Jane and Robert Die from Smallpox

Background and Outbreak

The episode reaches Shankar and Sutherland through Hobbs, who says that he learned of the crisis from a neighbor. A priest brought the news that Robert, Hobbs’s friend, had smallpox. The illness had become an immediate practical emergency: Robert needed to be taken to an infectious-disease hospital, but his care raised urgent questions about who would look after him and how the household could afford it. Jane refused to leave his side, remaining with him through the day; she had fainted the previous night.

The couple lived in a poor flat in Williams Lane. Hobbs’s account makes their poverty part of the danger, not incidental background. He was told that Robert could not remain at home, while the question of who would care for him and where money would come from remained unresolved. Friends warned Hobbs to keep a mile away from the contagious disease and, if he wished to help, to send money through the priest. He nevertheless went down Bowbazar Street toward the couple’s home.

Hobbs did not enter. He could smell phenol and medicines from a distance and imagined the priest inside, tending Robert’s lesions with olive oil. The vivid image of a body consumed by sores gives the illness a brutal physical presence, while the threshold Hobbs does not cross marks the fear surrounding contagion. Outside, he encountered Jane on her way to market, carrying a shopping bag and wearing the clothes of pregnancy. Her appearance sharply contrasted with her former life as a celebrated barmaid at the Hotel Shahjahan, where she had attracted applause and helped draw customers to the bar.

Neighborhood Care and Hospital Vigil

Jane remained hopeful that Robert would recover. She told Hobbs that the priest had prayed for him at church and that the neighborhood boys had treated her kindly. Though they could not go to the Hotel Shahjahan or Wilson, she described them as gentlemen. They had prayed at Firinghee Kali and refused the money she offered. Instead, they said that if Robert recovered and found work, she could make them an English cake of the kind served with tea.

The boys’ kindness was practical as well as devotional. When they found Jane heading to market, they took the shopping bags from her and offered to do the shopping. They decided against buying fish, explaining that the goddess might be displeased, and urged Jane to sleep while they kept watch beside Robert. Jane warned them not to risk infection, since they had families of their own. The boys answered by showing her herbs tied to their arms with threads, which they regarded as protection, and gave her some to wear as well. Their confidence did not remove the medical danger, but it did keep Jane from facing the household’s burdens alone.

Robert’s condition deteriorated, and despite the boys’ reluctance he was taken to hospital, where he lay almost unconscious. Visits were forbidden in that ward. The boys nevertheless went there every day, carrying flowers from the temple and giving them to the warder to place beneath Robert’s bed. They returned to Jane with whatever news they could obtain. As she became unable to leave her bed, their visits and reports connected her to the husband she could no longer tend herself.

On one visit, the boys went as far as the sign forbidding entry and offered the warder a few coins they had saved, asking him to put flowers beneath Robert’s bed. The warder disclosed that patient number thirty-two had lost his sight. The boys feared that Robert would never see again and immediately wondered whether they could raise the eight rupees needed for a specialist’s consultation. The report was mistaken: Robert had lost the sight of one eye, while the other had been miraculously spared. But the boys did not know this when they returned to Jane.

Jane’s Death and Robert’s Last Decline

The boys could not bring themselves to tell Jane what they had heard. They tried to answer her question about Robert’s condition, but they were unaccustomed to lying; one began to weep. Jane fainted, and they carried her to the priest’s house. That same night she gave birth prematurely. During the early morning, the priests knelt and prayed for her as she lay dying. She died before the night was over, leaving the boys of Williams Lane in tears.

The account cuts between this private loss and the continuing business of the Hotel Shahjahan. While Jane’s neighbors mourned, the hotel bar had not yet closed, and customers were still calling for whisky and soda. The juxtaposition does not suggest that the hotel caused the deaths; it shows how the couple’s crisis and the city’s ordinary commercial life occupied the same hours, with no pause in one for the other.

The priest then corrected the boys’ understanding of Robert’s condition. He had not gone blind in both eyes: he had lost the sight of one eye, and the other remained sound. The reassurance came too late for Jane, whose body had already been covered with a white sheet. The boys asked to serve as pallbearers and offered to do whatever else was needed. The priest told them that a Christian funeral required more than their presence and that Llewellyn & Company, the established undertakers, would have to be involved. Their wish to take responsibility remained, even when the funeral arrangements required help beyond what they could provide.

Two Funerals and the Surviving Child

That night, while the boys went to see Llewellyn, Robert’s smallpox symptoms began to recede. His sores dried, his fever fell, and the agonizing phase of the illness passed. As his awareness returned, so did the memory that he had left Jane alone in a miserable Williams Lane flat. He asked where his wife was. The recovery that might have reunited them instead sharpened the coming loss: he was physically improving just as Jane had died.

The boys told the priest what had happened, and he spoke with the doctors. They opened the hospital ward to him so he could give Robert the news. Though experienced in bringing aid and comfort to grieving people, the priest could not soften its effect. Robert collapsed when he learned of Jane’s death. That night his fever rose; he threw his glass of milk to the floor and refused food. The doctors tried to save him, but their efforts failed.

In the darkness, the boys returned to Llewellyn. The funeral procession set out from the hospital and went to the Lower Circular Road Cemetery. The boys had no money: they had bought a large wreath for Jane, whom they called Mem-boudi, and borrowed money for a cheaper wreath for Robert, which they placed on the hearse. The priest returned home with the newborn child. Hobbs ends his account without claiming to know what followed for the baby, leaving the infant’s survival as the one future opened by the story, not a future it describes.

Narrative and Significance

Hobbs’s story gives the neighborhood boys the role of a community of care. They shop for Jane, guard Robert, bring temple flowers into a forbidden hospital ward, seek medical help, and arrange the couple’s funerals despite their own poverty. Their gestures do not avert either death. Their devotion is measured instead by what they continue to do when hope narrows: carry flowers, bring news, borrow money, and stay present.

The sequence also turns on the distance between information and its arrival. A report that Robert had lost his sight in both eyes is corrected only after Jane has died; Robert’s own recovery comes too late to return him to her. Meanwhile, the hotel bar remains open through the night. By recounting the couple’s deaths to Shankar and Sutherland, Hobbs sets the suffering of Williams Lane against the uninterrupted life of the city and the hotel, where customers continue to demand service as grief unfolds elsewhere.