I was six years older than my 13-year-old son when I read The Shadow Lines, and it’s my grand plan to make both my sons read the book at 19. There is something about Amitav Ghosh’s hauntingly beautiful, painstakingly crafted second novel that makes me feel that today’s youngsters — raised on a healthy diet of Rowling, The Hunger Games and manga comics — will “get TSL”.

Going back in time, The Shadow Lines was a special book for my generation, and more so for Calcuttans. I was just beginning an English literature undergraduate course in Delhi and our curriculum brimmed with classics that were masterfully mounted in rural England, London, Dublin or New England. To see an elegantly written and beautifully unfolding novel set in Gol Park and Southern Avenue was unimaginable for me. We were suddenly confronted with drives to Garia, a school bus hurtling through Park Circus and a grandmother taking her constitutionals around the Lakes. And what was most stunning was that the conversations in the novel read and sounded real, unlike the stilted dialogues that marred many English books by Indians at the time.

In many ways this was the novel that must have emboldened a whole generation of writers to set their stories in Calcutta. I remember Kunal Basu saying that he read Ghosh and realised that a Bengali chap can get by and, equally importantly, get away with writing about his city. Over the last 25 years, novels ranging from Amit Chaudhuri’s wonderful A Strange and Sublime Address to Jhumpa Lahiri’s just-released The Lowland have been pin-coded partially or wholly in Calcutta.

But at 19, I did not know all of this. It was the incredible cast of characters and quite simply the story that got under my skin. The nameless narrator, wildly imaginative in his recollections, brings alive his black sheep of an uncle Tridib, his mercurial grandmother and his impossibly beautiful cousin Ila as he moves from age nine to his late 20s.

Time in the novel is not linear but the back and forth never breaks the momentum, which builds to its breathtaking climax. So one moment we have Tridib’s recollections of 1939 England, and the grandmother’s 1920s Dhaka immediately after. The narrator is speaking from the late 1970s about his childhood in the early 1960s. Yes, it’s that confusing and yet, when you read The Shadow Lines, these time zones blur and the story flows lucidly across the 250-odd pages.

It’s a testimony to Ghosh’s storytelling that one can feel the same sense of doom for a young man smoking at his window in 1939 London when the air raids begin, as you do when Tridib, May Price and the narrator’s grandmother make their journey into old Dhaka on an afternoon in January 1964.

I had heard Ghosh speak about The Shadow Lines in 1993 at Jadavpur University, and he said that he wrote the book out of a feeling that India was getting “unglued”. It was amazing to hear him use the same word in his television interview recently. In fact, he had told us wide-eyed JU post-grad students that the schoolbus’s journey through a volatile Park Circus was inspired by a story he had heard about Delhi during the anti-Sikh riots.

It was only when I re-read the novel earlier this month that I fully realised the craft of the novel. The recurring images of mirrors, reflections and lateral inversions; the confessions in cellars, and the prefiguring of the Dhaka episode on Diamond Harbour Road. I don’t think I noticed all of that at the age of 19 as I was swept along by the plot.

What did strike me both times were the wonderful lyrical reflections of the narrator, as Proustian in his recollections as in his namelessness. Ila is described thus: ‘...although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all.’ And the narrator’s unrequited affections are ‘love, so alien to that other without which we cannot live… the idea of justice.’ The difference between war which is fought against an enemy and a riot which has ‘special quality of loneliness that grows out of fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.’

Ghosh has often said that The Shadow Lines was a novel that reflected the anxiety his generation felt about all the uprisings and unrest that India faced ‘between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’. He reckons that the incidents in the book, where a missing relic in Kashmir can trigger riots from Srinagar to Calcutta to Dhaka, cannot happen in modern-day India.

That said, the theme remains topical in the times of Muzaffarnagar. Equally, the novel is a compelling way to discover the history of the subcontinent between 1947 and 1971, when Bangladesh is born.

Ghosh released a limited edition of the book [Penguin, Rs 1,499] to celebrate 25 years of The Shadow Lines. He has handwritten the following lines in each of the 1,500 copies: “A place does not merely exist, it has to be invented in one’s imagination.”

The writer is the director of the Kolkata Literary Meet