Question

Read the following extract and rewrite it from the point of view of the boy :
[You may begin with : My mother hopes that I am preparing ... ]
''I hope you're preparing for your exams,'' she wrote back.
''After all, there's not much we can do about a skeleton that's been hidden a way for ten or fifteen years. Anyway, there were two newspapers in the cupboard. The Daily Chronicle, published from Delhi on January 18, 1930, is complete. That was four years before you were born. The main headline refers to the 'Bareilly Train Disaster' in which thirteen passengers were killed and nineteen seriously injured. There are also two pages of book reviews, including a review of 'The Glenlitten Murder' by E. Phillips Oppenheim. I think you have read some of his books. Books on the Riviera.
''The other book is about the spirit world, and the possibility of communicating with those who have passed from this material world. Perhaps we can summon up the spirit of the person who inhabited the skeleton? She could tell us how she met her end. Old Miss Kellner holds seances and table-rappings. But how would she summon up a spirit if she doesn't know who it was in the first place?
''The second newspaper - incomplete - is the Civil and
Military Gazette of March 2, 1930. This was published from Lahore, and as you know, Mr. Kipling worked on it a few years earlier. The front page is missing, but page 5 carries an ad for a film called 'The Awakening of Love' starring Vilma Banky. Vilma was a popular heroine when I was a girl. Nothing much else of interest except for a small item under the headline 'Elder Murder Sequel' : ''

Answer 1

My son never saw the skeleton in the cupboard. But, he played a small part in the events that followed its discovery. My son was fifteen that year, and he was back in his boarding school in Simla after spending the long winter holidays in Dehradun. I was still managing the old Green's hotel in Dehra, a hotel that was soon to disappear and become part of Dehra's unrecorded history. It was called Green's not because it purported to the spread of any greenery (its neglected garden was chocked with lantana), but because it had been started by an Englishman, Mr. Green, back in 1920, just after the Great War had ended in Europe. Mr Green had died at the outset of the Second World War. He had just sold the hotel and was on his way back to England when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a German submarine. Mr Green went down with the ship.

The hotel had already been in decline, and the new owner, a Sikh businessman from Ludhiana, had done his best to keep it going.

But post-War and post-Independence, Dehra was going through a lean period. My husband's motor workshop was also going through a lean period - a crisis, in fact - and I was glad to take the job of running the small hotel while he took a job in Delhi.

I wrote to my son about once a month, giving him news of the hotel, some of its more interesting guests, the pictures that were showing in town.