NCERT Textbook - The Third and Final Continent | English Class 11 PDF Download

 Page 1


62 Woven Words
The Third and Final Continent
Jhumpa Lahiri
F F F F F Guess what these words and phrases mean from the context
LSE Grundig reel-to-reel hollered
heralded clamorous stucco
forsythia bushes ruffles chapped
foyer mortified
I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the
equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For
three weeks I sailed on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel,
in a third-class cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the
Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and, finally,
to England. I lived in north London, in Finsbury Park, in a
house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like
myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling
to educate and establish ourselves abroad.
I attended lectures at the LSE and worked at the
university library to get by. We lived three or four to a
room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking
pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table
covered with newspapers. Apart from our jobs we had few
responsibilities. On weekends we lounged barefoot in
drawstring pyjamas, drinking tea and smoking Rothmans,
or set out to watch cricket at Lord’s. Some weekends the
house was crammed with still more Bengalis to whom we
had introduced ourselves at the greengrocer or on the Tube,
and we made yet more egg curry, and played Mukesh on a
Grundig reel-to-reel, and soaked our dirty dishes in the
bathtub. Every now and then someone in the house moved
out to live with a woman whom his family back in Calcutta
had determined he was to wed. In 1969, when I was thirty-
6
2019-2020
Page 2


62 Woven Words
The Third and Final Continent
Jhumpa Lahiri
F F F F F Guess what these words and phrases mean from the context
LSE Grundig reel-to-reel hollered
heralded clamorous stucco
forsythia bushes ruffles chapped
foyer mortified
I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the
equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For
three weeks I sailed on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel,
in a third-class cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the
Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and, finally,
to England. I lived in north London, in Finsbury Park, in a
house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like
myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling
to educate and establish ourselves abroad.
I attended lectures at the LSE and worked at the
university library to get by. We lived three or four to a
room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking
pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table
covered with newspapers. Apart from our jobs we had few
responsibilities. On weekends we lounged barefoot in
drawstring pyjamas, drinking tea and smoking Rothmans,
or set out to watch cricket at Lord’s. Some weekends the
house was crammed with still more Bengalis to whom we
had introduced ourselves at the greengrocer or on the Tube,
and we made yet more egg curry, and played Mukesh on a
Grundig reel-to-reel, and soaked our dirty dishes in the
bathtub. Every now and then someone in the house moved
out to live with a woman whom his family back in Calcutta
had determined he was to wed. In 1969, when I was thirty-
6
2019-2020
The Third and Final Continent 63
six years old, my own marriage was arranged. Around the
same time, I was offered a full-time job in America, in the
processing department of a library at MIT. The salary was
generous enough to support a wife, and I was honoured to
be  hired by a world-famous university, and so I obtained a
sixth-preference green card and prepared to travel farther
still.
By now I had enough money to go by plane. I flew first
to Calcutta, to attend my wedding, and a week later I flew
first to Boston, to begin my new job. During the flight I
read The Student Guide to North America, a paperback volume
that I’d bought before leaving London, for seven shillings
six pence on Tottenham Court Road for, although I was no
longer a student, I was on a budget all the same. I learned
that Americans drove on the right side of the road, not the
left, and that they called a lift an elevator and an engaged
phone busy. ‘The pace of life in North America is different
from Britain as you will soon discover,’ the guidebook
informed me. ‘Everybody feels he must get to the top. Don’t
expect an English cup of tea.’ As the plane began its descent
over Boston Harbour, the pilot announced the weather and
time, and that President Nixon had declared a national
holiday: two American men had landed on the moon.
Several passengers cheered. ‘God bless America!’ one of
them hollered. Across the aisle, I saw a woman praying.
I spent my first night at the YMCA in Central Square,
Cambridge, an  inexpensive accommodation recommended
by my guidebook. It was walking distance from MIT, and
steps away from the post office and a supermarket called
Purity Supreme. The room contained a cot, a desk and a
small wooden cross on one wall. A sign on the door said
cooking was strictly forbidden. A bare window overlooked
Massachusetts Avenue, a major thoroughfare with traffic
in both directions. Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared
one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless
emergencies and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors
opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the
night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times
suffocating. I felt it deep in my ribs, just as I had felt the
furious drone of the engine on the SS Roma. But there was
2019-2020
Page 3


62 Woven Words
The Third and Final Continent
Jhumpa Lahiri
F F F F F Guess what these words and phrases mean from the context
LSE Grundig reel-to-reel hollered
heralded clamorous stucco
forsythia bushes ruffles chapped
foyer mortified
I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the
equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For
three weeks I sailed on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel,
in a third-class cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the
Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and, finally,
to England. I lived in north London, in Finsbury Park, in a
house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like
myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling
to educate and establish ourselves abroad.
I attended lectures at the LSE and worked at the
university library to get by. We lived three or four to a
room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking
pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table
covered with newspapers. Apart from our jobs we had few
responsibilities. On weekends we lounged barefoot in
drawstring pyjamas, drinking tea and smoking Rothmans,
or set out to watch cricket at Lord’s. Some weekends the
house was crammed with still more Bengalis to whom we
had introduced ourselves at the greengrocer or on the Tube,
and we made yet more egg curry, and played Mukesh on a
Grundig reel-to-reel, and soaked our dirty dishes in the
bathtub. Every now and then someone in the house moved
out to live with a woman whom his family back in Calcutta
had determined he was to wed. In 1969, when I was thirty-
6
2019-2020
The Third and Final Continent 63
six years old, my own marriage was arranged. Around the
same time, I was offered a full-time job in America, in the
processing department of a library at MIT. The salary was
generous enough to support a wife, and I was honoured to
be  hired by a world-famous university, and so I obtained a
sixth-preference green card and prepared to travel farther
still.
By now I had enough money to go by plane. I flew first
to Calcutta, to attend my wedding, and a week later I flew
first to Boston, to begin my new job. During the flight I
read The Student Guide to North America, a paperback volume
that I’d bought before leaving London, for seven shillings
six pence on Tottenham Court Road for, although I was no
longer a student, I was on a budget all the same. I learned
that Americans drove on the right side of the road, not the
left, and that they called a lift an elevator and an engaged
phone busy. ‘The pace of life in North America is different
from Britain as you will soon discover,’ the guidebook
informed me. ‘Everybody feels he must get to the top. Don’t
expect an English cup of tea.’ As the plane began its descent
over Boston Harbour, the pilot announced the weather and
time, and that President Nixon had declared a national
holiday: two American men had landed on the moon.
Several passengers cheered. ‘God bless America!’ one of
them hollered. Across the aisle, I saw a woman praying.
I spent my first night at the YMCA in Central Square,
Cambridge, an  inexpensive accommodation recommended
by my guidebook. It was walking distance from MIT, and
steps away from the post office and a supermarket called
Purity Supreme. The room contained a cot, a desk and a
small wooden cross on one wall. A sign on the door said
cooking was strictly forbidden. A bare window overlooked
Massachusetts Avenue, a major thoroughfare with traffic
in both directions. Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared
one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless
emergencies and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors
opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the
night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times
suffocating. I felt it deep in my ribs, just as I had felt the
furious drone of the engine on the SS Roma. But there was
2019-2020
64 Woven Words
no ship’s deck to escape to, no glittering ocean to thrill my
soul, no breeze to cool my face, no one to talk to. I was too
tired to pace the gloomy corridors of the YMCA in my
drawstring pyjamas. Instead I sat at the desk and stared
out the window, at the city hall of Cambridge and a row of
small shops. In the morning I reported to my job at the
Dewey Library, a beige fortlike building by Memorial Drive.
I also opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and
bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s, a store
whose name I recognised  from London. I went to Purity
Supreme, wandering up and down the aisles, converting
ounces to grams and comparing prices to things in England.
In the end I bought a small carton of milk and a box of
cornflakes. This was my first meal in America. I ate it at
my desk. I preferred it to hamburgers or hot dogs, the only
alternative I could afford in the coffee shops on
Massachusetts Avenue, and, besides, at the time I had yet
to consume any beef. Even the simple chore of buying milk
was new to me; in London we’d had bottles delivered each
morning to our door.
In a week I had adjusted, more or less. I ate cornflakes
and milk, morning and night, and bought some bananas
for variety, slicing them into the bowl with the edge of my
spoon. In addition I bought tea bags and a flask, which the
salesman in Woolworth’s referred to as a thermos (a flask,
he informed me, was used to store whiskey, another thing
I had never consumed). For the price of one cup of tea at a
coffee shop, I filled the flask with boiling water on my way
to work each morning, and brewed the four cups I drank in
the course of a day. I bought a larger carton of milk, and
learned to leave it on the shaded part of the windowsill, as
I had seen another resident at the YMCA do. To pass the
time in the evenings I read the Boston Globe downstairs, in
a spacious room with stained glass windows. I read every
article and advertisement so that I would grow familiar
with things and, when my eyes grew tired, I slept. Only I
did not sleep well. Each night I had to keep the window
wide open; it was the only source of air in the stifling room,
and the noise was intolerable. I would lie on the cot with
my fingers pressed into my ears but when I drifted off to
2019-2020
Page 4


62 Woven Words
The Third and Final Continent
Jhumpa Lahiri
F F F F F Guess what these words and phrases mean from the context
LSE Grundig reel-to-reel hollered
heralded clamorous stucco
forsythia bushes ruffles chapped
foyer mortified
I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the
equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For
three weeks I sailed on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel,
in a third-class cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the
Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and, finally,
to England. I lived in north London, in Finsbury Park, in a
house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like
myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling
to educate and establish ourselves abroad.
I attended lectures at the LSE and worked at the
university library to get by. We lived three or four to a
room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking
pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table
covered with newspapers. Apart from our jobs we had few
responsibilities. On weekends we lounged barefoot in
drawstring pyjamas, drinking tea and smoking Rothmans,
or set out to watch cricket at Lord’s. Some weekends the
house was crammed with still more Bengalis to whom we
had introduced ourselves at the greengrocer or on the Tube,
and we made yet more egg curry, and played Mukesh on a
Grundig reel-to-reel, and soaked our dirty dishes in the
bathtub. Every now and then someone in the house moved
out to live with a woman whom his family back in Calcutta
had determined he was to wed. In 1969, when I was thirty-
6
2019-2020
The Third and Final Continent 63
six years old, my own marriage was arranged. Around the
same time, I was offered a full-time job in America, in the
processing department of a library at MIT. The salary was
generous enough to support a wife, and I was honoured to
be  hired by a world-famous university, and so I obtained a
sixth-preference green card and prepared to travel farther
still.
By now I had enough money to go by plane. I flew first
to Calcutta, to attend my wedding, and a week later I flew
first to Boston, to begin my new job. During the flight I
read The Student Guide to North America, a paperback volume
that I’d bought before leaving London, for seven shillings
six pence on Tottenham Court Road for, although I was no
longer a student, I was on a budget all the same. I learned
that Americans drove on the right side of the road, not the
left, and that they called a lift an elevator and an engaged
phone busy. ‘The pace of life in North America is different
from Britain as you will soon discover,’ the guidebook
informed me. ‘Everybody feels he must get to the top. Don’t
expect an English cup of tea.’ As the plane began its descent
over Boston Harbour, the pilot announced the weather and
time, and that President Nixon had declared a national
holiday: two American men had landed on the moon.
Several passengers cheered. ‘God bless America!’ one of
them hollered. Across the aisle, I saw a woman praying.
I spent my first night at the YMCA in Central Square,
Cambridge, an  inexpensive accommodation recommended
by my guidebook. It was walking distance from MIT, and
steps away from the post office and a supermarket called
Purity Supreme. The room contained a cot, a desk and a
small wooden cross on one wall. A sign on the door said
cooking was strictly forbidden. A bare window overlooked
Massachusetts Avenue, a major thoroughfare with traffic
in both directions. Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared
one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless
emergencies and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors
opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the
night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times
suffocating. I felt it deep in my ribs, just as I had felt the
furious drone of the engine on the SS Roma. But there was
2019-2020
64 Woven Words
no ship’s deck to escape to, no glittering ocean to thrill my
soul, no breeze to cool my face, no one to talk to. I was too
tired to pace the gloomy corridors of the YMCA in my
drawstring pyjamas. Instead I sat at the desk and stared
out the window, at the city hall of Cambridge and a row of
small shops. In the morning I reported to my job at the
Dewey Library, a beige fortlike building by Memorial Drive.
I also opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and
bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s, a store
whose name I recognised  from London. I went to Purity
Supreme, wandering up and down the aisles, converting
ounces to grams and comparing prices to things in England.
In the end I bought a small carton of milk and a box of
cornflakes. This was my first meal in America. I ate it at
my desk. I preferred it to hamburgers or hot dogs, the only
alternative I could afford in the coffee shops on
Massachusetts Avenue, and, besides, at the time I had yet
to consume any beef. Even the simple chore of buying milk
was new to me; in London we’d had bottles delivered each
morning to our door.
In a week I had adjusted, more or less. I ate cornflakes
and milk, morning and night, and bought some bananas
for variety, slicing them into the bowl with the edge of my
spoon. In addition I bought tea bags and a flask, which the
salesman in Woolworth’s referred to as a thermos (a flask,
he informed me, was used to store whiskey, another thing
I had never consumed). For the price of one cup of tea at a
coffee shop, I filled the flask with boiling water on my way
to work each morning, and brewed the four cups I drank in
the course of a day. I bought a larger carton of milk, and
learned to leave it on the shaded part of the windowsill, as
I had seen another resident at the YMCA do. To pass the
time in the evenings I read the Boston Globe downstairs, in
a spacious room with stained glass windows. I read every
article and advertisement so that I would grow familiar
with things and, when my eyes grew tired, I slept. Only I
did not sleep well. Each night I had to keep the window
wide open; it was the only source of air in the stifling room,
and the noise was intolerable. I would lie on the cot with
my fingers pressed into my ears but when I drifted off to
2019-2020
The Third and Final Continent 65
sleep, my hands fell away and the noise of the traffic would
wake me up again. Pigeon feathers drifted onto the window-
sill and, one evening, when I poured milk over my
cornflakes, I saw that it had soured. Nevertheless I resolved
to stay at the YMCA for six weeks, until my wife’s passport
and green card were ready. Once she arrived I would have
to rent a proper apartment and so, from time to time, I
studied the classified section of the newspaper, or stopped
in at the housing office at MIT during my lunch-break, to
see what was available in my price range. It was in this
manner that I discovered a room, for immediate occupancy,
in a house on a quiet street, the listing said, for eight
dollars per week. I copied the number into my guidebook
and dialled from a pay telephone, sorting through the coins
with which I was still unfamiliar, smaller and lighter than
shillings, heavier and brighter than paisas.
‘Who is speaking?’ a woman demanded. Her voice was
bold and clamorous.
‘Yes, good afternoon, madame. I am calling about the
room, for rent.’
‘Harvard or Tech?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Are you from Harvard or Tech?’
Gathering that Tech referred to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, I replied, ‘I work at Dewey Library’,
adding tentatively, ‘at Tech’.
I was given an address and an appointment for seven
o’clock that evening. Thirty minutes before the hour I set
out, my guidebook in my pocket, my breath fresh with
Listerine. I turned down a street shaded with trees,
perpendicular to Massachusetts Avenue. Stray blades of
grass poked between the cracks of the footpath. In spite of
the heat I wore a coat and a tie, regarding the event as I
would any other interview; I had never lived in the home of
a person who was not Indian. The house, surrounded by a
chain-link fence, was off-white with dark brown trim.
Unlike the stucco row house I’d lived in, in London, this
house, fully detached, was covered with wooded shingles,
with a tangle of forsythia bushes plastered against the
front and sides. When I pressed the calling bell, the woman
2019-2020
Page 5


62 Woven Words
The Third and Final Continent
Jhumpa Lahiri
F F F F F Guess what these words and phrases mean from the context
LSE Grundig reel-to-reel hollered
heralded clamorous stucco
forsythia bushes ruffles chapped
foyer mortified
I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the
equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For
three weeks I sailed on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel,
in a third-class cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the
Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and, finally,
to England. I lived in north London, in Finsbury Park, in a
house occupied entirely by penniless Bengali bachelors like
myself, at least a dozen and sometimes more, all struggling
to educate and establish ourselves abroad.
I attended lectures at the LSE and worked at the
university library to get by. We lived three or four to a
room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking
pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table
covered with newspapers. Apart from our jobs we had few
responsibilities. On weekends we lounged barefoot in
drawstring pyjamas, drinking tea and smoking Rothmans,
or set out to watch cricket at Lord’s. Some weekends the
house was crammed with still more Bengalis to whom we
had introduced ourselves at the greengrocer or on the Tube,
and we made yet more egg curry, and played Mukesh on a
Grundig reel-to-reel, and soaked our dirty dishes in the
bathtub. Every now and then someone in the house moved
out to live with a woman whom his family back in Calcutta
had determined he was to wed. In 1969, when I was thirty-
6
2019-2020
The Third and Final Continent 63
six years old, my own marriage was arranged. Around the
same time, I was offered a full-time job in America, in the
processing department of a library at MIT. The salary was
generous enough to support a wife, and I was honoured to
be  hired by a world-famous university, and so I obtained a
sixth-preference green card and prepared to travel farther
still.
By now I had enough money to go by plane. I flew first
to Calcutta, to attend my wedding, and a week later I flew
first to Boston, to begin my new job. During the flight I
read The Student Guide to North America, a paperback volume
that I’d bought before leaving London, for seven shillings
six pence on Tottenham Court Road for, although I was no
longer a student, I was on a budget all the same. I learned
that Americans drove on the right side of the road, not the
left, and that they called a lift an elevator and an engaged
phone busy. ‘The pace of life in North America is different
from Britain as you will soon discover,’ the guidebook
informed me. ‘Everybody feels he must get to the top. Don’t
expect an English cup of tea.’ As the plane began its descent
over Boston Harbour, the pilot announced the weather and
time, and that President Nixon had declared a national
holiday: two American men had landed on the moon.
Several passengers cheered. ‘God bless America!’ one of
them hollered. Across the aisle, I saw a woman praying.
I spent my first night at the YMCA in Central Square,
Cambridge, an  inexpensive accommodation recommended
by my guidebook. It was walking distance from MIT, and
steps away from the post office and a supermarket called
Purity Supreme. The room contained a cot, a desk and a
small wooden cross on one wall. A sign on the door said
cooking was strictly forbidden. A bare window overlooked
Massachusetts Avenue, a major thoroughfare with traffic
in both directions. Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared
one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless
emergencies and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors
opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the
night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times
suffocating. I felt it deep in my ribs, just as I had felt the
furious drone of the engine on the SS Roma. But there was
2019-2020
64 Woven Words
no ship’s deck to escape to, no glittering ocean to thrill my
soul, no breeze to cool my face, no one to talk to. I was too
tired to pace the gloomy corridors of the YMCA in my
drawstring pyjamas. Instead I sat at the desk and stared
out the window, at the city hall of Cambridge and a row of
small shops. In the morning I reported to my job at the
Dewey Library, a beige fortlike building by Memorial Drive.
I also opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and
bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s, a store
whose name I recognised  from London. I went to Purity
Supreme, wandering up and down the aisles, converting
ounces to grams and comparing prices to things in England.
In the end I bought a small carton of milk and a box of
cornflakes. This was my first meal in America. I ate it at
my desk. I preferred it to hamburgers or hot dogs, the only
alternative I could afford in the coffee shops on
Massachusetts Avenue, and, besides, at the time I had yet
to consume any beef. Even the simple chore of buying milk
was new to me; in London we’d had bottles delivered each
morning to our door.
In a week I had adjusted, more or less. I ate cornflakes
and milk, morning and night, and bought some bananas
for variety, slicing them into the bowl with the edge of my
spoon. In addition I bought tea bags and a flask, which the
salesman in Woolworth’s referred to as a thermos (a flask,
he informed me, was used to store whiskey, another thing
I had never consumed). For the price of one cup of tea at a
coffee shop, I filled the flask with boiling water on my way
to work each morning, and brewed the four cups I drank in
the course of a day. I bought a larger carton of milk, and
learned to leave it on the shaded part of the windowsill, as
I had seen another resident at the YMCA do. To pass the
time in the evenings I read the Boston Globe downstairs, in
a spacious room with stained glass windows. I read every
article and advertisement so that I would grow familiar
with things and, when my eyes grew tired, I slept. Only I
did not sleep well. Each night I had to keep the window
wide open; it was the only source of air in the stifling room,
and the noise was intolerable. I would lie on the cot with
my fingers pressed into my ears but when I drifted off to
2019-2020
The Third and Final Continent 65
sleep, my hands fell away and the noise of the traffic would
wake me up again. Pigeon feathers drifted onto the window-
sill and, one evening, when I poured milk over my
cornflakes, I saw that it had soured. Nevertheless I resolved
to stay at the YMCA for six weeks, until my wife’s passport
and green card were ready. Once she arrived I would have
to rent a proper apartment and so, from time to time, I
studied the classified section of the newspaper, or stopped
in at the housing office at MIT during my lunch-break, to
see what was available in my price range. It was in this
manner that I discovered a room, for immediate occupancy,
in a house on a quiet street, the listing said, for eight
dollars per week. I copied the number into my guidebook
and dialled from a pay telephone, sorting through the coins
with which I was still unfamiliar, smaller and lighter than
shillings, heavier and brighter than paisas.
‘Who is speaking?’ a woman demanded. Her voice was
bold and clamorous.
‘Yes, good afternoon, madame. I am calling about the
room, for rent.’
‘Harvard or Tech?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Are you from Harvard or Tech?’
Gathering that Tech referred to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, I replied, ‘I work at Dewey Library’,
adding tentatively, ‘at Tech’.
I was given an address and an appointment for seven
o’clock that evening. Thirty minutes before the hour I set
out, my guidebook in my pocket, my breath fresh with
Listerine. I turned down a street shaded with trees,
perpendicular to Massachusetts Avenue. Stray blades of
grass poked between the cracks of the footpath. In spite of
the heat I wore a coat and a tie, regarding the event as I
would any other interview; I had never lived in the home of
a person who was not Indian. The house, surrounded by a
chain-link fence, was off-white with dark brown trim.
Unlike the stucco row house I’d lived in, in London, this
house, fully detached, was covered with wooded shingles,
with a tangle of forsythia bushes plastered against the
front and sides. When I pressed the calling bell, the woman
2019-2020
66 Woven Words
with whom I had spoken on the phone hollered from what
seemed to be just the other side of the door, ‘One minute
please!’
Several minutes later the door was opened by a tiny,
extremely old woman. A mass of snowy hair was arranged
like a small sack on top of her head. As I stepped into the
house, she sat down on a wooden bench positioned at the
bottom of a narrow carpeted staircase. Once she was settled
on the bench, in a small pool of light, she peered up at me
with undivided attention. She wore a long black skirt that
spread like a stiff tent to the floor, and a starched white
shirt edged with ruffles at the throat and cuffs. Her hands,
folded together in her lap, had long pallid fingers, with
swollen knuckles and tough yellow nails. Age had battered
her features so that she almost resembled a man, with
sharp, shrunken eyes and prominent creases on either side
of her nose. Her lips, chapped and faded, had nearly
disappeared, and her eyebrows were missing altogether.
Nevertheless she looked fierce.
‘Look up!’ she commanded. She shouted even though I
stood only a few feet away. ‘Fasten the chain and firmly
press that button on the knob! This is the first thing you
shall do when you enter, is that clear?’
I locked the door as directed and examined the house.
Next to the bench on which the woman sat was a small
round table, its legs fully concealed, much like the woman’s,
by a skirt of lace. The table held a lamp, a transistor radio,
a leather change purse with a silver clasp and a telephone.
A thick wooden cane coated with a layer of dust was propped
against one side. There was a parlour to my right, lined
with bookcases and filled with shabby claw-footed furniture.
In the corner of the parlour I saw a grand piano with its
top down, piled with papers. The piano’s bench was missing;
it seemed to be the one on which the woman was sitting.
Somewhere in the house a clock chimed seven times.
‘You’re punctual!’ the woman proclaimed. ‘ I expect you
shall be so with the rent!’
‘I have a letter, madame.’ In my jacket pocket was a
letter confirming my employment from MIT, which I had
brought along to prove that I was indeed from Tech.
2019-2020