The Shadow Lines Book

The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those little events, internal, local, almost civic, which, in peaceful lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversations, jokes, stories wantonly exaggerated: it would have been the ready-made nucleus for a cycle of legends, if one of us had had an epic turn of mind.

~ Marcel Proust
The Shadow Lines of History (& Geography)

It is said that childhood is the font of all stories. No story can be told without getting the child in you involved. Well, that is not quite true. You can tell one without involving the child, except that it wont be a story anymore. It will be an anecdote - a story without the soul.

Here, the child, and the adult, and the teenager flit across the shadow lines of time that separates them, blending into each other, becoming one and separate without the slightest effort.

One minute the wonder of the child, next the indifference of the adult, next the deliberate inadequateness of the teenager - all assault the reader at the same time. Taking the reader on a parallel journey. The transitions between times is stunning - seamless! Between past and present selves… all shadow lines are sketched in loving detail.

This technique is employed partly due to narrative expediency, but also to show the true nature of stories we tell ourselves - they are as fleeting as our memories. Our personal histories are figments of our imagination.

Sometimes this shadowy nature of memory revels itself:

You might think you know a story, you have grown up with it. Then someone comes along and says, but that could not have happened. You look them in the eyes and say, 'look, that is what happened.' They will understand.

Not so much. Your stories are built on 'facts' that they are alien to. They belong to another time, one parallel to theirs. To another universe. Did you meet the multi-verse today?

Looking-Glass Borders

But these lines, these stories, are not just personal, they are spun out and eventually lays siege to whole nations. They become political hallucinations:

What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony: the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the 4000-year-old history of that map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines - so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free - our looking-glass border.

Combine this with the opening quote from Proust, where anyone who is unaware of the 'Saturday' becomes 'barbarians' and we can see how history (& geography) are nothing but silly private jokes that we play on each other. (in fact it was stumbling across the passage in Proust that made me turn to this half-formed review among my notes.)

The Grand Illusionists

But Tha'mma, how can you teach me grammar - you don't even know the difference between coming and going!

The illusions that we conjure out of these shadows, made of boundaries which evidently are, but where there could be none. Lines circumscribing a 'present, a 'past and 'future', a 'home', a 'abroad', a country, a family, a property, even an identity - none solid - all melting when not paid attention to. Lacking a centre, we float on our emotions '

' The Shadow lines present only when a light is shone somewhere near by - but disappearing in darkness and in light - if paid attention to or if ignored - appearing only at the sideways glance. Such strange places do we inhabit in our personal stories, the ones told to ourselves.

It is only apt that one of the sideways glanced characters in the book is called MayaDevi (Goddess of Illusion), and she is in fact the main actor - the dancing shadow line - disappearing if forgotten or if paid attention to - possible (/living) only on the sidelines but impossible to live without.