a festival. The narrator convinces Tha'mma to allow his family to accompany
Ila's to their family home in Raibajar. When they meet Ila's family in Gole Park, the narrator's
mother is shocked that the narrator, who spent weeks asking after Ila, is too shy to talk to her.
The narrator feels as though his mother betrayed him by making it clear that he needs Ila
more than Ila will ever need him. Regardless, the family piles into the Shaheb's two cars and
drive for hours. When they reach the massive house, Ila leads the narrator into a half-
underground storage room, which stores a massive table that Tridib's grandfather shipped
back from London. Ila decides that they're going to play a game called Houses, which she
plays with Nick in London. She informs the narrator of who Nick is, and the narrator
understands that Nick is his competition for Ila's affection. Ila draws a map in the dust of
Mrs. Price's house and adds a room for Magda, her doll, who is the baby for the purposes of
the game. When everything is set, Ila tells the narrator what "happened" to Magda at school
that day: the ugly school bully chased the beautiful blonde Magda home, yelling slurs at her
—but Nick Price saved her from being beaten up. When Ila starts to cry, the narrator is angry
and doesn't understand why she's crying. Finally, Tridib walks in with the children and listens
to the narrator tell Ila's story. He encourages the narrator to not call Ila dumb for crying like
the story is real, and he insists that everyone lives in stories.
In 1959, Tridib and May, who is nineteen at the time, begin writing to each other. They
exchange photos after a year. In 1963, Tridib sends May a very long letter recalling an
experience he had as a boy in London, when he watched two strangers have sex in a bombed
cinema. He tells May that he wants to meet her like those strangers did—as strangers in a
ruin. May is flustered, but she makes plans to visit Tridib in India. Around the same time,
Tha'mma, who is retired and has time on her hands for the first time in her life, receives word
that her uncle Jethamoshai, who is in his nineties, still lives in the family home in Dhaka. She
believes that it's her duty to bring Jethamoshai home to India. Not long after this comes to
light, the Shaheb receives a job posting in Dhaka, and he, Mayadebi, and Robi move there.
Finally, Mayadebi invites Tha'mma to visit, and they make plans to try to save their uncle
from the growing unrest in the Muslim-majority city. May makes plans to travel to Calcutta
and then to Dhaka with Tha'mma. Tridib decides to accompany them to Dhaka.

The narrator joins Tridib and his father to pick May up from the train station. Over the next
few days, the narrator accompanies Tridib and May as they drive around and see the sights.
He shows her the table in Raibajar, and she tells him that Ila was a victim of bullying, but
Nick never saved her. When they visit the Victoria Memorial, May becomes suddenly
emotional. Tridib tells her that it's their ruin, which puzzles the narrator. He understands that
there's a relationship between May and Tridib that he won't understand. Not long after that,
on January 4, 1964, Tridib, May, and Tha'mma leave for Dhaka.

A few days later, the narrator experiences a harrowing bus ride home from school as the
driver tries to protect the dozen boys from the angry mobs in the streets. Meanwhile, in
Dhaka, the Shaheb warns Mayadebi and Tha'mma that trouble is brewing there, but Tha'mma
insists on seeing Jethamoshai anyway. Thirteen-year-old Robi is excited to see "trouble" and
goes with them to the old house in Dhaka. There, a Muslim mechanic
named Saifuddin greets them and explains that a rickshaw driver named Khalil cares for
Jethamoshai. When Khalil arrives, he leads his guests into the house. Jethamoshai doesn't
recognize his nieces, but he tells Tridib that he's waiting for his family to return so that he can
take them to court and gain full ownership of the house. The driver races to the door and says
that there's trouble, and they have to leave. Khalil agrees to drive Jethamoshai in his rickshaw
to Mayadebi's house. When they're in the car, they turn a corner and come face to face with a
mob. It surrounds the car and breaks the windshield. When the mob descends on the
rickshaw, Tha'mma tells the driver to go, but May gets out to try to save Jethamoshai. Tridib
follows her, but Tridib, Jethamoshai, and Khalil are all brutally murdered by the mob. The
narrator's parents tell him later that Tridib died in an accident. The following year, Tha'mma
gives her beloved gold chain away to fund the war with Pakistan and appears crazy to the
narrator. His mother explains that Tha'mma hasn't been the same since "they" killed Tridib.

In college, the narrator continues to both love Ila and find her frustrating, as she never
understands why he is so insistent on remembering Tridib's stories or their own childhood
antics. Once, during a summer holiday, she convinces the narrator and Robi to go with her to
a nightclub. Robi doesn't want to go, but at the club, he forbids Ila from dancing with another
man. She screams at them that she lives in London so she can be free of this kind of
oppression. The narrator tells this story to Tha'mma on her deathbed, and it makes her
extremely angry: she doesn't think Ila's kind of freedom is real. In her anger, Tha'mma writes
a letter to the dean of the narrator's school the day before she dies, telling the dean that the
narrator visits prostitutes and should therefore be expelled.

After seeing a lecture in Delhi, the narrator realizes that although he never connected the
events as a child, the riot he experienced in Calcutta and the riot that killed Tridib in Dhaka
was part of the same political uproar. As he studies Tridib's atlas, the narrator discovers that
borders are meaningless and actually helped create the climate that brought on the riots in the
first place. The narrator goes on to pursue an advanced degree in London. At one point, Ila
takes Robi and the narrator to visit Mrs. Price and introduces them to Nick. The narrator
shows off the power of Tridib's stories by leading his friends around London and through
Mrs. Price's house based off of the mental maps Tridib created for him. Ila, Robi, and the
narrator have dinner at an Indian restaurant afterwards, and Robi admits that he has a
recurring nightmare about the riot in Dhaka in which he can never keep Tridib from getting
out of the car. The narrator also reconnects with May, who plays oboe in an orchestra. They
spend Christmas with Mrs. Price, and May suggests that Nick is lying about leaving his job in
Kuwait: she believes he embezzled money. There's a blizzard that night, so Ila and the
narrator stay at Mrs. Price's house in the cellar. Ila undresses in front of the narrator, not
realizing his feelings for her, but she spends the night with Nick.
Back in London a few years later, Ila marries Nick. At their party, the narrator gets very
drunk and May offers to take him home and put him to bed. The narrator assaults May but
feels horrible about it in the morning. She takes him with her while she collects money for
her "worthy causes," and on a break, she talks about her relationship with Tridib. As the
narrator prepares to return home a few months later, Ila confides in him that Nick is cheating
on her, though she refuses to leave him. The night before the narrator leaves, he has dinner
with May. At dinner, May tells the narrator about the riots and asks if he thinks that she killed
Tridib. May tells him that she used to think she did, but she knows now that Tridib sacrificed
himself and knew he was going to die. She asks the narrator to stay the night and he accepts,
glad to finally understand the mystery of Tridib's death.

Summary and Analysis

Thirteen years before the narrator's birth, in 1939, Mayadebi, the Shaheb, and eight-year-
old Tridib move to England. The narrator, who is now eight years old himself, tries to imagine
Tridib as an eight-year-old but struggles to—Trudib is now 29 years old and looks ancient to
the narrator. The narrator decides that Tridib surely looked like him, though his
grandmother, Tha'mma, insists Tridib didn't.
When the narrator decides that he and Tridib look alike, it's an early indicator of the degree
to which the narrator idolizes Tridib and wants to be as much like him as possible. It doesn't
matter that (according to Tha'mma) this is impossible; it's more important for the narrator to
identify with Tridib than believe the truth.
Tha'mma doesn't like Tridib; she insists that a person must use their time wisely, and that
Tridib doesn't do that. This is, of course, why the narrator loves to listen to Tridib: he doesn't
seem to do much, but he also doesn't seem to waste time. Tridib often drops in to see the
narrator's family without warning. Despite Tha'mma's dislike of him, it tickles her when he
visits because his family is rich.
The strange relationship between Tha'mma and Tridib points out that Tha'mma is very keen
to associate with the rich and powerful, regardless of whether or not she actually likes them.
This suggests early on that social standing is very important to Tha'mma and the narrator's
family as a whole.
Tha'mma knows that Tridib visits primarily to "nurse his stomach." He comes when he finds
himself needing a restroom immediately, a condition known to the family as "Tridib's
Gastric." Tha'mma always forces him to go through pleasantries before allowing him to slip
away to the bathroom. The narrator notes that he grew up believing that Tridib had a special
organ called a Gastric, though he was too shy to ask about it. Tha'mma never let Tridib stay
long, as she believes him capable of having a negative influence on the narrator and
his father.
The mention of Tridib's Gastric shows that the narrator was an innocent, gullible child—and
therefore, his perception of the world as a child isn't to be trusted. Essentially, the anecdote
about Tridib’s Gastric sets out a starting point from which the narrator can mature and grow
up over the course of the novel.
The narrator runs into Tridib in the street fairly regularly when he's a child. Tridib is the only
one in his family who spent most of his life in Calcutta, as the rest of his family is wealthy
and travels often. Tha'mma is offended by this: she sees it as proof of Tridib's frivolity that
he never married or got a real job. Instead, he lives with his grandmother in the old family
house in Calcutta. Though Tha'mma often tells the narrator that she pities Tridib, the
narrator understands that she fears him because she believes he spends all his time on
street corners, gossiping. Tridib, is, however, pursuing a PhD in archaeology.
Tha'mma clearly believes that it's horrible to not make the most of one's social standing. The
narrator recognizes that there's a difference in how Tha'mma talks about Tridib and how she
actually feels about him. It's unclear how true this is (remember the narrator as a child isn't
reliable), but it does set up the precedent that the narrator believes himself to be an expert
on Tridib and Tha'mma.

The narrator knows that Tridib only goes to the park rarely, and he hears about Tridib from
his best friend and neighbor, Montu, as well as from local shopkeepers. The narrator
wonders if that kind of community even exists today in that neighborhood—then, Gole Park
was outside the city, and there were only a few refugees.
The mention of there only being a few refugees indicates that at this point in the neighbor's
childhood, the tensions between India and East Pakistan aren't running high—later, during
the riots in 1964, Calcutta is flooded with refugees from East Pakistan.
If he hears Tridib is nearby, the narrator skips his evening cricket game and finds him. He
never questions why Tridib is in the area, though he should have, as Tridib didn't live there
and had a detached air about him. The narrator wonders if the people put up with Tridib
because he is worldly and sometimes gives incredible advice—though he's also known for
giving outright incorrect advice sometimes.
By describing Tridib as an unknowable, strange character, the narrator suggests that Tridib
defies normal and accepted methods of categorization or description. Essentially, Tridib is in
control of his own identity, and he doesn't share it with many.
Tridib is so self-mocking, nobody on the street quite knows what to believe about him.
Nobody really believes he's the son of a rich and powerful diplomat, so the story that he has
a wife and several children prevails. The narrator, as a young boy with a reputation for being
gullible, can't set anyone straight.
This passage draws out the relationship between observed reality and stories. People in the
community accept the (incorrect) story about Tridib’s family life because it aligns with the
people’s observed reality and perception of Tridib.
When the narrator is nine, Tridib disappears for weeks. When the narrator stops at Tridib's
house one day, Tridib tells him a secret: he's discovered treasure from an ancient dynasty,
and he instructs the narrator to not tell a soul. Weeks later, the narrator finds Tridib in Gole
Park, telling people that he's been away in England visiting relatives through marriage. He
says he stayed with a woman named Mrs. Price, who has a daughter named May. When
asked, Tridib explains that May isn't sexy in the conventional way but is warm and kind.
To an adult reader, it's more readily understood that Tridib has feelings for May—something
that goes right over the narrator's head, mostly because of his youth. These two opposing
stories also call into question which one is true, though it's clear that Tridib hasn't actually
been in London. This sets up the idea that stories can be important and informative, even if
they might not be entirely truthful.
The narrator bursts forward and yells at Tridib that he got it wrong, since he just saw him a
few weeks ago in Calcutta. The listeners burst out laughing, but Tridib pinches the narrator's
cheek and says good-naturedly that anyone who believes everything they're told deserves to
be lied to. When he leaves, the listeners are on edge, as they believe they've been made a
part of a joke. The narrator, furious with himself, yells at the listeners that Tridib had been to
London when he was a boy, as his father needed an operation that couldn't be performed in
India. He explains that the Price family is real, and they invited Tridib's parents to come. The
listeners laugh, and the narrator runs away angry.
The fact that the narrator bursts in like this suggests that he believes in the importance of
the truth, especially when he then goes on to attempt to set the listeners straight about the
Price family. Tridib's reaction to the narrator's outburst suggests he takes more pleasure in
the telling than having people believe his stories are real, which is an early way for the novel
to build up Tridib's love of storytelling and his skill at it.

ACTIVE THEMES
The narrator tells the reader that he met May Price for the first time two years later, and
then for the second time seventeen years later in London. In London, it takes the narrator a
month to find May. She plays the oboe in an orchestra, and the narrator manages to get a
seat at one of her concerts. She looks much the same as the narrator remembers, but her
long black hair is now streaked with gray. The narrator remembers watching her, entranced,
as she practiced her music when she visited Calcutta.
By meeting May at several different points throughout his life, the narrator must naturally
try to piece together his childhood conception of May with the adult reality before him,
something that will test the narrator's ability to mature and reevaluate his childish
conceptions. The fact that May looks so similar will complicate this process.
After the concert, the narrator catches May's attention, and they meet in the foyer. The two
are embarrassed, and May explains she remembers the narrator as a boy very well, and he
doesn't look much different now. She invites him back to her apartment for a simple dinner.
On the tube, she explains that she also works for relief agencies, providing housing for
people in Central America.
When May says that the narrator looks much the same—even though he's a full-grown adult
at this point—it suggests that there will be some struggle as these two attempt to
reestablish their relationship to each other, now that May is solidly in middle age and the
narrator is no longer a child.
At her apartment, the narrator looks over May's bookshelf while May cooks. He comes
across a photo of her that he says looks like it was taken when she visited his family in
Calcutta. She primly says that it was taken several years before, and explains that she sent it
to Tridib. She tells the narrator that she and Tridib began writing to each other in 1959,
when she was 19 and Tridib was 27. The narrator tells the reader that he likes to imagine
that Tridib received May's photograph the day he told the fantastical story in Gole Park.
Again, when the narrator discovers the truth of when the photo was taken, he must
reevaluate what he thought was true about May and his past recollections of her. Further,
when May admits that she and Tridib wrote to one another (and presumably, shared some
sort of romance), the narrator is forced to amend his memory and look back on what he
remembers to integrate this new information.
The narrator insists that Tha'mma was wrong about Tridib: he is openly dismissive of the
gossips, and the narrator recognizes that he's happiest surrounded by books. Once, the
narrator and his cousin, Ila, discuss this when they're sixteen and Ila and her family visit.
When Ila gets out of the car, Tha'mma is in awe of her beauty, but the narrator is
disappointed to see his cousin dressed in a sari like everyone else. Ila and the narrator
decide to walk down to the lake.
The narrator's disappointment at seeing Ila in a sari suggests that he loves or admires Ila in
part because she seems foreign and exotic. Further, the fact that both Ila and the narrator
remember Tridib suggests that they might have differing recollections, which will again
require both of them to reevaluate what they remember and what might be true.
They sit awkwardly for a minute and finally, the narrator asks Ila if she remembers how, as
children, Ila, the narrator, and Robi used to go find Tridib and listen to him talk about all
sorts of things. Ila insists she remembers and laughs, but the narrator can tell she doesn't
truly remember. The narrator asks if she remembers all the strategies they used to get Tridib
to pull out photographs and talk about his year in London. Ila again says she remembers
faintly and seems puzzled by the narrator's insistence on dredging up old memories.
This exchange sets up the narrator and Ila as fundamentally different in how they think
about the past and memory. These memories were clearly not important enough to Ila to
truly remember them, which begs the question of what she does truly remember and value.
The narrator, on the other hand, clearly lived for these experiences with Tridib, which
illustrates his closeness with Tridib.
The narrator asks Ila how she could possibly forget, and she responds by asking him how he
even remembers. The narrator tells the reader this isn't even a question—Ila will never
understand what Tridib's stories meant to the narrator. Since Ila traveled so much as a child,
she was as familiar with the world as the narrator, who never traveled, was with his local
park. Ila never understood that Tridib allowed the narrator to travel in his imagination by
telling him stories and pointing out locations in his atlas.
The relationship between the narrator and Tridib, despite their age difference, is was built
on the understanding that stories and memories are extremely important—it's the only way
the narrator learns about the world around him. In contrast, Ila has the freedom to
experience these places firsthand, so her own memories and experiences are more
important to her than Tridib's stories.

RELATED QUOTES WITH EXPLANATIONS

The narrator rambles about wanting to see Cairo but soon realizes Ila isn't listening.
Suddenly, Ila snaps her fingers and says that the ladies' room is on the far side of the
departure lounge in Cairo. The narrator thinks that to Ila, the world is made up of departure
lounges, all with the ladies' rooms hidden somewhere different. He understands that those
restrooms were the only fixed points in her childhood.
By recognizing that airport bathrooms were the only constant things in Ila's childhood, the
novel begins to suggest that Ila's childhood, though privileged, wasn't as idyllic as it seemed.
Relying on public restrooms for consistency implies that Ila's childhood was tumultuous.
A decade later, when the narrator is in London, he and Ila often go out. The narrator is
always thrilled to get to take the underground transit somewhere, and Ila teases him
mercilessly for it. To her, the underground is a means of travel; to the narrator, it's
otherworldly. He never manages to persuade her that places must be invented in a person's
imagination; they don't just exist. When the narrator was a boy, Tridib told him that Ila had
never truly traveled, since her imagination and her inventions of places simply traveled with
her: she long ago stopped seeing places with fresh eyes.
The stories that people tell the narrator intimately inform how he looks at places when he
finally gets to see them himself, once again underscoring the importance the narrator places
on memory and stories. This suggests that the narrator is very entrenched in a kind of
mental community made up of all the people who shaped the way he views the world, while
Ila exists in a mental world where she's very alone.
Ila visits Calcutta most summers while she and the narrator are children. She always brings
her yearbook from her latest international school, and she and the narrator pore over the
pages as Ila points out her friends. The narrator notes that though Ila can always describe
the events captured in the photos with great detail, she's always absent from the photos.
When the narrator can pick out these inconsistencies in Ila's narration using the photos, it
suggests again that her childhood wasn't actually idyllic. Since Ila spent time in London, she
likely experienced racial violence or bullying and might not have been friends with any of the
people she points out in the yearbook to the narrator.
When they're 14, Ila points out a picture of a boy who looks much older and says that he's
her boyfriend. A few pages later, the narrator sees a photo of the boy with his arms around
blonde girls. Ila is in the background of the photo, unsmiling, with books in her arms. A week
later, the narrator discovers that Ila ripped the photo out, and the narrator feels as though
Ila might not be so different from him: they might both be going to school to "cling to their
gentility."
Even as this passage makes Ila's inconsistencies very clear, it also shows Ila using stories to
attempt to guide the narrator's idea of what Ila's life is like. This suggests that Ila feels as
though she has something to prove, and that even at a young age, she feels compelled to act
and speak a certain way to maintain her status as the wealthy, worldly cousin.
Years later, when Robi, the narrator, and Ila are drinking in a London pub, the narrator
reminds Ila about the yearbooks. Ila laughs and says that school is all that matters to all
children—except for the narrator, who she insists was strange in his love of faraway lands.
She adds that at least her stories taught the narrator that the places in the atlas were real,
not "fairylands" like Tridib told him about. The narrator says this assertion was misguided;
Tridib, as an archaeologist, instructed the narrator to use his imagination precisely and with
purpose.
It's worth noting here that Ila's experiences allowed her to actually visit faraway lands,
adding more credence to the idea that new places were uninteresting to her because of the
frequency of her travels. With the assertion that Tridib had definite ideas about how to use
one's imagination, it shows that Tridib believed fully in creating one's reality through stories
with intricate detail.
The narrator recalls a time when he was ten and Ila; her mother, Queen Victoria;
and Tridib came to visit. In the flashback, Queen Victoria tells the narrator about their house
in Columbo, which backs up to a poultry farm and has a sloped roof. Queen Victoria is afraid
of the proximity to the poultry; she's heard that poultry attracts snakes. She says that one
morning, her cook burst in screaming about a crocodile in the yard. Victoria was shocked to
see he was right—there was indeed a huge lizard. She instructed the cook to cut the lizard's
head off before Ila saw it.
This flashback within a flashback emphasizes the wealth that Ila's family enjoys: they have
servants, a big house, and have enjoyed all of this in the faraway country of Sri Lanka. Telling
this story to the narrator is as much an attempt to entertain and awe (with the lizard) as it is
to impress upon him how wealthy Ila's family is.
The cook, gripped with fear, refused, so Queen Victoria summoned Lizzie, Ila's new nurse. In
the strange, almost-unintelligible dialect that Victoria developed to speak to Lizzie, she asked
Lizzie what the creature in the garden was. Lizzie laughed and said it's a gentle thala-goya,
and she was distraught when Queen Victoria suggested killing it. Lizzie said it keeps snakes
away and ran downstairs to offer the creature vegetables. Not about to be outdone, Victoria
offered the thala-goya vegetables herself and spoke to it in a version of her Lizzie dialect.
The animal flicked its tail, seemingly in response to the special language, which made
Victoria like it. She allowed it the run of the garden and only had Lizzie tie it up during
parties.
Even though Lizzie speaks English (and it's implied that Queen Victoria is absolutely fluent in
English), Queen Victoria speaks to the nurse in a strange, made-up dialect. It's a very overt
way for Victoria to show everyone, Lizzie included, that Queen Victoria thinks Lizzie is stupid
and uneducated. Similarly, when Victoria won't let Lizzie outdo her, it shows that Ila's family
is somewhat anxious about looking wealthy and properly performing the image of wealth.
One morning, after a party, Ila went outside to read by the pond. The thala-goya was still
tied up. As Ila became engrossed in her book, she noticed something out of the corner of
her eye. With a scream, Ila turned around slowly to come face to face with a giant snake,
poised to strike. When the snake struck, Ila managed to tip her chair over so it didn't hit her.
Before the snake could strike again, it turned and shot away, pursued by the thala-goya. The
lizard had bitten through its rope to chase the snake.
Though Victoria doesn't acknowledge it in her story, the fact that the thala-goya saved Ila
means that, in some ways, Lizzie is far more knowledgeable and worldly than the wealthy
people who employ her. This suggests in a more overarching way that wealth isn't a
guarantee of knowledge.
When Queen Victoria is finished telling her story, she waits for the narrator's response. The
narrator doesn't want to disappoint Tridib, so he asks what species the snake was. Tridib
looks disappointed. Later, as the narrator says goodbye, Tridib suggests that snakes aren't
that interesting and asks if the narrator noticed that Ila's house had a sloping roof. Tridib
asks the narrator to imagine it: it would mean there's no place to fly kites or hide. As Tridib
gets in the car he punches the narrator in the chest, confusing the narrator even further. As
the narrator puzzles over the exchange later, he imagines sloping roofs and realizes that they
are indeed more interesting than snakes, simply because of how ordinary they are.
Tridib’s reaction to the story emphasizes that he is very interested in the setting of his stories
and other people’s stories. This in turn explains why, as an adult, the narrator is so taken
with ordinary things like the tube system in London. The narrator, deeply impacted by
Tridib’s way of seeing the world, realizes that it's those small details that differentiate these
places from his life in Calcutta, and therefore, that's what makes those places interesting.
Despite understanding Tridib's meaning, the narrator also understands that Tridib's
imagination is far more detailed and precise than his own. According to Tridib, people can
only know things through true desire, which enables someone to see other worlds as though
there's no division between person and world. The narrator thinks about this as he listens
to Ila in the pub, and he reasons that Ila lives so fully in the present that it's unthinkable to
her that people can experience worlds in their imaginations with as much clarity as she
experiences the real world.
Tridib's wisdom here suggests that he, in some ways, doesn't think much of borders—he
wants to experience the world as though there's no border between his memory, his stories,
and what he sees in front of him. For Ila, on the other hand, those borders between reality
and memory are of the utmost importance, given that she never thought much of stories
and imagined places in the first place.
RELATED QUOTES WITH EXPLANATIONS
Right after the narrator arrives in London, Ila takes him out to show him around. The
narrator notices a building, fetches Ila, and pulls her to stand in front of it. She doesn't
understand why the building is so interesting. The narrator goes in and asks the receptionist
if this is where the Left Book Club used to be, but she doesn't know. Back outside, Ila is
indignant, but the narrator tells her that Tridib used to tell them about how Alan
Tresawsen, Mrs. Price's brother, worked there before the war. The narrator sees the building
like he imagines Tridib saw it. Ila, however, leads the narrator away, and the narrator is again
baffled by how different they are.
Again, when the narrator recognizes places in the present (1980s) that Tridib told him about
forty years before, it shows just how much the narrator relies on Tridib's stories to inform
how he interacts with places and people in the present. The narrator effectively sees the
world as though the divisions between different time periods and different people don't
actually exist—for him, all of those different times are layered to create one rich image.
In the pub, the narrator tries to explain to Ila and Robi the "archaeological" Tridib, but Ila is
contemptuous. The narrator insists that if they don't use their own imaginations, they'll live
forever in other people's inventions. Ila insists she's already free of others' inventions, and
the narrator says that he isn't when he's in London. To explain, he tells Ila how she once
"invented" London for him when they were eight. Ila's father had gotten a job teaching in
London, and the family soon realized that the rooms the university provided weren't big
enough. Mrs. Price offered to let them stay with her.
Notice that for the narrator, not being "free" of others' inventions isn't a bad thing—in fact,
he relies on others' inventions to inform his own. Because Ila never had anyone "invent"
London for her, she gets to move through the city without others' thoughts impeding her
own observations. However, Ila's insistence that she's free is questionable because much of
the novel suggests that people cannot actually be free of anything.
Ila and her family are living with Mrs. Price when they visit Calcutta for a holiday. Queen
Victoria invites the narrator's mother to bring her family to visit the old family house in
Raibajar. The narrator's mother is excited, as she never gets to take holidays. When she
approaches Tha'mma to ask permission, Tha'mma sharply insists that Victoria only wants
them so the narrator can entertain Ila, and they're not beggars who will take anything
offered. The narrator approaches his grandmother and reminds her that his father took Ila
and her family to the zoo last year, knowing that Tha'mma's greatest fear is not being able to
return kindnesses tit for tat. Tha'mma relents.
Tha'mma is in charge of the household, which is an indicator of her standing within her
family. Even though the narrator is a young child, he is observant of his family members and
knows how to use his knowledge to his advantage. He recognizes that Tha'mma's actions are
ruled by pride, which the novel as a whole suggests makes her exceptionally vulnerable to
manipulation.
Two days later, the narrator, his mother and father, and Tha'mma wait at Gole Park to
meet Ila's family. The narrator, overcome with excitement at getting to see Ila, jumps and
points when he sees their Studebaker. Tha'mma drily notes that the Shaheb, her
"Europeanised" brother-in-law, is sitting in the backseat smoking. She wonders what uniform
he's wearing, and the narrator explains his grandmother's theory that the Shaheb's
wardrobe consists only of impeccable outfits, each one appropriate for a different locale
where he works as a diplomat. When Mayadebi gets out of the car, the narrator notes that
she and Tha'mma look like the same person reflected in a mirror.
The narrator's excitement makes it clear to the reader that as a child at least, the narrator
idolizes Ila. As a well-traveled child, Ila can likely tell him stories just like Tridib does that help
him learn about the world. Tha'mma's distaste for the Shaheb suggests that there's probably
something else amiss with him, given how Tha'mma so fully admires those who are of a
higher social standing than she is.
Robi interrupts the narrator's story to say that the two didn't look alike at all, and in
fact, he looked more like Tha'mma than anyone else in the family. The narrator explains to
the reader that this isn't incorrect and meant that Robi was Tha'mma's favorite. Once, when
Robi was twelve, Mayadebi sent Tha'mma an anxious letter implying that Robi got in trouble
at school. Tha'mma summoned Tridib to explain the incident fully, and he said that Robi had
beaten up a notorious bully. This sent Mayadebi into a panic: she feared that Robi was going
to become a bully himself. Tha'mma insisted that Mayadebi should be proud of Robi and
says that Mayadebi was always a bit of a fool.
Robi's actions as a child will be important to keep in mind later, as Robi turns into an adult
who is very concerned with justice, morality, and following the rules. The differences that
begin to emerge here between Tha'mma and Mayadebi suggest that Tha'mma has always
been the leader of the two; despite Mayadebi's financial success and power, her older sister
is the one who has more power and influence.
Tha'mma told Tridib and the narrator about a quiet boy she'd gone to college with in the
1920s. One morning, a group of policemen arrived in what was, at that time, a perfectly
normal raid on universities. Tridib took a moment to explain to the baffled narrator that back
then, there was a terrorist movement in Bengal, and secret societies attempted to
assassinate British officials. Tha'mma fiddled with her gold chain and said that an officer had
picked out this quiet boy. The boy hadn't seemed afraid at all. Tha'mma tells the narrator
and Tridib that she thinks that Robi would've been like that boy, had he been alive then.
Tha'mma's sense of pride in this unnamed boy suggests that she grew up harboring anti-
British, pro-India sentiments. This event would've taken place before Indian independence,
which means that Tha'mma would've been at the mercy of the British officials in charge of
running the colony. This begins to show the child narrator that his grandmother is more than
she seems—she has a history that deeply informs how she thinks about the present.
Tridib asked what happened to the boy, and Tha'mma said she learned later that the boy
had been preparing to assassinate an English magistrate and was sent to prison. Afterwards,
whenever Tha'mma and Mayadebi passed the place where the boy had lived, Tha'mma told
Mayadebi the boy's story, which frightened Mayadebi. Tha'mma admitted to Tridib that she
used to dream of the boy and was fascinated by the terrorist movements, and she wanted to
join but didn't know how. The narrator was shocked to hear that Tha'mma would've killed
an Englishman, and Tha'mma had looked the narrator in the eye and said that she would've
done anything to be free.
Though it is a much quieter through-line than Tridib's storytelling, Tha'mma is also a prolific
storyteller. This offers another figure for the narrator to learn from, whose stories will also
go on to influence how the narrator views the world and the people in it. When Tha'mma
mentions being free, it suggests that she had (and possibly still has) a very strong sense of
what it means to be free and of the importance of achieving freedom.
The narrator returns to his story. He and Robi, who was a few years older, sized each other
up as Tha'mma greeted the Shaheb by sniffing his face. Later, the narrator's father scolded
Tha'mma for this, but she insisted he stank of alcohol at 9 A.M. The narrator's mother hadn't
smelled anything, but the Shaheb had also won her heart that day: he kindly asked her
questions about how easily accessible different food items in the market were. She was
touched by his interest. Years later, the narrator's father discovered that the Shaheb asks this
question of all women he meets in his duties as a diplomat.
The Shaheb shows that he knows how to make his very high social standing less intimidating
for those lower on the social ladder than him, which suggests that Tha'mma dislikes him for
reasons yet unknown.
After the narrator's mother and the Shaheb finished talking, the narrator was worried
because Ila hadn't yet arrived. He ran to Jatin, who said Ila wasn't coming but winked at the
narrator's father. The narrator believed it, and when Mayadebi noticed how sad he looked,
she explained to him that Ila, Queen Victoria, Tridib, and Lizzie are in another car. Finally,
the other car pulls up. The narrator hides in Tha'mma's sari. Queen Victoria roars at Lizzie to
fetch Ila, who's asleep in the backseat. Ila finally emerges, dressed in a white English dress
and rubbing her eyes. She and the narrator eye each other.
The fact that the narrator believes Jatin (when it's very clearly a joke) provides more
credence to the narrator's assertion that he was an extremely gullible child. This means that
he was likely more susceptible to other people’s stories than he might've been otherwise,
which offers another reason why the narrator loved and respected Tridib so much.
Ila interrupts, saying she couldn't have been wearing that dress. Robi rolls his eyes and
remarks that Ila had trunks of dresses. The narrator remembers the dress in vivid detail,
down to the smell of the starch. His mother had loudly complained that the narrator had
been asking about Ila for days and now won't even approach her. Queen Victoria thought
this was sweet, and Ila turned away. The narrator realized that Ila didn't miss him, and he
was angry with his mother for letting Ila know that she had power over the narrator. To
escape, the narrator jumped into the car with Ila. She pushed him into the front seat.
When the narrator realizes that Ila doesn't care about him in the same way, it sets up the
idea that Ila isn't just wealthier and worldlier than the narrator; her power exists in other
ways as well. Though this seems like a reason for the narrator to give up his idolization of Ila,
the fact that he continues to love her through the rest of the novel suggests that this is
another way in which the narrator isn't free—his love for Ila traps him.
RELATED QUOTES WITH EXPLANATIONS
The narrator fell asleep and finally woke up when they arrived at the house, which sat way
up on a hill. The servants fussed over Ila for a while until she grabbed the narrator and
dragged him inside to hide. She led him through a maze of hallways until she reached her
target, a half-underground storage room. The narrator was scared; the room was dark and
filled with murky shapes. Ila wouldn't let him return to the adults, even when they
heard Queen Victoria and Lizzie yelling for them.
Ila, like Tha'mma, is the ringleader and is assured of her own power within her family and
social circle. The narrator's reaction is very indicative of his youth, as well as his love of
stories. This reality, which he hasn't encountered yet in stories, is absolutely terrifying.
Ila suggested they play a game and led the narrator to a massive sheet-covered object.
When they pulled the sheet off, a table huger than anything the narrator had ever seen
emerged. Three years later, when he took May to see it, he learned that it didn't just seem
huge because he'd been so small; even May was in awe of its size. The narrator had told May
that Tridib's grandfather bought it in London in the 1890s and shipped it to Calcutta in
pieces, but it was so big, he didn't know what to do with it.
The table that doesn't change in relation to the narrator’s age or maturity level—it remains
just as massive and imposing as it was in his childhood, highlighting the veracity of this
particular childhood memory.
May wondered what it cost to ship it and anxiously said that one could've put roofs on all
the huts they saw on the drive there for the cost of the table. The narrator hadn't known
what to say to that, and May wondered why Tridib's grandfather brought back a "worthless
bit of England." The narrator had found it impossible to think of the table as just another
object, since he'd seen it take shape so miraculously three years before.
Remember that later in life, May becomes involved in humanitarian charities. The presence
of such a massive piece of furniture that isn't even being used represents a waste of
resources in her eyes. The narrator’s disappointment in May’s reaction shows that May is
somewhat blind to the wonders of storytelling.
The narrator returns to the story of his visit with Ila. Ila asked the narrator to get under the
table with her to play a game she played with Nick. She explained that Nick is Mrs. Price's
son, and they walk to and from school together every day. The narrator was confused and
didn't want to play and instead asked about Nick. Ila explained that Nick was tall, with long
yellow hair. The narrator tells the reader that Ila's admiration turned Nick into a "spectral
presence" in his life: he knew that no matter what he did, Nick was always doing it better. He
was always older and more mature, and all that the narrator knew about Nick was from a
story the narrator’s father had told him years ago.
This is the point at which the narrator recognizes that Nick Price is his rival for Ila's affection.
However, it's important to remember that Ila is a child here, and her story may or may not
be entirely truthful. It's already been established that she uses her power to impress the
narrator, which means that she could be exaggerating some of Nick's qualities in order to
make him sound better and more impressive than he actually is—or to make the pair seem
closer than they are in real life.
The narrator's father visited Mrs. Price when Nick was thirteen. He was impressed by Nick's
composure and asked Nick what he wanted to be when he grew up. Nick said he wanted to
be like his grandfather, Lionel Tresawsen. Tridib later told the narrator about Lionel
Tresawsen: Tridib said that he'd been a jack of all trades traveling around the world and had
finally ended up in Calcutta. He married there, but he soon returned with his wife and two
children to London. He'd been an avid inventor and was interested in séances. He met
Tridib's grandfather, Mr. Justice Chandrashekhar Datta-Chauduri, at a séance. The narrator
is in awe of Nick and Lionel Tresawsen, and he feels as though Tresawsen is much like him
since he also loved to travel.
The description of Nick's composure further draws out the difference in maturity level
between Nick and the narrator, which in turn makes Nick an even more revered figure in the
narrator's imagination. This relationship with Nick means that the narrator once again uses
stories that others tell him to influence the way that he thinks about someone. When the
narrator feels close to Lionel Tresawsen because of their shared love of "travel," it shows
that the narrator believes fully that his traveling in Tridib's stories is little different from
physically moving from country to country.
When the narrator took May to see the table and asked her about Nick, she said his hair
wasn't truly yellow, and he wanted to be a chartered accountant and live abroad. May didn't
know what a chartered accountant was, and the narrator asked if Nick wanted to travel
like Lionel Tresawsen. May explained that travel means different things to different people
and wondered if the narrator would like Nick. The narrator cried that he already did like
Nick, but May cautioned that Nick wasn't like them and said nothing else on the subject.
May's assertion that Nick isn't like them begins to cast a shadow on Nick's character and
suggests that he might not be as wonderful Ila told the narrator he was. The difference in
the way May and Ila describe Nick's hair suggests that to Ila, Nick probably seems extra
exotic given that her hair is likely extremely dark.
Seventeen years later, the narrator finally meets Nick. The narrator, Ila, and Robi visit Mrs.
Price, and as soon as the narrator sees Ila, he knows she has a secret. She hurries them to
the tube station, where she finally says that Nick is going to meet them. It will be the first
time she's seen him in ten years. Robi asks if Nick is no longer in Kuwait, and Ila explains he
came home unexpectedly. When the three exit the train, the narrator knows Nick the
moment he sees him standing on the platform. He's surprised to see that Nick is no taller
than he is. When Ila approaches Nick, she ignores his hand and instead kisses him on the
mouth. He blushes and laughs.
When Ila seems unconcerned that Nick is no longer working in Kuwait for unknown reasons,
it suggests that she's willing to not ask important questions like this—and those questions
will be very important to everyone else. This suggests that Ila works hard to free herself from
others' stories and instead, continues to live in her own sense of reality that she carefully
creates for herself, either by using or ignoring what other people say.
Nick offers his hand to the narrator, and the narrator coyly says that this isn't the first time
they've met—the narrator grew up with Nick. Nick is perplexed, and the narrator explains
he's known the London streets for a long time as well. When they exit the tube station, the
narrator points to the different roads in the surrounding areas, and mentions which ones
were hit by bombs in World War Two. Nick is incredulous, and he walks ahead with Ila.
The fact that the narrator can navigate around London when he's never been to this part of
town is a testament to Tridib's exceptional sense of place in his stories: he bestowed upon
his nephew a detailed mental map that works in real life just as well as it does in the context
of a story.
Robi informs the narrator that the Germans didn't develop bombs powerful enough to
destroy entire streets until after 1940. The narrator insists that Tridib told him that the street
was destroyed. They argue for a moment, and then they decide to go look at the once-
destroyed street. When they arrive they discover the road is quiet, residential and lined with
trees. As the narrator looks up and down the road, he thinks that he didn't expect to see
exactly what Tridib saw 40 years ago, but the stories that Tridib told about this street seem
almost realer than the sight in front of him.
Again, the narrator looks at the street as though it's made up of layers of events, time, and
stories. Tridib's stories inform how the narrator thinks about the street, even if the street
now looks very different. This shows again how intensely the narrator holds onto these
stories and in some cases, actively rejects trying to come to his own conclusions about
places—he believes that those stories should take precedence.
When the narrator and Robi return to Ila and Nick, Nick is rambling on about Kuwait and not
feeling pressure to get another job. Nick notices the narrator, and asks him to lead them to
44 Lymington Road, since he seems to know the streets. The narrator agrees and leads them
there in mere minutes. The cherry tree outside is taller than the narrator expected, and
old Mrs. Price comes out of the house to greet her guests. Nick mentions how the narrator
knew how to get to the house, and the narrator, embarrassed, explains he's just heard a lot
about it.
The mention that the cherry tree is taller suggests that the narrator likely didn't account for
the fact that it's been decades since Tridib last saw the tree—it's certainly grown since then.
This indicates that in some cases, the narrator isn't very adept at bringing Tridib's stories into
the present and acknowledging that places do change over time, even if the stories about
them remain true and important.
Mrs. Price offers the narrator a drink, but he's too engrossed in looking around the room
that Tridib had once shown him pictures of. The pictures were taken mostly by
the Shaheb in 1939, and they were taken on an evening that Mrs. Price invited her
brother Alan and his three roommates to come for tea. The narrator remembers how, when
Tridib had shown the photographs to May, she'd remarked that the camera looked at people
differently back then.
Here, the storytelling structure (stepping out of the narrative to describe these photographs)
reinforces how the narrator sees the world: it doesn't exist in a linear, neat way for him.
Instead, the world is made up of these fragmented memories, layered on top of each other,
that provide a greater sense of nuance when considered all together.
In one photo, Snipe stands with a pit he dug that was supposed to be the start of a bomb
shelter. Dan stands to the right—he'd been a fascinating figure for the young Tridib. He
worked at a leftist newspaper, and Tridib's questions about the paper were embarrassing
and, according to Mrs. Price, "difficult." Mike lies stretched out in front of Snipe and Dan. He
hadn't liked the Shaheb. Alan Tresawsen had rescued the Shaheb from an uncomfortably
racist encounter with Mike, and he stands in the middle of the photograph.
The mention of racism playing out in 1939 suggests that none of the times the narrator
discusses are times free of racism—it plagues Tridib's family throughout his life and even at
this point, when Mrs. Price is showing her Indian guests such kindness, others feel very
differently about their role in the world.
One of Alan's arms is mostly metal, and Mrs. Price never believed his story that he injured it
in a motorcycle accident. She'd received a letter from France, signed by a possibly German
and Jewish woman, Francesca, informing her of Alan's injury. When Alan finally returned to
England, he was evidently unwell and unwilling to tell his sister how he became injured. In
the photo, Francesca stands between Dan and Alan, dressed in black and looking
unbelievably elegant. Mrs. Price and Mayadebi stand on the edge. Mrs. Price never liked
Francesca, and struggled to figure out which of the three men she was officially partnered
with, as it was never clear.
Mrs. Price's discomfort with her brother's living situation suggests that she relies on clear
and neat delineations to make sense of the world—both on this micro scale of individual
relationships, as well as on a global scale. This adds to the novel's exploration of what
borders mean and what they do. It suggests here that the lack of clarity is only a problem for
Mrs. Price, an outside observer, which indicates that "insiders" don't always need borders to
shape their identities.
In another photo, taken in the drawing room, Francesca, Dan, and Mike sit in an armchair,
laughing. Alan stands behind the chair in between Mayadebi and Mrs. Price, who's holding
the infant May. Alan looks down with a smile at Mayadebi. As the Shaheb took the photo,
the two had been talking about how surprisingly friendly England was becoming in the lead-
up to the war. Alan had remarked that Germany was evolving in much the same way, and
mentioned that going from one country to the other was like stepping through a looking
glass.
By using the motif of the looking glass, the novel begins to show instances in which two
seemingly opposite entities (first Tha'mma and Mayadebi, now England and Germany) are
actually not all that different from each other—and despite their issues with one another,
they're much the same at heart. This is another suggestion that clear delineations don't do
much, given that things look similar on both sides.
Tridib carried one more image with him that wasn't captured in a photograph: he watched
the four friends walk off into the twilight together towards their house on Brick Lane. He
understood that he knew nothing of the house where they lived, and he wondered what
kind of small arguments played out in that house. The Nazi-Soviet pact would be signed a
week later, and Tridib wondered if the petty arguments or the threat of the war was more
real to them. He believes that the four of them knew that the world as they knew it wouldn't
survive the war.
The push and pull here between everyday life and the looming war suggests that it's a
matter of perspective as to which seems more important. It's also worth noting that the war
(since it's implied the friends don't survive) destroys this small group with no clear
delineations, showing that drawing borders is more powerful than existing without.
Back in Mrs. Price's living room, Nick jokes with the narrator and asks if he can find his way
around the house, too. The narrator thinks for a moment and then describes how to get to
the kitchen and the cellar. Ila laughs in disbelief, and the narrator tells the reader that Ila was
the one who showed him the house in the first place, under the giant table in Raijabar. After
she and the narrator crawled under the table, she drew lines in the dust for the road, front
door, hallway, and other rooms. She explained that she and Nick play Houses down in the
cellar, since Houses must be played somewhere dark and secret.
Here, the narrator shows that he also uses Ila's stories in order to add layers of meaning to
his lived reality—and further, that her maps were equally as effective as Tridib's, given how
the narrator can use them here. Again though, the fact that Ila doesn't remember playing
this game with the narrator suggests that she doesn't need to remember things like this in
order to make sense of the world.
As Ila drew the lines, the narrator suddenly became angry. The lines didn't make sense, even
though Ila insisted they could pretend it was a house if they wanted to. Finally, the narrator
insisted that they needed to have a veranda for it to be a real house. He pushed Ila and drew
a veranda, and Ila looked ready to cry. She explained that where the narrator drew the
veranda was supposed to be Magda's room. Magda is her doll, but she insists that Magda is
a baby for the purposes of the game, since houses need babies.
When the narrator insists on needing a veranda, it's indicative of the fact that the narrator
hasn't actually traveled—per what he explains, Indian homes overwhelmingly have
verandas, while they're not as common elsewhere. This suggests that Ila's method of seeing
the world firsthand lets her acknowledge these other realities.
Ila told the narrator that first, they have to get out of bed and change clothes for the day.
She pulled her dress off and stood in just her underwear. The narrator reached out to touch
her skin, even when she seemed not to want him to, and became fascinated by a tiny black
bump above one of her nipples. He rolled it around in his fingers and tried to taste it, but Ila
slapped him away and told him to "go to work" until she told him to come back. The narrator
agreed and when he was allowed to return to the house, Ila was "outside."
Though the narrator's fascination with Ila's body is likely due to his romantic love for her, it's
telling that he doesn't listen to her the first time when she asks him to stop—it suggests that
the narrator doesn't always acknowledge other people’s autonomy. This mirrors other
instances of disrespected borders in the novel, which often lead to violence.
Ila began to tell the narrator what happened to Magda at school: the children stared at
Magda because she was the most beautiful blonde child they'd ever seen, and everyone
wanted to be friends with her. One girl, Denise, hated Magda. Denise was big and ugly, and
she felt threatened by Magda's power over the other children. Today, Denise had made a
mistake at the chalkboard, and Magda had been called on to correct it. The teacher
suggested that Denise take language lessons from Magda. Denise had quietly called Magda a
“wog.”
It's worth noting the inconsistencies in Ila's story, as it suggests that it's not a figment of her
imagination: "wog" is a slur used against Indian people, and it makes little sense in this
situation for Denise to use it in reference to a blonde girl. This suggests that this "story"
might have actually happened to Ila. She begins to process what happened by telling it here,
and makes it easier to deal with by using her doll as a stand-in for herself.
After school, Magda decided to take a different route home to escape Denise. However, she
soon heard Denise yelling slurs at her, and Magda ran to escape. Suddenly, Magda felt
someone push her, and she crashed into the pavement. Denise punched Magda. Magda
closed her eyes in defeat, but heard the voice of Nick Price pulling Denise off of her. Nick
had led Magda home, and the narrator says that he always saw Nick as a savior because of
this story. Ila, however, burst into tears when she finished her story.
Given the inconsistencies in the story, it's questionable whether or not Nick actually helped
Ila—especially given that she's clearly very upset about what happened. This suggests that
as worldly and sophisticated as Ila is, she is not free from being identified as Indian, and nor
is she exempt from racist attacks.
Three years later, after the narrator told May the story, she gently explained that Nick hadn't
helped Ila at all, and in fact, he didn't even want to be seen with her. A policeman had
brought Ila home, and Ila refused to tell anyone what happened. The narrator imagines Ila
walking home alone in a London drizzle, when in Calcutta she never has to even walk
anywhere, let alone walk by herself. May implored the narrator to not think too badly of
Nick, as he was just a child.
The fact that Ila altered the story to paint Nick in a better light suggests that she idolizes him,
much as the narrator idolizes Ila. In both cases, the one doing the idolizing forgives their idol
for their poor behavior. This is indicative at this point of both the narrator and Ila's youth.
Years later, when he's home on summer break from college in Delhi,
the narrator tells Tha'mma this story. Tha'mma is very ill at this point, though nobody knows
that she's going to die from this illness. Tha'mma declares that getting beaten up was Ila's
fault, as she had no right to be in England in the first place. Tha'mma won't drop the subject
and between racking coughs, she insists that Ila still has no right to be there (Ila is at college
in London). Tha'mma insists that the English drew their borders with blood through years
and years of wars, and that's what makes a country. She tells the narrator that he has to do
the same for India.
Tha'mma believes in the power of war to establish borders that actually mean something—
and notably, she sees the violence as necessary to put those borders in place. When she
dismisses Ila's time in England, it shows that she believes that those borders shouldn't allow
anyone in and out—it seems that she wants different countries to have little or nothing to
do with each other. Remember that Tha'mma lived through British rule, which makes this
view more understandable.
RELATED QUOTES WITH EXPLANATIONS
The narrator's heart fills with a mixture of love and pity for Tha'mma. Later, when he
told Ila about what Tha'mma said, she said something about her being a "warmongering
fascist," and the narrator repeated something that Tridib had said: Tha'mma just wanted a
middle-class life that allowed her to believe in the power of nationhood.
Tridib's wisdom implies that there's freedom in having enough financial power to support
oneself and by extension, believe in the power of one's government—something that Tridib
implies the lower classes don't have, and the upper classes don't care about (since they can
travel more freely).
The next morning, when the narrator returns to Tha'mma's side, Tha'mma insists that Ila is
in England because she's greedy. The narrator reminds Tha'mma that Ila is far wealthier in
India than she'll ever be in England, but Tha'mma persists and calls Ila a "greedy little slut."
She asks the narrator to explain why he's defending Ila, and in his anger, the narrator tells
Tha'mma why Ila lives in England.
The fact that Tha'mma is so intent on talking this way implies that there's more to it than the
belief that Ila is greedy and doesn't belong in England. Ila's "greed," however, could be seen
as an affront to Tha'mma's pride. Tha'mma is self-made, and may see Ila as fettering away
her privilege like Tridib did.
The summer before, Ila arranged an impromptu trip to Calcutta at a time when both
the narrator and Robi had been home. Upon the narrator's return home, his mother fed him
lunch and Tha'mma drily told her to not worry about dinner—the narrator, she declared,
won't be home for it, since Ila is in town. As Tha'mma predicted, the narrator went to see Ila
that afternoon. Ila insisted she visited because she wanted to take advantage of her school
holiday. The narrator watched her sprawled in an armchair, dressed exotically in jeans and a
tee shirt, her stomach exposed where her shirt rode up. The narrator rolled onto his
stomach to hide his erection and hopefully preserve their friendship.
When Ila demonstrates that she can arrange a trip to India so quickly, it's an indicator of her
family's wealth and standing, something that Ila isn't even aware is special or different. To
that effect, the narrator's preoccupation with Ila's "exotic" clothes suggests that he's as
much in love with her worldliness as he is with any other aspect of her or her personality.
When the narrator tries so hard to preserve his friendship with Ila but seems unable to
squash his romantic feelings, it indicates that she still very much controls him.
A few days later, Robi, the narrator, and Ila spent a hot afternoon in Ila's room. Once the sun
set, she insisted they go out to the nightclub at the Grand Hotel. Robi was scandalized by the
idea of drinking in public, which Ila scorned—the narrator explains that her morals were
absolute, and she didn't take context into her judgments. For Robi, drinking at school on
occasion was acceptable, but drinking in public was not.
The insistence that Ila doesn't consider context is an indicator that she doesn't necessarily
see borders as doing much, given that she presumably behaves the same no matter where in
the world she is, societal norms aside. This suggests that even as an adult, Ila is still
somewhat childlike—thinking in absolutes like this is often construed as childish and naïve.
Robi became a leader in college because he viewed the world simply and followed the rules
to the letter. Once, he flat out refused to attend student union meetings in regards to a
student strike over something petty, and his standing among the student body meant that
the entire strike was called off. Later, when the narrator asked Robi about the event, Robi
wouldn't say much. Eventually, the narrator understood that Robi had an intuitive sense of
right and wrong that kept him following the rules, and this made others admire and fear
him.
While Robi's morals make him a leader, it's worth noting that Ila never truly becomes a
leader (later, the narrator observes that she's a mere observer among her Trotskyist
roommates). This suggests that having a moral compass and a sense of context are far more
successful (and mature) ways to lead than being so set in one's ways, as Ila is.

Ila finally managed to convince Robi to go. She led Robi and the narrator to the hotel, and
the receptionist showed them to the nightclub. The room was dark and cavernous, and Ila
bullied Robi into entering. A waiter led them to their table with a flashlight, and Ila giggled at
the band. Robi angrily ordered them beers and asked Ila if her Trotskyite friends know that
she spends her holidays like this, and Ila insisted they don't care since they're not joyless like
Robi. This made Robi even angrier.
Robi's insistence on not going suggests that this is something entirely outside the norm of
acceptability in upper-middle class Indian culture—something that Ila, with her scorn for
context, simply doesn't understand. This suggests at this point that Robi believes in borders
and difference.
The female performer stepped out and began flirting with a nearby table of middle-aged
businessmen. Robi growled that he'd punch the performer if she came close, but
fortunately, the woman stepped to the middle of the dance floor and invited the room to
find a stranger to dance with. Ila excitedly tried to get either the narrator or Robi to dance
with her, but the narrator was too shy and Robi was too angry. He insisted that he wasn't
going to let Ila dance at all, which perplexed and then angered Ila. She huffed out of her
chair and approached one of the businessmen.
Here, Ila's actions are very western—in India, she would normally be required to defer to
someone like Robi. However, that kind of social structure is little more than a story to Ila,
given that she grew up with so much power and influence. Her reality, in which she has the
power to do what she wants, is far more compelling than Robi's reality of rules and norms is.
When the businessman agreed to dance, Robi got up, snatched Ila by her blouse, and
pushed the businessman back. He paid a waiter and the wait staff ushered the narrator, Ila,
and Robi out of the club. They walked a short way and then Ila angrily turned on Robi. Very
calmly, Robi explained to her that "girls don't behave like that here." He said that she can do
what she wants in England, but not in India. She pushed the narrator away and hailed a taxi.
As she got in, she shouted that she lives in England so she can be free of oppressive Indian
culture. The narrator ran with the taxi for a minute and shouted back that Ila can never be
free of him, as they're both inside each other.
When the narrator makes this exchange personal and makes it about his relationship with
Ila, it suggests that he sees himself as representing India in a way—a reading that makes Ila's
lack of regard for the narrator make more sense, given how little she thinks of India. The
narrator does recognize, however, that he lives with Ila's stories and memories inside of him,
and he implies that Ila must do the same. Given how much Ila lives in the present and how
little she thinks of stories, this likely isn't true for her.
After the narrator tells Tha'mma this, he knows he made a mistake: she doesn't think much
of freedom that can be purchased with a plane ticket. Tha'mma spits that Ila can live like a
whore in England, but that's not real freedom. The narrator goes to his room and
remembers Ila's angry face. He thinks that everyone but him wants to be free, and he
wonders if he's the only one who relies entirely on the voices inside of him.
For Tha'mma, freedom comes after war and bloodshed draw a line in the sand (as happened
during Partition), and it's not something that one can achieve with a plane ticket. This again
shows the major differences between Tha'mma and Ila: Tha'mma relies on borders, while Ila
ignores them.
The narrator goes to Tha'mma the next morning. She now has a nurse and refuses to speak
to her grandson. When Tha'mma attempts to throw a bedpan at the nurse, the nurse asks
the narrator to leave. As he retreats, he hears Tha'mma ask why he always defends "that
whore" Ila. Tha'mma's condition worsens over the next few days, and she continues to ask
the narrator about Ila and call her a whore whenever he visits. By the end of the narrator's
holidays, she finally begins to improve, and he decides to return to Delhi to sit his
examinations. When he says goodbye to Tha'mma, she pulls his head to her chest to bless
him and again asks why he let Ila trap him, and says that she knows he sees prostitutes in
Delhi.
Interestingly, Tha'mma seems very aware that the narrator is in love with Ila and is therefore
under her spell. This casts her assertion that he must draw bloody borders for India in a
different light, as it suggests that she'd like to see him draw boundaries between himself and
Ila as well. Tha'mma's mention of prostitutes suggests that she believes she also has a great
deal of power over the narrator, as it reads very much like a threat in this situation.
The narrator's parents write often for the next two months, and then the letters stop for a
week right before his examinations. Finally, he receives a letter saying that Tha'mma died
and has already been cremated. The narrator wanders around Delhi in grief, but he thinks
it's fitting that he learned about her death in this way. He reasons that she was too
passionate to exist in his world, where exams are apparently more important than death.
The strange relationship between Tha'mma's youthful desire to climb the social ladder and
the narrator's life at a much higher rung suggests that social standing isn't all it's cracked up
to be. Tha'mma, ultimately, couldn't exist in the narrator's world, as it's a mental world, not
the bloody world she came of age in.
Several days later, the dean summons the narrator and informs him that Tha'mma wrote to
say that the narrator has been seeing prostitutes, and the school is going to expel him for
bad behavior. The narrator asks to see the letter and is shocked to see that Tha'mma wrote it
the day before she died. He manages to explain to the dean that Tha'mma was very ill and
denies he's ever seen prostitutes. As he leaves the office, he wonders how Tha'mma ever
found out that he had actually gone several times with friends to visit prostitutes, and he
wonders how she also knew that he was in love with Ila.
Tha'mma's attempt to punish the narrator by denying him his successes is an underhanded
attempt to punish him for loving Ila, given that Ila represents everything that Tha'mma
despises and doesn't understand about the modern world. This shows that Tha'mma's
nationalistic pride is even more powerful than her love for her family and her desire to see
them be successful, especially in her old age.
When the narrator lives in London for the first time, he finally has to face the truth of his
affections for Ila. A tune from a Hindi movie gets stuck in his head, and he hums it as he
wanders around the city, inevitably finding himself in Ila's neighborhood. At this point, he
decides to drop in and visit her. He counts the yards, feet, and miles as he walks to drown
out the tune. He muses that love is the thing that people try the hardest to quantify by
buying expensive diamonds, cars, or islands for women. Despite this, the narrator's love for
Ila, quantified by the miles he walks to see her, means nothing to her.
Here, the narrator uses the quest to "quantify" love through spending money on a lover as a
way to try to tell himself a story that makes sense about his strange and inappropriate love
for his cousin. He hopes that by applying this kind of a story to it, the story will provide some
other layer of meaning that will make it okay. Ila, however, still has the upper hand, as
evidenced by his assertion that his quantified love doesn't move her in the least.
Ila lives with young liberal activists who argue quietly and seriously about small things.
The narrator soon realizes that though they all seem to like Ila, they see her as a guest or as
decoration in their house. He often finds Nick at Ila's house, and Nick strangely fits in with
Ila's housemates. He sometimes proofs pamphlets for them. When he attends
demonstrations, he often deals with police because he looks so upstanding in a suit.
It's worth noting that both Ila and Nick would likely experience some major negative
changes if the Trotskyists' dreams come true: the Trotskyists seek to destroy the class
system, and in doing so, the wealthy Price and Datta-Chaudhuri families would absolutely
pay the price for that.
One evening, Ila makes a face at the narrator's shabby clothes and insists on taking him to
Brick Lane to buy new clothes, where the shops are run by Indians and Bangladeshis. The
narrator quickly composes his face and agrees to meet Ila at lunchtime two days later. At the
appointed meeting time, the narrator is late. He arrives at the pub and wishes that he could
hide and watch Ila and Nick, who are sitting together at a table, as to maybe understand
their relationship.
Brick Lane is where Alan Tresawsen lived in a communal house. The fact that the
neighborhood is now an Indian one illustrates how drastically places can change over time,
though it still doesn't diminish the power of Tridib's stories about the place from forty years
ago. The narrator will surely still see the lane as Tridib saw it.
Ila has no interest in hearing the narrator's explanation for his lateness, and explains
that Nick wants to come along since he's interested in the import-export business. Nick
chats about his plans for a few minutes until Ila decides it's time to head to Brick Lane. When
they arrive, the narrator is shocked: he expected to see redbrick houses lining a narrow
street, but instead, the street looks like Bangladesh was dropped in the middle of London.
Familiar-looking Bangladeshi shops exist in Victorian London houses.
The existence of this Bangladeshi neighborhood in the middle of London indicates that
borders aren't always effective, given that the narrator observes that an entire country
appears to just exist within an entirely different one. This suggests that borders aren't even
always clear-cut or well defined, as evidenced by the implication that this street is fairly
separate from the rest of the surrounding neighborhoods.
Nick points at a mosque and explains it was a synagogue when the area was Jewish before
the war. The narrator adds that that's when Nick's uncle, Alan Tresawsen, lived on the
street, and offers to show Nick and Ila where Alan lived. He leads them to a quiet part of
Brick Lane and finally, points at a crumbling building with a sign that reads "Taj Travel
Agency." Nick doesn't believe his uncle would've lived someplace like this, since he was
wealthy enough to live wherever he wanted. The narrator bites his tongue and doesn't
suggest that Alan did live here because he wanted to.
Nick's amazement that his uncle lived in a neighborhood like this creates the sense that
more than anyone else, Nick is caught up in appearing upper class—and further, expects that
his ancestors to be similarly committed to keeping up with that appearance. This story
challenges his preconceptions about his uncle, which again shows the power stories have to
alter the reality that a person experiences in the present.
The narrator imagines which bedroom belonged to Dan, who was upstairs because he
couldn't sleep on the fateful night in 1940. Everyone else was asleep downstairs in case
bombs dropped. Dan heard the bombs falling, but London didn't yet know how to tell if the
bombs were close—and they were. A bomb dropped on the sidewalk outside, shattering the
window and killing Dan. The stairs collapsed on the others. Alan threw himself
over Francesca, saving her and sacrificing himself, and Mike survived. Francesca was sent to
an internment camp on the Isle of Wight, and Mike joined the navy and died in
1943. Tridib went with Mrs. Price and Mayadebi to collect Alan's things a few days after he
died, and he found a photo of the four friends, laughing in the park.
In killing all four of these friends, the violence of World War II made it abundantly clear that
their kind of communal living, without clear delineations between sex or nationality
(Francesca was a German Jew), has no place in the hostile world that the war tried to create.
The photograph stands as a testament to their friendship and the fact that they could exist
in happy solidarity, if only for a finite amount of time.
When the narrator finishes telling Ila and Nick this, Ila comments that they must've been
happy in the house, since she lives in exactly the same way in her house. The narrator
marvels that Ila believes that her experience is exactly the same as other, earlier
experiences, just because they look somewhat alike. He snaps at her and insists that it
wasn't idyllic then, with the Nazi-Soviet pact, and they probably fought about it. Ila laughs
that fighting is half the fun of living in a house like that, and insists that the narrator
wouldn't understand it. She says that the narrator spent his entire life in middle-class Delhi
and Calcutta, while she lived and lives in London in the middle of political movements. Ila
insists that Alan knew he was a part of important events, and that nothing important ever
happened in Calcutta or Delhi.
At this point sometime in the 1980s, England was struggling with major conservative
movements. While these were important in shaping England, the narrator definitely has a
point that the climate and experience in London in the 1980s versus during World War II is
entirely different. Again, Ila doesn't believe in context, which allows her to feel this way. Her
disbelief in context is also what allows her to say that nothing important happens in India—
as the reader will learn later, the narrator himself experienced a number of extremely
important events throughout his childhood in India.
RELATED QUOTES WITH EXPLANATIONS
The narrator is flabbergasted. Ila notes that Calcutta experienced riots and famine but not
on a scale that affects the whole world or is remembered. The narrator shouts that unlike
her, he understands that politics are serious, but she retorts that he knows nothing about
England. He gives up but thinks that he knows people who survived the "Great Terror" in the
1960s and 1970s, which Ila doesn't understand. He reasons that Ila might know more than
he gives her credit for, since she does take on violent racists in London.
What Ila really points to here is the fact that when western powers are in charge, they're the
ones who control which stories get told—which means, by extension, that Ila's not wrong
that plenty of people in Europe aren't as aware of what's going on in India as they are of
what's happening in their backyards. This does not, however, mean that things that happen
in India are less important or traumatic—they're just not talked about as widely.
RELATED QUOTES WITH EXPLANATIONS
The entire argument bores Nick, so he leads Ila and the narrator into the travel agency. The
agent isn't at all friendly, insists they speak English, and begins shouting when the narrator
asks if there was ever a staircase in the building. Nick, Ila, and the narrator leave. Nick
comments on the success of the business, and thinks out loud about getting into the
"futures market." Annoyed, the narrator suggests Nick get a job first, and Nick explains he
can't in England since the salary is too low. When the narrator asks why he gave up his job in
Kuwait, Nick insists that it wasn't professional enough. The narrator is skeptical. Ila angrily
leads Nick away. She runs back to the narrator and tells him to call before he visits her again.
Nick takes advantage of the fact that his family is wealthy, which in turn affords him the
privilege of being able to dabble, dream, and not have to hold down a real job. Ila's anger
when the narrator takes offense to this shows that she still idolizes Nick like she did as a
child, even if he isn't perfect in the flesh. When the agent insists on speaking English, it
suggests that even though he lives in a Bengali neighborhood, it's still very important to him
to appear to be English and fit in.
The narrator doesn't see Ila for two weeks. Mrs. Price invites both Ila and the narrator for
Christmas Eve dinner with her, May, and Nick. Ila is late, and when she arrives, she asks the
narrator why he hasn't visited her. When they all sit down, Ila announces she got a job with
the Save the Children Fund, and they toast to her and to their grandfathers Lionel
Tresawsen and Mr. Justice Chandrashekhar Datta-Chaudhuri. After the toast, Nick slurs
about how wonderful his grandfather's life was, traveling the world, and laments that all he
got was a horrible job in Kuwait.
Nick's sense of entitlement is glaring here—he seems to believe that he deserves a life just
as exciting as his grandfather's, when Tridib told the narrator that Lionel Tresawsen
absolutely worked hard for everything he had. This places Nick and Ila on similar footing in
their respective families, given that Ila also scorns her family's wealth by getting involved
with the Trotskyists.
May lightly suggests that Lionel Tresawsen would've made more of Kuwait.
When Nick insists that Kuwait is a horrible place, May coolly says that Nick needs to stop
lying and admit that his boss didn't like him and, possibly rightfully, accused him of
embezzling money. Nick stands up, calls May a bitch, and goes to his room. Mrs. Price is
asleep in her chair. A half hour later, Ila fetches Nick, they wake up Mrs. Price, and May
carves the turkey. Dinner is mostly silent and awkward, and the narrator decides to leave as
soon as he finishes his after-dinner brandy. May catches him in the hall and suggests that the
blizzard is too bad for anyone to leave. She pleads with her eyes for the narrator to stay so
she can stay too, and he agrees.
Nick's behavior is extremely childish here, which provides more evidence for the possibility
that neither he nor Ila have matured significantly. May's silent pleading with the narrator to
stay suggests that there's more to their relationship than what meets the eye, given that
they shared a strong relationship with Tridib. When the narrator agrees to stay, it implies
that he cares for May—though it's also worth noting that he's also excited to spend the night
in the same space as Ila.
Mrs. Price heads for bed as May and Nick settle Ila and the narrator on camp beds in the
cellar. The narrator's heart bursts with hope. When May and Nick leave, Ila laughs that she
and the narrator are back where they began, playing Houses. The narrator stares as Ila
undresses, wrapping herself in a towel. He thinks she looks more beautiful than any woman
he's ever seen, and he creeps up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder.
The narrator still very much feels as though Ila's acceptance or dismissal of him is an intrinsic
part of his identity—if she accepts him as a lover, it'll mean that all the stories he's been
telling himself about her finally match up with reality, even if such a situation would mean
that they're flouting boundaries.
Ila laughs, turns around, and stops in her tracks when she sees the look on the narrator's
face. She runs into his arms and hugs him. He realizes he's crying, and Ila apologizes for
undressing in front of him. She insists she wouldn't have had she known the narrator's
feelings. Ila kisses the narrator on the chin and runs upstairs to talk with Nick. The narrator
lays in the dark and ruminates on that day that Ila stepped out of the car in Gole Park, when
it was made clear to everyone that their need for each other would never be equal. She
doesn't come back to the cellar, and the narrator feels as though Ila took his life hostage
again.
When Ila doesn't return, it's clear that she spent the night with Nick instead—something
that she surely knew wouldn't go over well with the narrator, and suggests that she has little
reason to care for or think about his emotions in this situation. When the narrator feels
exactly the same way now as he did as an eight-year-old, it illustrates how childhood and
adulthood are constantly informing each other.

Themes:

Youth vs Maturity

The Shadow Lines follows the unnamed narrator, the youngest member
of the Indian Datta-Chaudhuri family, as he pieces together his family
history. This history spans several decades and follows many different
family members—including his grandmother's youth in Dhaka in the
1910s and 1920s, his uncle Tridib's experiences of World War II in
England as a child, the Partition of India in 1947, and finally, the riots in
Calcutta and Dhaka in 1964, which unfold when the narrator is eleven. As
the narrator recounts these events in a nonlinear fashion, he seeks to
make sense of his family and his history by reevaluating initially youthful
and simplistic understandings of people and events. The novel suggests
that in doing so, the narrator is finally able to reach maturity and a
greater sense of his place in his family and in the world.

The novel pays close attention to the different ways that characters
approach things based on their age, particularly in regards to the narrator.
To this end, the narrator often tells stories multiple times, sometimes from
different perspectives, to explore these differences. This is most evident
first in the narrator's interpretation of the story Ila tells him while they're
playing a game called Houses. She tells him a story about how their
"daughter," her doll Magda, was attacked by a racist classmate on her
way home from school. Ila and the narrator are eight years old at the time
that Ila tells this story, and in his youthful ignorance, the narrator doesn't
realize that this isn't a made-up narrative—this event actually happened
to Ila. As a child herself, Ila attempts to make the event easier to bear by
using the doll as a stand-in for herself and altering the story so that it
ends happily. Because the narrator doesn’t realize that Ila’s story is part
of her lived experience, he becomes angry when cries while telling the
story—as far as he's concerned, the story shouldn't matter, since it is just
make-believe. However, Ila's version of the story does develop Nick
Price, the savior figure, as the person with whom the narrator must
compete for Ila's affection. Three years later, when the narrator recalls
Ila's story and tells it to May, Nick's older sister, she explains what
actually happened: Ila herself was the victim, and Nick didn't save her. In
fact, he ran away, as he didn't want to be seen with an Indian girl. When
the narrator learns what actually happened, it helps him to move towards
maturity by developing a greater sense of understanding of those people
around him. Especially since the narrator idolizes both Nick and Ila as a
child (and Ila into adulthood), this shows him that he must be willing to
allow his perspectives and understandings to mature and develop in order
to grow up.
This idea that understanding one's family history allows a person to reach
a point of emotional maturity reaches a conclusion when the narrator,
now an adult in his late twenties or early thirties, reconnects with May in
London and learns about May's brief romantic relationship with Tridib
almost twenty years prior, as well as the truth of Tridib's death. These
were events that the narrator witnessed or heard about as a child, but he
never fully understood—Tridib died before he could help the narrator
make sense of the riots or Tridib's seemingly mysterious relationship with
May. When the narrator accompanies Tridib and May on their tourist
activities in Calcutta, he is frustrated to realize that there are things
between them that he doesn't understand, such as when Tridib mentions
"ruins" belonging to them. It's cathartic for the narrator to finally be able
to piece together some of those mysteries, such as when May explains
that the "ruins" referred to a letter he wrote in which he confessed his
love for her. She also tells the narrator that contrary to what his parents
told him, Tridib didn't die in an accident. Rather, he died a grotesque and
violent death attempting to protect May and his great
uncle Jethamoshai from a riot. Following these revelations, the narrator
and May have sex. In doing so, they connect in a very adult way over
events they barely understood in their youth, which left them lost and
uncertain of what even happened. By finally giving words to what
happened and looking at each other as equal adults, rather than
continuing to relate to each other like they did when May was in her early
twenties and the narrator was a child, both of them achieve a sense of
relief at finally uncovering a mystery that kept them chained to that place
in time.

Overall, Ghosh presents youth and childhood as a period of both blissful

innocence and shocking, anxiety-inducing uncertainty. By framing the
novel around the narrator's quest to understand his childhood more fully—
and his childhood desire for a more adult understanding of the people and
events he experiences—the novel suggests that while youth and
adulthood are two distinct states of being, each state continuously informs
the other. Further, because it's not necessarily the happy moments that
the narrator dwells on, either in the past or the preset, the novel ends
with the assertion that growing up, becoming mature, and making sense
of one's childhood necessarily hinges on losing one's childish sense of
innocence and self-importance, and in doing so, coming to grips with the
violent, awful, and nonsensical world.

Theme 2: Memory, storytelling and reality

The narrator of The Shadow Lines is endlessly fascinated by the

relationship between memories as they exist in people's minds
and memories that are transformed into stories and passed on
through the spoken word. As a child, he lives for the stories his
uncle Tridib tells him of living in England, as well as other stories
about the Price family, which is the family that Tridib and his
parents stayed with. As the narrator grows up and experiences
others challenging these stories that Tridib told him, he becomes
even more convinced of what Tridib always insisted: while stark
reality has its place, one can live an even richer life when a
person allows stories and memories, both one’s own and those of
others, to inform and influence their reality.

The narrator grows up idolizing Tridib, mostly because Tridib is an

exceptional storyteller. He can craft worlds and situations with
great detail—and the narrator takes the stories to heart to such
an intense degree—that as an adult, the narrator is able to find
his way around parts of London he's never been to, based purely
on his uncle's stories and the mental maps Tridib created for him.
This illustrates how, for the narrator, Tridib's memories and
stories are extremely real—something that the narrator's
cousin, Ila, doesn't understand. Though Ila also enjoys the stories
when she's a child, they don't hold the same importance for her
as an adult. The narrator suggests that this is because Ila, who
grew up wealthy and privileged, never had to use her imagination
to travel or see things. Essentially, the novel suggests that
because Ila's lived experience is so rich, she has no reason to
make memories that contain the same degree of richness. She,
unlike the narrator, can always buy a ticket to a faraway land or
find another interesting lover. However, because of this disregard
for memories and stories alike, the narrator interprets Ila's life as
actually less rich, as she doesn't rely on the "clamoring voices" to
mediate her experiences with the world, as the narrator does.

Despite the fact that the narrator relies so heavily on Tridib’s

stories and memories, the instances when the narrator either
cannot gain understanding outside of his own memories or simply
doesn't have Tridib's memories to color his experience are telling.
This suggests that Ila's method of moving through the world has
its place, given that she doesn't struggle with the issues the
narrator does of whose stories take precedence: his own, or
someone else's. This is most apparent in the case of Tridib's
death, something that Tridib himself cannot tell the narrator
about and the truth of which the narrator's family keeps from him.
They originally tell him that Tridib died in an accident in Dhaka,
and at eleven years old, the narrator doesn't find this particularly
interesting—accidents, he insists, aren't that compelling for a
child, unlike other means of death. However, as the narrator
grows older, he begins to wonder about the truth of his parents'
story. He finally consults both the newspaper from the day Tridib
died and May, who witnessed firsthand what happened. The
narrator discovers that though he also experienced the riots that
gripped Calcutta and Dhaka (and killed Tridib) and was
understandably terrified by what happened, the power of his own
memories of the event, coupled with his youth, meant that he
never connected his experience of the riots in Calcutta with Tridib
and May's experience in Dhaka. When the narrator learns from
May that Tridib was murdered by a mob while attempting to save
her, his great-uncle Jethamoshai, and his great uncle's
caregiver, Khalil, the narrator is finally able to make sense of
Tridib's story, his own story, and the story of the riots as a whole.

With this understanding, which completes the narrator's

understanding of his uncle's entire life, the narrator finally
realizes the impact and the importance of telling stories and
holding onto other people’s memories. May’s memories allow the
narrator to, for the first time, grasp the reality and the scope of
what happened. This echoes the way that Tridib's stories about
World War II made that war feel real for the narrator. With this,
the novel ends by asserting that though reality as Ila experiences
it has its place, memories and stories offer unique insight into an
event that simple experience doesn't allow.

3. Freedom and Identity

The Shadow Lines centers on the relationship between freedom

and how people try to achieve that freedom. In this way, the
novel seeks to parse out the meanings of different kinds of
freedom and how one's perception of freedom influences their
identity. Further, the novel also suggests that the idea of freedom
is enough to drive someone mad, even if freedom is ultimately
unreachable.
The novel explores the idea of freedom primarily through the
opposing definitions held by Tha'mma, the narrator's
grandmother, and Ila, his cousin. Tha'mma, who was born in
1902, grew up during the British occupation of India. As a young
woman, Tha'mma believed that there was nothing more
important than securing freedom from British rule, even telling
her wide-eyed grandson that she wanted to join the terrorists and
assassinate British government officials to meet those ends.
Despite being so intent on this freedom as a young woman, when
Partition (the process that granted the colony of British India
freedom from colonial rule by creating the separate countries of
India, West Pakistan, and East Pakistan, which later became
Bangladesh) finally took place in 1947, Tha'mma was far too busy
working and raising a family as a widow to even celebrate, let
alone consider the gravity of what happened. It's not until much
later that 62-year-old Tha'mma, as she prepares to return to
Dhaka for the first time since she was a young woman, realizes
the implications of the colony's divisions. While she identifies
proudly as an Indian and Hindu woman, the fact that she was
born in Dhaka means that, in light of current borders, she was
born in East Pakistan—a Muslim-majority country. This realization
shakes her sense of identity to its very core, especially in light of
her growing nationalism in her old age. This nationalism, which
reaches its height after Tridib dies on this trip to Dhaka, leads
Tha'mma to sell her beloved gold chain to fund the Indian fight
against Muslims. When the narrator confronts her about it, she
screams at him that she did it to ensure his freedom from "them"
(presumably, the Muslim East Pakistanis). This suggests that
Tha'mma's desire for freedom and an easy identity very literally
drives her mad, and this nationalism only increases in the
following years until her death.
As far as Tha'mma is concerned, Ila's desire for and definition of
freedom is a direct attack on her own beliefs about freedom. This
is primarily because Ila seeks her freedom by escaping to
England, where she can live as a modern western woman: she
can sleep with or flirt with men if she feels like it, she can travel
around the world, and most importantly, she's no longer under
the control of her male relatives in India. However, the novel
questions if the "freedom" Ila finds by living in England is even
real when it describes the man she marries, Nick Price. Though
Ila's marriage to Nick is supposed to free her from obligations to
her family and give her a platform of support, Nick admits mere
months into their marriage that he has several other girlfriends
and no interest in giving them up. When Ila refuses to leave her
marriage because she loves Nick too much, she chooses to exist
in a place where her freedom is compromised. The narrator
interprets this as an indication that in some ways, Tha'mma was
right: Ila can't be free. This is reinforced in a point that comes
later in the novel but earlier chronologically, when the narrator
tells his dying grandmother that Ila lives in England so that she
can be free. Tha'mma calls Ila a whore and insists that Ila is in no
way free—as per Tha'mma's understanding, freedom can't be
purchased in the form of a plane ticket, especially since her own
first and only plane ride to Dhaka resulted not only in an identity
crisis, but the loss of family.

As the narrator speaks to others about the meaning of freedom,

from his uncle Robi to May, he comes to understand though
everyone desperately loves the idea freedom and wants it for
themselves, actually achieving true freedom is nearly impossible.
Robi believes he'll never be free of the traumatic memories of
Tridib's death, which he witnessed firsthand; Ila chooses to never
free herself from her unhappy marriage that was supposed to free
her; and the narrator asserts that the Indian subcontinent will
never truly be free from the spite and animosity caused by British
rule, long after Partition. With this, the novel suggests that
freedom is an impossible idea, and no one can ever be truly free,
no matter how hard one might fight for it or attempt to escape
oppression.

4. Social Standing and Pride

For all of the characters in The Shadow Lines, social standing is a

major motivating factor in their lives. By exploring how people's
desire for wealth and social standing gets out of control as a
result of excessive pride, the novel suggests that these things
should be treated with caution and not be taken too seriously.
The narrator notes that though his education and his family's
standing have had innumerable positive effects on his life, he also
shows how the same things tear apart different factions of his
family and prove to be, in some cases, lethal.

Over the course of the novel, the characters make it abundantly

clear that even more important to them than climbing the social
ladder is highlighting the differences, real or imagined, between
themselves and those who exist on the social ladder below
them. Ila's mother, who goes by the nickname Queen Victoria,
is one of the most overt offenders. Although the woman she hires
to nanny Ila, Lizzie, speaks fluent English and is semi-
conversational in Hindi, Queen Victoria insists on speaking to
Lizzie in her own made-up language designed to make Lizzie
seem stupid and uneducated. In reality, Lizzie is just poor and
from a different part of the country. Tha'mma also relies heavily
on her sense of pride. When her husband died prematurely,
leaving Tha'mma with a young son and no job, Tha'mma was too
prideful to ask her wealthy family members for help. Instead, by a
stroke of luck, she got a job as a teacher that she then held for
the next thirty years, and impressed upon her son, the
narrator's father, the importance of education. In her old age,
she construes her relatives as greedy and unhelpful for not
coming to her aid, though they didn't help her exactly because
she refused their help. However, by juxtaposing Tha'mma's sense
of pride in her self-made wealth and her sister's family's inherited
wealth with an open distaste for poor people and an implied fear
of living like poor people, the novel suggests that the characters'
desire for wealth and standing is somewhat understandable. It's
in their best interests to make sure their children attend the best
schools and achieve the highest marks, as that will ensure that
they don't end up poor.

Chronologically speaking, pride is the first thing that begins to

destroy the narrator's family. When Tha'mma and Mayadebi are
young girls, they live in a large house in Dhaka with a number of
extended family members. When their father begins fighting with
their uncle Jethamoshai, the two men decide that the only way
to deal with the conflict is to divide the house in two with a wall
and never speak to each other again. For Tha'mma, who is old
enough to remember a time when the house was not divided, she
sees that her father and uncle's excessive pride is what causes
them to feel that their only option was to divide the house in a
completely nonsensical way and cut off the other half of the
family. Further, the prideful natures of both parts of the family
don't end after the division: the patriarchs forbid their children
from playing with each other, and thus, the two halves of the
family fall out of contact. Most chilling is what Tha'mma discovers
when she returns to the house in her sixties. Jethamoshai still
lives there, an ancient man in his nineties, and is still very clearly
upset about the conflict with his brother: he rants and raves about
wanting to take his brother's family to court to legally claim the
other half of the house, and indeed, ran out several family
members who at various points tried to return to the house. By
this point, Jethamoshai is completely unable to care for himself,
and he certainly would not be taken seriously in a court of law. In
this way, the novel offers a dark cautionary tale of the
consequences of pride, as Jethamoshai's pride leads to his own
death, the death of his caretaker, Khalil, and Tridib.

Tha'mma believes wholeheartedly that it's important to make

good use of one's social standing—a belief that stems from her
own bootstraps story of success. As far as she's concerned, Tridib
blatantly ignores this, which makes him untrustworthy and stupid
in her eyes. Instead of becoming a professor, Tridib spends his
time on the streets, talking—a sin to trump all others, according
to Tha'mma. Again, however, Tha'mma turns this all on its head
when, on the day before she dies, she writes a letter to the dean
of the narrator's school, informing him that the narrator has been
visiting brothels and therefore should be expelled—essentially,
attempting to deprive her grandson of the social standing he
would achieve through education. The narrator understands that
his grandmother did this because she resents that the narrator is
deeply in love with Ila, who attempts to reject her own high social
standing by becoming involved with Trotskyism in London, a
political movement that seeks to upend the class system
altogether. Though Tha'mma is unsuccessful in ruining her
grandson's chances at a better life through education, this
instance illustrates again the dangers of excessive pride and
obsession with social standing. Tha'mma ensures that her
grandson will think poorly of her after her death, destroying her
family in yet another way. The novel illustrates the innumerable
ways that pride and fear can tear apart a family, ending with the
assertion that though the reasoning behind people's pride can, in
some cases, be understandable, the means absolutely do not
justify the ends.

5. Borders, Violence and Political unrest

The events of The Shadow Lines center primarily around riots that took
place in Calcutta, India, and Dhaka, East Pakistan, in late 1963 and early
1964. Though the narrator doesn't discover the truth until the very end
of the novel, it's this riot in Dhaka that kills Tridib, a realization that
suddenly forces the narrator to reevaluate his experience of the conflict
from his hometown in Calcutta and consider the ways in which the riots
were an even bigger defining moment in his life than he realized at the
time. As the narrator, in his late twenties or thirties, finally pieces together
what happened, he begins to consider the role that British colonialism and
the border between India and East Pakistan played in the conflict, and
how the political unrest of the period truly impacted his understanding of
his family and the world.

When the British finally granted their colony of British India independence
in 1947, they divided the colony along religious lines, creating the Hindu-
majority country of India and the Muslim-majority countries of East
Pakistan and West Pakistan. As the narrator, who grew up in the Indian
city of Calcutta, describes, these borders meant that he was relatively
unaware of anything happening outside his home in India—cities that
were a thousand miles away but still in India were in the forefront of his
consciousness and understanding, while cities that were a day's drive
away, but in another country, simply didn't exist in his mind.
Characters:
1. The narrator
The narrator was born in Calcutta, India in 1953, where he
lives with his parents and his grandmother, Tha’mma. He
spends his entire childhood in Calcutta and spends a lot of it
with his favorite uncle, Tridib. Tridib tells him stories,
pointing out faraway cities in his atlas and telling him often
about living in London as a child. The narrator idolizes
Tridib's way of living and looking at the world, which is a
problem when the narrator is around his cousin Ila. Though
the narrator loves Ila romantically, he struggles regularly to
try to make her see the importance of Tridib's stories. He
and Tridib decide that because Ila traveled so much as a
child, she didn't need to rely on stories like the narrator did,
since he never left Calcutta. Though the narrator is often
self-centered and unaware of the scope of the world, he is
also very tuned into the inner workings of his family. He
understands, for example, that Tha'mma has a deep sense
of pride, and he uses his knowledge to his advantage. After
Ila tells the narrator about an English boy named Nick
Price, the narrator understands that Nick is his rival for Ila's
affection. Eventually, Ila and Nick get married, which is
heartbreaking for the narrator. He feels trapped by his
unwavering love for Ila, as he knows she’ll never love him
back. Over the next several years in London, the narrator
reconnects with Ila; Nick’s sister, May; and Robi in London.
He has a brief sexual encounter with May, who used to be
romantically linked to Tridib. May enlightens the narrator as
to the real cause of Tridib’s death in Dhaka, and the narrator
 realizes that the terrifying riot he experienced in Calcutta in
1964 was just like the one that killed Tridib in Dhaka.

2. Tridib:
Tridib is the narrator's uncle. He's about twenty years older
and is a very skilled storyteller. He often tells the narrator
stories about the year he lived in London with the Prices.
Tridib's sense of place in his stories is so exact, the narrator
can find his way around London as an adult years later going
off of what Tridib told him. Tridib has an atlas that he uses to
show the narrator where in the world the places he talks
about in his stories are. As an adult, Tridib is the only one in
his family to not take after his wealthy father and get a high-
powered, international job. Instead, he remains in his
grandmother's home in Calcutta and pursues a PhD in
archaeology. When Tridib is 27, he begins a correspondence
with May, Mrs. Price's daughter. She was an infant when
he lived in London. They write for several years and at one
point, Tridib writes a long, detailed letter about a time he
witnessed strangers having sex and invites May to come to
India. When May accepts and arrives in Calcutta, she's
relieved to discover that Tridib isn't scary—he's shy and
young-looking, and though he very clearly loves May, he's
unsure of what to say or how to show it. Tridib accompanies
May and Tha'mma to Dhaka and to Tha'mma's ancestral
home, where he dies in a riot. He is brutally murdered
attempting to save May, Jethamoshai, and Khalil from an
angry mob. His death haunts May, the narrator, Tha'mma,
and Robi for decades.

3. Ila
 Ila is the narrator's cousin. They're the same age, and their
families joke that they could be twins, but they're very
different. Ila's family is very wealthy and she lives in a
number of foreign cities throughout her childhood, which
makes her much less interested in their uncle Tridib's
stories. She can recall where every ladies' restroom is in the
airports, something the narrator believes was a way for her
to find some sort of consistency in an otherwise whirlwind
childhood. During her childhood, she lives in London at Mrs.
Price's house for a while and attends school with Mrs.
Price’s son, Nick. When she visits Calcutta and plays with
the narrator, she indirectly tells the narrator about being
bullied and beaten for being Indian, and the narrator doesn't
piece together what actually happened until years later.
Because Ila grows up in a lot of western cities, she thinks
about freedom differently than the narrator and Robi do.
She loves to talk about having promiscuous sex and wears
clothing the narrator finds exotic (mostly jeans and t-shirts).
Though the narrator loves her romantically throughout his
childhood and into adulthood, Ila either doesn't realize or
doesn't care. Ila dabbles in Trotskyism in London, and tells
the narrator that nothing that happens in India is important
on a global scale. She marries Nick Price and soon discovers
that this was a mistake: he has several other girlfriends and
refuses to give them up. Though she confides in the narrator
and seeks comfort from him, she later insists that she made
it up and Nick would never hurt her.

4. Tha’mma
Tha'mma is the narrator's grandmother. As a young woman in
British India, she desperately wanted to be a part of the terrorist
groups that fought for India's independence from Britain. When
Partition happened in 1947, however, Tha'mma was too busy
raising the narrator's father as a single parent to think much of it.
When her husband died, Tha'mma became fiercely independent
and refused help from everyone, including her younger
sister, Mayadebi. Eventually, Tha'mma told herself that her
relatives actually refused to help her, so she actively distanced
herself from much of her family. Throughout the novel, she's
cautious about family relationships, given that as a child, she saw
her father and uncle feud and finally build a wall through their
house to resolve it. She's also a stickler about using one's time
wisely, also as a result of having to support herself and put her
son through school alone. Because of this, she dislikes Tridib,
who she believes to be a gossip. After she retires, Tha'mma
withdraws and cedes control of the household to the
narrator's mother. In a sudden shift in character, Tha'mma
decides in her early sixties that it's her duty to bring her elderly
uncle Jethamoshai home to India, given the rising tensions
between India and Pakistan. The prospect of returning to Dhaka is
a difficult one for her: she doesn't understand what Partition was
for if the border itself isn't even visible, and she struggles to cope
with the sudden realization that her birth in Dhaka means that
she was born in East Pakistan. After Jethamoshai and Tridib die in
the riot, Tha'mma sells her favorite gold chain to fund the war
effort with Pakistan. She becomes nasty to the narrator when she
deteriorates while he's in college, and calls Ila a whore.

5. May Price
May is Mrs. Price's daughter. She's an infant when Tridib and his
family are in London in 1939, and she's at least ten years older
than her younger brother, Nick. May is an oboist and plays in an
orchestra professionally throughout her adult life, though later in
life, she also works for "worthy causes" that provide housing and
disaster relief in third-world countries. When she's 19, she and
Tridib begin a correspondence that lasts for four years and
culminates in a visit to India. At this point, May isn't sure if she
loves Tridib or not, and she remains unsure even throughout the
visit. While she's in India, she and Tridib see the tourist sights and
spend time together, often accompanied by the narrator, who is
eleven at the time. Near the end of her visit, she accompanies
Tridib and Tha'mma to Dhaka and visits Tha'mma's ancestral
home. When a riot breaks out May gets out of the car, believing
that as an Englishwoman, the mob won't hurt her. Though she's
correct, Tridib dies when he gets out of the car to protect her and
his great-uncle Jethamoshai. May lives the rest of her life
wondering if she killed Tridib, though she eventually comes to
belief that Tridib sacrificed himself for her. Presumably because of
what she saw in India and because of her guilt, she sleeps on the
floor and fasts one day per week. When she reconnects with the
narrator in the 1980s, she shares with him her youthful
uncertainties about whether or not she loved Tridib and her fears
that she killed him. Though he assaults her, she later invites him
to have sex after sharing her version of what happened during the
riot.

6. Maya debi
Mayadebi is Tha'mma's younger sister. The narrator describes
the two women as being like reflections in a looking glass.
Mayadebi is lucky enough to marry the Shaheb, a wealthy
diplomat. As such, she travels often throughout her life, including
to London in 1939 with the nine-year-old Tridib, her middle son.
She has an older son, Jatin, and a much younger son, Robi, who
is only a few years older than the narrator. Mayadebi is a beautiful
and shy woman, and she worries often about Tridib's safety while
they're in London. Though she offers to help Tha'mma when
Tha'mma's husband dies, Tha'mma refuses her help. Tha'mma
often refers to Mayadebi as somewhat foolish, given that
Mayadebi was afraid of scary stories and fully believed her older
sister's tale that their uncle Jethamoshai's side of the house was
entirely upside-down. However, Mayadebi agrees to take
Tha'mma to visit their ancestral home when Tha'mma visits her in
Dhaka. For much of the visit and during the riot, Mayadebi is
silent. After Tridib dies, she gives the narrator his atlas.

7. Nick Price
8. As children, Ila introduces the narrator to Nick Price through
stories she tells about playing with him in London when her family
lives with his. He's several years older, blonde, and has long hair.
The narrator recognizes that Nick is his opponent for Ila's affection
and therefore feels as though he grows up in Nick's ever more
mature shadow, even though he doesn't meet Nick until they're all
adults. Though Ila idolized Nick as a child and the two likely did play
together, he also refused to stand up for Ila when she was a victim
of racial violence. In adulthood, Nick floats somewhat aimlessly
through life, coasting on opportunities afforded to him through his
privilege. His sister, May, implies that Nick was fired from his last
job for embezzlement. Not long after Nick and Ila marry, Ila
discovers that Nick has several other girlfriends and no intention of
giving any of them up. Though she decides she could never leave
him, she does punish him by embarrassing him at dinner parties.