It’s ( Chowrindhee or in Bengali ???????) wonderful book by famous Bengali writer Shankar ( born Mani Shankar Mukherjee) . It is a bestseller from it’s first publication as a book by Dey’s Publishing in June 1962. Later it was published in different other Indian languages including English. It even has been published in many foreign languages all over the world. A movie named Chowringhee was made in Bengali and that was a hit.
The story starts in 60’s Calcutta. Shankar who once came to Calcutta loss his job as a clerk of last British lawyer Noel Barwell after his death. Without a stable job he was struggling to arrange his livelihood. One day he got a job at Shahjahan Hotel with the help of his friend. Here he meets many people and gets intriduced with there unique charecters, the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Kaberi Guha. With it’s accounts of the privet lives of the celebrities, sympathetic narrative weaving the past and the future it stands as a masterpiece novel. Soon Shankar becomes attached to the lives of the Shahjahan Hotel and its ordinary yet extraordinary lives of people. As the story continues we can see the up and down of life from the perspective of a employee of the hotel who is the author himself.
Throughout the novel the author shows the history of Calcutta, the colonial culture after independence, how the lives of people have been changed through time. There may be ups and downs but life continues.
It’s an masterpiece by Shankar.