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1 " Urmila stared at him, openmouthed. ‘But he’s meant to come to our flat for dinner tonight,’ she began to explain, meaninglessly. ‘That’s why I’m cooking this fish; that’s why I’m going to be late for the press conference …’ She shook the bag of fish under his nose once again. The secretary sneered. ‘You’re either mad or dreaming,’ he said. ‘Mr Haldar is booked on a flight to Bombay this evening – he has to attend a meeting there. He had no plans to visit you or anyone else here.’ With a gesture of dismissal, he turned to the chowkidar. "
― Amitav Ghosh , The Calcutta Chromosome
2 " Tell him,’ the woman said with a mocking smile, ‘tell him that what he sees is the creature’s member entering the body of its mate, doing what men and women must do ... "
3 " But before franking the letter for the post, next morning, Farley added a few scribbled lines in the margin: ‘In haste: much that I feared has been confirmed in these last hours. Shortly before matins, there was a knock on my door: it was Cunningham’s young assistant. He told me – oh so many things – I shall write of them all to you in time. Suffice it to say for the present, that everything is other than what it appears to be, a phantom of itself. The young man has promised to reveal everything to me if I would but accompany him to his birthplace. Fortunately the place of which he spoke is not far from the location of my clinic. We are to leave tomorrow: I shall write again and in greater detail, dear friend, once I know more ... "
4 " Raising her voice, the woman said to the crowd, in archaic rustic Bengali: ‘The time is here, pray that all goes well for our Laakhan, once again. "
5 " The masthead said The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a dateline: ‘Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898’. "
