Sujata Mitra and Shankar’s friendship

Sujata Mitra and Shankar’s friendship grows through repeated visits, rooftop conversations, and a playful gesture of care that makes the hotel feel less isolating. It is a relationship of mutual recognition: Sujata brings laughter and attention into Shankar’s life, while he offers the dependable companionship she says she has nowhere else to find. Her later praise, conveyed by Satyasundar Bose, gives that bond a lasting presence after her death.

How the Friendship Takes Shape

Sujata begins visiting Calcutta frequently in the course of her work. Shankar realizes that the formal Miss Mitra he had known has become, in his understanding, Sujata: a woman who enjoys conversation, laughs readily, and can make others laugh too. Their friendship takes shape not through a declaration but through this ordinary ease. Her visits become familiar, and Shankar’s pleasure at seeing her reflects how much her presence changes the atmosphere around him.

She also learns about the hotel workers’ duties and joins them on the rooftop after bathing, setting aside formalities. One visit becomes a small, intimate comedy: she tells Shankar to close his eyes and open his mouth, then slips a chocolate or sweet between his lips. She pulls her fingers away just as he closes his mouth and teases him for nearly biting her. Shankar pretends innocence and asks for another sweet, turning her playful attention into a shared joke. The moment is modest, but it gives their friendship a physical, domestic warmth amid the routines of hotel work.

Companionship and Mutual Need

The closeness between them is clearest on a night when Sujata is about to leave on a night flight. She worries that her arrival has disturbed the settled lives of Shankar and Satyasundar Bose. Shankar answers that he will get used to the change, then describes himself as someone the Shahjahan had turned to stone, revived by the healing touch of a woman who rescued him from it. His image presents Sujata’s friendship as more than pleasant company: her presence has helped him recover a sense of life beyond the hotel’s consuming routines.

Their conversation turns to her family and to her bond with Bose. Shankar asks whether the two have settled their engagement. Sujata’s response makes plain the loneliness behind her independent working life: she says she has no family, just as Bose has no one else, and that she cannot imagine taking holidays. Her last stay with them in Calcutta had been her first vacation in years, and she had enjoyed herself. Bose at least has Sahibganj to return to; she has no equivalent refuge. The contrast explains why the time spent with Shankar and Bose matters to her, without making their companionship a substitute for the security she lacks.

Shankar answers with a promise of continuing friendship. He tells her to forget the others because she will always have him, and explains that he feels indebted to the people who have given him so much. Helping someone, even in a small way, would ease that burden. Sujata replies that he has already done a great deal for her and asks, in effect, who else she has besides the two of them. Their exchange makes the relationship reciprocal: Shankar offers support, but Sujata also recognizes him as someone whose presence and care have already mattered.

Remembrance and Aftermath

The friendship is framed against the changes in Bose’s life and the impending choices around his work and relationship with Sujata. When Bose later writes to Shankar, he explains that he had postponed marriage while considering his own career, while Sujata had never hesitated to regard him as her man. The letter also says that her office has apparently arranged for her compensation to be paid to Bose. These details place Shankar’s bond with Sujata within a larger circle of attachment and loss, while the surviving evidence does not specify the cause of her death.

Bose reveals that Sujata had held Shankar in very high esteem and had called him an exceptional person. Shankar reacts with embarrassment rather than solemn acceptance. As he reads the letter, the rooftop rooms and even the hotel seem to laugh at him for believing such praise; the reception counter, once the boundary separating hotel staff from guests, joins the imagined mockery. This response does not cancel the force of Sujata’s regard. Instead, the remembered judgment unsettles Shankar precisely because it reaches him through the familiar, teasing world of the Shahjahan after she can no longer say it herself. Her affection survives in the letter as a final act of recognition, connecting the lively friend who fed him sweets on the rooftop with the absent woman whose kindness he cannot easily accept as his due.