Joseph-Ghosh-5/2

2. Neel is subject to a physical exam and the tattooing of his sentence on his body. The tattoo artist is a loyal subject of the former zemindar. Neel vows to always speak English in the future. He has been renamed. Themes: language, renaming, reversal of fortune, cleanliness.




Neel's English, right in the heat of his abuse, is itself a symbol of conquest. It is not only his body that is controlled, but his language as well. Ghosh writes, 'But such was the urgency of this desire that words failed him and he could think of nothing to say; no words of his own would come to mind--only stray lines from passages that he had been made to commit to memory: '....this is the excellent foppery of the world...to make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon and the stars..' Such a poetic line is immediately undermined by the next remark: 'bend him over, check his arse....(283)'

In the tattoo scene, it is interesting to note that Neel returns to his body. In the short span of less than a couple of pages, he returns to his solitary prison. Ghosh writes, "it was as if the body that he had thought to have vacated were taking revenge on him for having harbored that illusion, reminding him that he was its sole tenant, the only being to whom it could announce its existence through its capacity for pain.(285)' This is a very dramatic passage, but it's immediately undermined when Ghosh announces that the ink was watered down and Neel had even fallen asleep on the lap of the tattooist.