Ila, the narrators cousin is another important influence on the young, impressionable narrator.

She, owing to
her fathers job is a globetrotter and comes to settle in London. Her experience of places as diverse as
Colombo and Cairo and her school years at all these exotic places woven into delightful anecdotes for the child
narrator initiate for the latter his first ever flights of imagination. Along with Tridibs encyclopedic knowledge, it is
cousin Ilas descriptions of her vibrant life abroad that give the narrator a flight outside the confines of his drab
Gole Park flat.

The cousins colourful Annual Schoolbooks become his initiators into an unseen but alluring world outside. For
Ila the immediacy of experience personal/political is so overwhelmingly important that its context and historicity
remains suspended in the background. Earlier the mere description of the city of Cairo brings to the mind of the
atlas educated, historically aware narrator, the first pointed arch in the history of mankind whereas for Ila Cairo
is merely a place to piss in. She flits from experience to experience with a heightened sensual gusto but failing
to arrive at any stage in the novel to a state of greater knowledge, insight or evolution. Tridib often said of her
that the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places she had not
travelled at all. For Ila the current was the real: it was as though she lived in a present which was like an
airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of past and future by steel flood gates.