In perplexity I turned back through the pages of the atlas at random, shut my eyes, and let the point of my compass fall on the page. It fell on Milan, in northern Italy. Adjusting my compass to the right scale I drew a circle which had Milan as its centre and 1200 miles as its radius.
This was another amazing circle. It passed through Helsinki in Finland, Sundsvall in Sweden, Mold in Norway, above the Shetland Islands, and then through a great empty stretch of the Atlantic Ocean until it came to Casablanca. Then it travelled into the Algerian Sahara, through Libya, into Egypt, up through the Mediterranean, where it touched on Crete and Rhodes before going into Turkey, then on through the Black Sea, into the USSR, through Crimea, the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Estonia, back to Helsinki.
Puzzling over this circle, I tried a little experiment. With my limited knowledge, I tried to imagine an event, any event, that might occur in a city near the periphery of that circle (or, indeed, much nearer) — Stockholm, Dublin, Casablanca, Alexandria, Istanbul, Kiev, any city in any direction at all — I tried to imagine an event that might happen in any of those places which would bring the people of Milan pouring out into the streets. I tried hard but I could think of none.
None, that is, other than war.
It seemed to me, then, that within this circle there were only states and citizens; there were no people at all.
When I turned back to my first circle I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines; I had to remind myself that they were not to be blamed for believing that there was something admirable in moving violence to the borders and dealing with it through science and factories, for that was the pattern of the world. They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. 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.
There was only one small chink in the armour of austerity that had sat so heavily on my grandmother ever since I could remember: she had a secret fondness for jewellery. There’d been nothing secret about this weakness of hers when she was a girclass="underline" it had been a passion.
I know this because I sometimes heard relatives — people who had known her in Dhaka — teasing her about her love of jewellery; asking her what had become of all those necklaces and bangles she had made my grandfather buy her.
Their teasing didn’t bother my grandmother at all.
It was a good thing I had something to fall back on, she would say quietly. How do you think I managed, all those years when I was living in that slum, when all of you’d forgotten about me? How do you think I would have survived if I hadn’t had my jewellery to fall back on?
The offending relative would be stung into silence. But later, when we were out of her hearing, they would explain to me, chuckling, that her love of jewellery had been a family joke when she was a girl. She would often be seen at the little gold-merchant’s shop at the corner of Jindabahar Lane, peering in through the bars, staring at the goldsmiths working inside. She took so much delight in exclaiming over her married cousins’ jewellery cases that they had kept the keys ready on the ends of their saris whenever she went visiting. At weddings, knowing old housewives would ask her for her opinion on the jewellery the bride had been given, as though she were a gold-merchant’s grandmother, rather than a chit of a girl.
She had stopped wearing jewellery publicly, of course, after she was widowed, and later, when my father married my mother, she had given her all the jewellery she hadn’t yet sold. She loved to see my mother wearing the bangles and necklaces she had given her. But my mother didn’t particularly care for jewellery and rarely wore any — even to weddings.
This never failed to infuriate my grandmother. So you’re going to a wedding with your neck bare? she would snap at my mother. I suppose you want to give everybody the impression that you’re starving here.
But it’s horrible to be weighed down with gold in this heat, my mother would protest.
So then what did I save all this stuff for? my grandmother would say, glaring at her. I could have sold it off, along with all the rest — God knows I needed the money — but I saved it so that my daughter-in-law wouldn’t have anything to complain about. And now you tell me you’re too fashionable to wear gold at a wedding. The problem is that your generation of girls has grown too used to luxury — you’ve forgotten the value of things. I’d just like to see you bringing up that spoilt son of yours in a one-room tenement in a slum; I’d just like to see it.
So, to mollify her, my mother would open the steel box in her cupboard, take out one of the necklaces she had been given and put it on.
My grandmother would pretend not to notice for a while, but in fact, of course, she was always delighted. After a decent interval she would summon my mother and run her fingers over the necklace, smiling to herself and reminiscing about the place where she had bought it, trying to remember the name of the shop.
My mother would take it off and slip it into her handbag as soon as she was out of the house (horrible heavy thing!), but my grandmother was not to know, and the mere sight of the necklace would leave her contented.
But there was one piece of jewellery that she had never parted with. It was a long, thin gold chain with a tiny ruby pendant. It was so much a part of her that I hardly noticed it: she had never taken it off, at least not in my recollection.
But all the same, she was very ashamed of wearing it, and went to great lengths to hide it under her blouse, spreading it out over her shoulders, with the pendant tucked deep inside so that nobody would see it. She believed that our relatives would gossip if they saw her wearing it.
I know what they’d say, she would mutter. They’d say: Look at her — she’s been a widow for years and she’s still wearing jewellery as though she were a girl. Why, I’m sure even your father thinks that, deep down in his heart.
Of course she did not neglect to inform my father of her views. He, for his part, would try to persuade her that he didn’t mind about her necklace at all, that, indeed, he would have been happy if she’d worn more jewellery. And perhaps in a way he would have been; perhaps it really would have pleased him to see her, all dressed up, like his fashionable colleagues’ mothers, who went to clubs with their sons wearing just the right touches of gold around their necks and wrists, laying claim to chicdom through their defiance of the ancient, but sadly démodé, proscriptions.