1. How did the narrator meet his friend as?
2. According to the narrator, their friendship will never end. True / False
3. What did the friend do when the narrator was in darkness?
the questions
(3x1=3 ma
Answers
ANSWER
My son never saw the skeleton in the cupboard. But, he played a small part in the events that followed its discovery. My son was fifteen that year, and he was back in his boarding school in Simla after spending the long winter holidays in Dehradun. I was still managing the old Green's hotel in Dehra, a hotel that was soon to disappear and become part of Dehra's unrecorded history. It was called Green's not because it purported to the spread of any greenery (its neglected garden was chocked with lantana), but because it had been started by an Englishman, Mr. Green, back in 1920, just after the Great War had ended in Europe. Mr Green had died at the outset of the Second World War. He had just sold the hotel and was on his way back to England when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a German submarine. Mr Green went down with the ship.
The hotel had already been in decline, and the new owner, a Sikh businessman from Ludhiana, had done his best to keep it going.
But post-War and post-Independence, Dehra was going through a lean period. My husband's motor workshop was also going through a lean period - a crisis, in fact - and I was glad to take the job of running the small hotel while he took a job in Delhi.
I wrote to my son about once a month, giving him news of the hotel, some of its more interesting guests, the pictures that were showing in town.