Shibdas Debsharma

Shibdas Debsharma is a professor and astrologer whose reputation rests on an imposing catalogue of predictions, yet his encounter with Connie reveals the human stakes beneath that public image. He claims to read strangers’ pasts and futures from their expressions, but Connie’s visit turns his practice from a display of prophetic authority into a test of what such authority can offer a person pleading for someone she loves.

Identity and Reputation

Shibdas Debsharma is known as a celebrated seer. Connie has memorized his purported achievements and seeks him out specifically to consult him, not to admire Calcutta. Among the predictions attributed to him are that Lord Curzon would never become prime minister of England and that Lord Kitchener would die in a shipwreck. His further record is said to include Tagore’s renunciation of his knighthood, Lord Brabourne’s premature death, Germany’s decline and fall, Hermann Göring’s suicide, and Subhash Chandra Bose’s exile from India and marriage to a foreign woman. Above all, Shibdas is credited with having predicted Indian independence. The account also preserves a qualification that complicates his prophetic prestige: he foresaw that India would not soon be able to free itself from the Commonwealth.

Other claims extend his reputation beyond political prediction. Through Mahadev Desai, Shibdas supposedly sent Kasturba Gandhi a secret warning that her husband was in great danger, while assuring her that she need not worry about how she herself would die. He is also said to have advised Edward VIII to carry an amulet, sent by urgent post; the story suggests that royal history might have unfolded differently had the king kept it with him. These stories present Shibdas as a figure whose supposed foresight reaches from public history into intimate grief and royal affairs, though they remain claims reported by the narrative rather than independently confirmed events.

Practice and the Problem of Payment

Shibdas’s consultation room lies on a small street in a remote suburb of Calcutta. His stated method is to begin without asking questions: he studies a stranger’s expression and draws conclusions about that person’s past and future. The method depends on winning the visitor’s confidence through an initial reading, which makes it, as the narrator observes, a risky undertaking. With Connie, Shibdas tries to infer her circumstances from her age, manners, and dress. The narrator considers her purpose evident enough without astrology: she has not come for advice about clothing, physical complaints, or iron in India.

The image of spiritual detachment is reinforced by a leaflet Connie carries. Marked as private and confidential, it leads the narrator to understand that Shibdas dislikes publicity and regards accepting payment as sinful. Yet the scene does not simply show money absent from the consultation. Connie reverently places a ten-rupee note at his feet. A separate account of his principles says that he considered it sinful to charge even one anna beyond the seventy-three rupees and four annas and four pice said to be the cost of preparing an amulet. His stance is therefore presented not as indifference to transactions altogether, but as a claim to exact, morally regulated payment rather than profit.

Connie’s Consultation

After Shibdas closes his eyes and sits in thought, he tells Connie that her desire will be granted, then asks to see her palms. He reads suffering in her hands and warns that she will have to endure more. Connie is moved by the promise and distressed by the warning. Her reaction exposes the purpose of her visit: she is not seeking an ordinary prediction about her own prospects, but hope for Harry.

Connie then asks Shibdas to make Harry taller. She says that she wants neither happiness nor wealth nor property for herself; she would accept his being short if only others would stop calling him a dwarf. The prayer makes plain that the wound she seeks to mend is not merely a difference in height but the humiliation attached to it. Shibdas’s earlier reassurance that Connie will receive what her heart desires thus acquires a difficult meaning. The text does not establish that he can change Harry’s body, and his warning of further suffering remains beside the promise rather than being resolved by it.

The narrator, who says that years of witnessing pain, humiliation, and rejection have hardened him, is nevertheless shaken by Connie’s plea. He understands that her devotion is directed toward Harry’s dignity, not toward personal advantage. His response changes the emotional significance of the visit: what he had regarded as a waste of time becomes an occasion for understanding Connie, and he is prepared to leave with her when she wants to go.

Fate, the Amulet, and Narrative Significance

Shibdas frames human limits in religious terms. When Connie fears Harry’s death, he tells her that people are what God wills them to be and that trying to bend that will invites anger. He then opens a box and gives her an amulet, describing it as extraordinarily powerful and as working through atomic force. Its instructions are specific: Connie is to wear it on her bare foot after bathing, and on the day she puts it on she must abstain from drink and debauchery. She accepts it respectfully. The contrast between surrender to divine will and the promise of a potent protective object is left in view; the account does not confirm that the amulet changes Harry’s condition.

Shibdas consequently occupies an unsettled position between prophet, religious authority, and practitioner whose methods rely on reading appearances. His remarkable reputation establishes the scale of Connie’s hope, while the consultation reveals the boundary that hope cannot simply erase: Harry’s bodily difference and the cruelty of being named for it. Shibdas offers reassurance, a warning, and a ritual object, but Connie’s plea—not a verified miracle—supplies the scene’s clearest truth. The encounter also alters the narrator’s understanding of her, showing how a consultation with a supposed seer can disclose the visitor’s circumstances more powerfully than it establishes the seer’s powers.