NCERT Book Class 11 English (Woven Words) Short Stories 6 The Third and Final Continent

62 Woven Words

6 The Third and Final Continent
Jhumpa Lahiri

F Guess what these words and phrases mean from the context

LSE Grundig reel-to-reel hollered
heralded clamorous stucco
forsythia bushes ruffles chapped
foyer mortified

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