The narrator’s unemployment after being fired by Shahjahan Hotel

The narrator’s unemployment after being fired by the Hotel Shahjahan is a rupture in both livelihood and identity: dismissed as part of a management change, he loses the work and shelter that had organized his life, then crosses a mocking city before finding grounds to resist despair. The episode moves from the clipped procedure of a termination meeting to an expansive night walk, where streets and hotel lights seem to judge him and the stars offer a quieter alternative. Its ending does not restore his position, but it refuses to make dismissal the final measure of his future.

Dismissal and Its Terms

In Jimmy’s office, Phokla Chatterjee is present when the narrator is informed that his services will no longer be needed from the following day. The timing is tied to the end of the month and to an imminent inspection of the cabaret by Mr Chatterjee: the matter must be examined carefully, Jimmy explains, and the end of the month makes the change convenient. The termination is presented as a management decision already worked out, not as a discussion in which the narrator can plead his case.

Phokla explains the financial terms. The records show that Marco Polo had given the narrator a temporary contract, so its provisions did not entitle him to an additional month’s salary. The new management nevertheless chooses not to exploit that technicality and will give him a month’s extra pay. Jimmy hands him an envelope full of banknotes; Phokla ends the exchange with a brief goodnight, leaving no opening for the narrator to answer. The payment softens the immediate financial blow without changing the essential fact: his employment ends the next day, and the decision has been made without his participation.

The explanation Rosie later gives on the roof identifies the policy behind the dismissal. Jimmy had already presented Mr Chatterjee with a detailed plan, and the new management wants only girls at the reception counter. Rosie says she tried to stop Jimmy while he was typing and pleaded with him, but could not alter the outcome. Her account makes clear that the narrator is displaced by a staffing policy, rather than by a failing described in the meeting. Her attempted intervention distinguishes personal sympathy from institutional power: she regrets what has happened, but her plea cannot reverse the plan.

From the Hotel to the Streets

The narrator feels that his world is collapsing around him. As he heads for the roof, he finds Rosie waiting there; she climbs up with him and tells him she is sorry. That encounter gives the dismissal a human witness, but not a remedy. The hotel has been his recent realm, and now its employment decision threatens his place within it at the same moment that it removes his job.

Later, after the cabaret has ended and the Hotel Shahjahan has fallen quiet, the narrator runs downstairs with Bose-da’s letter in his pocket. He experiences the rooms as if they have discovered what the letter says and are laughing at the judgment it contains: Sujata-di has called him exceptional. The tables, chairs, stairs, and familiar reception counter seem to join in the ridicule. The counter, once a place he knew through his work, offers no sympathy in his imagination; instead, its imagined scorn turns the distinction between employee and hotel into an accusation directed at him. The letter’s praise, which might ordinarily have been a comfort, becomes unbearable in the immediate aftermath of rejection.

Outside, the neon lights of the Hotel Shahjahan continue blinking as the streets lie asleep. The narrator is unemployed and without a roof, and says that everything he had is gone. The scene recalls an earlier humiliation inflicted by an uneducated doorman on Clive Street. That memory makes the present shame feel like a recurrence rather than an isolated wound: once again, the narrator feels exposed to ridicule when he is already vulnerable. Now, however, the mockery seems to come from the whole inanimate city. Central Avenue, Dharmatala Street, and Chowringhee Road appear to sleep while the hotel’s lights taunt the dismissed employee.

A Walk Through a Mocking City

Without noticing when he has crossed Central Avenue, Chowringhee, and Park Street, the narrator reaches the junction of Theatre Road, walking as if out of his mind. The orderly row of streetlamps seems to take its turn laughing at him. This progression makes the walk feel less like a chosen route than a movement driven by shock: familiar streets pass beneath him while his attention remains caught in the humiliation of losing his place.

At the site of what is now the Birla Planetarium, he turns his attention to the stars. The large group of trees on the way toward the Victoria Memorial calms him. In his perception, the trees and distant stars do not ridicule him; they leave open the possibility that the judgment contained in Bose-da’s letter might not be false. Their silence matters beside the hotel’s imagined laughter. Neither the trees nor the stars promise employment, shelter, or vindication; they simply withhold the certainty of condemnation that the narrator has projected onto the city.

Refusal of Despair

After his mind settles, the narrator returns and stops on Chittaranjan Avenue, where the tired neon lights of the Hotel Shahjahan remain visible in the distance. Looking back at the place that has been his extraordinary realm, he recalls a passage by Rudyard Kipling, who had stayed in another old Calcutta hotel in the late nineteenth century. Kipling’s remembered night vision concludes in a prayer affirming universal corruption and ruin. The narrator recognizes that, alone in Calcutta at midnight, without a job or a roof, he could have made the same appeal to destruction.

He does not. Despite his grievances, anger, offences, and resentment, the narrator cannot give assent to that vision of universal doom. The contrast is not that his material loss has been repaired: he remains fired, and the Hotel Shahjahan’s lights still flicker behind him. Rather, the stars give him strength, and the time ahead appears generous and infinite. He imagines that the sinful city may someday be sanctified by goodness. After one last look at the hotel, the dismissal remains a real and immediate defeat, but it no longer determines the entire horizon of what may follow.