Marco Polo

Marco Polo, manager of the Hotel Shahjahan, is both an administrator who shapes the hotel’s daily work and a man whose private life eventually pulls him beyond its walls. The contrast becomes stark when his familiar absorption in hotel affairs gives way to an unexplained absence and a disoriented return. His final departure is not simply a change of employment: it follows the disclosure that a relationship once contrived for legal purposes has become a genuine attachment to Lisa.

Identity and Work at the Hotel

Marco Polo’s managerial authority appears in practical decisions about staffing and hotel business. When the narrator needs a job, B. Byron worries that no position may be available. Satyasundar Bose argues directly to Marco Polo that the reception desk cannot be adequately covered by only two people: its work is interrupted by cabaret ticket sales, while the receptionist is also expected to take food and drink orders at Mumtaz after spending ten hours behind the counter. The explanation persuades Marco Polo to make room for the narrator at reception. The decision reveals a manager whose staffing arrangements can be challenged, but also shows the strain that the hotel’s overlapping duties place on its workers.

Marco Polo’s control of hotel operations extends to the presentation and movement of staff. When Rosie fears for her job, Satyasundar Bose expects that Marco Polo will not dismiss her if a reasonable explanation can be given. Later, Marco Polo summons Rosie to bring him a letter from an airline: a possible new service to Calcutta could mean that the hotel needs more rooms. The letter makes expansion a concrete managerial concern, while the scene also shows Rosie moving between the reception desk and the manager’s office at his instruction.

He recognizes that staffing depends on personal as well as formal arrangements. Marco Polo tells the narrator that the work under discussion properly belongs to Rosie, but that she withdraws when she learns another woman may be coming to the Shahjahan. The remark connects an individual employee’s reluctance to the hotel’s practical need to fill a post. His intervention is briskly businesslike: once Rosie has been sent to fetch the airline letter, he turns to the narrator and discusses the work that must be done.

The Hotel as a Public Stage

Marco Polo manages an establishment where hospitality is also performance. At a banquet for the Sociedad Filantrópica, its organizers welcome guests at the counter while elaborate preparations fill the hotel: Satyasundar Bose has arranged the hall, and Nityahari has prepared three hundred and fifty boar’s-head dishes. The occasion is presented as a service to humanity, but Bose warns the narrator that the newspapers will report speeches and summaries already prepared before the banquet, rather than what actually happens. Marco Polo’s hotel is thus a venue in which public appearances, staff labor, and commercial activity meet; the gap between a polished event and its backstage arrangements is part of the world he administers.

The cabaret makes that division between display and labor still more visible. When Connie is introduced, the lights go out and a moving spotlight searches the stage; instead of Connie, the audience first sees Harry in evening dress, wearing a tall top hat and carrying a cane. During the performance, the first act ends with the lights being switched off to preserve Connie’s modesty, while she waits backstage, wrapped in a robe and out of breath. Marco Polo is not shown directing these moments, but their setting matters to his role: the hotel turns entertainment into business, and its management must negotiate the demands of performers, staff, and paying guests.

That commercial pressure is made explicit when Connie’s performances bring the hotel eight or nine thousand rupees in a single night. Gómez understands that his own standing counts for little beside her importance to the business. The episode offers a measure of the incentives shaping Marco Polo’s workplace, even as his response to particular personnel remains mediated through instructions, staffing, and the hotel’s needs.

Disappearance and Return

Marco Polo’s absence disrupts the routines by which the hotel knows him. On a dry day, he goes out early in the evening and does not return. Mathura Singh explains that Marco Polo usually goes somewhere for a drink on such days, but that he has never stayed away so long during all the years Mathura has worked there. The distinction is telling: drinking is familiar enough to be part of the staff’s understanding of his habits, while the length of this absence is unprecedented. The hotel’s concern registers through the people who keep its night shift and watch its doors.

He eventually returns with B. Byron, who has helped him out of a taxi and entrusted him to the waiters before leaving. Marco Polo stands very straight near the counter, yet seems like a stranger in his own hotel. When Satyasundar Bose asks where he has been and explains how worried everyone was, Marco Polo looks at him without understanding and asks why he has been standing all night. The narrator contrasts this figure with the manager formerly obsessed with the hotel and eager to know every detail. His posture remains composed, but his disorientation has severed the connection between that outward bearing and his former command of the place.

The return does not immediately restore his old place in the hotel. The following morning, B. Byron visits the narrator and says that the previous night will probably remain memorable for both him and Marco Polo. Later, after an excited discovery prompts Byron to hurry back to the Shahjahan, he forces open the manager’s office door and brings Marco Polo out with him. The urgency of the scene marks another passage away from ordinary hotel business: the manager is no longer simply attending to his office, but being drawn out of it by events connected to his past.

Lisa, the Past, and Departure

B. Byron eventually explains the connection between Marco Polo and Lisa. At an earlier point, Marco Polo paid Lisa to pose as his lover so that he could use the supposed adultery as grounds for divorce from Susan Munro. What began as an arrangement for a legal purpose has changed: Marco Polo is now in love with Lisa. She initially doubts his feelings, but weeps when she realizes that he has no other motive. Byron’s account makes the reversal especially concrete through an act of care: he has seen Marco Polo cleaning Lisa’s vomit. Lisa’s body has been severely weakened, but Marco Polo tends to her rather than treating her usefulness or appearance as the basis of their relationship.

Lisa has improved after receiving treatment, and the two have decided to live together. Her wish to visit the Shahjahan is checked by Marco Polo, who is wary of Jimmy and of the way the manager’s reputation can reflect on the hotel. His concern shows that even while preparing to leave, he remains attentive to the hotel’s public standing and the people who control its atmosphere. Yet the couple cannot resolve their future within India: the law does not permit them to marry there, and Marco Polo does not want to live with Lisa without marrying her.

He therefore accepts a position at a hotel in Costa Dorada, Africa, described as an insignificant establishment in an insignificant town. The move takes him away from both the Shahjahan and the geographic worlds invoked in Byron’s account, Europe and Asia. It offers no grand professional ascent; its importance lies in giving Marco Polo and Lisa the possibility of spending the rest of their lives together as husband and wife. A scheme once devised to end a marriage has thus led, through a change in feeling, to a new shared life elsewhere.

Marco Polo’s departure is staged as a final act of hotel management and farewell. His luggage is loaded into a hotel car, and the waiters and other employees line up outside the office. In shorts and a white shirt, he resembles a ship’s captain as he stands near Jimmy and shakes hands with the staff one by one. He urges them to keep the flag flying and asks the butler to look after his men. The orderly leave-taking gives his authority a last public form: he departs not as an anonymous passenger but as the manager bidding farewell to the people who worked under him.

For the narrator, the scene leaves the hotel feeling like an empty, cursed castle. Familiar faces had disappeared at different times of day, and now, at dinner, the narrator imagines himself seated alone at an empty table after the departure of a whole family. The image registers the personal cost of Marco Polo’s exit without making the hotel itself disappear. What changes is its human arrangement: Jimmy begins to make clear that the Shahjahan will no longer be run as before, and a young woman is brought in to replace Satyasundar Bose. Marco Polo’s absence therefore marks both the end of a personal chapter and the beginning of a managerial change that the remaining staff must face.