“Nothing is permanent in this strange city”

Nothing is permanent in this strange city is Satyasundar Bose’s compressed account of Calcutta’s impermanence, set against the Hotel Shahjahan’s astonishing endurance. The expression gathers together reversals of fortune, the brevity of fame and life, and a city that seems to outlast the people who try to shape it. Yet its meaning is not simply that everything disappears: the hotel persists as a witness to human lives, holding their pleasures and griefs long after its founder could have imagined.

The expression and its immediate claim

Satyasundar Bose applies the expression to Calcutta as a place where no status or condition can safely be treated as lasting. His examples make the claim concrete. Even Charnock, formidable in his day, died in Calcutta after only two years; Bose observes that the city seemed to breathe more easily only after Charnock had been sent to his grave. The abrupt scale of the example turns the saying from a general reflection into a pointed local history: power and reputation do not exempt anyone from the city’s transience.

The same idea extends beyond death to public standing and personal circumstance. Fame is compared to a comet crossing the sky: brilliant, conspicuous, and fleeting. The person who spends a night as an emperor in the Hotel Shahjahan’s most expensive room may, by the next day, be a beggar finding shelter in the street. The movement between luxury and destitution compresses an entire reversal into a single night. In Bose’s account, youth and life belong to the same unstable order as wealth and renown; none can claim permanence in Calcutta.

The hotel as counterpoint

The Hotel Shahjahan complicates the expression. Human lives and fortunes pass through it, but the building itself stands with what the narrative calls incredible arrogance, receiving the celebrations, desires, greed, acceptance, sacrifice, joys, and sufferings of many nights. It does not make those experiences permanent for the people who undergo them. Rather, it outlasts them, becoming the structure within which successive, transient lives leave their traces.

This contrast is especially sharp because the hotel’s endurance exceeds the expectations attached to its founding. Simpson’s creation survives the ravages of time, and Simpson himself could not have imagined that the building would last so long. The possibility of his rising from his grave in the St. John cemetery to stand before the Hotel Shahjahan gives the comparison a human measure: its founder, too, has passed away, while the work he made remains. The city’s impermanence therefore does not mean that every object vanishes at once. The hotel’s persistence exposes the difference between the short span of an individual life and the longer life of a place shaped to receive many lives.

Simpson’s wager on the future

The hotel’s survival is tied to Simpson’s original vision. When others dismissed his plans as castles in the air, he insisted that the scheme was grounded in business: he intended to build a hotel near Fort William. He reasoned that Calcutta would determine India’s future, that many people would come to the city, and that they would pay for somewhere to stay. The hotel would serve them through its breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; he expected its usefulness to keep his memory alive even without a statue erected in his honour.

Simpson’s confidence was expansive but still limited by the generations he could picture. He anticipated that his friends’ children and grandchildren would know the hotel, but could not look beyond the next two generations. The later view of the building exceeds that horizon: its guests are no longer merely those descendants, but people from many more generations. In this sense, the expression’s force rests on a reversal within Simpson’s own story. The founder and his imagined audience belong to the past, while the hotel has continued into a future he could not count.

Memory in a building that outlasts people

The reflection on impermanence is framed by a nighttime encounter with the old building. The narrator lies on the desolate roof, waiting for morning and expecting to see the beautiful night on a golden chariot; the palace seems to wake in the dark. Though it is not contemporary and does not even belong to the present century, it remains a guardian of unread chapters of a history languishing amid dirt. Its age makes the past feel close, but its neglected condition also warns that endurance is not the same as complete remembrance.

That distinction gives the expression a historical as well as personal reach. People disappear, reputations turn, and the city changes, while buildings can survive as imperfect keepers of what has happened. The Hotel Shahjahan’s long life does not cancel Bose’s claim; it gives the claim its setting and its tension. The city is impermanent for those who live through its reversals, yet its surviving hotel gathers the emotional record of those passing lives. The expression thus holds two truths together: no person can command permanence, but a place may continue to contain the evidence of people who are gone.