Mosquito: Premendra Mitra

The story's so tied up with Ghanashyam-da - Ghana-da for short - that unless I tell you something about him, half the fun of the story will be lost. So I think I ought to start by describing him.

It's impossible to guess Ghana-da's age from his tall, bony, dried-up appearance. He could be anything from thirty-five to fifty-five. When asked he laughs a bit and says, 'I was too busy going around the world to keep track! But -,' and the story that Ghana-da launches on may well be set in the time of the Sepoy Mutiny or that of the first Russo-Japanese War. So we've given up trying to guess his age. We've accepted that there's no place in the world that he hasn't been to in the last two hundred years and no event that he hasn't had something to do with.

I don't exactly know why he decided to come live in our tiny boarding house in this obscure lane. That he condescends to grace our holiday addas with his presence must also be attributed to his infinite kindness.


Translated from Bengali by Amlan Das Gupta