Bose-da's letter to Shankar

Bose-da's letter to Shankar carries news of Sujata Mitra's death and Bose's decision to leave Calcutta, but its arrival also becomes a scene of grief for Shankar. Written after Bose has scattered Sujata's ashes in the Arabian Sea, the letter moves from loss and remembrance to an impending departure, then offers Shankar a final message from Sujata: she held him in exceptional regard. Shankar cannot finish reading it; the words follow him through the Hotel Shahjahan, where the rooms and even the reception counter seem to laugh at the praise he has received.

Delivery and Immediate Effect

The letter arrives when Shankar has just been dismissed and is already facing bad news. Gurberiya, unaware of the dismissal, tells him that a letter has come. Shankar tries to read it but cannot continue: it slips from his hands and falls to the floor. Gurberiya picks it up, extends it back to him, and asks what has happened. The physical interruption makes the letter's first effect visible before its contents are fully known: Shankar is overwhelmed, and another person must retrieve the message he cannot hold.

The letter is from Bose-da, whom the narrative also calls Bose. Its salutation addresses Shankar directly, and Bose explains that he has no one else to write to. That statement gives the correspondence a double loneliness. Bose writes because Sujata is gone and he feels alone; Shankar receives the letter at a moment when his own working life has just been abruptly cut off. The letter connects their separate losses without suggesting that they are the same.

Sujata's Death and Bose's Grief

Bose reports that he has just returned from casting Sujata's ashes into the Arabian Sea. The previous night, late, he received a telephone call informing him that Sujata Mitra, a flight attendant, had died in a car accident on the way to the Delhi airport. The letter gives no further account of the accident. Instead, it records the arrangements that followed: Bose's name appeared on the form Sujata had completed for the airline as her closest person, and the airline arranged to send her body to him by plane in accordance with her final wish.

That detail makes their intimacy legible through an official form as well as through Bose's grief. Among all the people in the world, Sujata had named him as the person closest to her. Bose recalls that he had postponed their marriage while thinking about Shankar and his own career, whereas Sujata had never hesitated to acknowledge Bose as her man. He remembers her as someone who accepted matters of life and death more easily than he did, and who never lowered herself by placing her own interests ahead of other people's. The letter thus joins the practical record of her death to Bose's account of the person she was to him.

Bose says that all his memories have become like an endless dream. The image registers bereavement as an altered relation to the past: Sujata's life is now inaccessible, while memory continues without a clear end. His statement that she had repeatedly crossed the line separating life from death is present in the letter as part of his understanding of her; the correspondence offers no further explanation of that phrase. The ashes in the sea, the body returned by air, and the memories that remain give the account its movement from reported death toward irreversible absence.

Departure and the Return of the Dhobi's Son

Bose expects that the airline has instructed its office to pay Sujata's compensation to him. He says that this may make him a rich man, but immediately sets wealth against belonging: the prince has become the dhobi's son again, and he cannot survive there alone. The letter does not present the compensation as a remedy for loss. Instead, it sharpens the contrast between a possible financial change and the absence that governs his future.

Bose says he would like to return to the Hotel Shahjahan, but that possibility is ruled out. He has therefore decided to go and work at Marco Polo's hotel on the Costa Dorada in Africa. The sequence is direct: Sujata's death leaves him alone; a return to his former hotel is unavailable; a job elsewhere becomes the course he chooses. The letter does not say what awaits him there. It closes instead on the fact of his departure, making the hotel at the Costa Dorada a destination chosen under the pressure of bereavement rather than a described new beginning.

Sujata's Message and Shankar's Response

Before the letter ends, Bose tells Shankar something he had never told him before: Sujata thought very highly of him. Bose remembers her once describing Shankar as an exceptional person. The praise reaches Shankar secondhand, carried inside a letter whose main subject is death and separation. It is a final message from Sujata, but the narrative does not present it as uncomplicated comfort.

Shankar puts the letter in his pocket and runs downstairs as the rooms on the roof seem to laugh at him. He imagines the building's bricks repeating Sujata's judgment, and then finds the same mockery in the Hotel Shahjahan after the cabaret has ended and the hotel has gone to sleep. The tables, chairs, staircase, and familiar reception counter appear to suppress smiles or laugh openly. The counter, which has been part of Shankar's working life for so long, offers no sympathy; in his imagination, it rebukes him for believing a woman in love. The letter's private commendation therefore becomes a public-feeling humiliation in Shankar's mind. Its importance lies not only in the news it conveys, but in the collision it creates between Sujata's faith in him and his own inability, at that moment, to receive her praise as consolation.