Relics, Tangles, Partition

In "The Shadow Lines," the house the grandmother grew up in serves as an obvious metaphor: The house is partitioned between the two families with a wooden wall to the extent that the toilet is even split in half. (121) To me this sounded like a fable, and was intended to make partition look impractical and silly in its wishful thinking. The grandmother would then tell her younger sister stories about their mysterious aunts, uncles, and cousins and how they did everything upside down. I want to read this as a innocent child-like xenophobia, if this is possible. But the metaphor gets more complicated.

As a result of the partition of India, the house has become a home for several refugee families. The uncle, and I'm not sure if we should believe this, is still concerned that the other half of the family will come take it from him. How do we decipher this as a metaphor? I think the answer lies in the riots that surrounded Tridib's death and the disappearance of a relic in Kashmir. The disappearance caused both multi-national solidarity, but also was seen as an attack on Muslims.

Relics are influential in the novel. Tridib is an archeologist, and in one of the most memorable parts of the novel for me, was when the narrator recognizes Nick's uncle's house as both past and present: its existence articulated by both its missing staircase and the current travel agency.

The grandmother talks about living in the past, and doesn't seem to understand the result of partition in relation to visible borders. The reason I bring this up is because this novel best describes the lingering problems of partition (Reading in the Dark as well). The problems with partition extend beyond practicality and ethnic cleansing, in time and spectrum. I liked that I was taught to view a place as both its history and its contemporary.

When the narrator himself starts to figure some of this out he claims that previously, "I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border existed a different reality." (214)

This novel, in all its tangles between countries and continents, past and present, articulates through its form this idea: the world is connected--invented space, nationality, is...invented. Something to be believed in--mystic but not fact.