Unit 9: Vocabulary from Readings 3

Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.

Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality.

“WHAT'S THAT?” conceding,
“DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.”

Their thick skulls bled with rancor
when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips
you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse.

Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,
and snow had inducted me into white fellowships

“No—we won’t, we won’t,” they wailed so horrendously that she actually let down the bolt of the front door, so that they burst out like seeds from a crackling, overripe pod into the veranda with such wild, maniacal yells that she retreated to her bath and the shower of talcum powder and the fresh sari that were to help her face the summer evening.

The white walls of the veranda glared stridently in the sun.

The motherly Mira intervened. She pulled the boys roughly apart.

“Dip, dip, dip—my blue ship—” and every now and then one or the other saw he was safe by the way his hands fell at the crucial moment—palm on palm, or back of hand on palm—and dropped out of the circle with a yell and a jump of relief and jubilation.

“I know I have to, idiot,” Raghu said, superciliously kicking him with his toe.

Ravi had never cared to enter such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct household goods seething with such unspeakable and alarming animal life, but, as Raghu’s whistling grew angrier and sharper and his crashing and storming in the hedge wilder, Ravi suddenly slipped off the flower pot and through the crack and was gone.

He chuckled aloud with astonishment at his own temerity so that Raghu came out of the hedge...

The children trooped under it again and again in a lugubrious circle, ducking their heads and intoning
“The grass is green,
The rose is red;
Remember me
When I am dead, dead, dead, dead...”

He would not follow them: he would not be included in this funereal game.

But he had been forgotten, left out and he would not join them now. The ignominy of being forgotten—how could he face it?