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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes on to Tridib himself and terms it as a sacrifice, which she cannot understand and must not try also
because ‘ any real sacrifice is a mystery’. She invents this term and suffixes it to Tridib’s nature of
death.
6.1.5 May Price

May Price is a daughter of Tresawsen and is kind and simple. She is a student studying at the
Royal College of Music and plays the oboe and joins and orchestra. She stays at 44 Lymington
Road, London. She had got broad shoulders with average height and wasn’t pretty. She had a
strong face and a square jaw and her thick straight hair came down to her shoulders. She had a
wonderful smile, which lit up her blue eyes and gave her quality of her own and set her apart.
When the narrator visits her after 17 years of the Dhaka episode, he finds that she was exactly
looking the same as he had seen her in Calcutta except that her shoulders had broadened for her
height and had thickened; she seemed top heavy now and had not added an inch to her waist.
She earns her living by playing her organ in an orchestra though with a bored mechanical precision.
Her income is not much but still she works for philanthropic causes and has joined a couple of
small relief agencies, which provided housing for the survivals of an earthquake in Central America.
She found great deal of satisfaction in her work and religiously collects money for her cause
moving from road to road.
May becomes a victim of cultural dislocation when she comes to India and it sets the stage for
personal and public tragedy. Her uncompromising humanitarian approach to humans and animals
alike requires that she force Tridib while they are on the drive to stop and attend to a wounded
dog on a highway. Tridib who is driving with May, and the narrator in the car ignores the plight
of the dog and moves ahead but May takes a glimpse and forces him to stop and turn around. She
herself slits the throat of the animal to relieve him of the pain. Tridib hesitant in the beginning but
lends her the helping hand on seeing the energy and commitment of May Price for a stray dog.
The same humanitarian stint comes to the fore when they are surrounded by a rioting mob in
Dhaka; overriding all the concerns of the rest of the party she jumps out of the car to save the old
man of 90 who is following them on the Rickshaw.
As a 19-year-old girl, May Price is curious and wide-eyed who gets fascinated by the sight of the
cotton man twanging his long bow. She is so much delighted by his instrument that she asked the
narrator to stop the cotton man for she would like to hear the sound of his instrument. She pays
him Rs. five for that and he happily goes away. Another quality of May that shifts the spotlight on
her is her kind and forgiving nature. In a drunken stupor narrator attempts to force himself upon
her a couple of time on his drive from Lymington Road to May Price’s apartment and finally does
manage to tear off her brassiere but May pushes him out and forgives him the next morning when
the narrator asks for pardon. She had quite loved him when she had visited India and took him
along wherever she went.
6.1.6 Roby
The younger brother to Tridib and son of Sahib, a high profile diplomat is strongly built and is a
favourite of Tha’mma for she believes that one cannot build a strong nation without building a
strong body first. And she tells the narrator also that he is not like him; frail and thin.
Like his father, he had also traveled extensively but does not make a cultureless identity. He is
very much Indian and tells Ila in Grand hotel when she insists on a dance; if not with them then
with others, ‘Girls don’t behave like that here. You may do what you like in London. Here, there
are certain things you cannot do. That is our culture; that is how we live’, he quips. Strong as he
is, he knocks down the businessman whom Ila selects for the dance and leaves the hall with her.
It was the same strength, conviction and a sense of morality, which made him rebel against the
college union, and face them single handedly when they gave a call for strike over a student’s

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