The Third and Final Continent
Beyond imagination
Explain what Mrs Croft meant to the narrator and how the story uses conversation.
Slowly, the couple explore Boston together. They find shops selling Indian groceries, make Bengali friends, and gradually fall in love.
One day the narrator reads Mrs Croft's obituary (a newspaper notice of a death). He is too moved to speak. Hers was the first life he had admired in America.
Years later, he and Mala are American citizens, with a house near Boston, and a son studying at Harvard.
Driving past Mrs Croft's old street, he tells his son about her. What amazes the son most is how tiny the rent was.
He says his life is quite ordinary: he is not the first man to seek his fortune far from home. Yet sometimes, when he thinks of all the miles he has travelled and the people he has known, it is beyond his imagination.
Notice how each character's way of speaking shows their world: Mrs Croft's loud commands, Helen's casual talk, and the narrator's own polite, formal English.
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