Sutherland Returns to Calcutta and Reveals His Origins

Sutherland’s return to Calcutta turns a question about the Shahjahan Hotel bar into a search for the buried history of his own family. The physician arrives as an apparently detached visitor, but his inquiries lead him from an old newspaper clipping to Williams Lane and the Lower Circular Road Cemetery, where the past he has tried to trace becomes painfully immediate. Only after leaving does he explain to Shankar that he was born in Williams Lane, the child of Jane Grey and Robert Adam, and that a priest took him to England after their deaths.

The Question Behind the Visit

Sutherland’s curiosity begins with the bar’s location and history. He asks whether it has always occupied the same part of the Hotel Shahjahan, then narrows the question: he wants to know when it reached its present location, looking back no further than the late nineteenth century, when women served drinks at the counter. Shankar initially assumes the visitor may be considering a practical change to the bar and offers to pass a suggestion to Markapala. Sutherland denies that he is proposing anything. His interest is historical, though its personal source remains undisclosed.

The hotel offers no simple answer. Since Simpson sold it, ownership has changed repeatedly, and successive proprietors have altered its interior according to their preferences. Apart from the building’s outer shell, little has remained intact. Sutherland’s question therefore meets a place that has repeatedly remade itself, while the evidence he seeks survives in fragments kept by people who remember its earlier life.

At Hobbs’s welcome, the subject of women serving at the bar summons an older and darker past. Hobbs says that only Mrs. Brockway, the wife of the priest at Union Chapel, might have been able to answer fully. Sutherland explains that he had tried to find her son, Frenner Brockway, because he wanted to learn something about his mother, but had uncovered little. He knew only that Brockway’s father had been a priest and that Brockway himself had been born in Calcutta. The remark points toward a personal investigation, but Sutherland still does not tell Shankar why the subject matters to him.

Hobbs’s Records and the Women of the Hotel

Hobbs has preserved newspaper clippings in a notebook stretching back several decades. One advertisement, issued by the Hotel Shahjahan, announces the arrival of Marian Booth and Jane Grey at Kidderpore aboard the SS Hawaii. It presents the two women as a guarantee of guests’ pleasure and comfort, then boasts that they will be kept locked away during the day and again after their work at night. Hobbs rejects the idea that they were legally enslaved, but says the humiliations he witnessed and heard about might deserve a new word of their own. The advertisement’s polished language and its blunt confinement notice expose the coercion beneath the hotel’s sales pitch.

For Sutherland, Jane Grey is not merely a name in an old advertisement. Hobbs’s clipping connects the hotel’s former barmaids to the history he has been trying to recover, though the full connection emerges only later. Hobbs recalls that he knew Silverton, a manager who would eventually buy the hotel, and that the establishment endured a period of neglect, physical decay, and shortages. The clipping is one of the modest records through which Hobbs has tracked changes in the hotel; he remarks that he never expected such trivial beginnings to lead to consequential events. The preserved paper thus carries both institutional memory and the personal history that Sutherland has come to confront.

After Hobbs finishes recounting the tragedy of Jane and Robbie, the difference between the two visitors is unmistakable. Shankar cannot hold back his tears. Sutherland, by contrast, shows little outward disturbance, thanks Hobbs, and leaves without speaking. The silence is not proof that the story has left him untouched: his subsequent journey makes clear that he is trying to approach the people in Hobbs’s account through places and gestures rather than explanation.

Williams Lane and the Cemetery

Sutherland asks Shankar whether he knows Williams Lane and the Lower Circular Road Cemetery. Although Shankar is due back at the reception desk, Satyasundar Bose signals that he will cover for him, and Shankar accompanies the doctor. Sutherland seems so absorbed that he treats Shankar almost as a hired guide, moving through the city with the bewilderment of a visitor confronted by an unfamiliar place. At the entrance to Williams Lane, boys are playing at the junction with Bowbazar Street. Their presence recalls the boys in Hobbs’s account, who had gone to the priest for news of the funeral. Yet the house where the earlier events unfolded may have vanished, replaced by another building, and the children in the street know nothing of the history Shankar imagines behind them.

A small beggar boy is filling a tin with water at a street hydrant when he falls and begins to cry. Sutherland runs to him, lifts him, and holds him against his chest, despite Shankar’s warning that the child’s leg has an ugly pustule and that the doctor will soil his clothes. Sutherland ignores the onlookers who gather around the foreigner embracing a street child. He wipes the boy’s runny nose with his handkerchief and asks in Hindi where his parents are. The boy points toward Sealdah Station, then suddenly struggles free and runs, apparently afraid that he is about to be abducted. Sutherland remains where he is, wiping his eyes with the same corner of the handkerchief he has just used on the child.

From Williams Lane, they go directly to the Lower Circular Road Cemetery. As evening darkens, flower sellers approach them at the entrance. Shankar has no money, so Sutherland buys flowers. Inside, the darkness makes it impossible to find the grave of the former Shahjahan barmaid. The boys who once arranged the funeral may no longer be alive, and no one can say where they laid her to rest. In contrast, the Hotel Shahjahan remains active, still drawing the hungry, thirsty, and desirous. The city’s lively institution persists while the people who suffered within its history become difficult to locate.

Sutherland places the flowers beside a tree and stands silently. The visit cannot restore a name to a particular grave or bring the lost house back into view. It does, however, give him a place to acknowledge the dead. For Shankar, the quiet gesture makes Hobbs’s story present in the city again, even as the physical evidence of that story has nearly disappeared.

The Letter and the Disclosed Past

Sutherland leaves for London early the next morning. Shankar does not see him depart and expects never to meet him again. A few days later, however, a letter arrives, and the visit’s hidden purpose becomes explicit. Sutherland apologizes for his behavior and admits that he had wronged Shankar and Hobbs by withholding the truth. He had intended to explain in person, but says his connections with India have ended: he is going to Tahiti on assignment for the World Health Organization and expects to spend the few days remaining to him there.

Sutherland identifies himself as the child born in Williams Lane to Jane Grey and Robert Adam. After the deaths of his parents, the priest took the baby back to England. The child was legally permitted to use the priest’s surname. This is the revelation that recasts Sutherland’s earlier conduct: his questions about the barmaids, his interest in Jane Grey, and his journey through Williams Lane were not the detached research of a visitor. They concerned his own origins and the family tragedy that had sent him away from Calcutta.

He explains that he wanted to spend his last night in Calcutta at the Hotel Shahjahan, and thanks Shankar for making that wish possible. He also expresses relief that women no longer work as barmaids there. In his view, Mrs. Brockway spared many women a life of misery; she is dead, so he cannot thank her in person. Instead, he has written to her son, Frenner Brockway. His gratitude broadens the meaning of the hotel’s history: the old advertisement records confinement and exploitation, while the woman who helped prevent that suffering receives belated recognition through Sutherland’s letter.

The letter closes the distance Sutherland maintained during the visit. He asks Shankar to understand why he lost his composure that night and to forgive him. His return has not recovered every trace of his parents or made the past fully knowable. It has brought him, instead, to the street where he was born, the cemetery where he leaves flowers, and the hotel where the history of Jane Grey’s work survives in Hobbs’s clipping. The journey’s final disclosure turns these separate acts of inquiry and mourning into a single effort to face the life from which he was taken.