ABSTRACT
At midnight, when the world was hushed in sleep, this awful-looking hovel did not stand alone in solitude, for around it hundreds of identical houses stood side by side, and human beings were alive, asleep in those houses. When the author thought of this, his mind was, unusually, at peace. Speaking of solitude, the whole cluster of hundreds of houses beaten by the June rain was, he should say, enwrapped in solitude. He felt as though the warm breaths of those asleep reached my skin from neighboring houses not one iota different from the one in which he was sitting. Maybe at least one person was awake in each family, and like he was engrossed in killing the slugs that were creeping around in the shabby, rain-soaked house. Inside the mosquito net, five relatives were sleeping together, almost piled on one another.
