Judgments of that kind came very easily to Ila, because to her morality could only be an absolute. She could understand and admire someone who never ate meat on principle, but a person who was a vegetarian only at home was, to her, the worst kind of hypocrite. She knew that Robi was quite happy to risk expulsion occasionally by smuggling bottles of rum into his room and drinking the night away with his friends, and because she could not see that he would do those things in college precisely because there was a certain innocence about those exploits in those circumstances, the kind of monasticism that honours the rules of the order in their breach, she could not understand why Robi would feel himself defiled, drinking in a nightclub, surrounded by paunchy men with dark-pouched eyes.
In this scene, Ila shows that she believes Robi is a hypocrite for not wanting to drink at a club. She feels this way because she knows he drinks at college and is only not doing it there because of social mores. This reveals that, for her, inconsistency of belief is an especially unappealing trait, as it shows that someone only behaves in a certain way to keep up appearances. Due to the fact that his objections are only rooted in optics and not moral values, she finds his point of view dishonorable. In the same way, the narrator demonstrates that for Robi his life at home in India and his life abroad are two entirely separate entities, governed by markedly different rules.
So that was what I told my grandmother as she lay in her sickbed, glaring at me; I told her that Ila lived in London only because she wanted to be free. But I knew I had made a mistake the moment I said it; I should have known that she would have nothing but contempt for a freedom that could be bought for the price of an air ticket. For she too had once wanted to be free; she had dreamt of killing for her freedom.
In this climactic moment, the narrator finally tells his grandmother why Ila chose to live abroad and not in India. She is on her deathbed and keeps asking the narrator why he defends Ila's choices, as she cannot understand why she left. He tells her it is because she wanted to be free in a way that she could never be in India. He shows the benefit of hindsight, realizing in the present why she hated Ila's freedom so much but describing how he could not fathom it at the time. This passage takes on a particular weight after the reader learns that Tridib has died as a result of the narrator's grandmother's actions. She not only hates Ila's freedom, but also hates the fact that she can leave her home and the past behind, a choice that his grandmother no longer has.
I would wonder why a girl had attempted suicide exactly nine times to get back the man she loved; why I had been driven to count all the yards that I had walked when I went to see Ila. I could think of no answer, except that it is because that state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings—the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horror from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite: it is as though we say to ourselves—he bought her a diamond worth exactly so much, or she gave up a career that would have earned her precisely so much, in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically.
Here the narrator describes the way in which people, including himself, try to quantify their love. In the end, he says, these are all attempts to make sense of love's volatility, as if assigning it a number or value will make it easier to understand. He compares himself to these people to show that he was caught up in the terrifying and overwhelming feeling of love and sought to justify it to himself. This moment, like others in the book, shows love's potential to be a destructive and completely overwhelming force.
It was true, of course, that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother’s voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to those slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn’t study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn’t use them like claws to cling to what we’d got, that was where we’d end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.
This moment lays bare a great deal of the class prejudice that surrounded the narrator during his childhood. The view of the impoverished neighborhood reminds him of all of the warnings his mother constantly gave him about not slipping into the lower class. It is established earlier in the novel that the narrator is from a middle-class background. His immediate family is comfortable but does not have the same level of wealth as Ila's or Tridib's. In this passage he captures the fear that underlies his family's life, the constant concern that if they do not move up the economic ladder they will fall back, becoming part of a depressed landscape like this one.
I had known that I would not see uprooted trees or splintered windows or buckled flagstones: I had expected nothing of all that, knowing it to be lost in a forty-year-old past.
But despite that, I still could not believe in the truth of what I did see: the gold-green trees, the old lady walking her Pekinese, the children who darted out of a house and ran to the postbox at the corner, their cries hanging like thistles in the autumn air. I could see all of that, and yet, despite the clear testimony of my eyes, it seemed to me that Tridib had shown me something truer about Solent Road a long time ago in Calcutta, something I could not have seen had I waited at that corner for years —just as one may watch a tree for months and yet know nothing at all about it if one happens to miss that one week when it bursts into bloom.”
In this moment, the narrator is describing a house that Tridib told him about. He is walking down a street with Nick and Ila and they make fun of him for naively expecting there to be a hole in the house from the Blitz. What he reveals in this scene, however, is that he is aware that the damage of the past has been healed; but its impact still lingers. He believes that there is some essential truth in what Tridib told him about the house; even if it no longer looks the way he remembers. This touches on a larger theme within the book, which is the way the events of the past still have relevance and weight in the present. Even though the house itself is undamaged, he perceives some lasting effect of the bombings.
It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world—not language, not food, not music—it is the special quality of the loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.
This passage occurs late in the novel, as the speaker describes a day when riots broke out in his hometown. In this moment, he shifts out of the scene of his harrowing bus ride home and tries to capture the feeling that moment elicited in him. He describes how these moments of social collapse serve as a reminder that "normalcy" and stability can easily be upset. He identifies this as a sensation that is unique to the people who live on the "subcontinent," stating that they know especially well what it is to live on a continual fault line. This excerpt is particularly important to the novel as a whole, as it effectively shows the social unrest at which the narrator has been hinting throughout the story. By describing peace as "contingent," he means that social order hinges on essentially unpredictable events, suggesting that the terrifying specter of violence lives in every seemingly normal day.
Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose—have already lost—for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state—nothing like that: no barbed wire, no check-points to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words—that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words.
In this moment, the narrator describes his battle against an invisible silence that prevents him from writing about the riots in Calcutta and Dhaka. He makes the careful distinction that this silence is not "enforced" by outside political forces, nor is it the result of a faulty memory. Instead, as he puts it, it comes from a source he does not fully understand. While he does not specify exactly what forces this silence upon him, the impression this description leaves is that it stems from his inability to find the right words to describe the experience. His sadness and horror at his uncle's death leave him without any language to process the trauma.
Slowly, as I looked around me, those scattered objects seemed to lose their definition in the harsh, flat light of the naked bulb; one of those dimensions seemed to dissolve: they flattened themselves against the walls; the trunks seemed to be hanging like paintings on the walls. Those empty corners filled up with remembered forms, with the nine-year-old Tridib sitting on a camp bed, just as I was, his small face intent, listening to the bombs; the ghost of Snipe in that far corner, near his medicine chest, worrying about his dentures; the ghost of the eight-year-old Ila, sitting with me under that vast table in Raibajar. They were all around me, we were together at last, not ghosts at all: the ghostliness was merely the absence of time and distance—for that is all that a ghost is, a presence displaced in time.
Similar to the passage about the house, this excerpt shows how places invisibly contain the past. The narrator describes various objects in the cellar fading into the background as he is overcome with memories of the past. In the end, when he imagines the people from his past becoming increasingly real, he states that they are only separated by "time and distance." What he means, or seems to suggest, is that the events of the past still have an influence on the present, as is made clear by his powerful recollections of both Ila and Tridib.
What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony—the irony that killed Tridib: 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.
In this scene, the speaker writes about the arbitrary nature of borders. He describes the confidence with which governments initially drew their borders and contrasts it with the powerful connection between Dhaka and Calcutta on the day of Tridib's death. The central idea behind what he says is that historical events often share an invisible bond that transcends both distance and time. Riots over a religious relic in Khulna cause violence in both Dhaka and Calcutta. What the narrator highlights here is the fact that the linkage between these cities at this moment renders these borders meaningless.
At bottom she thought the Shaheb was not fit for his job, that he was weak, essentially weak, backbone-less; it was impossible to think of him being firm under threat, of reacting to a difficult or dangerous situation with that controlled, accurate violence which was the quality she prized above all others in men who had to deal with matters of state. She knew instinctively that it was Mayadebi who took his decisions, who virtually did his work for him, who had politicked and maneuvered with all her resources to salvage something of his career, and therefore, imagining him to be nothing but a dim irradiation of her sister, she could not help being a little contemptuous of him.
Here, the narrator shows the specific disdain that his grandmother has for Ila's father Shaheb. He states that she sees him as essentially unable to carry out his duties and as constantly relying on his wife to make decisions, save his career, and handle all difficult matters. While her judgment of him is harsh, the narrator seems to understand the logic behind her feelings. Her criticisms are somewhat impersonal, hinging on his inability to fulfill the roles assigned to him. They are not based on any specific reaction or feeling she has towards him as a person, but derive from her rules and principles.
