As the Indian narrator of “The Third and Final Continent” begins a new job in Boston in 1969, he seems profoundly isolated. Both of his parents are dead and he’s lived away from his older brother for several years. His marriage has been arranged and his wife Mala, a decade younger, is literally and emotionally a stranger. As Mala stays in India waiting for her green card, he initially immigrates to America alone. Mrs. Croft, his elderly landlady, has little in common with him since she belongs to a different race, culture, and era. However, over the course of the story, the narrator starts to connect with Mrs. Croft through small acts of care and respect. Later in the story, when Mrs. Croft looks over Mala in her Indian sari, the narrator suddenly realizes that his wife is isolated, too. This wave of empathy lets him connect with Mala and build a foundation for their decades-long marriage. In this way, the story portrays the pain of isolation, but also suggests that a sense of isolation is itself a universal condition. As such, the story shows how a recognition of isolation can itself become a foundation for connection.
As the story begins, the narrator is isolated from those around him, showing little outward connection to anyone. The narrator has been living away from India for quite some time when the story starts. And the narrator, it appears, experienced a profound isolation even before moving to England. His father died when the narrator was a teenager, and his death drove the narrator’s mother “insane.” The narrator’s brother, who lives in Calcutta, has a family of his own. In contrast, Mala, the narrator’s new wife, comes from a close-knit family. In the first nights of their marriage, she weeps, missing her parents, an emotion with which he cannot fully sympathize. The narrator, embedded in his own familial isolation, does not at this point expect that he and his wife will ever be more than strangers.
When he moves to Boston, the narrator’s isolation becomes even more stark. He ceases to have any connection to a Bengali community. He must learn to adjust to new currency, food, noise, and even to how milk is delivered. Even simple words set him apart: what he knows as a “flask” in America is called a “thermos.” To combat this foreignness, he develops the routine of going to work, returning home, and reading the newspaper to “grow familiar with things.” But that very routine is defined by how solitary his days are.
When he moves into a room of Mrs. Croft’s house, the narrator appears to share almost nothing in common with her. Mrs. Croft is 103 while the narrator is in his 30s. She has lived in America her whole life, while he has traveled to three continents. She is delighted by the recent moon landing, while he doesn’t think about it much at all. Initially their interaction is largely transactional: Mrs. Croft wants the narrator to do something, like say that the moon landing is “splendid,” and he does it. Yet their relationship shifts when the narrator recognizes how physically isolated Mrs. Croft is. He decides to hand her his rent check directly, rather than leave it in the appointed spot, so that she will not have to struggle with her cane to walk over and get it. Mrs. Croft is touched by the narrator’s kindness—which is a physical act of connection through handing her the check—and a bond forms between them.
The way that a mutual recognition of isolation can lead to connection is even more clearly portrayed in the narrator’s relationship with Mala. When Mala first comes to join him in the United States, the narrator sees her as a burden. He worries about her ability assimilate, is annoyed by her traditional Bengali ways, and just generally can’t find a way to connect to her or get used to having her around. But when he brings Mala to meet Mrs. Croft, and Mrs. Croft scrutinizes Mala “head to toe,” the narrator realizes that his wife’s experience of moving to America must be just as isolating and alienating as his own experience. In this mutual experience of isolation, he feels the first connection with her, and realizes he will grow to love her, and she him. Soon after this experience, the narrator begins to share his emotions with Mala, and opens up to her in an act of trust.
Over the next thirty years, the narrator and Mala build a life in Boston together. They have a son, buy a home, and become American citizens. They build a broad and deep connection, and a happy marriage. But the foundation for that happiness is the initial realization of shared experience: a shared experience of what it feels like to be isolated.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Isolation and Connection Quotes in The Third and Final Continent
Apart from our jobs we had few responsibilities. On weekends we lounged barefoot in drawstring pajamas, drinking tea and smoking Rothmans, or set out to watch cricket at Lord’s. Some weekends the house was crammed with still more Bengalis . . . and we made yet more egg curry, and played Mukhesh on a Grundig reel-to-reel, and soaked our dirty dishes in the bathtub.
In a week I had adjusted, more or less. I ate cornflakes and milk, morning and night, and bought some bananas for variety, slicing them into the bowl with the edge of my spoon. In addition I bought tea bags and a flask, which the salesman in Woolworth’s referred to as a thermos (a flask, he informed me, was used to store whiskey, another thing I had never consumed). For the price of one cup of tea at a coffee shop, I filled the flask with boiling water on my way to work each morning and brewed the four cups I drank in the course of a day.
My wife’s name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man.
‘A flag on the moon! Isn’t that splendid?’
I nodded, dreading what 1 knew was coming. ‘Yes, madame.’
“Say ‘splendid’!”
This time I paused, looking to either side in case anyone were there to overhear me, though I knew perfectly well that the house was empty. I felt like an idiot. But it was a small enough thing to ask. ‘Splendid!’ I cried out.
“I come once a week to bring Mother groceries. Has she sent you packing yet?”
“It is very well, madame.”
“Some of the boys run screaming. But I think she likes you. You’re the first boarder she’s ever referred to as a gentleman.”
“Not at all, madame.”
…a week later we were still strangers. I still was not used to coming home to an apartment that smelled of steamed rice, and finding that the basin in the bathroom was always wiped clean, our two toothbrushes lying side by side, a cake of Pears soap from India resting in the soap dish.
Mala rose to her feet, adjusting the end of her sari over her head and holding it to her chest, and, for the first time since her arrival, I felt sympathy. I remembered my first days in London . . . Like me, Mala had traveled far from home, not knowing where she was going, or what she would find, for no reason other than to be my wife. As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.
At night we kissed, shy at first but quickly bold, and discovered pleasure and solace in each other’s arms. I told her about my voyage on the SS Roma, and about Finsbury Park and the YMCA, and my evenings on the bench with Mrs. Croft. When I told her stories about my mother, she wept. It was Mala who consoled me when, reading the Globe one evening, I came across Mrs. Croft’s obituary.
While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary . . . Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
