ROLE OF MEMORY AND IMAGINATION IN SHADOW

LINES

“Memory is the cabinet of imagination,

The treasury of reason,
The registry of conscience,
And the council chamber of thought.”
-Basile

In Shadow Lines (1988), Ghosh has presented numerous bits of historical

events, spread throughout, to reflect upon various issues like partitioning,
border-crossing, migration and inter cultural relations. Knowing (in the form
of memory) and not knowing (as in imagination) are so intricately linked in
this novel that their interaction seems to hold the key to its meaning. By
recalling and imagining things, Ghosh has succeeded in building bridges
between disparate people and locations, ethnicities and communities, in his
narrative.

The transparency of the unnamed and undescribed narrator lets different

persons, events and places luminously enter the story and find new
configurations. From the narrator’s maps of memory, we get a better insight
into the lives of all the characters, also we learn about certain events and
incidents, which might have been irrelevant for other people. For instance, in
the final section of the novel, the narrator desperately searches to recover
the lost events (riots of 1964), which were so well engraved in his memory
had “vanished without leaving a trace in the histories and bookshelves.” The
multiple switches in the narrative from one time sequence to another are to
tell the story, which contains multiple stories if his grandmother (Th’amma),
his grandaunt (Mayadebi), his uncles Tridib and Robi, his cousin Ila and of
May Price. All these stories-within-stories are united by the thread of
memory, which is treated as the driving force of the novel.

The narrator claims that he has learned the practice of imagining from his
alter-ego Tridib. While recollecting, the narrator reveals that it is Tridib
who has given him “eyes to see the world”. It is Tridib that triggers in him a
longing to imagine familiar and unfamiliar places in memory and imagination.
In short, it is Tridib’s gift of imagination that kindles in the narrator a
desire to travel around the globe. Tridib has even suggested to the narrator
to use his “imagination with precision” in order to voyage into unknown
spaces. He once said to the narrator that one could never know anything
except through desire “that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to
other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where
there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror”. The
narrator is sad to know that his globe-trotter cousin Ila, nevertheless, has
no concept of place because she could not invent a place for herself but
relies on the invention of other. Ila, on the other hand, despises the
narrator for having a dreamy view of distant spaces and dismisses his
practice of imaginary space construction as a mere indulgence of fancy. The
narrator underlines the role of memory and imagination, time and again in
inventing place, because he wants to be free of other people’s fabrication of
places. Thus, as a school boy, the narrator conjured up a picture of London
that was so vivid in his imagination that years later, when he came to London
for the first time, he could lead Nick and Ila confidently along the roads of
West Hampstead to the Price house, as if he had lived there himself.

The narrator is also deeply memorized by an imaginary space like Tridib’s

ruin, which he discovers at the Victorian Memorial in Calcutta. In the course
of remembering yet another particular spatial practice, the narrator points
out that ‘space’ at times can carry inexplicable marks of time. While
recollecting Ila in London, he explains how he was suddenly haunted by the
ghosts of time in the cellar of the Prices, when he was playing ‘Houses’ with
her- a game he had actually played with her in their ancestral home in India.
By a slight of vision, the cellar of the price house (in London) turns into the
underground room in Raibajar house, holding a clue to Ila’s shabby secret- as
a child, when she was betrayed by him. Just as the prices were first
mentioned in a story made up by the Tridib, and eventually turn out to be
real people, Nick too is first mentioned by Ila in a game of make believe and
then gets transformed into the narrator’s adversary and mirror image. While
witnessing the ghosts of time in the presence of Ila that are the “ghosts of
memory and imagination” simultaneously, the narrator experiences a rush of
multiple memories overwhelming his entire being, like the one of his
grandmother’s ancestral house in Dhaka. Long ago, when the Jindabahar Lane
House was partitioned, the children (Th’amma and Mayadebi) invented
stories about the other half to highlight the strangeness and absurdity of
the inversion of normalcy. The stories about the ‘upside-down house’
proliferated over the years and the strange thing was that as they grew up,
even the grandmother herself almost came to believe in those stories. Here,
Ghosh has accorded these stories, as much reality as the lived experiences.
For this reason for the narrator, real places, persons or events, in his
recollection appear as much imaginary as much real.

In the Shadow Lines, there is a repeated insistence on the freedom for each
individual to be able to create his own stories in order to prevent getting
trapped into someone else’s construction of reality. Tridib’s early warnings
to the narrator- that he should learn to imagine precisely- can be seen in
this context. While going down the memory lane, the narrator tries to
inhabit a trans-cultural space like to achieve freedom, as his imagination is
the only key to freedom. For it is imagination that unlocks perception and
creates experience and meaning: reality is an impenetrable blanket from
which we can receive only what we give.

Thus, we see in the entire novel that there has been a constant and
significant role of memory and imagination, as it is only the “shadows” of
memory and imagination that haunts all characters in the novel as they
struggle to narrate their personal and collective histories to each other.