Marco Polo and Lisa

Marco Polo and Lisa are connected by a past that the narrator can identify only after an investigation leads him back to a woman he once knew under another name. Lisa, formerly a singer and later Elizabeth, has fallen into poverty and disability. When the narrator recognizes her, the discovery joins Marco Polo’s obscured personal history to the narrator’s own earlier life among the women who made and painted wastepaper baskets. The connection becomes legible through recognition, but the circumstances of Lisa and Marco Polo’s former relationship remain largely unstated.

An old connection pursued

Byron’s search begins with a clue from one of his sources: somewhere in Chhatawala Lane, a woman who had once sung in a restaurant might be connected to Marco Polo’s past. The previous night, Byron and Marco Polo had gone there together to look for her. They found her room occupied by a guest and waited outside, hoping to speak with her after he left; they eventually failed to see her. The search is therefore attached to Marco Polo personally, though the account does not explain what had passed between him and the woman, or why he needed to find her.

When Byron recounts the address, the narrator recognizes the building. It also housed Magpil & Clerk, the company for which he had once worked, and its women had helped him by counting and tying the wastepaper baskets he sold. They had also given him water when he was thirsty. Their work and assistance make the building more than a clue in Byron’s investigation: it connects the search for Marco Polo’s past to the narrator’s own remembered dependence on people whose lives he had only partly understood.

Elizabeth becomes Lisa

The narrator asks the women whether they know Susan Munro, who used to sing on Park Street. They do not recognize the name, but one recalls Elizabeth, an older woman who says she used to sing and believes fate brought her to the building. The narrator remembers her as the woman who kept count of the baskets, whose towel the others used to dry them when afternoon rain soaked them. They tell him she is ill in bed and show him the way to her room.

Elizabeth recognizes the narrator. She recounts what happened after he left: Magpil’s business declined as people took baskets without paying, and its owner was forced to leave. Her own earnings from the baskets fell with the business. Now the younger women let her stay, clean her room, and, when a client appears whom none of them wants, send him to her. Her account makes clear how precarious her circumstances have become: she has lost the modest income attached to the basket work and relies on the other women for shelter and care.

Her physical condition sharpens that precarity. She cannot walk because an old fall broke her leg; unable to afford a doctor, she went without treatment as the injury worsened. She says that even getting to the bathroom can require her to brace herself against the wall. Barbara and Pamela have obtained a bedpan for her. These details ground the encounter in immediate need rather than in the glamour of her former singing life.

The recognition and its limits

As Elizabeth begins humming a refrain that had once moved Calcutta’s pleasure-seekers, the narrator suddenly understands who she is: Elizabeth is Lisa, the singer Susan Munro replaced. He remembers knowing her fairly well during his time at Magpil and recognizes, with retrospective shock, that this is the woman who had disturbed Marco Polo’s life. The revelation is decisive for the narrator because it transforms a familiar face from his former workplace into the answer to Byron’s search.

The discovery does not, however, fill in the history between Lisa and Marco Polo. The narrator’s realization identifies the woman, but the account supplies no specific description of their earlier meetings, no explanation of Lisa’s feelings toward him, and no account here of Marco Polo learning that she has been found. Their relation is presented as a consequential past whose particulars remain out of view. That gap matters: the plot makes identity recoverable, while leaving the emotional and practical substance of the former connection partly concealed.

A past threaded through hardship

Lisa’s change of name and circumstance gives the recognition its force. She appears in the present not as a singer on Park Street but as an ill woman in Chhatawala Lane, dependent on the kindness of younger women and on whatever income their unwanted clients might provide. The narrator’s memory of the baskets, towel, and shared work restores continuity between those different versions of her life. Her past is not recovered through a public record or through Marco Polo’s account, but through the ordinary labor and mutual familiarity the narrator remembers.

The episode also places the search for a woman from Marco Polo’s past beside the material conditions of the women who once worked with the narrator. Lisa’s former singing and current circumstances are not treated as separate identities: the same woman moves from a remembered role in Calcutta’s entertainment life to an impoverished room where injury restricts her movement. The narrator’s recognition joins those realities without resolving them. Marco Polo’s connection to Lisa is thus both a key to his past and a meeting point between a private mystery and the precarious lives the narrator had once encountered at work.