20th century

The 20th century provides both a setting and a point of return in the book: it locates the narrator in Calcutta and Marco Polo in Italy, while bringing older histories into view through memorial inscriptions, recollection, and surviving records. Rather than fixing every episode to a precise year, the narrative lets the century emerge through the lives and traces it gathers.

The Century as a Narrative Present

The narrator pauses to rest in Curzon Park, in Chowringhee, on a sunny May afternoon in the 20th century. This present-day scene looks backward as well as outward. Lord Curzon remains a disputed figure in Bengal’s historical memory: the narrator recalls the curses directed at him and the belief that Bengal’s misfortunes began with his idea of dividing the land, yet offers him a greeting and wishes him peace. The gesture holds accusation and civility together without resolving the history between them.

A nearby inscription makes time more concrete. At the feet of Sir Hariram Goenka, it records his birth on 3 June 1862 and his death on 28 February 1935. The dates place a long individual life across historical change, while the narrator’s pause turns a public memorial into a point of contact between the city’s past and its present. The 20th century is thus not an isolated backdrop: it is encountered among older memories and the names preserved in stone.

Lives Carried into the Century

The narrator also measures the present against his own earlier life. He recalls arriving from Kashundia as an adolescent, crossing the Ganges by steamer from Ramkeshtopur Ghat, and staring at the Calcutta High Court. His work as a secretary to a British lawyer brought affection from older colleagues and opened a world of judges, lawyers, and clients. That security ended when his employer died. The narrator describes the loss as a sudden reversal: even a small disturbance can destroy an oasis for people already made vulnerable by poverty, forcing him to set out again despite his exhaustion.

Marco Polo’s naming offers a distinct passage into the same century. After priests consider the boy’s birth, the place where he was found, and the place to which he was brought, they decide that a wandering star suits him and give him the name Marco Polo. He is described as reborn in 20th-century Italy, then sent to a hotel-management institute so that he can become self-supporting. His new name and vocational training make the century a time of assigned identity and practical preparation, not simply a date on a calendar.

Records, Recollection, and the Reach of the Past

The narrative’s sense of historical time also depends on fragments that outlast the people they describe. Hobbs keeps newspaper cuttings in a notebook, including an advertisement issued by the Hotel Shahjahan announcing the arrival of Marian Booth and Jane Grey at Kidderpore aboard the SS Hawaii. Its boast about the women’s service is paired with the revelation that they would be locked up during the day and after work at night. The clipping preserves the hotel’s own public language alongside evidence of the restrictions imposed on its employees; the past survives as a document that can be reopened and read aloud.

Other episodes are transmitted through remembered acts rather than dated records. In Hobbs’s account, neighborhood boys bring temple flowers to Robbie despite a sign forbidding entry. They give the guard coins they have saved and ask him to place the flowers beneath Robbie’s bed. When asked whether Robbie is a relative, they explain that he lives in their neighborhood and is as poor as they are. The scene preserves a small, repeated practice of care, showing how social time is marked not only by public dates but by what a community continues to do for one of its own.

The Century as an Uneven Archive

The book juxtaposes formal markers of time with histories recovered by conversation and investigation. Byron’s search for a woman who once sang in a restaurant leads him and Marco Polo to Chhatawala Lane. They wait outside her room, but cannot see her because she has a guest. When Byron gives the narrator the address, the narrator recognizes the building as the former premises of Magpil & Clerk, where he had worked. The connection recalls the women who counted and bundled his wastepaper baskets and gave him water when he was thirsty. A clue in a present investigation thus opens onto the narrator’s own work history and an earlier, ordinary kindness.

Taken together, these scenes make the 20th century a frame containing uneven kinds of evidence: an inscription with exact dates, an old advertisement, a remembered journey, and an address that revives a personal past. The century is legible through such traces, but they do not form a complete or uniform record. The narrative’s attention falls instead on how historical claims, private loss, work, and acts of neighborly care persist within the city’s changing present.