Marco Polo and Susan Plan a Divorce Based on Fabricated Adultery is a scheme to turn a failing marriage into a legally recognizable separation by staging an affair. Marco Polo wants to leave Calcutta, but divorce demands time, money, witnesses, and a carefully concealed arrangement. The plan recruits Lisa as the supposed lover, assigns Susan the role of plaintiff, and leaves Marco Polo trying to finance a case he cannot remain in the city to oversee. Its promise of a clean legal ending gives way to silence, arrest, and the eventual discovery that the petition was never filed.

Legal and Personal Impasse

Marco Polo had married Susan through an Indian church ceremony, but he had not familiarized himself with the country’s divorce laws. His visa was nearing expiration, and he wanted to do something—anything—that would let him leave Calcutta for good. The legal advice he sought made clear that divorce would not be a quick formality: the applicant had to appear in court, witnesses had to be found, and the process could consume both money and effort. When Marco Polo asked how long it might take, the lawyer allowed that it could take as long as two years.

The obstacle was not only procedural. Susan’s marriage certificate gave her an advantage in her profession, so she was not enthusiastic about surrendering it. Marco Polo asked her to help him out of the marriage by presenting a case that would preserve her own reputation while obtaining the separation he wanted. The proposed allegation was that he had flirted with other women. Susan would be the plaintiff, and Marco Polo’s absence at his distant workplace would make it easier for the court to issue a favorable verdict. The scheme depended on presenting a mutually arranged outcome as a dispute initiated by Susan.

Recruiting Lisa and Staging Evidence

When Marco Polo became desperate for a woman willing to pretend to adultery in a divorce case, Susan proposed Lisa. Lisa, she reasoned, had no reputation to lose, and Susan had done her favors before. A few days later, Susan reported that Lisa wanted to see the man named as her supposed lover. Marco Polo went with Susan to Lisa’s house early one morning. Lisa had been awake all night and had only recently gone to bed; waking to find the pair there, she laughed at the contrast between the respectable wife and the alleged adulterous husband.

Marco Polo explained the plan. Lisa already understood the predicament: her own divorce proceedings had taken place in the same court. For the case, Susan would say that she had introduced Lisa and Marco Polo. That part, at least, would be literally true. Marco Polo then outlined how the fabricated affair would be made to look credible. He proposed specifying four or five nights on which he had supposedly been caught spending the night at Lisa’s home, asking Susan to record the dates in a notebook. His embarrassment interrupted the explanation, but Lisa supplied the implication herself, laughing as she did so.

The documentary evidence was to be staged as well. Marco Polo planned to write letters to Lisa after consulting the lawyer, then have her send them to Susan in separate envelopes. He also asked Lisa to write letters of her own, including a note suggesting that they would meet secretly at her house. He proposed that they be seen together in restaurants a couple of times, adding public sightings to the private correspondence. The plan thus assembled a paper trail and a few supposed witnesses around encounters that were meant to appear illicit, even though the participants were cooperating to invent them.

Payment and the Risk of Collusion

Lisa made clear that Susan would not pay her for taking part. When Marco Polo asked what Lisa wanted, the answer was two thousand rupees. He had not imagined that ending his marriage would place him in such a position. That afternoon, in a restaurant, he wrote Lisa a couple of timid letters; the thought of having to perform these actions to satisfy the law made his stomach turn. That night he went to Lisa’s house with the letters.

Marco Polo handed Lisa one thousand rupees, explaining that what little remained had to go to the lawyer and promising to send more when he returned. The lawyer was paid, and Susan’s adultery petition was filed in court. But on the day the application was to be signed, the lawyer warned them that it must state that the parties had made no arrangement with one another to obtain the divorce. If the court suspected such collusion, the consequences could be dangerous. The lawyer insisted that no one could know Marco Polo had paid for Susan’s divorce; from that point, Susan alone was the client, and Marco Polo was not to write to the firm, even by mistake.

The Plan Unravels

After settling some matters in Calcutta, Marco Polo returned to work. He managed to raise about five hundred rupees and sent the money to Lisa, promising to send the rest later. He had no way to write to her or discover what was happening, and no friend who could keep him informed. The secrecy that was supposed to protect the case also cut him off from the people carrying it forward.

Susan wrote to him once, not with news of the divorce, but to say that she had bought a new car. The development Marco Polo most feared was coming to pass, while the lawyer asked for more money. Marco Polo borrowed the funds and sent them to Susan’s address. Then he was arrested. His Italian connections again attracted police attention, in a period when Italy’s relationship with the Allies made that background consequential. His detention removed him still further from the proceedings he had set in motion.

No Petition, No Resolution

When Marco Polo later returned to Calcutta, the manager’s post at the Shahjahan Hotel was vacant, and the owners welcomed a candidate with his qualifications and recommendations. But the question of Susan and the divorce remained unsettled. The woman who had stirred up trouble in wartime Calcutta had disappeared somewhere in the human jungle. Marco Polo asked at the lawyer’s office, where no one would give him news; the elderly lawyer had sold his share to his partner and died. Marco Polo then asked at the court and learned that no divorce petition had been filed in his name.

That discovery overturns the apparent progress of the scheme. Susan’s petition had been presented as filed, money had changed hands, and the participants had been warned to conceal their agreement, yet no case in Marco Polo’s name could be found. The account does not establish what happened to the money or why the petition disappeared. Instead, the episode ends with the practical failure of a plan built on staged evidence and fragile communication: Marco Polo had tried to leave his marriage by making the law believe in an affair, but he could not secure even the record of a divorce.