My grandmother didn't approve of Tridib. He is a loafer and a wastrel. I would sometimes hear her saying to my parents; he doesn't do any proper work, lives off his father's money. To me she would only allow herself to say with a sardonic little twist of her mouth: I don't want to see you loafing with Trideb, Tridib wastes his time.

It didn't sound terrible, but, in fact, in my grandmother's usage there was nothing very much worse that could be said of anyone. For her time was like a toothbrush: it went mouldy if it wasn't used. I asked her once what happened to wasted time. She tossed her small silvery head, screwed up her long nose and said: It begins to stink.

As for herself, she had been careful to rid our little flat of everything that might encourage us to let our time stink. No chessboard nor any pack of cards ever came through our door; there was a battered Ludo set somewhere but I was only allowed to play with it when I was ill. She didn't even approve of my mother listening to the afternoon radio play more than once a week. In our flat all of us worked hard at whatever we did: my grandmother at her schoolmastering; I at my homework; my mother at her housekeeping; my father at his job in a company.

Our time wasn't given the slightest opportunity to grow mouldy.

That was why I loved to listen to Tridib: he never seemed to use his time, but his time didn't stink. Sometimes Trideb would drop in to see us without warning. My grandmother, for all her disapproval of him, would be delighted whenever he came- partly because she was fond of him in her own way, but mainly because Tridib and his family were our only rich relatives, and it flattered her to think that he had gone out of his way to come and see her.

But of course, she knew, though she wouldn't admit it, that he had really come to nurse his stomach.