Lisa

Lisa’s return turns a forgotten singer from Marco Polo’s past into the partner with whom he hopes to build a future. The narrator first recognizes her as Elizabeth, the performer Susan Munro had replaced, and only then understands that this vulnerable, injured woman is the person whose supposed affair once served Marco’s divorce plans. Her story moves from lost income and bodily hardship to a love tested by illness and by the law.

Identity and Earlier Life

Lisa had been a singer associated with Magpil. The narrator remembers her as the performer Susan Munro replaced: Susan had sold cakes before beginning to sing in Lisa’s place for a salary of ten rupees. Lisa recognizes the narrator from the period when he knew her at Magpil, and his sudden recognition of her as Elizabeth makes the connection to Marco’s past fall into place. Lisa had once disturbed Marco’s life, though the narrator had not known that the woman he now encountered was the same person.

Her recollections also locate her decline in the collapse of the business that had sustained her. After the narrator left, people took baskets from Magpil without paying, and the business was eventually forced to close. Lisa’s own income dwindled with it; she had at least been able to earn something from the baskets. Her account joins a personal reversal to a material one: the livelihood around her disappeared, and the singer remembered from an earlier period was left with few ways to support herself.

Poverty, Injury, and Daily Care

By the time the narrator finds her, Lisa cannot walk. She explains that she fell and broke her leg long ago but could not afford to see a doctor. The bone worsened without treatment, and she now lives with the consequences. She can reach the bathroom only by supporting herself against a wall, and sometimes cannot manage even that. Barbara and Pamela have obtained a bedpan for her.

Lisa’s circumstances are precarious, but not entirely without human support. Younger women have let her stay with them, look after her, and clean her room. When a client appears whom none of them wants, they send him to Lisa. The account does not turn this arrangement into a secure livelihood: Lisa calls her present situation pathetic and describes how sharply her earnings have fallen. Care and economic vulnerability occupy the same room; the help she receives does not undo the poverty that has left her dependent on others.

Her physical condition also becomes part of the narrator’s recognition of the scale of her life. He watches her try to move her injured leg and recalls the singer who once moved Calcutta’s pleasure-seekers with a refrain. The contrast is not simply between performance and illness: Lisa still hums that refrain, while the body that once carried her public presence can no longer reliably carry her to the bathroom. Her old song briefly connects the person before him to the life he had known, without concealing what has changed.

Marco Polo and the Reversal of the Past

The narrator eventually asks Lisa about Susan Munro. Lisa knows Susan as the cake seller who began singing in her place for ten rupees, and she does not seem warmly disposed toward her. This exchange confirms Lisa’s connection to the former performance arrangement while exposing the continuing bitterness attached to it. Her past is not only a career remembered by the narrator; it is also a history of lost work and diminished income that Lisa herself can recount.

Marco’s earlier arrangement with Lisa had been calculated rather than romantic. He paid her to pose as his lover so that he could use a fabricated adultery accusation as grounds for divorce. The later disclosure overturns the meaning of that transaction: after all this time, Marco has fallen in love with her. Lisa initially does not believe him. When she comes to understand that he has no other motive, she cries. Their relationship thus begins its new phase under the shadow of an old pretense, but the pretended intimacy has given way to a genuine attachment.

Marco’s care is shown through physical acts rather than declarations. He takes Lisa to a doctor and has her foot X-rayed; he is also seen cleaning her vomit. The report that she has improved considerably after treatment offers a change in her immediate condition, not a claim that her long injury has simply vanished. Her body remains vulnerable, while Marco’s attention to its needs makes the reality of his commitment legible to others.

A Shared Future Beyond India

Lisa wants to visit Hotel Shahjahan, but Marco does not agree. He has little confidence in Jimmy, and fears that the manager’s bad reputation will reflect on the hotel. Lisa’s wish to return therefore meets Marco’s distrust of the place and its management. Their decision is instead to live together, though a legal barrier shapes what that can mean: Marco cannot marry Lisa in India, and he does not want to live with her without marriage.

He chooses a job at a modest hotel in an insignificant town on Costa Dorada, Africa, far from Europe and Asia. The destination is not presented as a glamorous escape. It is a practical route around the restriction that prevents their marriage in India, and Marco and Lisa intend to spend the rest of their lives there as husband and wife. Their departure is announced as a plan; the evidence does not establish that the marriage has already taken place.

Lisa’s significance lies in the way her reappearance changes the shape of Marco’s story. She had once been recruited to furnish false evidence for a divorce; now the relationship becomes real, and his care for her is measured against the deterioration of her health. Her recovery remains partial and her future depends on a move they have chosen under constraint. The narrative holds those facts together: a former singer with little income and a badly injured leg is not rescued from hardship by a romantic revelation, but she is no longer alone in facing it.