Remembering

Last year, to mark this anniversary, I posted a passage from Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines. I’d like to do so again.

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The Shadow Lines is a semifictional account of anti-Muslim communal violence in Calcutta in 1964. Parallel anti-Hindu riots erupted in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) around the same time; Ghosh witnessed it personally.

In this scene, the narrator recounts a bus ride home from school with his friends. The bus driver, surveying the growing menace in the streets, realizes he cannot drive the children home. Taking evasive action, he departs from the usual route and picks up speed. The children begin to panic.

None of us looked at each other. We could not recognise the streets we were careering through. We did not know whether we were going home or not.

The streets had turned themselves inside out: our city had turned against us.

Tublu began to cry. One by one the rest of us gathered around him. At any other time we would have laughed, but now, we listened to him in silence, appalled. He was really crying; we could tell — not for attention, nor because he was hurt. There was an ocean of desolation in his sobs.

He cried like that all the way home, for all of us.

It would not be enough to say we were afraid: we were stupefied with fear.

That particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy, for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of the violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. 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 loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.