Ya se han ido las chicas de Kidderpore

Ya se han ido las chicas de Kidderpore is an eight-line elegiac passage that enters the narrative at a graveside, where the narrator imagines Hobbs murmuring it behind the silent Sutherland. Its movement from the vanished women of Kidderpore to the Hotel Shahjahan, still drawing the living toward it, makes the verse a hinge between private mourning and the hotel’s seemingly endless life. The women are remembered through an unsettled mixture of desire, judgment, and loss: the poem preserves their presence even as its refrain-like opening declares them gone.

Identity and Placement

The expression is presented as verse, not as a separate narrated episode. It occurs during the narrator’s nighttime visit with Sutherland to a cemetery, where they have brought flowers for an old Hotel Shahjahan barmaid. The passage is not introduced as a formally recited poem. Instead, after describing Sutherland standing silently beside the flowers, the narrator says it seemed as though Hobbs were behind him, murmuring the lines. That framing matters: the verse reaches the scene as an imagined voice from the past, rather than as a conversation the narrator can verify.

The title phrase names the women as a group and places them in Kidderpore, while the surrounding scene links their disappearance to one particular former barmaid whose grave the visitors cannot locate. The text does not establish that this woman is one of the poem’s named girls, nor does it identify the poem’s author. Its association with Hobbs is mediated by the narrator’s impression, and the distinction leaves the lines suspended between recollection and elegy. The verse belongs to the cemetery scene, but its imagined speaker also seems to carry the hotel’s accumulated memory into that place of burial.

The Cemetery Scene

The poem follows a failed search. The narrator and Sutherland enter a silent cemetery at night carrying flowers, but cannot see well enough to find the woman’s grave. Sutherland has a lighter, yet its small light cannot make the vast burial ground legible. The narrator wonders where the boys of Williams Lane laid the barmaid to rest and observes that probably none of them remain alive. The uncertainty is concrete: the visitors have a gesture of remembrance, but no identifiable grave at which to complete it.

The flowers are finally placed beside a tree. Sutherland stands there without speaking, and that stillness provides the immediate setting for the imagined verse. The poem does not resolve what the search could not: it supplies no name, location, or recovered marker for the dead woman. Instead, its voice broadens the scene from one unlocated grave to a vanished collective. The narrator then has to return to the hotel, concerned that Marco Polo may already be shouting because he cannot find him. Mourning therefore takes place under a practical limit; the living must leave, while the cemetery and its unlocated dead remain behind.

Images of Desire and Precarious Survival

The poem’s first movement recalls women through their imposing faces and curled hair, then recasts them as dark sirens. Its language makes them striking and alluring, but not serenely romantic: fertile kisses are set against barren hearts. That pairing resists a simple celebration of beauty or erotic power. Physical intimacy appears abundant in the image, while emotional fulfillment is withheld. The verse’s perspective is itself uneasy, remembering the women through their effect on others even as its tone mourns their passing.

The next images place the women between cold and heat and describe them as holding firmly to what they have obtained. These details suggest lives organized around unstable conditions and hard-won possession, though the poem does not specify what the women have acquired or explain their circumstances. Its language shifts from sensual portraiture toward endurance: the women are not only objects of fascination but figures who cling to what is theirs. The passage preserves that pressure without turning it into a complete account of their lives.

The final image sets the women beside a flock of beardless sailors whose hopes of artificial pleasures have been unsettled. The contrast gives the stanza a social dimension: the sailors bring youthful expectation, while the women are associated with experiences that expose the manufactured or precarious character of those hopes. The poem does not narrate a particular encounter, and it does not tell what became of the sailors. Instead, it compresses a world of desire and exchange into a few images, leaving the women both vividly present in memory and difficult to know beyond the roles assigned to them.

Memory, Disappearance, and the Hotel

The poem’s opening declaration of departure resonates with the failed grave search, but the narrator immediately sets that disappearance against the Hotel Shahjahan’s persistence. The boys of Williams Lane may themselves be gone, and the barmaid’s resting place cannot be found; the hotel, by contrast, remains alive, eternally young, and continues to attract the hungry, thirsty, and lustful. This contrast gives the verse its larger force. People vanish from the city’s visible life, while the institution that drew them into its orbit appears to renew itself without remembering them in the same way.

The scene does not suggest that the hotel literally remembers its former workers. Rather, the verse and the narrator’s act of carrying flowers supply a fragile counter-memory. They gather people who might otherwise remain unrecorded: the old barmaid, the women of Kidderpore, Hobbs as an imagined murmuring presence, and the boys who buried the dead. Yet remembrance remains incomplete. There is no located grave and no confirmed identity connecting the barmaid to the poem’s collective. The passage’s elegy therefore preserves absence as well as presence: it gives the vanished women a voice, while acknowledging how little can be recovered about their individual lives.