Ganges

The Ganges connects personal passage, urban memory, and unexpected fellowship in the novel. The narrator crosses it as a poor adolescent arriving in Calcutta, while later reflections place the river beside a city that continually absorbs newcomers and consigns most lives to oblivion. Near its banks, a dawn song briefly draws the outsider Lambreta into a welcoming group of singers.

A Crossing into a New Life

The narrator remembers arriving from Kashundia by crossing the Ganges on the steamer Amba from Ramkeshtopur Ghat. The journey brings him to Calcutta and to the sight of the High Court, where he will find work as a lawyer’s secretary. In retrospect, the river marks a passage from the poverty and hardship of his earlier life toward a new world of work and affection from older colleagues. That welcome proves temporary: after his English employer dies, the narrator must begin his journey again. The crossing thus stands at the beginning of a life shaped by both opportunity and loss.

The River and the City’s Historical Memory

The Ganges also frames the novel’s account of Calcutta as a place of arrivals, fortunes, and erasures. Across the centuries, thousands settle in the city; some arrive penniless and acquire wealth and renown, bringing different origins, languages, customs, and cultures. Yet time repeatedly sweeps away the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, rich and poor, native and foreign, and casts people into oblivion. Only a few escape that disappearance, surviving in the form of statues. At the western end of Curzon Park, Sir Hariram Goenka’s statue stands within this meditation on what the city remembers and what it loses. The river’s banks evoke not a secure refuge from change but the edge of a historical current that leaves only sparse memorial traces.

A Place of Brief Fellowship

Beside the Ganges, near the Calcutta Swimming Club, Lambreta encounters people singing at dawn. He is captivated by their song, makes himself a place on the ground, and joins in with clapping and singing despite not understanding the words. His companions treat him kindly and offer him flowers. The episode gives the river a more intimate significance: alongside the city’s divisions and the historical forgetting associated with it, the Ganges becomes a setting for a moment of welcome across difference. Lambreta’s participation is brief and unplanned, but it turns a solitary outsider into a companion in the shared act of singing.