Selling Wastepaper Baskets after Losing His Job

Selling wicker wastepaper baskets becomes the narrator’s first desperate means of earning a living after his English employer dies and his clerical career ends. The shift is stark: the young secretary who had found refuge in the lawyer’s kindness must now carry goods from office to office, paid only if he can persuade someone to buy.

The Loss of Employment and the Search for Work

The death of the English lawyer dismantles the security the narrator had come to regard as an oasis after poverty and hardship. As the last babu of the last English lawyer at the High Court of Calcutta, he is once again forced to begin his journey without a livelihood. His former colleagues grieve over the loss of his position while urging him to leave the unhappy maze in which they remain; he departs with his bag and lunch tin, facing an uncertain future.

He needs work simply to live as a human being, but his school-leaving certificate and the sympathy of acquaintances bring no job. People express regret, then plead poor business conditions and promise to contact him if a vacancy appears. One office refuses even to let him see Mr. Dutta, a man whose legal case the narrator had once helped secure for free. Dutta sends a note saying he is too busy to meet, and, after the narrator swallows his pride and writes back as requested, no reply comes.

The narrator sends applications by the dozen, detailing his qualifications to friends, strangers, and even post-office boxes. The effort yields no employment; it only increases the post office’s income. Having saved nothing for lean times, he spends nearly all the money he has and comes face to face with hunger. The basket-selling job arrives not as a chosen trade but as the narrow opening left after these refusals.

The Job at Magpil & Clerk

The narrator presents the position as a commercial job, a more dignified label for peddling. He is to visit offices and sell wicker wastepaper baskets, receiving four annas for each one sold. The commission sounds promising to someone with almost no money left, but it offers no assured wage: earning depends on making sales, and the first baskets do not sell.

The business itself makes a comic contrast between its grand-sounding name and its circumstances. Magpil & Clerk evokes the names of established companies such as Burmah Shell, Jardin Henderson, and Andrew Yule, yet its proprietor, the young M. G. Pillai, owns only two pairs of trousers and one rather grimy tie. A dim room on Chhatawala Lane serves simultaneously as factory, office, showroom, kitchen, and bedroom. The name Magpil is formed from Pillai’s own name; the Clerk is Pillai’s secretary, the narrator himself.

Precarious Labour and the Reversal in Fortune

Armed with baskets, the narrator makes the rounds of offices, looking beneath the desks of the babus who might be customers. The work places him on the other side of the office world he once inhabited: formerly a legal secretary among clerks and professionals, he now approaches them as a commission salesman, dependent on their willingness to buy. Their suspicion and his failure to sell the first baskets expose how little the polished title of commercial work changes the insecurity beneath it.

The episode turns the death of the narrator’s employer into a practical and social fall. The legal office had offered a place, a function, and the kindness of older colleagues; basket selling supplies only the possibility of a few annas at a time. Its makeshift workplace and uncertain commission give material form to the narrator’s renewed struggle to survive, as he is pushed from an established clerical role into the precarious economy of selling door to door.