Stories from Tagore

About the book

This English collection brings together stories including The Cabuliwallah, The Home-Coming, Subha, The Postmaster, and Master Mashai. Tagore often begins with an ordinary relationship and discovers how unequal expectations or social circumstances make it fragile. A child's need for affection, a visitor's remembered family, or a teacher's devotion can acquire importance that another character scarcely understands. The narrative voice moves between sympathy and irony, allowing a small gesture to reveal a larger failure of recognition. Prepared as a school reader, the volume also includes explanatory notes and word-study material, whose educational purpose is stated in its preface. The stories themselves invite a less mechanical kind of attention: listening for feelings that custom, authority, or convenience has made easy to overlook.

• Attachment and separation
• Childhood
• Recognition and neglect

Why read it

For concise stories whose emotional force often grows from the unequal meaning two people give to the same relationship.

English story collection with educational notes