Clive Building is where the unemployed narrator’s effort to sell wastepaper baskets meets both the everyday indignity of class exclusion and an unexpected act of generosity. The building’s elevator, stairs, and entrance frame a small encounter with lasting force: years later, its unknown doorman remains a guiding presence in the narrator’s memory.

Setting and Access

On a blistering May afternoon, with Calcutta’s streets nearly deserted in the heat, the narrator entered a large building carrying two baskets. He climbed into its elevator, but when the operator saw the baskets, he recognized the narrator as a street vendor, reopened the doors, and directed him to the spiral staircase. The elevator, he explained, was reserved for officials and employees. The brief dismissal made the building’s hierarchy tangible: the narrator could enter, but his work and poverty excluded him from its ordinary convenience.

The Doorman and the Basket Sale

At Clive Building, an office doorman helped the narrator sell six baskets. When the narrator offered him a commission of one rupee and fifty annas, the doorman turned pale and his friendly expression vanished. The narrator initially thought the man objected to the size of his share and was about to explain that he earned no more than a rupee and a half from the six baskets. Instead, the doorman angrily made clear that he had arranged the purchase out of pity, not to obtain a commission. His response exposed the narrator’s mistaken assumption and transformed what he had treated as a routine transaction into a rebuke about motive and trust.

A Lasting Moral Memory

The doorman urged the narrator to remain honest and not try to deceive the divine watcher above. Yet the narrator left feeling that he had already failed the trust placed in him: he had charged four annas for each basket. From Dalhousie Square he went to Curzon Park in Chowringhee, carrying the encounter with him. Looking back after a life that brought him wealth, status, and proximity to celebrated people, he still remembered the unknown doorman of the obscure Clive Building office as a guiding star. The building’s significance lies less in any account of its later history than in this remembered meeting, where a commercial exchange became a measure of the narrator’s own honesty.