The Third and Final Continent – Class 11 English Chapter 6 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

Jhumpa Lahiri (born 1967 in London) is an Indian Bengali writer living in New York. This story is from her collection *Interpreter of Maladies* (1999), which won the Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into many languages. Her stories deal with Indians living abroad — people brought up in traditional India who encounter a "baffling new world".

Summary

From Calcutta to London

The unnamed narrator leaves India in 1964 with a commerce certificate and about ten dollars. He sails for three weeks on the SS Roma to England and lives in Finsbury Park, north London, with a dozen penniless Bengali bachelors. He attends lectures at the LSE and works in the university library. They share a single icy toilet, eat egg curry with their hands off newspaper-covered tables, and play Mukesh on a Grundig reel-to-reel.

To America, 1969

At thirty-six his marriage is arranged. He gets a job in the processing department of the library at MIT, flies to Calcutta for the wedding and then to Boston. As his plane lands, the pilot announces that two Americans have landed on the moon. His guidebook tells him Americans drive on the right, call a lift an "elevator" and that he shouldn't "expect an English cup of tea".

At the YMCA

He stays at the noisy YMCA in Central Square, Cambridge, living on cornflakes and milk, learning that a "flask" is called a "thermos". After six weeks' waiting for his wife's papers, he answers an advertisement: a room for eight dollars a week.

Mrs Croft

The landlady is Mrs Croft, tiny, fierce, dressed in a long black skirt and starched white blouse. She orders him to fasten the chain on the door, then bellows: "There is an American flag on the moon!" and demands, "Say 'splendid'!" This becomes their nightly routine on the piano bench. He never tells her the flag has been taken down. When he puts his first rent into her hands instead of on the piano ledge, she says, "It was very kind of you!"

Helen

Her daughter Helen, sixty-eight, visits weekly with cans of soup. She reveals that Mrs Croft taught piano for forty years to raise her children, and that she is 103 — born in 1866 — and stopped eating solids after turning 100. The narrator is stunned; he remembers his own mother, driven insane by widowhood after his father's death, whom he nursed and cremated. He begins to watch over Mrs Croft.

Mala

His wife Mala arrives. They are strangers — he did not embrace her at the airport; she covers her head with her sari. A week later he takes her to Mrs Croft's house. Mrs Croft has broken her hip after falling off the bench. When she proudly says she called the police, he cries "Splendid!" and Mala laughs for the first time. Mrs Croft inspects Mala and declares: "She is a perfect lady!" The narrator laughs quietly, and for the first time husband and wife look at each other and smile — "the moment when the distance between Mala and me began to lessen".

Thirty years later

Months later he reads Mrs Croft's obituary: "hers was the first death I mourned in America, for, hers was the first life I had admired". Now American citizens, he and Mala live near Boston; their son studies at Harvard. The narrator calls his achievement "quite ordinary" but says: "there are times when it is beyond my imagination".

Characters

Themes

Literary Devices & Style

Word Power

Exam Focus

Outline: strict landlady and polite boarder → nightly "splendid" ritual → he hands her the rent ("very kind of you") → learns she is 103 and watches over her → "perfect lady" moment → he mourns her death.

Food (cornflakes vs egg curry, rice with hands), dress (sari, bare feet), marriage customs, old people living alone vs family care.

A stranger's life he admired — her independence and endurance — created a genuine bond.

Language work: British vs American — lift/elevator, flat/apartment, flask/thermos, engaged/busy, petrol/gas; parts of a house — parlour, foyer, lounge, lobby, attic, portico, porch.

Common Mistakes