Shadow Lines
A beautifully told story, the nameless narrator idolizes Tridib, through whose eyes he begins to invent worlds and lives in excruciating detail. Throughout the novel, characters explore borders and nationalities ambivalently, but the crowning glory of the book is the irony which festers around key incidents like a wound. Below are a few lines that touched my heart. of the story itself, I shall not say anymore. A must read.
".. she had made public then and forever, the inequality of our needs; she had given Ila the knowledge of her power and she had left me defenseless; naked, in the face of that unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed."
" The enemy of silence is speech. But there can be no speech without words and no words without meanings - so it follows, inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that... ...and this is a silence that lies in the gap between words and the world. It is proof against any act of scorn or courage and lies beyond defiance - for what means have we to defy the mere absence of meaning?"