Shankar Walks the City at Night and Witnesses Hotel Workers' Hardships

Shankar’s late-night walk through Calcutta turns the polished world of a charity banquet into a confrontation with the people it leaves out. After seeing hotel workers without a proper place to sleep and learning how Mayadhar’s untreated varicose veins threaten his livelihood, Shankar returns to the Hotel Shahjahan with a changed understanding of the city and of his own experience. He regards the walk as the moment he crossed into adulthood.

The Banquet and the City’s Public Face

The walk follows a night of conspicuous hospitality at the Hotel Shahjahan. The international Sociedad Filantrópica had recently opened a Calcutta section, and its banquet presented itself as service to humanity. The organizers welcomed guests at the reception counter: Agarwalla wore a bandhgala and churidar, Langford formal Western dress, and Khan Bahadur Huq attire that acknowledged Mughal tradition. In Satyasundar Bose’s quiet assessment, the city’s social gatherings drew on the same lists of prominent invitees, who moved from one hotel, club, or private home to another. The speeches and summaries, he observed, had reached the newspapers before the banquet itself, leaving the reports to record ceremony rather than what actually happened.

The hotel’s spectacle was also a workplace. During Connie’s performance, the lights went out, a spotlight searched the stage, and the audience’s anticipation briefly fell silent before the beam found a small figure in evening dress. Later, at the end of the first act, the lights were switched off to preserve Connie’s modesty; she stood backstage, wrapped in a robe and breathless, asking where Harry had gone. Shankar had been caught in the demands surrounding the performance and the guests. After the cars departed, he had enjoyed none of the evening and had not even eaten. He left the hotel on an impulse, almost against his instincts.

The Workers’ Unseen Lodgings

By the time Shankar reached Chittaranjan Avenue, buses and trams had long since stopped running. The city seemed to him as if sedated, its calm unfamiliar and frightening. A statue of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee in judicial robes stood at the crossroads, while the illuminated globe above the headquarters of the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation continued to turn. These fixed signs of civic order framed a city that Shankar was only beginning to see from the street level.

Two Hotel Shahjahan waiters recognized him and explained that they slept outside because there was no room in the kitchen and the cooks’ assistants would not let anyone in. The hotel lobby had enough carpeted space for people to lie down, but allowing staff to sleep there would damage the hotel’s dignity; the portico was forbidden for the same reason. The men therefore had to seek shelter near the statue of Sir Ashutosh and Victoria House. The contrast was stark: the establishment protected its prestige by keeping its own workers out of sight, while the employees found rest wherever the city allowed it.

One waiter had a standing meal arrangement with Little Shahjahan, at three and a half rupees per meal. Mayadhar was the only one who had not eaten. He lay on the grass clutching his legs, his pain worse that night. By the light of the electric company, Shankar saw veins swollen and knotted like cords, resembling bluish snakes wound around Mayadhar’s legs. Satyasundar Bose had identified the condition as varicose veins, but naming it did not make treatment accessible or work less necessary.

Illness, Work, and the Price of Rest

The other waiter explained that years of standing made their legs swell, and that they hid the condition from the head waiter because discovery could mean immediate dismissal. Medical advice to rest their feet offered no practical remedy: a hotel worker could not rest his feet and still do the job. The work that kept the hotel functioning also inflicted a condition its employees had to conceal in order to keep working.

Satyasundar Bose had given Mayadhar a letter of recommendation to a doctor he knew, but Mayadhar had not yet gone. The treatment seemed too expensive, and he was trying to save money. Now, fearing that he might suffer the same fate as Bharat, he believed his legs could develop sores that would burst and bleed, leaving him unable to stand. If he could no longer stand, he would lose his job; if he lost his job, his children would go hungry. His account gives the walk its concrete stakes: illness threatens not only a worker’s health but also the survival of his family. A doctor’s recommendation exists, yet the cost of acting on it keeps help out of reach.

Curzon Park and a Threshold of Adulthood

After telling the waiters it was late and they should sleep, Shankar continued without knowing where he himself could go. In Curzon Park he found many people sleeping outdoors. The paved ground below the statue of Sir Hariram Goenka was already occupied by a fortunate few; streetlight filtered through railings onto their feet. Those who slept there had placed dry leaves over their eyes to block the light supplied freely by the Corporation. The detail turns civic illumination into an irony: for people without a room, even public light could disturb the little shelter they had found. Shankar understood this improvised refuge as the sleeping place of the India to which he belonged.

The walk also changes how he reads Calcutta. Earlier that night, he had wondered whether the deserted city was really the city of his dreams, or whether he was alone in a wilderness. Now the city’s stillness has given way to evidence of lives that its respectable interiors exclude. He had been told to observe rather than ask questions; the walk makes observation itself a form of recognition. The suffering he encounters is not separate from the hotel’s polished face: the waiters’ hidden illness and outdoor beds belong to the same system that protects the lobby’s dignity and stages the banquet’s hospitality.

When Shankar returned to the Hotel Shahjahan very late, he felt that he had finally reached adulthood. He understood his earlier way of seeing as inexperienced and the night as a crossing into a new world. Satyasundar Bose was alone behind reception and noticed that Shankar looked unwell and red-eyed. He had kept sandwiches from the old man in a drawer and, with no guests likely to arrive, told Shankar he could break the rules and eat them at the counter. The small kindness closes the episode without undoing what Shankar has seen: care is possible within the hotel, but the workers’ poverty and bodily exhaustion remain built into its everyday order.