Effectiveness Of Customer Care Policies For Hospitality Industry Marketing Essay

Effectiveness Of Customer Care Policies For Hospitality Industry Marketing Essay Customers service we have to provide our customers there necessary requirements. Needs to address the business requirement. We have offered them the service on which they can keep their trust. We have to full fill their demands. Customer care- serve them beyond their expectation create the trust in them that we can serve them better. Make them comfortable so that they can always come back. Adapt the policy according to the guest demands. Importances the customers care policy in hospitality industry hospitality business is the word personalizes service to their precious customers .and them that customers are always right. Customers are like god. To make the customers happy the planes can be for internal and external customers if you want to expand your business then your internal and external customers also has to be very satisfied coz then only you can become a successful organisation. And your organisation can stay at the top for longer time of period. The reason of every big successful company is the ways they make their customers policies the policies which they make in their organisation those are favourable to the customers. These policies are helping the customers to archive their own goal or their targets .they analysed their weakness and strengths which are external problems. Need of customer care policies plans- Uninformed customer prospect incorrect or lacking market studies could guide the miss present the customers expectation causes frustration. To keep the customers happy or to complete their demands and wish some essential factors need to be handle carefully Trust promise -customers trust is very important it is everyone responsibility to deliver what they have promise to the customers errors can happens while doing the work. There are different pollicises for every department Service routine -service show could be dissatisfying because of staff not open-handed reason for this is they dont know their job well so they cant perform well. Poor knowledge and lack of coordination between employees. Low excellence principles -If the organization has set some principles then those could be unlike shapes the customers prospect and management. It may have the wrong self awareness about their customers needs. The effectiveness of customer care policies for hospitality industry It can help to know about the customers desire and their needs To know our competitors exact position in the market. We can identify the latest trends in the market. By this we can progress the examiners standards The effective customer care can improve the business. Hotel industry customers every hotel has the different customers their need also different they visit the hotel according to their needs and how much they can effort its all depend on customers. Customers have the different types they can be business customers tourist, leisure, student, disable, local etc. Business customers they dont select the same hotel often they select the according to their needs depends on what kind of business they are going to do it what facilities are they expecting from the hotel. Also business people travel all around the world they dont stay for long time in one hotel. They have to move according to their client their meetings. so their needs are different from other customers. Leisure client- leisure customers have more time to spend then business people. Their stay normally is long stay because they come to see the places they have enough time to spend the money and use the luxury facilities of the hotels. Leisure customers normally are couples, newly married, or rich people. Tourist client the name itself defines their identity tourist customers come to see the places their stay can be long or can be short depends what plane they have in their mind. Tourist people can be friends families. Etc mostly they choose the normal hotel or we can call it as budge hotels. Only the tourist who have more money to spend they prefer the luxury hotels. Citizen the local people also visit their historical places or for change they visit the places in their states only this people most of the time their stay is short they also prefer the budget hotels. Royalty card holder the name says itself royal means these customers are very important customers they need to treat differently than other customers. we have to give them special attendance they always stay in a luxury hotels their visit to the hotel can be frequent .they are the card holder of the big hotels also they provide the business to the hotels . How dose these points can be applied to the McDonalds case study ? As they serve the different types of customers in one organisation Kids and young generation- the main customers of the McDonalds are the young people and the kids their main motto is to serve them better way so they can come back again and again. They have really effort able prizes because the young people and kids they dont have lots of money to spend on their food. So MC Donalds suits their budget. Mc Donalds is the place where people can come and have a causal meeting or just for relax also they got different Varity in fast food. Families -as compare with the other fast food chain competitors they have Varity and a very effort able prize food every single kid want to go to the MC Donald and have some food. Business people-business people are very busy especially in the morning so they dont have time cook at home or spend some time is restaurants so they also prefers the fast food like MC Donald provides . Traveller -for travellers MC Donalds they provides the maps and happy meal in very low prize. So travellers can come and have the happy meal in quick time and thats how they can save their time. Disable people-for the disable people mc Donald have special facilities like they have special setting arrangement also discount in prizes. Health conscious people-people are very health conscious now they want to have salads, and less oil, no junk food in their daily meals so for them mc Donalds have different salads and other Varity food menu. Importance of customer care culture-the recent survey shows that they have done some evaluation of customer care program. 90% staff found that program is helpful. 92 % are saying that they learn out of it and now they have some knowledge about the hospitality industry. 80% have found the hand book was very important to them By getting some knowledge the customer care has been improved Evaluation of customer care program- Analyse recent customers needs of the market. Mc Donalds has to know what current position in the market is there. Where they are standing in the market. Identify their resources and they have to know their recourses from where they can get the business. Mc Donalds can be use as a customer care finest perform. For example bench marking. Mc Donalds have their own goals. they want to expand their business They need to examine the result and if there any problem then they needs to find out alternative solution for it. Analyse the feedback in regular intervals. KPI-key performance indicator Customer feedback is very important every organisation has to encourage their customers to give there feedback so that the organisation will come to know in which area they are lacking. The customers feedback can be verbal or non verbal. Verbal feedback- it can be face to face , telephonic Non verbal feedback-questioners, comment card, E mail feedback, feedback from staff Face to face-this can be direct interact with the guest this can be very quick way to get the feedback you can get the exact feedback from the guest. Telephone feedback-as we can use the latest technology so we can use it to give the feedback telephone feedback is one of them in this the customers can call the organisation and give their feedback. Questioner method -this is the principle which is given to the customers what they think about the company what are their expectations from the company every one cant express their feelings because of the language problem but questioner method help them to express their views and they can share their knowledge with everyone. Email feedback-today every hotel has their own website we can go to that website and can have a look of that hotel or organisation thats why Email feedback is very important you can give your feedback after visiting that hotel or that particular organisation. Comment card -this is an easy way to find out the customers feedback after every service or every visit you can give the customer ,feedback card and can request them to fill the feedback card . Guest history record -the guest history record helps to keep the estimate the helpfulness of the customer care policies this deals with the keeping the customers personal records, so that if they come next time then you already have their records. By keeping guest records can be very useful because if the customer knows that you really take care of them you already knows what they like and what they dont like then they will always come back to your organisation may be they will recommend Advantages of direct dialogue- This method helps to get the personal view and personal thoughts about the organisation. Or service Straight talk with the guest can help you to better understand the guest needs. Full keep count information is composed from the customers by using this method. Disadvantages of direct dialogue This process is very lengthy as customer point of view because business class people dont have that much time. Communication gap can occurs in this Advantages of telephone feedback- This is very quickest way and this can save the time also Customers can give there feedback direct on the phone after finish the stay in hotel. Disadvantage of telephone feedback- While talking on the phone with the customers if we cant understand what is the other person is saying then it can create the problem because you dont know what feedback customers is giving .so this can be disadvantages of the telephone feedback. This can be incomplete feedback You cant get the detail information on the phone. Advantages of questioner methods This is easy way to get the feedback from the customers This is also quick way to get the feedback from the customers you can get the data or some notes from the customers. This is low cost method compare to the other methods. Disadvantages of questioner method Sometimes customers dont feel comfortable to fill up the form This method can bring the verbal communication barriers Some time if the customers dont understand the question properly then he cant give you the perfect feedback. Advantages of Email feedback This can be easy way to give the feedback also this is more rapidly and cheaper way. Also we can easily communicate with the business client The words which we use in the e mails it can be easily read and easy to understand. Also we can give the detail information in the e mail. Email reply can be very fast and convenient Disadvantages of email feedback The main threats of the email feedback are the virus if the emails contain virus then you cant open that email so you cant have the feedback or you can lose the important data. Sometimes Emails can be very big, for the business client big emails are not good, because they dont have time to go through that email. Email sending is not useful to the tourist people simply because they dont have an access to the internet while travelling. Advantages of comment card This procedure gives the immediate feed back This card you can give the guest when they check out because that time they can give the feedback the reason for this is they already use the facilities what we have offered so they can give the feedback. Disadvantage of comment card Sometime the comment card information can be lost because you have to keep all the records all the documentation work, and if we lost that work then we cant get back to the customers. Sometimes if one particular person has got the bad guest feedback then that feedback form may be he will not give to his superiors if that happens then this can be loss for the company. Comment card feedback is not useful to the business people because they comes for short meeting or quick lunch or dinner that moment they dont have the time to fill the comment card. Advantages of guest history records This method is useful to the company to know their guest needs very well Also the guest will also feel very good that the company giving so much of respect so they will always want to go to that same company May be they can suggest the other people to go that particular organisation. This is how they can expand their business. Disadvantage of guest history records You have to keep so much of records for example you have to keep their birthday date, anniversary date etc. To keep that record up to date may be you need to appoint one extra person to do that job. Effectiveness of feedback method It can give the customers full detail information You can know what your customers expecting from you what their expectations. Customers likes and dislikes It apprises the service excellence It helps to know the current trends which are going in the market. Also help to improve the customer care policies Guest can give their feed back as much time or whenever they want at any time. Self empowerment Self empowerment means it allows all the staff of the organisation a

Factors that influence to increase price of goods

Factors that influence to increase price of goods Introduction Controls the market price of all necessary goods are the prime objective of the government. However, with the price increases of essentials capturing headlines of our national newspaper and TVs almost everyday. This price-hiking problem has become the main social problem in Bangladesh and it has great negative impacts on the people. The poor general mass is suffering most in this problem. Besides, it also hindrance the growth and development of the country. Ultimately, the goals of welfare state hampered due to lack of proper controlling the price of necessary goods. There are many reasons behind this problem. According to the finance and planning adviser, Mizan Azizul Islam, International price hike of essential necessities as being responsible for high domestic prices. In most of the cases, international market price is responsible for domestic inflation. Besides, production and production costing, export and import, preservation system, marketing policies, communication system etc are also responsible for this problem. Moreover, a group of business people are taking the advantages of these and increasing the price of necessary goods. This is unethical and unlawful. Factors that Influence to Increase Price of Goods Some factors are influencing the overall situation of the market to increase the price of necessary goods. They are- Production Production cost Preservation system Marketing strategy Export and Import Unethical business practice tendency Syndication Retail sellers unlawful tendency towards benefit Global market price Lack of government rules and its implementation Production The mass production of goods nationally and globally reduces the price of goods. If it is hampered, then it is impossible to control the price or keep the price of all necessary good in the reach of the poor people. This kind of problem happened when big countries such as China, India, Korea etc fail to produce their necessary goods. Last year due to natural disaster India fail to produce rice as a result demand for rice grows up and a scarcity was arise in the global market and at the same time price for rice goes up at a tremendous rate*. And it had a impacts both in the global and local market. *.Article on the newspaper ( The Daily Star )- Due to natural disaster India fails to produce rice to meet the local demand. So, they are going to buy and preserve rice from the global market. ally recognized levels. Production Cost Production cost depends on availability of production materials such as seed, fertilizer, water, production equipments and the weather. Lack of any of them interrupts the production and increase the production cost. According to the Section 171.1014, 1 taxable entity that elects to subtract cost of goods sold for computing its taxable margin shall determine the amount of that cost of goods sold as provided by this section. Moreover, the cost of goods sold includes all direct costs of acquiring or producing the goods (Labor costs, raw materials costs, handling costs, storage costs, repairing and maintaining costs etc)*. In addition, the cost of goods does not include the following costs in relation to the taxable entitys goods (Renting or leasing costs, selling, distributions, advertising costs etc)*. However, a group of businessperson are not following this rules and regulation and increasing the price of necessary goods for seeking more benefits. On the other hand, the governments are not taking any steps against this group of people though are there rules and regulations to prevent this. The only reason behind is that now a days more than 60% MPs are businessperson. * Section 171.1012. Determination of Cost of Goods Sold. In this section: The cost of goods sold includes all direct costs of acquiring or producing the goods, including: (1) labor costs; (2) cost of materials that are an integral part of specific property produced; (3) cost of materials that are consumed in the ordinary course of performing production activities; (4) handling costs, including costs attributable to processing, assembling, repackaging, and inbound transportation costs; Preservation Lack of proper preservation system has a great impact of the quality of the goods and on its price. Because of this most of the times producer mainly the farmer lose their interest to produce the goods. However, the government tries to make the cold storages in most of the prime cities. Further, it is not sufficient. Moreover, sometimes it is too much costly for the farmers and so on. Every year just for the lack of cold storage, farmers are dropping out their goods in the ponds, rivers. Such as tomato, potato, onion etc. Besides, it is a reason of environment pollution. The government is not taking the necessary steps to prevent this. As a result, the victim farmers are losing their interest for producing this goods and a scarcity is going to rise in the local market. Therefore, price of this goods are going high which is unreachable to the general mass. (5) storage costs, including the costs of carrying, storing, or warehousing property, subject to Subsection (e); (6) depreciation, depletion, and amortization, to the extent associated with and necessary for the production of goods, including recovery described by Section 197, Internal Revenue Code; (7) the cost of renting or leasing equipment, facilities, or real property directly used for the production of the goods, including pollution control equipment and intangible drilling and dry hole costs; (8) the cost of repairing and maintaining equipment, facilities, or real property directly used for the production of the goods, including pollution control devices; (9) costs attributable to research, experimental, engineering, and design activities directly related to the production of the goods, including all research or experimental expenditures described by Section 174, Internal Revenue Code; (10) geological and geophysical costs incurred to identify and locate property that has the potential to produce minerals; (11) taxes paid in relation to acquiring or producing any material, or taxes paid in relation to services that are a direct cost of production; (12) the cost of producing or acquiring electricity sold; and (13) a contribution to a partnership in which the taxable entity owns an interest that is used to fund activities, the costs of which would otherwise be treated as cost of goods sold of the partnership, but only to the extent that those costs are related to goods distributed to the taxable entity as goods-in-kind in the ordinary course of production activ * The cost of goods sold does not include the following costs in relation to the taxable entitys goods: (1) the cost of renting or leasing equipment, facilities, or real property that is not used for the production of the goods; (2) selling costs, including employee expenses related to sales; (3) distribution costs, including outbound transportation costs; (4) advertising costs; (5) idle facility expense; (6) rehandling costs; Marketing Still in our country, there are no proper marketing policies of the government. The lower middle class, middle class and upper class businessperson are controlling the markets. Most of the times the farmers are deprived their due prices. The middle class businessperson is unethically increasing the benefit margins. On the other hand, regarding imported goods, the businessperson are syndicating and increasing the prices of goods very high. As a result, for both of this system nationally produced goods and imported goods the consumers of our country are victims of this unethical business. Most of the times the government are the co-sharer of these unethical activities of the businessperson. In one sense, due to dishonesty and corruption justice is like a golden deer for people of Bangladesh. Therefore, the price controlling is hard to reach without development of the humanity. Besides this in Bangladesh, the business people are not following the perfect marketing strategy. In addition, the government has a lack of control on the over all market condition. Sometimes-due to this many businessperson starts to market their products without testing it and maintaining the quality*. Moreover, they focus on advertisements and start to market the products at a low price. As a result, the reputed companies who are maintaining the quality of the products it becomes tough for them to sustain in the market. Because they cannot able to market the products at a cheaper rate like their competitors. As a result, the general people have to buy the quality products at a higher rate. Communication Problem Communication problem influences to increase the price of necessary goods such as vegetables, imported goods etc. Without proper communication problem, it is tough to distribute the goods properly. It is great problem in Bangladesh and we are suffering this problem year after year. Government is trying to improve the communication problem. However, the steps they are taking are not sufficient for our country. Most of the times in the rainy seasons, prices of goods due to the communication problem. Moreover, every year flood is a common natural disaster for Bangladesh that totally breaks down the transportation system of us. On the other hand, each and every the transportation companies have to face many problems. Our government does not take any steps to secure the communication system. Groups of people take the advantage and collect money from the transportation sectors such as police, Mastans and so on. Due to this types of unethical activities, the cost of goods are incrasing. Export According to the Export Policy 1997-2002 the main objectives are to achieve optimum national growth, narrow down the gaps between export and import, to make the exportable items more attractive, to develop and expand infrastructure and so on*. In the year of 2009-2010, we export $18.36 billion. For Bangladesh the main export items are garments, textiles, jute and jute goods, ships, leather, produce, frozen fish and seafood, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, cement. Our main export partners are US 31.8%, Germany 10.9%, UK 7.9%, France 5.2%, Netherlands 5.2%, Kuwait 4.9%, Japan 4.5%, Italy 4.42% (2000). However, we fail to achieve our export objectives due to political disturbance, economical condition, natural disaster and so on. Every year we are exporting less and importing more. As a result, it create a negative impacts on our economy and price of goods are going up. Because of this unstable economic condition is arising day by day. The economy of Bangladesh is constituted by that of developing country. Its per capital income in 2008 was est. US$1,500. This is lower than India and Pakistan. Bangladesh ranked as the 48th largest economy in the world in 2008. In Bangladesh the economy has grown at the rate of 6-7% p.a. Due to infrastructure problems in transportation, communications, power supply and water distribution Bangladesh can not able to achieve it export objectives. These are the reason, which influence to increase the price of necessary goods. Objectives ( Export policy 1997-2002) The principal objectives of this policy are : 1. To achieve optimum national growth through increase of export in regional and international market; 2.. To narrow down the gap between the countrys export earning and import payment through achievement of the export targets ; 3.. To undertake timely steps for production of exportable goods at a competitive price with a view to exporting and strengthening existing export markets and making dent in new markets; 4.. To take the highest advantage of entering into the post Uruguay liberalized and globalized international market; 5. To make our exportable items more attractive to the market through product diversification and quality improvement; 6.. To establish backward linkage industries and services with a view to using more indigenous raw materials, expand the product base and identify and export higher value added products ; 7. To simplify export procedures and to rationalize and solidify export incentives; 8. To develop and expand infrastructure ; 9. To develop trained human resources in the export sector; 10. To raise the quality and grading of export products to internation Import According to the Import Policy 1997-2002 the main objectives are to make the import policy compatible with the changes in world-market, to ensure the growth of industries and so on*. In the year of 2008 Bangladesh imports$20.205 billion. Our main imported items are machinery and equipment, chemicals, iron and steel, raw cotton, food, crude oil and petroleum products. Our main import partners are China 11.4%, India 9.1%, Singapore 8.5%, Hong Kong 7.1%, Japan 6.5%. Government is sincerely committed to fostering a gradual development of free market economy in the light of GATT agreement. For the interest of export promotion investment in the country, it is necessary to have a long term, stable, facilitative liberal Import Policy. The present government has taken steps to extend the duration of the Import Policy from two years to five years. Efforts have been made to make the Import Policy easier and more liberal by relaxing or rescinding the regulatory provisions of the previous Import Policy. Provisions have already been made to allow import of capital machinery and industrial raw materials on consignment basis without the cover of the Letter of Credit. Main objectives of Import policy a) To make the Import Policy Compatible with the changes in world-market that have occurred as a result of the introduction of market economy and signing of the GATT Agreement. b) To simplify the procedures for import of capital machinery and industrial raw materials with a view to promoting export, and c) To ensure growth of the indigenous industry and availability of high quality goods to the consumers at a reasonable price Government has taken steps for quality control in the import of cement, fertilizer etc. In order to protect the interest of the consumers, steps are afoot to ensure that in future all imported consumer items conform to a specified standard of quality. In the present Import Policy Order, second hand/reconditioned machinery are importable subject to fulfillment of certain conditions. Gradually efforts will be made to classify the machinery under H. S. Code. However, lack of proper management sometimes the import polices are disrupted. As a result, it takes too much time to discharge/unload the goods from sea-port. So, the importers have to increase the price of the goods. Besides, syndicating problem is a great reason to increase the market price of imported goods. Unethical Business Practice Tendency Most of the cases upper class and middle class businessperson are dishonest, selfish and they are acting as the head of the society*. They are controlling the local market price as their own wish. Besides, they are controlling the era of devils and making wealth and property. Moreover, they are also responsible for syndicating and increasing the price of local market goods. Among the politician more than 60% are businessperson*, they deals with the politicians and political parties and using their power in the wrong direction. Besides, corrupting the business sectors as much as they can just to make profits. In words, it is the Kingdom of dishonest, wealthy and powerful persons. The mass people are helpless to control the price of necessary goods. According to a report in *Amar Desh (May 11, 2007), prices of essential food items have increased 25 per cent on an average in the past four months. According to a report in New Age (May 11, 2007), prices rose between five and 50 per cent during the same period- most of it under the military-backed interim government of Fakhruddin Ahmed that assumed office after the proclamation of a state of emergency on January 11. According to the governmentà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã… ¸s own statistics, inflation increased from just fewer than six per cent in January this year to almost 7.5 per cent by March. While the government appears to be in denial suggesting that inflation is not really out of control and quite below the danger level, experts fear that it might, in fact, have crossed the double-digit mark driven by the soaring food prices. *According to SLATE magazine (2007), about our very own mafia groups that group has come to be known, and often referred to in the media, as the syndicate. Despite the fact that academics, researchers and even politicians have acknowledged such collusion, its existence is denied upfront, both by government officials and businesspeople, in a manner that can be likened to that regarding the mafia. For the longest time, the existence of the mafia, or rather Cosa Nostra, was denied by insiders as well as government officials till misconceptions and myths were laid to rest by, what came to be known as, the Maxi Trial in a court in Sicily over a hundred years after its existence was officially reported. As for the syndicate, it has proved to be invincible and even immune to a state of emergency, which has not been able to curb Retail Sellers These types of people are also corrupted. They are mainly creating artificial crises of the product in the local market*. As a result, demand for those goods goes up. Moreover, sometimes the retailers offer gift items with the low quality products. As a result, demand for quality products goes down and they take the advantage by stocking the products. After few days later they market the products at a higher price. Global Market Prices It is also one of the prime reasons for increasing the price of necessary goods. We are insufficient to produce the necessary goods. Therefore, we have to depend on importing goods from foreign countries. Moreover, we need to depend on favorable price of goods of the world market. *THE RESTRICTIVE TRADE PRACTICES, MONOPOLIES AND PRICE CONTROL ACT Commencement: 1st Februar, 1989 An Act of Parliament to encourage competition in the economy by prohibiting restrictive trade practices, controlling monopolies, concentrations of economic power and prices and for connected purposes Government Precaution In all the cases the government steps towards controlling the price is also major factor. However, I am disclosing with regret that the every sector in our country are controlled by the corrupted businessperson. Most of the cases the rules of laws are absent and the implementations of laws are in near zero percentage. Those who will implement the law, most of them are highly corrupted. Therefore, the result is a big zero. The mass people with a new hope changing the government every 5 years. However, the result is more disappointed and more distress. In a word, it is a land of all evils and injustice. Without developing, the morality it is absurd to change this hails condition. We have to start a revolution from young generation. Conclusion Due to all of these lacking it is going to be impossible to control the price of necessary goods. The very poor people are suffering most of the cases by this problem. As a result, the major portion of the people are going as burden for the society. Therefore, we have to take precautions to avoid this problem for making a happy, wealthy and prosperous Bangladesh. If we want to achieve this then we have to take serious action and frame effective laws for the elimination of the middle men groups existing various trading circles, by framing effective measure to control bribery between law enforcing agencies and trades. A strong co-ordination efforts and monitoring cells should be formed to observe and check price level of essential commodities in different trade center of the country. Besides, committees should be established for the co-operation, co-ordination and exchange of information in between different Government officials entrusted to check price level, by re-introducing old rationing system by the Government to stable the prices, by identifying syndicate groups and taking appropriate action against them.

Medicine as a Form of Social Control Essay -- Papers

Medicine as a Form of Social Control This critique will examine the view that medicine is a form of social control. There are many theorists that have different opinions on this view. This critique will discuss each one and their different views. We live in a society where there is a complex division of labour and where enormous varieties of specialist healing roles are recognised. We attribute to our modern healers a great deal of power, and trust that they will use it for our benefits rather than to harm us. Professional codes of ethics are promises that doctors will use their knowledge to benefit patients. The sociologist Talcott Parsons (1951) described what he considered the essential point of this contract. These rights, obligations and privileges are standards of behaviour, which Parsons felt people in American society believed desirable in the 1940s. The sociological term for such a standard of behaviour is a norm. People in modern Britain acts in a certain way that is seen as appropriate for ill people. In the 1950s, Parsons (1951) outlined the norms that govern illness behaviour and professional responses to it, in modern society. He also saw the patient - doctor relationship as a social system, governed by norms about appropriate behaviour. Also, Parsons (1951) claimed illness as disruptive, a kind of deviance and is therefore potentially disruptive to the social order. Parsons saw society as a functioning whole, and was concerned with how the social order was maintained, and how various institutions in society in the case health care institution function... ...power, which extend throughout the whole of society. He described what he called the clinical gaze as having moved beyond the hospital and the clinic into many and diverse sites such as our schools, workplaces, and homes. For Foucault (1973) the clinical gaze was a facet of a new kind of power, which relied on surveillance and inspection. In conclusion, this critique has critically examined the view that medicine is a form of social control. Discussing the views of theorists such as Talcott Parsons, Ivan Illich, Narvarro, Irving Zola and Foucault. These theorists have views about how dominating medicine can be in society, the power of the professionals and medicalisation how it refers social problems into medical problems. Throughout this critique, it has been made clear that medicine is a form of social control.

Emily Dickinson :: essays research papers

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. She had a younger sister named Lavina and an older brother named Austin. Her mother Emily Norcross Dickinson, was largely dependent on her family and was seen by Emily as a poor mother. Her father was lawyer, Congressman, and the Treasurer for Amherst College. Unlike her mother, Emily loved and admired her father. Since the family was not emotional, they lived a quiet secure life. They rarely shared their problems with one another so Emily had plenty of privacy for writing. During her childhood, Emily and her family attended The First Congregational Church on a regular basis. Emily did not like going to church because she didn't think of herself as being very religious. She refused to believe that Heaven was a better place than Earth and eventually rebelled from the church. Emily saw herself as a woman who had her own way of thinking, a way of thinking shaped neither by the church or society. By the time she was twelve, her family moved to a house on Pleasant Street where they lived from 1840 to 1855. Emily was already writing letters, but composed most of her poetry in this home. Emily only left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for two semesters. Though her stay there was brief, she impressed her teachers with her courage and directness. They felt her writing was sensational. At the age of twenty-one, Emily and her family moved to the Dickinson Homestead on Main Street. This move proved to be very difficult for Emily. This was difficult for Emily because she became very attached to her old house, which shaped her writing and personality for fifteen years. They now lived next door to her brother Austin and his wife Susan and their daughter Martha. Emily and Susan became so close that many people believe they may have been lovers. A rumor perpetuated by the fact that Emily was known to have written many love letters and poems to Susan. Martha attempted to protect both of their images and suppress the rumors. It became common knowledge that Emily had some type of very strong feelings for Susan. At the age of thirty-one Emily sent some of her poems to a publisher, Thomas Higginson, from whom she got a very good response and a strong friendship developed. He acted as her mentor but she never seemed to have taken any of his advice. It became evident that she didn't like the idea of having her works published, she made 40 packets of about twenty poems apiece from 814 poems. She placed these in a box along with 333 other poems. Emily died on May 5, 1886 at the age of 56.

Also by Amitav Ghosh The Hungry Tide Incendiary Circumstances

Also by Amitav Ghosh The Hungry Tide Incendiary Circumstances The Glass Palace The Calcutta Chromosome In an Antique Land The Circle of Reason Sea of Poppies River of Smoke The Shadow Lines Amitav Ghosh www. johnmurray. co. uk First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd First published in 2011 by John Murray (Publishers) An Hachette UK Company  © Amitav Ghosh 1988 The right of Amitav Ghosh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Li brary Epub ISBN 978-1-84854-423-9 Book ISBN 978-1-84854-417-8 John Murray (Publishers) 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH www. johnmurray. co. uk For Radhika and Harisen CONTENTSTitle Page Copyright Page Dedication Going Away Coming Home Going Away In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father’s aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib. It startles me now to discover how readily the name comes off my pen as ‘Mayadebi’ for I have never spoken of her thus; not aloud, at any rate: as my grandmother’s only sister, she was always Mayathakuma to me. But still, from as far back as I can remember, I have known her, in the secrecy of my mind, as ‘Mayadebi’ – as though she were a well-known stranger, like a film star or a politician whose picture I had seen in a newspaper.Perhaps it was merely because I knew her very little, for she was not often in Calcutta. That explanation seems likely enough, but I know it to be untrue. The truth is that I did not want to think of her as a relative: to have done that would have diminished her and her family – I could not bring myself to believe that their worth in my eyes could be reduced to something so arbitrary and unimportant as a blood relationship. Mayadebi was twenty-nine when they left, and Tridib was eight.Over the years, although I cannot remember when it happened any more than I can remember when I first learnt to tell the time or tie my shoelaces, I have come to believe that I was eight too when Tridib first talked to me about that journey. I remember trying very hard to imagine him back to my age, to reduce his height to mine, and to think away the spectacles that were so much a part of him that I really believed he had been born with them. It wasn’t easy, for to me he looked old, impossibly old, and I could not remember him looking anything other than old – though, in fact, at that time he could not have been much older t han twenty-nine.In the end, since I had nothing to go on, I had decided that he had looked like me. But my grandmother, when I asked her, was very quick to contradict me. She shook her head firmly, looking up from her schoolbooks, and said: No, he looked completely different – not at all like you. My grandmother didn’t approve of Tridib. He’s a loafer and a wastrel, I would sometimes hear her saying to my parents; he doesn’t do any proper work, lives off his father’s money.To me, she would only allow herself to say with a sardonic little twist of her mouth: I don’t want to see you loafing about with Tridib; Tridib wastes his time. It didn’t sound terrible, but in fact, in my grandmother’s usage, there was nothing very much worse that could be said of anyone. For her, time was like a toothbrush: it went mouldy if it wasn’t used. I asked her once what happened to wasted time. She tossed her small silvery head, screwed up h er long nose and said: It begins to stink. As for herself, she had been careful to rid our little flat of everything that might encourage us to let our time stink.No chessboard nor any pack of cards ever came through our door; there was a battered Ludo set somewhere but I was allowed to play with it only when I was ill. She didn’t even approve of my mother listening to the afternoon radio play more than once a week. In our flat we all worked hard at whatever we did: my grandmother at her schoolmistressing; I at my homework; my mother at her housekeeping; my father at his job as a junior executive in a company which dealt in vulcanised rubber. Our time wasn’t given the slightest opportunity to grow mouldy.That was why I loved to listen to Tridib: he never seemed to use his time, but his time didn’t stink. Sometimes Tridib would drop in to see us without warning. My grandmother, for all her disapproval of him, would be delighted whenever he came – partly be cause she was fond of him in her own way, but mainly because Tridib and his family were our only rich relatives, and it flattered her to think that he had gone out of his way to come and see her. But of course, she knew, though she wouldn’t admit it, that he had really come to nurse his stomach.The truth was that his digestion was a mess; ruined by the rivers of hard-boiled tea he had drunk at roadside stalls all over south Calcutta. Every once in a while a rumble in his bowels would catch him unawares on the streets and he would have to sprint for the nearest clean lavatory. This condition was known to us as Tridib’s Gastric. Once every few months or so we would answer the doorbell and find him leaning against the wall, his legs tightly crossed, the sweat starting from his forehead.But he wouldn’t come in right away: there was a careful etiquette attached to these occasions. My parents and grandmother would collect at the doorway and, ignoring his writhings, wo uld proceed to ask him about his family’s doings and whereabouts, and he in turn, smiling fixedly, would ask them how they were, and how I was, and finally, when it had been established to everyone’s satisfaction that he had come on a Family Visit, he would shoot through the door straight into the lavatory.When he emerged again he would be his usual nonchalant, collected self; he would sink into our ‘good’ sofa and the ritual of the Family Visit would begin. My grandmother would hurry into the kitchen to make him an omelette – a leathery little squiggle studded with green chillies, which would lie balefully on its plate, silently challenging Gastric to battle. This was the greatest sign of favour she could show to a visitor – an omelette made with her own hands (it fell to the less favoured to feast on my mother’s masterly tidbits – hot shingaras stuffed with mincemeat and raisins, or crisp little alpuris). Sometimes, watching h im as he chewed upon her omelette, she would ask: And how is Gastric? or: Is Gastric better now? Tridib would merely nod casually and change the subject; he didn’t like to talk about his digestion – it was the only evidence of prudery I ever saw in him. But since I always heard my grandmother using that word as a proper noun, I grew up believing that ‘Gastric’ was the name of an organ peculiar to Tridib – a kind of aching tooth that grew out of his belly button.Of course, I never dared ask to see it. Despite the special omelette, however, my grandmother would not let him stay long. She believed him to be capable of exerting his influence at a distance, like a baneful planet – and since she also believed the male, as a species, to be naturally frail and wayward, she would not allow herself to take the risk of having him for long in our flat where I, or my father, might be tempted to move into his orbit. I didn’t mind particularly, for T ridib was never at his best in our flat.I far preferred to run into him at the street corners in our neighbourhood. It didn’t happen very often – no more than once a month perhaps – but still, I took his presence on these streets so much for granted that it never occurred to me that I was lucky to have him in Calcutta at all. Tridib’s father was a diplomat, an officer in the Foreign Service. He and Mayadebi were always away, abroad or in Delhi; after intervals of two or three years they would sometimes spend a couple of months in Calcutta, but that was all.Of Tridib’s two brothers, Jatin-kaku, the elder, who was two years older than Tridib, was an economist with the UN. He was always away too, somewhere in Africa or South East Asia, with his wife and his daughter Ila, who was my age. The third brother, Robi, who was much younger than the other two, having been born after his mother had had several miscarriages, lived with his parents wherever they happened to be posted until he was sent away to boarding school at the age of twelve.So Tridib was the only person in his family who had spent most of his life in Calcutta. For years he had lived in their vast old family house in Ballygunge Place with his ageing grandmother. My grandmother claimed that he had stayed on in Calcutta only because he didn’t get along with his father. This was one of her complaints against him: not that he didn’t get along with his father, for she didn’t much care for his father either – but that he had allowed something like that to interfere with his prospects and career.For her, likes and dislikes were unimportant compared to the business of fending for oneself in the world: as far as she was concerned it was not so much odd as irresponsible of Tridib to shut himself away in that old house with his grandmother; it showed him up as an essentially lightweight and frivolous character. She might have changed her opinion if he h ad been willing to marry and settle down (and she hadn’t any doubt at all that she could have found him a rich wife), but every time she suggested it he merely laughed.This was further proof that he lacked that core of gravity and determination which distinguishes all responsible and grown-up men; a sure sign that he was determined to waste his life in idle self-indulgence. And yet, although she would pretend to dismiss him with a toss of her head, she never ceased to be wary of him, to warn me against his influence: at heart she believed that all men would be like him if it were not for their mothers and wives. She would often try to persuade me that she pitied him. Poor Tridib, she would say.There’s nothing in the world he couldn’t have done with his connections – he could have lived like a lord and run the country. And look at him – oh, poor Tridib – living in that crumbling house, doing nothing. But even as a child I could tell she didnà ¢â‚¬â„¢t pity him at all – she feared him. Of course, even she would acknowledge sometimes that Tridib did not really do ‘nothing’. In fact, he was working on a PhD in archaeology – something to do with sites associated with the Sena dynasty of Bengal. But this earned him very little credit in my grandmother’s eyes.Being a schoolteacher herself, she had an inordinate respect for academic work of any kind: she saw research as a life-long pilgrimage which ended with a named professorship and a marble bust in the corridors of Calcutta University or the National Library. It would have been a travesty to think of an irresponsible head like Tridib’s mounted in those august corridors. Part of the reason why my grandmother was so wary of him was that she had seen him a couple of times at the street corners around Gole Park where we lived. She had a deep horror of the young men who spent their time at the street-corner addas and tea-stalls around ther e.All failcases, she would sniff; think of their poor mothers, flung out on dung-heaps, starving †¦ Seeing Tridib there a few times was enough to persuade her that he spent all his time at those addas, gossiping: it seemed to fit with the rest of him. But the truth was that Tridib came there rarely, not more than once or twice a month. I would usually hear when he came: Nathu Chaubey, the paanwala who sat in the stall at the corner of our lane, or my friend Montu, who could see the far side of the lane from his bathroom window, or someone at the second-hand bookstalls, would tell me. They all knew I was related to Tridib.When I go past Gole Park now I often wonder whether that would happen today. I don’t know, I can’t tell: that world is closed to me, shut off by too many years spent away. Montu went away to America years ago and Nathu Chaubey, I heard, went back to Benares and started a hotel. When I walk past his paan-shop now and look at the crowds thronging th rough those neon-lit streets, the air-conditioned shops packed in with rickety stalls and the tarpaulin counters of pavement vendors, at the traffic packed as tight as a mail train all the way to the Dhakuria overbridge, somehow, though the paan-shop hasn’t changed, I find myself doubting it.At that time, in the early sixties, there were so few cars around there that we thought nothing of playing football on the streets around the roundabout – making way occasionally for the number 9, or any other bus that happened to come snorting along. There were only a few scattered shacks on Gariahat Road then, put up by the earliest refugees from the east. Gole Park was considered to be more or less outside Calcutta: in school when I said I lived there the boys from central Calcutta would often ask me if I caught a train every morning, as though I lived in some far-flung refugee camp on the border.I would usually hear that Tridib was around on my way back from our evening cricket game in the park. My cricket game was the one thing for which my grandmother never grudged me time away from my homework: on the contrary, she insisted that I run down to the park by the lake whether I wanted to or not. You can’t build a strong country, she would say, pushing me out of the house, without building a strong body. She would watch from her window to make sure I ran all the way to the park.But if I happened to hear that Tridib was around I would double back through the park and the back lanes. Someone would always be able to tell me where he was: he was a familiar figure within the floating, talkative population of students and would-be footballers and bank clerks and smalltime politicos and all the rest who gravitated towards that conversation-loving stretch of road between Gariahat and Gole Park. It did not occur to me then to wonder hy he was well known, or known at all – I simply took the fact for granted, and was grateful for the small privileges his presence secured for me on those streets: for the odd sweet given to me by a shopkeeper of his acquaintance; for being rescued from a fight in the park by some young fellow who knew him. But in fact it seems something of a mystery to me now, why they put up with him: he was never one of them, he didn’t even live there, and he often didn’t have much to say.He was usually content to listen to their loud quicksilver conversations in silence: often when he came he would have about him the tired, withdrawn air of a man who has risen from some exhausting labour and ventured out to distract himself. But occasionally, when he was in the mood and somebody happened to say something that made a breach in his vast reservoirs of abstruse information, he would begin to hold forth on all kinds of subjects – Mesopotamian stelae, East European jazz, the habits of arboreal apes, the plays of Garcia Lorca, there seemed to be no end to the things he could talk about.On those evenin gs, looking at the intent faces of his listeners, watching his thin, waspish face, his tousled hair and his bright black eyes glinting behind his gold-rimmed glasses, I would be close to bursting with pride. But even at those times, when he was the centre of everybody’s attention, there was always something a little detached about his manner.He did not seem to want to make friends with the people he was talking to, and that perhaps was why he was happiest in neutral, impersonal places – coffee houses, bars, street-corner addas – the sort of places where people come, talk and go away without expecting to know each other any further. That was also why he chose to come all the way from Ballygunge to Gole Park for his addas – simply because it was far enough for him to be sure that he wouldn’t meet any of his neighbours there.Perhaps they put up with him simply because he wasn’t like them, because he was different – partly also because th ey were a little frightened of him: of the occasional, devastating sharpness of his tongue, and of the oddly disconcerting streams of talk that would suddenly come gushing out of him. But of course, he also had his uses: there was a streak of intensely worldly shrewdness in him which would stand them in good stead every once in a while.For example, he would give a student precise and detailed instructions on how to write an examination paper, because he happened to know that Professor So-and-so was going to correct it, and he liked answers that were slanted just so, and the student would do as he had said, and get a first class. Or else when someone was going to appear for a job interview he would tell him what he was likely to be asked, and when the interview was over it would turn out that Tridib’s predictions had been dead right.But equally his advice would sometimes seem deliberately misleading, perverse. Once, for instance, he told a young man who was going to be intervi ewed by a multinational company that the firm, once famous for its stuffiness, had recently been bought by a Marwari businessman and become very nationalist, and that he would not stand any chance at all of getting in unless he went to the interview dressed in a dhoti. The young man went off to the interview duly clad in dhoti, and found that the doorman wouldn’t let him in.Nobody was ever quite sure where they stood with Tridib: there was a casual self-mockery about many of the things he said which left his listeners uncertain about whether they ought to take what he said at face value or believe its opposite. As a result, inevitably, there were all kinds of conflicting rumours about him – especially because he was secretive about his family and his circumstances to an extraordinary degree – even more than was wholly warranted by the fact that everybody young was turning Maoist at that time.Someone would remark knowingly that he had heard that Tridib’s f amily was rich and powerful, that his father was a diplomat, the son of a wealthy judge, and his brother was a brilliant economist who had a job with the UN and lived abroad. But no sooner would he say it than a sceptical voice would cut him short and say: Where do you live, mairi? D’you think we’ve all dropped out of the sky that we’ll believe all that – don’t you know he’s married and has three children and lives with his widowed mother in a slum near Santoshpur?And since there was something just a little improbable about the son of a diplomat, scion of a rich and powerful family, turning up at those street corners for years on end, it was the latter kind of story that people tended to believe. Sometimes I would try to tell them the truth. But I was just a boy and I happened to have a reputation for being wide-eyed and gullible. Besides, they all knew we lived in a small flat down the lane; if I had tried too hard to persuade them that we had rich and powerful relatives they would only have thought that I was giving yself airs. When I was about nine Tridib once stayed away from his haunts in Gole Park for so long that the regulars began to wonder what had happened to him. I was the only one who knew, because I had stopped by at his house once (as I often did in those days) on my way to my maths tutor’s house, in the afternoon. This was during the time he was telling me the story of his journey to England in instalments. I had found him, as always, lying on a mat in his room at the top of the house, reading, with a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray beside him.When I told him that people were asking about him at Gole Park, he put a finger to his lips. Shh, he said. Don’t tell them a thing. Do you know what? I think I may have discovered the mound where the kings of the Sena dynasty used to bury their treasure. If the government finds out, they’ll take everything. Don’t say a word to anyone and don’t come here again for a while – you may be followed by secret agents. I was thrilled: I hugged the secret to my chest every time I was asked about him. He’d gone, I would say. He’s vanished. Then, one evening, on my way to the park, I heard he’d surfaced at Gole Park again.I doubled back and found him at his favourite adda, on the steps of an old house, surrounded by his acquaintances. I waved to him, from between someone’s legs, but he was busy answering their questions and didn’t see me. Where have you been all this while, Tridib-da? somebody said. It must be three or four months †¦ I’ve been away, I heard him say, and nodded secretly to myself. Away? Where? I’ve been to London, he said. To visit my relatives. His face was grave, his voice steady. What relatives? I have English relatives through marriage, he said. A family called Price.I thought I’d go and visit them. Ignoring their sceptical grunt s, he told them that he had been to stay with old Mrs Price, who was a widow. Her husband had died recently. She lived in north London, he said, on a street called Lymington Road; the number of their house was 44 and the tube station was West Hampstead. Mrs Price had a daughter, who was called May. And what’s she like? a voice asked. Sexy? He reflected on that for a moment, and said, no, she wasn’t sexy, not in the ordinary way – she was thick-set, with broad shoulders, and not very tall.She wasn’t beautiful or even pretty in the usual sense, for she had a strong face and a square jaw, but she had thick straight hair which came down to her shoulders in a glossy black screen, like a head-dress in an Egyptian frieze, and she had a wonderful, warm smile which lit up her blue eyes and gave her a quality all her own, set her apart. And what does she do? someone sneered. Is she a wrestler or a hairdresser? She’s a student, said Tridib. At least, a kind o f student – she’s studying at the Royal College of Music. She plays the oboe, and one day she’s going to join an orchestra.It was then, I think, that I could restrain myself no longer. I thrust myself forward through the thicket of trousered legs and cried: Tridib-da, you’ve made a mistake! I met you last month, don’t you remember? You were in your room, lying on your mat, smoking a cigarette. You were looking for †¦ There was a howl of laughter and a chorus of exclamations: You fraud, you liar, you were just making it all up, you haven’t been anywhere †¦ Tridib did not seem to be at all put out, either by what I had said or by their laughter.He laughed too, shrugging good-naturedly, and said: If you believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all †¦ Leaning towards me, he pinched my cheek and grinned. Isn’t that so? he said, with an interrogatory nod, his spectacles glinting in the lamplight. H is aplomb gave an uneasy edge to the laughter and the comments around him: it seemed now that he had made them the victims of a complicated private joke. There was an edgy hostility in their voices when he left. You can’t believe a word he says, somebody exclaimed, he just likes to bamboozle people and play jokes on them.But another, sharper voice broke in and said: Joke? He wasn’t joking, he believed everything he said: it was no joke, the fact is that he’s a nut – he’s never been anywhere outside Calcutta. I was furious with myself now for having exposed Tridib to their ridicule. You don’t know what you’re talking about, I cried. I was shouting at the top of my voice, so they listened. Still shouting, I told them the truth as I knew it: that Tridib had been to London, with his parents, many years ago, when he was a boy. They had aken his father there for an operation, which couldn’t be done in India. They had had to go, even though it was 1939 and they knew there might be a war. His brother Jatin had been left behind in Calcutta with his grandparents because he was older and couldn’t be away from school for so long. And yes, there was a family called Price, who lived in West Hampstead, but they weren’t relatives – they were very, very old friends of Tridib’s family, because Mrs Price’s father, Lionel Tresawsen, had lived in India hen the British were here, and he and Tridib’s grandfather, who was a very important man, a judge in the Calcutta High Court, had been friends. Long after Lionel Tresawsen went back to England his daughter had married a man who had taught her in college, whom everyone called Snipe because his name was S. N. I. Price. When she’d heard that Tridib’s father was ill she had written to them and sent telegrams to say that they must stay with her in London, because she’d bought a big house, and she’d been wanting to take in lodgers anyway.And it was true that she had a daughter called May, but she was a little baby when Tridib was in London, and as far as I knew he hadn’t seen her since. And Mrs Price had had a brother too, called Alan, who had been in Germany before the war †¦ I gave up, exhausted. That’s an even better version than Tridib’s, somebody said, with a snort of laughter. It’s true, I shouted back at him. If you don’t believe me, ask †¦ Tridib? A voice prompted, and they doubled up with laughter. I pushed my way out and ran all the way down the lane and up the two flights of stairs to our flat.I was an hour late, and my grandmother was very angry. In her controlled, headmistress’s voice she asked me where I had been, and when I didn’t answer she raised her hand, drew it back and slapped me. Where have you been? she asked again, and this time I blurted out that I’d been down at the corner. She slapped me again, really hard. Haven’t I told you, she said, you’re not to go there and waste your time? Time is not for wasting, time is for work. I met May Price for the first time two years after that incident, when she came to Calcutta on a visit.The next time I met her was seventeen years later, when I went to London myself. I went to England on a year’s research grant, to collect material from the India Office Library, where all the old colonial records were kept, for a PhD thesis on the textile trade between India and England in the nineteenth century. More than a month passed after I arrived in London, before I could meet May again. I had to go to a great deal of trouble to find her. She was playing in an orchestra and living on her own in a bedsit in Islington. Mrs Price gave me her phone number and I called her several times, but she was never in.And then, one morning, while looking through the entertainment page of the Guardian, I saw a notice which said that her orchestra w ould be playing the Dvorak Cello Concerto that evening at the Royal Festival Hall. I went there early that evening: I could only afford a ticket for a place on one of the benches behind the orchestra, and I had heard they sometimes sold out very early. But as it turned out I managed to get a seat quite easily: the soloist was a Swedish cellist who clearly did not have much drawing power. When I went in, I discovered that my seat was directly behind the woodwind section.Soon I saw her; she was fussing with her music-stand, dressed, like all the other women in the orchestra, in a black skirt and white blouse. I watched her as she arranged her music and chatted with an elderly horn player who was sitting in front of her. Her hair was still cut exactly as I remembered it from the time she had stayed with us in Calcutta: falling thick and straight to her shoulders, mantling her neck and the sides of her face; but where I remembered it as dark and shiny, it was streaked now with bands of grey which shimmered when they caught the light.Her shoulders, always broad for her height, had thickened; she seemed almost top-heavy now, for she hadn’t added an inch to her waist. I caught a glimpse of her face when she turned to say something to a woman who was sitting in the row behind. She had deep lines running from the corner of her mouth to her nose, and her eyes, which had once been a clear, bright blue, had grown pale and prominent. Watching her through that concert, I thought of her as she was when she came to stay with us in Calcutta, all those years ago. We had moved to a much larger house then, and she had been given the guest room, downstairs.In the evenings, whenever I managed to elude my mother and grandmother (who didn’t want me to bother her), I would slip into her room, sit on the floor and listen to her playing scales on the recorder she had brought to practice on. Often she would blush with embarrassment, put her recorder down and say: Look, this must be so boring for you, all these horrible scales. But I wouldn’t let her stop. I would insist that she go on playing, and I would sit there entranced, and watch her blowing into her recorder, frowning, the muscles in her cheeks knotting in concentration.She was not frowning when she played in that concert in the Festival Hall: it was evident that her mastery of her instrument was so complete now that she had to give little thought to the music. All through that concert she, and most of the other musicians around her, performed with a bored mechanical precision, very much like veteran soldiers going through a familiar exercise at their sergeantmajor’s command. When the concert was over I waited in my seat until the audience had left and the members of the orchestra were busy packing their instruments.Then I leant over the railing and called out her name. She looked up, narrowing her eyes. She saw me and gave me a politely puzzled smile. Then, to my surprise, she re cognised me, and her face lit up and she waved. Pointing at the exit she mouthed the words: I’ll see you outside. I went out into the plush, chandeliered foyer and waited. Five minutes later, I saw her, picking her way through the last stragglers, her shoulders rolling, like a boxer’s, as she walked towards me. We met half-way down the foyer and froze in mutual embarrassment.She put out a tentative hand, and then suddenly she smiled, rose on tiptoe, pulled my head down and kissed me on the cheeks, her oboe clattering against my neck in its leather case. As we made our way out, I asked her how she had recognised me, after all those years. She gave it a moment’s thought and said: I put two and two together I suppose – I knew you were in London; Mother told me. She stopped to give me a quick, appraising look. And besides, she said, it’s not as though you don’t bear a family resemblance to the boy I met in Calcutta – and I remember him ve ry well.Her voice had a deep, gravelly, almost masculine texture; I couldn’t decide whether it had always been like that or whether it had changed. While she was leading me towards Waterloo tube station through a maze of concrete walkways, she stopped to ask: Have you got anything planned for the rest of the evening? I shook my head, trying not to look too eager. Well, she said, pausing to think; you could always come back with me to my bedsit, for dinner. I can’t offer you very much – just a beansprout salad and some grilled fish. I don’t know whether you care for that kind of thing?Yes, I said, nodding. That would be very nice. She gave me a quick smile. If it’s any consolation, she said, remember I sprouted the beans myself. In the tube, on our way to Islington, I told her how bored she had looked through the concert. She nodded sheepishly. Yes, she said; you’ve guessed my guilty secret. I only stay on with the orchestra because I’ ve got to make a living somehow †¦ She cleared her throat, hesitated, and went on to add: You know – I spend most of my time working for Amnesty and Oxfam and a couple of other relief agencies, small ones, you won’t have heard of them.I asked her a few questions and she described the project she was working on just then with a businesslike briskness: it was something to do with providing housing for the survivors of an earthquake in Central America. It was evident that she found a great deal of satisfaction in her work. Her room was on the first floor of a house that looked out on Islington Green. As she stepped in and switched on the lights, a television set near her bed lit up too, automatically. She hurried across the room and switched it off. Turning to face me she said, guiltily, as though she were making a confession: I leave it on all the time.It’s my only real indulgence. It fills up the room – it feels a bit empty otherwise. It was a large, pleasant room, full of plants; its windows looked out over the trees on the Green. There was very little furniture in it – an armchair, a desk, and a large bed, pushed up against the wall at the far end of the room. There were also a few cushions, with bright Gujarati mirrorwork covers, scattered on the floor, but they looked as though they had been thrown there more to fill up empty space than to be sat on: it did not look like a room where visitors were often expected.With a formal, faintly ironic little bow May invited me to amuse myself by looking through her bookshelf while she made our dinner. Glancing through her collection of Russian novels in paperback, miniature music scores and illustrated health books, I came upon an old photograph. It was pinned, along with a dozen other scraps of paper, on to one of those large boards that I had seen hanging over many student desks in London. It was a picture of her, taken a long time ago. While I was looking at it she darted ou t of her cupboard-like kitchenette to fetch something from the refrigerator.She noticed me standing in front of her board and came and stood beside me. When she saw what I was looking at she gave me a quick glance and opened her mouth to say something. But then, changing her mind, she whipped around again and went back to the kitchenette. Curious now, I followed her there and stood leaning against the wall, watching her as she bent down to look under the grill. I remarked casually that the picture must have been taken a long time ago: that was exactly how she had looked, if my memory served me right, when she had stayed with us in Calcutta.Not quite exactly, she said, watching the grill, her voice ironically precise; it was taken at least a couple of years before that. She looked at me, dusting her hands, raising her eyebrows as though in surprise. That was the picture, she said, a copy of which I was once privileged to send to Tridib. Later, when we were eating our dinner, I discov ered that in 1959, when he was twenty-seven and she nineteen, they had begun a long correspondence. Tridib had written first, she told me.He had always sent Mrs Price cards at Christmas, ever since they left London in 1940. But that year he had sent two, one to Mrs Price and one to her. He had inscribed a little note in her card saying that he remembered her very well, though she could not possibly remember him, that it would be a great pity if they lost touch altogether, and he hoped that some day she would find time to write to him. She was both touched and intrigued: she had already heard a great deal about him.Smiling at the memory, she told me how his card had reached her just when she was trying to get over an adolescent crush on a schoolboy trombonist, who had had no time for her at all and had not been overly delicate about making that clear. It was nice to feel that someone wanted to befriend her. She had written back, and after that they had written to each other regularly – short, chatty letters, usually. Soon, penfriend-like, they had exchanged photographs. I like to think that Tridib received May’s photograph the day he came to Gole Park and told us that made-up story.Actually my grandmother was wrong about Tridib: he was nothing at all like the hardened gossip-lovers who spent most of their time hanging around the street corners at Gole Park. He was often maliciously dismissive of those people; marine mammals, he would say of them, creatures who sink to the bottom of the sea of heartbreak when they lose sight of the herd. The truth was that, in his own way, Tridib was something of a recluse: even as a child I could tell that he was happiest in that book-lined room of his, right at the top of their old family house.It was that Tridib whom I liked best; I was a bit unsure of the Tridib of the street corners. His niece Ila and I used to disagree about this. We talked about it once, when we were about sixteen. I was soon to leave to go to college in Delhi, I remember, and Ila and her parents had just flown in from Indonesia for a short holiday. Soon after they arrived in Calcutta, they came to visit us. I still remember how my grandmother gasped when Ila climbed out of the car, the tasselled end of her long thick braid swinging freely in front of her.Even my grandmother, who was very critical in all matters to do with appearance, especially where Ila and her family were concerned, pinched her chin and said: Our Ila is growing into a real beauty – she’s taken after Maya. But as for me, I was disappointed: ever since I could remember, Ila had worn clothes the like of which neither I nor anyone else I knew in Calcutta had ever seen, and here she was now, dressed in a simple white sari with a red border, like any Bethune College girl on her way to a lecture.Soon, growing tired of our parents’ conversation, we went out, the two of us, for a walk. Involuntarily we found ourselves walking towards the lake. But when we reached it and spotted an empty bench, we both remembered how we used to sit on those benches when we were children, with our arms around each other’s waists, pretending to count the birds on the little island in the middle of the lake, and, suddenly embarrassed, we turned and hurried off towards the Lily Pool Bridge, in the distance, the awkwardness of our silence making me trip where there was nothing to trip on.At last, because I could think of nothing else to say, I asked her whether she remembered those days when we were children and she and Robi used to come to Calcutta in the summers, and three of us used to go up to Tridib’s room whenever we were bored and listen to him, in the still, sultry heat of the afternoons, while he lay on a mat, propped up with pillows, cigarette smoke spiralling out of his fingers, and spoke to us in that soft, deep voice of his, about the behavioural differences between the Elapidae and Viperidae families of snakes , or the design of the temples at Karnak, or the origins of the catamaran.Or, for example, the time when Robi and I decided to become explorers in the Empty Quarter, and went running up to his room to ask for a few tips before setting off. He had smiled and gone on to tell us in ghastly detail about the circumcision rites of one of the desert tribes. And then, spectacles glinting, he had said: So before you leave you’d better decide whether you would care to have all that done to your little wee-wees, just in case you’re captured. I asked her if she remembered how Robi and I had spread our hands instinctively over ur groins, and how angry we had been when she had laughed. Mere vagina-envy, she said, laughing, and I tried to keep my face impassive as though I was accustomed to girls who used words like that. But I could tell she didn’t remember. I asked her, then, if she had any memory of the stratagems we used to employ to get Tridib to tell us about the year he had spent in London, during the war; of how we used to pore over his photographs when we could persuade him to bring them out; of how he used to tell us about the people in them, pointing out Mrs Price with May in her arms, orAlan Tresawsen, her brother, with his bad arm hanging limply at his side, and her husband Snipe, who used to treat himself with Yeast-Vite tonic for his neuralgia and bile beans for his blood, Doan’s kidney pills for his backaches and Andrews Salt for his liver, Iglodine for his cuts and Mentholatum for his catarrh; Snipe, who had once sent Tridib to the chemist’s shop on West End Lane to buy him a glue called Dentesive so that his dentures would not be shaken out by the bombs. Yes, she said nodding, mildly puzzled by my insistence, she did have a faint recollection, but she could not exactly say she remembered. But how could you forget?I cried. She shrugged and arched her eyebrows in surprise, and said: It was a long time ago – the real q uestion is, how do you remember? But of course, to me it wasn’t a question at all. I tried to tell her, but neither then nor later, though we talked about it often, did I ever succeed in explaining to her that I could not forget because Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with; she, who had been travelling around the world since she was a child, could never understand what those hours in Tridib’s room had meant to me, a boy who had never been more than a few hundred miles from Calcutta.I used to listen to her talking sometimes with her father and grandfather about the cafes in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, or the crispness of the air in Cuzco, and I could see that those names, which were to me a set of magical talismans because Tridib had pointed them out to me on his tattered old Bartholomew’s Atlas, had for her a familiarity no less dull than the lake had for me and my friends; the same tired intimacy that made us stop on our way back from the park in the evening and unbutton our shorts and aim our piss through the rusty wrought-iron railings.I began to tell her how I longed to visit Cairo, to see the world’s first pointed arch in the mosque of Ibn Tulun, and touch the stones of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. I had been talking for a while when I noticed that she wasn’t listening to me; she was following a train of thought in her mind, frowning with concentration. I watched her, waiting eagerly to hear what she would have to say. Suddenly she clicked her fingers, gave herself a satisfied nod, and said aloud, inadvertently: Oh yes, Cairo, the Ladies is way on the other side of the departure lounge.I had a glimpse, at that moment of those names on the map as they appeared to her: a worldwide string of departure lounges, but not for that reason at all similar, but on the contrary, each of them strikingly different, distinctively individual, each with its Ladies hidden away in some yet more u nexpected corner of the hall, each with its own peculiarity, like the flushes in Stockholm’s Arlanda, so sleekly discreet that she had once missed two flight calls because it had taken her so long to understand how the handle worked.I imagined her alighting on these daydream names – Addis Ababa, Algiers, Brisbane – and running around the airport to look for the Ladies, not because she wanted to go, but because those were the only fixed points in the shifting landscapes of her childhood. When I went to London, a decade later, often when Ila suggested going out somewhere, to a film in Brixton perhaps, or to a new Vietnamese restaurant in Maida Vale, I would jump to my feet and, before I knew it, I would cry: Yes, let’s go, let’s go on the Underground. She would burst out laughing and mimic me, saying: You’d think we were going on the bloody Concorde.To her the Underground was merely a means of shifting venue: it would irritate her to see how e xcited I got when we stepped on to the escalators; she would watch me as I turned to look at the advertisements flashing past us on the walls, gulped in the netherworld smell of electricity and dampness and stale deodorant, stopped to listen to the music of the buskers booming eerily through the permanent night of the passageways, and in annoyance she would tug at my elbows and hiss: Hurry, hurry, you can’t stop here, you’ll hold people up.And if I still lingered she would snap at me impatiently: For God’s sake stop carrying on like a third-world tapioca farmer – it’s just the bloody Underground. And I would say to her: You wouldn’t understand: to you Cairo was a place to piss in. I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart.It was not her fault that she co uld not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all. All through her childhood, every time her family came back to Calcutta for a holiday, they brought back souvenirs from wherever they happened to be living at that time. Her parents would bring back all kinds of things – Indonesian leather puppets or improbable North African stools with camellike humps.But there was only one kind of souvenir that Ila ever thought of bringing back and I was the only person to whom she would show them. We would slip away to the shade of the rusty water tanks on the roof of their house, and there, with a tight little smile, she would produce a large manila folder. They were always the same, and in time they came to mean as much to me as they did to her: they were the Yearbooks of the International Schools of whatever city she happened to be living in at that time. They were always full of photographs.There would be one of each student and then pages of others – of groups of friends, of parties and tennis matches, of whole classes together. For a long time I could not believe that they were really pictures of a school, because in the pictures the boys and girls were standing around all mixed up together, and besides, not one of them was in uniform. To me, the clothes they were wearing in those pictures seemed to have as little to do with school as the costumes at a circus. Then Ila would point herself out, and there she would be, dressed in jeans or a skirt, and even, once, a Persian lambskin waistcoat.She would show me her friends, standing beside her, and I would roll their names around my tongue – Teresa Cassano, Mercedes Aguilar, Merfeth ashSharqawi – names of girls mainly at first, and then, as we grew older, boys too – Calouste Malekian, Cetshwayo James, Juin Nagajima – names which imprinted themselves on my mem ory so that years later I recognised Mercedes Aguilar at once when she turned up in a photograph two continents away from where she’d been when I had first seen her in those photographs. Ila’s closest friends were always the most beautiful, the most talented, the most intelligent girls in the school.She would point them out to me in the pictures of picnics and fancy-dress dances. The three of us went to that together, she would say, Teresa and Merfeth and I; and we spent the whole evening talking to each other – you should have seen the boys buzzing around us – but Teresa decided that we weren’t going to dance that evening, just like that, so †¦ And she would point Teresa and Merfeth out to me, laughing, slender girls, making faces at the camera. But somehow, though Ila could tell me everything about those parties and dances, what she said and what she did and what she wore, she herself was always unaccountably absent in the pictures.When we w ere fourteen she once pointed to the picture of a boy who, to me, already looked like a grown man, with a face like an American film star, square-jawed and cleft-chinned, with long black hair that curled down to his shoulders. His name is Jamshed Tabrizi, she said, he’s a fencing champion and this year his father gave him a BMW sports car for his birthday; he can’t drive it yet because he’s not old enough, but their chauffeur brought it around to the school one day. It’s red, like lipstick, and as soon as he gets his licence, we’re going to drive down to the beach at Pattaya on Sundays; it’s just a few miles from Bangkok.And then, in a rush, looking at me sideways, she added: He’s my boyfriend. But a few pages later, in their class photograph, there he was, right in the foreground, in the centre of the front row, grinning, broad-shouldered, a head taller than anyone else, with his arms thrown around the shoulders of two laughing blond e girls. And before she flipped the page I caught a glimpse of Ila herself, on the edge of the back row, standing a little apart, unsmiling, in a plain grey skirt, with a book under her right arm.She saw that I had noticed, and when I came upon that Yearbook again a week later I discovered that that page had been torn out. I felt a constriction in my throat, for suddenly it seemed to me that perhaps she was not so alien, after all, to my own small, puritanical world, in which children were sent to school to learn how to cling to their gentility by proving themselves in the examination hall. Those schools were all that mattered to Ila; the places themselves went past her in an illusory whirl of movement, like those studio screens in old films which flash past the windows of speeding cars.I confronted her with this once, in London, when the three of us, she, Robi and I, happened to be together in a pub, the Kembles Head, on Long Acre, a short walk from Covent Garden. Robi was stopping by in London on his way to Harvard. He was on leave from his job in the Indian Administrative Service, so that he could take up a fellowship in administration and public affairs for six months. We had decided to spend the evening together. Ila laughed when I reminded her about those Yearbooks and, picking up her glass of whisky, she said: Of course those schools mattered to me, schools are all that matter to any child, it’s only natural.It’s you who were peculiar, sitting in that poky little flat in Calcutta, dreaming about faraway places. I probably did you no end of good; at least you learnt that those cities you saw on maps were real places, not like those fairylands Tridib made up for you. But of course, among other things, Tridib was an archaeologist; he was not interested in fairylands: the one thing he wanted to teach me, he used to say, was to use my imagination with precision. For instance, when Ila and I were ten, her family came to Calcutta from Colombo for a holiday.Ila came with Tridib and her mother to visit us, and her mother, in her kindly way, knowing how fascinated I was by the countries they lived in, asked Ila to tell me a story about their house that she thought would interest her. Their house was in a quiet part of Colombo where diplomats and senior civil servants and people like that lived. It was an area where sprawling bungalows with huge lawns were threaded through by lanes that were often flooded with puddles of scarlet gulmohur and yellow jacaranda. Their house was at one end of a very quiet lane.It was a big house with large verandas and a steeply sloping roof covered with mossy tiles. The garden was at the back. It seemed to stretch out from inside the house; when the French windows were open the tiled floor of the drawing room merged without a break into the lawn. It was a quiet secluded garden, with a bronze vat, taller than a child, standing like a brooding tumulus in a corner. And it had a blue-tiled lily pond i n the centre, in which plump, fantailed goldfish flashed their white bellies at the sun. There was only one problem: adjoining the garden at the back was a poultry farm.This caused Ila’s mother a good deal of worry, apart from the bother of the smell and the noise, for she had heard that snakes were certain to appear wherever there were chickens. Still, the house was surrounded by a very high wall, and when the breeze was blowing in the right direction the garden was as tranquil as a Japanese cloister. One morning, soon after they moved in, their cook Ram Dayal came running upstairs and burst in upon Ila’s mother who was taking her midmorning nap in an easy chair on a veranda. Mugger-muchh, shrieked Ram Dayal. Save me, burra-mem bachao me from his crocodile.He was a tall, willowy, usually drowsy man, but now his eyes were starting from his gaunt face and his lips were flecked with spittle. Never heard of such a thing, Ila’s mother said to us. Crocodile in my gar den; almost fell out of my easy chair. My grandmother and I looked carefully away from each other, but ever afterwards the thought of Ila’s mother, with her rounded figure, as soft and plump as two buns squashed together in a schoolbag, falling out of her easy chair at the thought of a crocodile in her garden, was enough to reduce us to helpless laughter.Man was in a state, she snorted. Never seen anything like it. But now, being the woman she was, she folded her tiny hands in her lap, pushed her knot of hair back to the top of her head and sat up in her chair in the way the family had come to know so well, that characteristic pose that had earned her the nickname of Queen Victoria. Shatup Ram Dayal, Queen Victoria snapped. Stop bukbukking like a chhokra-boy. Dekho burra-mem, he said again, his thin voice vanishing into a screech. There it is, in the garden. And right he was, Queen Victoria said, her voice shrill with amazement.Damn and blast, there it was – a heck of a huge great big lizard, all grey and black, nasty greatbig creature, with a little pointed head and a tongue like a bootlace, wandering about in my garden like a governor at a gymkhana. But being, as she was, the daughter of a man who had left his village in Barisal in rags and gone on to earn a knighthood in the old Indian Civil Service, she retained her composure. Muro-it, Ram Dayal, she cried. Catch hold of it before Ila-mem sees it, and cut its head off. (As though it were a penis or something, Ila said to me years later. But Ram Dayal was knocking his head against the wall now, the whites of his eyes showing, tears zig-zagging down his cheeks. Why did I come to Lanka? he wailed. I knew Ravana would come to get me. Shatup Ram Dayal, Queen Victoria snapped. She rang the little bronze bell she always carried to summon Lizzie, Ila’s recently arrived Sinhalese ayah. Yes madam? Lizzie said from the doorway. She was a thin, middle-aged woman with a stern mouth and a small, was ted face, always very neatly dressed in the blouse and sari of her native Kandyan foothills.Waving a hand with careful nonchalance, Queen Victoria said: Lizzie, at it-garden looking-looking. The animal was sunning itself now, its grey chest raised high on stiff forelegs. Lizzie, what it-thing being-being? Queen Victoria said. She always spoke like that to Lizzie, though Lizzie spoke very good English and even knew a little Hindi. It was a language she had invented on the spot when Lizzie first came to them on the recommendation of a senior Sinhalese civil servant. Lizzie looked at it and laughed. That’s a thala-goya madam, she said. Very common here, very gentle animal.Queen Victoria glared at the reptile. Gentle, by Jove! she said to us. Wretched beast could have passed for a bloody tyrannosaurus. She turned to look at Lizzie. No possible, she said, it-thing killing-killing? Kill it? Lizzie cried, once she had decoded this. But why to kill it? They keep snakes away. She ran downstairs, and a few minutes later they saw her go into the garden with an armful of cabbage stalks and vegetable peel. She scattered them on the grass and the animal darted forward and began to feed. Hai, hai, hai, gasped Ram Dayal. Hai, hai, hai!Determined not to be outdone by Lizzie, Queen Victoria stiffened her back and went out into the garden herself, taking a few vegetables with her. The animal fixed its eyes balefully upon her as soon as she stepped into the lawn. She froze. Then, drawing on her last reserves of courage, she managed to mutter to it: Eating-eating nice veggie-veggies? which was only her Lizzie-language turned inside out, but the animal’s tail seemed to flicker in answer and from that moment onwards she considered it a part of her household: she was always at ease with anything and anybody who would respond to one of her private dialects.After that, even though many of her Sinhalese acquaintances were alarmed to find a monitor lizard on her lawn and to ld her stories about how they had been known to break children’s shinbones with a swipe of their tails, she allowed it the run of her garden, except, of course, when she had parties, when Lizzie was made to tie it to a tree with a length of rope. One day, early in the morning after one of her parents’ parties, when the lawn was still dotted with cigarette stubs and half-eaten snacks, Ila went out into the garden to read.She had a book with her that she had had to put away the night before when she was only twenty pages from the end, because Lizzie had switched off the lights in her bedroom. She flopped into a deckchair beside the lily pond and in a moment she was absorbed in her book. Ten pages later, still engrossed, she heard a soft splash in the lily pond. It was a very gentle splash, no louder than the sound of a goldfish’s tail flicking the surface.But she stirred, and, not quite taking her eyes off the page, she caught a glimpse of a shadow, as slim and si nuous as a branch of oleander, stretching from the edge of the lawn, under her chair and into the pool. Then the shadow rippled, and this time she looked up properly and saw scales glinting on a long muscular body. She screamed, and the book dropped out of her hands. It hit the edge of her chair and tumbled off, and she heard a dull, fleshy thud as it struck scales and muscle. The whole length of the snake’s body flashed past under the chair with an angry rustle, and then, somewhere behind her, she heard a slow prolonged hiss.She turned, slowly, stiffly, in the way one has to when one knows that one’s lungs are suddenly empty and one’s muscles have gone rigid with fear. The snake’s head was about a foot from her back. Its body lay curled, in tight regular coils, flat on the earth, while its head had reared up, higher than the back of the chair. She was whimpering now, trying to call out, but at the same time, looking at the snake’s head, she saw it more clearly than she’d ever seen anything before, with the telescopic clarity of absolute concentration.She could see its tiny eyes, the flaring nostrils at the end of the sharply pointed head, the tongue, no longer flickering, drawn into the soft pink mouth in readiness, the fangs, erect now, and dripping. Then she heard another sound at the far end of the garden and dimly, without turning her head, she saw the thala-goya thrashing at the end of its rope, battering the tree it was tied to with its tail. The snake heard it too, and it hesitated for a moment with its body arched. Its eyes settled upon Ila again and its neck bent still further back till it was like a drawn bow.Then its head flashed forward. At that moment, reflexively, Ila turned her body, a very small movement, but enough to overbalance the chair. She fell, the chair tumbled over with her, and the snake’s fangs glanced off its steel legs. It reared back again like a snapping whiplash. Ila tried to pus h herself up, but her hands slipped and she fell back. And then, with all the suddenness of a knot springing undone, the coiled snake dropped its head on the grass and shot away towards the wall. She looked up to see the thala-goya lumbering after it. It had bitten through the rope.But the snake was quicker and it had slithered over the wall long before the thala-goya could cross the lawn. So, young chap, Queen Victoria said, patting my head, her eyes twinkling. What do you make of that? I glanced instinctively towards Tridib. He was looking at me, eyes narrowed, head cocked. I was nervous now: I could see that he was waiting to hear what I’d have to say, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. My mother and grandmother were exclaiming with horror about the snake, asking Queen Victoria how big it was, whether it was poisonous or not.Taking my cue from them, I chose a safe course: hoping to earn Tridib’s approval by showing him how well I remembered everything he to ld us, I asked Queen Victoria whether the snake was of the species Boidae or Elapidae. Queen Victoria goggled at me and mumbled something to the effect of: Well that’s a bit of an uppercut, young chap; I don’t think I could tell you in a month of Sundays. While she was mumbling I stole a glance at Tridib. He had pursed his lips and was shaking his head in disappointment. I sat out the rest of their visit in crestfallen silence.On the stairs, when I was going down to see them off, while Ila and her mother lingered over their goodbyes, Tridib said to me casually that, if one thought about it, there was nothing really very interesting about snakes – after all, if I saw one in the lake, for example, what would I do? I’d come back home and tell everyone, but in a few minutes I’d forget about it and get back to my homework: the snake would have nothing whatever to do with my real life. I did not particularly care for the suggestion that my homework was m y real life, but I kept quiet anyway: I c