The Postmaster

By Rabindranath Tagore
The postmaster first took up his duties in the village of Ulapur. Though the village
was a small one, there was an indigo factory nearby, and the proprietor, an
Englishman, had managed to get a post office established.
Our postmaster belonged to Calcutta. He felt like a fish out of water in this remote
village. His office and living-room were in a dark thatched shed, not far from a green,
slimy pond, surrounded on all sides by a dense growth.
The men employed in the indigo factory had no leisure; moreover, they were hardly
desirable companions for decent folk. Nor is a Calcutta boy an adept in the art of
associating with others. Among strangers he appears either proud or ill at ease. At
any rate, the postmaster had but little company; nor had he much to do.
At times he tried his hand at writing a verse or two. That the movement of the leaves
and the clouds of the sky were enough to fill life with joy—such were the sentiments
to which he sought to give expression. But God knows that the poor fellow would
have felt it as the gift of a new life, if some genie of the Arabian Nights had in one
night swept away the trees, leaves and all, and replaced them with
a macadamised road, hiding the clouds from view with rows of tall houses.
The postmaster’s salary was small. He had to cook his own meals, which he used to
share with Ratan, an orphan girl of the village, who did odd jobs for him.
When in the evening the smoke began to curl up from the village cowsheds, and the
cicalas chirped in every bush; when the mendicants of the Baül sect sang their shrill
songs in their daily meeting-place, when any poet, who had attempted to watch the
movement of the leaves in the dense bamboo thickets, would have felt a ghostly
shiver run down his back, the postmaster would light his little lamp, and call out
“Ratan.”
Ratan would sit outside waiting for this call, and, instead of coming in at once, would
reply, “Did you call me, sir?”
“What are you doing?” the postmaster would ask.
“I must be going to light the kitchen fire,” would be the answer.
And the postmaster would say: “Oh, let the kitchen fire be for awhile; light me my
pipe first.”
At last Ratan would enter, with puffed-out cheeks, vigorously blowing into a flame a
live coal to light the tobacco. This would give the postmaster an opportunity of
conversing. “Well, Ratan,” perhaps he would begin, “do you remember anything of
your mother?” That was a fertile subject. Ratan partly remembered, and partly didn’t.
Her father had been fonder of her than her mother; him she recollected more vividly.
He used to come home in the evening after his work, and one or two evenings stood
out more clearly than others, like pictures in her memory. Ratan would sit on the floor
near the postmaster’s feet, as memories crowded in upon her. She called to mind a
little brother that she had—and how on some bygone cloudy day she had played at
fishing with him on the edge of the pond, with a twig for a make-believe fishing-rod.
Such little incidents would drive out greater events from her mind. Thus, as they
talked, it would often get very late, and the postmaster would feel too lazy to do any
cooking at all. Ratan would then hastily light the fire, and toast some unleavened
bread, which, with the cold remnants of the morning meal, was enough for their
supper.
On some evenings, seated at his desk in the corner of the big empty shed, the
postmaster too would call up memories of his own home, of his mother and his sister,
of those for whom in his exile his heart was sad,—memories which were always
haunting him, but which he could not talk about with the men of the factory, though
he found himself naturally recalling them aloud in the presence of the simple little girl.
And so it came about that the girl would allude to his people as mother, brother, and
sister, as if she had known them all her life. In fact, she had a complete picture of
each one of them painted in her little heart.
One noon, during a break in the rains, there was a cool soft breeze blowing; the
smell of the damp grass and leaves in the hot sun felt like the warm breathing of the
tired earth on one’s body. A persistent bird went on all the afternoon repeating the
burden of its one complaint in Nature’s audience chamber.
The postmaster had nothing to do. The shimmer of the freshly washed leaves, and
the banked-up remnants of the retreating rain-clouds were sights to see; and the
postmaster was watching them and thinking to himself: “Oh, if only some kindred soul
were near—just one loving human being whom I could hold near my heart!” This was
exactly, he went on to think, what that bird was trying to say, and it was the same
feeling which the murmuring leaves were striving to express. But no one knows, or
would believe, that such an idea might also take possession of an ill-paid village
postmaster in the deep, silent mid-day interval of his work.
The postmaster sighed, and called out “Ratan.” Ratan was then sprawling beneath
the guava-tree, busily engaged in eating unripe guavas. At the voice of her master,
she ran up breathlessly, saying: “Were you calling me, Dada?” “I was thinking,” said
the postmaster, “of teaching you to read.” And then for the rest of the afternoon he
taught her the alphabet.
Thus, in a very short time, Ratan had got as far as the double consonants.
It seemed as though the showers of the season would never end. Canals, ditches,
and hollows were all overflowing with water. Day and night the patter of rain was
heard, and the croaking of frogs. The village roads became impassable, and
marketing had to be done in punts.
One heavily clouded morning, the postmaster’s little pupil had been long waiting
outside the door for her call, but, not hearing it as usual, she took up her dog-eared
book, and slowly entered the room. She found her master stretched out on his bed,
and, thinking that he was resting, she was about to retire on tip-toe, when she
suddenly heard her name—”Ratan!” She turned at once and asked: “Were you
sleeping, Dada?” The postmaster in a plaintive voice said: “I am not well. Feel my
head; is it very hot?”
In the loneliness of his exile, and in the gloom of the rains, his ailing body needed a
little tender nursing. He longed to remember the touch on the forehead of soft hands
with tinkling bracelets, to imagine the presence of loving womanhood, the nearness
of mother and sister. And the exile was not disappointed. Ratan ceased to be a little
girl. She at once stepped into the post of mother, called in the village doctor, gave the
patient his pills at the proper intervals, sat up all night by his pillow, cooked his gruel
for him, and every now and then asked: “Are you feeling a little better, Dada?”
It was some time before the postmaster, with weakened body, was able to leave his
sick-bed. “No more of this,” said he with decision. “I must get a transfer.” He at once
wrote off to Calcutta an application for a transfer, on the ground of the unhealthiness
of the place.
Relieved from her duties as nurse, Ratan again took up her old place outside the
door. But she no longer heard the same old call. She would sometimes peep inside
furtively to find the postmaster sitting on his chair, or stretched on his bed, and
staring absent-mindedly into the air. While Ratan was awaiting her call, the
postmaster was awaiting a reply to his application. The girl read her old lessons over
and over again,—her great fear was lest, when the call came, she might be found
wanting in the double consonants. At last, after a week, the call did come one
evening. With an overflowing heart Ratan rushed into the room with her—”Were you
calling me, Dada?”
The postmaster said: “I am going away to-morrow, Ratan.”
“Where are you going, Dada?”
“I am going home.”
“When will you come back?”
“I am not coming back.”
Ratan asked no other question. The postmaster, of his own accord, went on to tell
her that his application for a transfer had been rejected, so he had resigned his post
and was going home.
For a long time neither of them spoke another word. The lamp went on dimly burning,
and from a leak in one corner of the thatch water dripped steadily into an earthen
vessel on the floor beneath it.
After a while Ratan rose, and went off to the kitchen to prepare the meal; but she was
not so quick about it as on other days. Many new things to think of had entered her
little brain. When the postmaster had finished his supper, the girl suddenly asked
him: “Dada, will you take me to your home?”
The postmaster laughed. “What an idea!” said he; but he did not think it necessary to
explain to the girl wherein lay the absurdity.
That whole night, in her waking and in her dreams, the postmaster’s laughing reply
haunted her—”What an idea!”
On getting up in the morning, the postmaster found his bath ready. He had stuck to
his Calcutta habit of bathing in water drawn and kept in pitchers, instead of taking a
plunge in the river as was the custom of the village. For some reason or other, the
girl could not ask him about the time of his departure, so she had fetched the water
from the river long before sunrise, that it should be ready as early as he might want it.
After the bath came a call for Ratan. She entered noiselessly, and looked silently into
her master’s face for orders. The master said: “You need not be anxious about my
going away, Ratan; I shall tell my successor to look after you.” These words were
kindly meant, no doubt: but inscrutable are the ways of a woman’s heart!
Ratan had borne many a scolding from her master without complaint, but these kind
words she could not bear. She burst out weeping, and said: “No, no, you need not tell
anybody anything at all about me; I don’t want to stay on here.”
The postmaster was dumbfounded. He had never seen Ratan like this before.
The new incumbent duly arrived, and the postmaster, having given over charge,
prepared to depart. Just before starting he called Ratan and said: “Here is something
for you; I hope it will keep you for some little time.” He brought out from his pocket
the whole of his month’s salary, retaining only a trifle for his travelling expenses.
Then Ratan fell at his feet and cried: “Oh, Dada, I pray you, don’t give me anything,
don’t in any way trouble about me,” and then she ran away out of sight.
The postmaster heaved a sigh, took up his carpet bag, put his umbrella over his
shoulder, and, accompanied by a man carrying his many-coloured tin trunk, he slowly
made for the boat.
When he got in and the boat was under way, and the rain-swollen river, like a stream
of tears welling up from the earth, swirled and sobbed at her bows, then he felt a pain
at heart; the grief-stricken face of a village girl seemed to represent for him the great
unspoken pervading grief of Mother Earth herself. At one time he had an impulse to
go back, and bring away along with him that lonesome waif, forsaken of the world.
But the wind had just filled the sails, the boat had got well into the middle of the
turbulent current, and already the village was left behind, and its outlying burning-
ground came in sight.
So the traveller, borne on the breast of the swift-flowing river, consoled himself with
philosophical reflections on the numberless meetings and partings going on in the
world—on death, the great parting, from which none returns.
But Ratan had no philosophy. She was wandering about the post office in a flood of
tears. It may be that she had still a lurking hope in some corner of her heart that her
Dada would return, and that is why she could not tear herself away. Alas for our
foolish human nature! Its fond mistakes are persistent. The dictates of reason take a
long time to assert their own sway. The surest proofs meanwhile are disbelieved.
False hope is clung to with all one’s might and main, till a day comes when it has
sucked the heart dry and it forcibly breaks through its bonds and departs. After that
comes the misery of awakening, and then once again the longing to get back into the
maze of the same mistakes.

Rayner M. Salvaña EL 114

Analysis:
The story ‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore explores themes of
loneliness, love, and human connection. Imagine a young postmaster, far from home,
in a quiet village. He's terribly lonely, missing the hustle and bustle of his old life.
Then he meets Ratan, a sweet girl who helps him with his daily chores, and they
grow close. She looks up to him like a father, showering him with affection and
loyalty. But the postmaster, though he appreciates her kindness, doesn't return her
feelings in the same way. He sees her as a helpful child, not a romantic partner.
When the time comes for him to leave, Ratan's heart is broken. She longs to go with
him, but he can't, or won't, take her. It's a sad story, showing how two people can be
close, even deeply connected, yet their feelings aren't matched. Ratan's love is one-
sided, leaving her with pain and disappointment. The postmaster, though he escapes
his loneliness, carries a different kind of sadness –the regret of not fully
understanding the depth of Ratan's devotion.
This story isn't just about sadness; it's a gentle reminder that love and
connection are complex. Sometimes, what we offer isn't what someone else needs or
wants. It teaches us the importance of empathy –trying to understand another
person's feelings, even if they're different from our own. The ending is bittersweet, a
realistic portrayal of how life sometimes leaves us with unfulfilled hopes and the ache
of unspoken words. It makes you think about how easily we can misunderstand each
other, and how important it is to truly listen and see the world through another's eyes.