Kuson Park is a public refuge in Calcutta where people with nowhere else to sleep shelter beneath the Sir Hariram Goenka statue and along the park’s western railings. In the narrator’s nighttime passage through the city, its dim, improvised sleeping places expose a social reality hidden behind the Shahjahan Hotel’s public life: some of the people who serve the city’s guests may have no proper place to rest themselves.

A Place to Sleep

After leaving the hotel workers he has encountered, the narrator wonders where he can go and wanders into Kuson Park. Many people are already sleeping there; he suspects that some may be his colleagues from the Shahjahan Hotel, though he cannot know. The paved ground at the feet of the Sir Hariram Goenka statue seems inviting, but a few fortunate sleepers have claimed it.

Along the park’s western railings, streetlight falls across the sleepers’ feet. Those who have found a place there cover their eyes with dry leaves to block the light provided by the Corporation. The small expedient creates darkness beneath the leaves: a makeshift shelter assembled from the city’s illumination and whatever is at hand.

The Hotel and the City’s Hidden Poor

Kuson Park stands in sharp contrast to the hotel’s scenes of abundance and ceremony. At the Shahjahan, a Philanthropic Society banquet brings guests together beneath the language of service to society, the nation, and the world; Bose-da observes that newspaper accounts of such gatherings are prepared before the event and omit what actually happens. The park scene turns attention away from the polished account and toward people sleeping outdoors, among them workers the narrator recognizes as his possible peers.

The contrast is not that the park hosts the hotel’s public events, but that the novel places these different conditions within the same city. The hotel’s formal welcome and its guests’ displays of generosity coexist with the pavement where people must improvise a place to sleep. In Kuson Park, the narrator finds the city from the side of those whose labor and hardship are easy to overlook.

Narrative Significance

The scene makes the narrator’s sense of belonging a matter of social position rather than comfort. Looking at the sleepers beneath the statue and railings, he identifies this neglected population as the India to which he belongs. The leaves laid over their eyes are both a practical answer to the streetlight and an image of shelter reduced to its barest possibility: darkness can be made, briefly, but the underlying exposure remains.

Kuson Park therefore serves as a counterimage to the hotel’s illuminated interiors. It brings the lives of the city’s poor and working people into view without turning their hardship into a public spectacle. The narrator’s uncertainty about whether his colleagues are among the sleepers also preserves the scene’s scale: their presence is plausible, not confirmed, and the park’s anonymous crowd exceeds what he can identify.