Short Stories By Rabindranath Tagore

Housewife

When we were two years or so below the scholarship class, our teacher
was Shibanath. He was clean-shaven, with closely cropped hair except
for a short pigtail. The very sight of him scared boys out of their wits. In
the animal world, creatures that sting do not bite. Our teacher did both.
His blows and slaps were like hailstones pounding saplings, and his
sarcasm, too, burnt us to the core.
He complained that the relationship between pupils and teacher was
not what it was in times past; that pupils no longer revered their teacher
like a god. Then he would hurl his power down on to our heads, like a
slighted god, roaring thunderously; but his roaring was mixed with so
many coarse words that no one could have taken it for a thunderbolt.
His ordinary Bengali appearance, too, belied the noise he made, so no
one confused this god of the second stream of the third year with Indra,
Chandra, Varuna or Kartik. There was only one god like him: Yama, god
of death; and after all these years there is no harm in admitting that we
often wished he would go, there and then, to Yama’s home. But clearly
no god can be more malevolent than a man-god. The immortal gods
cause nowhere near so much trouble. If we pick a flower and offer it to
them, they are pleased; but they do not harass us if we don’t offer it.
Human gods demand far more; if we fall the slightest bit short, they
swoop, red-eyed with fury, not at all godlike to look at.
Our teacher had a weapon for torturing boys that sounds trivial but
which was actually terribly cruel. He would give us new names.
Although a name is nothing but a word, people generally love their
names more than their own selves; they will go to tremendous lengths to
further their names; they are willing to die for them. If you distort a
man’s name, you strike at something more precious than life itself. Even
if you change someone’s ugly name to a pretty one – ‘Lord of ghosts’,
say, to ‘Lotus-lover’ – it’s unbearable. From this we derive a principle:
that the abstract is worth more to us than the material, fees to the
goldsmith seem dearer than gold, honour means more than life, one’s
name more than one’s self.

Because of this deep law of human nature, Shashishekhar (‘Moon-
crown’) was intensely distressed when Shibanath gave him the name
‘Bhetaki’ (‘Flat-fish’). His misery was doubled by the knowledge that the
name was precisely pointed at his looks; yet all he could do was sit
quietly and suffer silently.
Ashu was given the name ‘Ginni’ (‘Housewife’), but there was a story
behind this.
Ashu was the goody-goody of the class. He never complained to
anyone: he was very shy – maybe he was younger than the others. He
smiled gently at anything that was said to him; he studied hard; many
were keen to make friends with him, but he never played with any other
boy, and as soon as we were released from class he would go straight
home. At one o’clock every day a servant-girl would bring him a few
sweets wrapped up in a leaf, and a little bell-metal pot of water. Ashu
was very embarrassed by this; he could not wait for her to go home
again. He did not want his classmates to think of him as anything more
than a schoolboy. The people at home – his parents, brothers and sisters
– everything about them was very much a private matter, which he did
his utmost to conceal from the boys at school.
So far as his studies were concerned he could not be faulted in any
way, but every now and then he was late to school and could give no
good answer when Shibanath questioned him. His disgrace on these
occasions was appalling: the teacher made him stand by the steps to the
building, bent double with his hands on his knees. His misery and shame
were thus displayed to four whole classes of boys.
A day’s holiday came (to mark an eclipse). The next day Shibanath
took his place on his stool as usual and, looking towards the door, saw
Ashu entering the class with his slate and school-books wrapped in an
ink-stained cloth. He was even more hesitant than usual.
‘Here comes the Housewife!’ said Shibanath, laughing drily. Later,
when the class was over, just before he dismissed the boys, he called out,
‘Listen to this, everyone.’
It was as if the whole of Earth’s gravity were dragging young Ashu
down, but all he could do was sit with his legs and the end of his dhoti
dangling down from the bench, while all the boys stared at him. There
were many years to come in Ashu’s life, many days of joy, sorrow and shame more significant than this – but none could compare with what
his young heart suffered on this occasion. Yet the background to it was
very ordinary, and can be explained in a very few words.
Ashu had a little sister. She had no friend or cousin of her own age, so
Ashu was her only playmate. Ashu’s home had a covered porch, with a
gate and railings in front. The holiday had been cloudy and very wet.
The few people who continued to pass by, shoes in their hands,
umbrellas over their heads, were in too much of a hurry to look round.
Ashu played all day with his sister, seated on the steps of the porch,
while clouds darkened the sky and the rain pattered.
It was the wedding-day of his sister’s doll. Ashu was giving solemn
and scrupulous instructions to his sister about the preparations for the
wedding. A problem then arose about who would be the priest. The little
girl suddenly jumped up, and Ashu heard her ask someone, ‘Please, will
you be the priest at my doll’s wedding?’ Turning round, he saw a
bedraggled Shibanath standing under the porch, folding his wet
umbrella. He had been walking along the road, and had taken shelter
from the rain there. It was Shibanath whom the little girl had asked to
be priest at her doll’s wedding.
Ashu dashed straight into the house when he saw him, abandoning
the game and his sister. His holiday had been utterly ruined.
This was what Shibanath described with withering amusement the
following day, to account for his calling Ashu ‘Housewife’ in front of
everyone. At first the boy smiled gently, as he did to everything he
heard, and tried to join in a little with the merriment all around him.
But then one o’clock struck, the classes were dismissed, the servant-girl
from home was standing at the gate with two sweets in a śāl-leaf and
some water in a shining bell-metal pot, and Ashu’s smile gave way to a
deep red blush around his face and ears. The veins in his aching
forehead began to throb; he could no longer hold back the flood of tears
in his eyes.
Shibanath took a light meal in his rest-room, and settled down for a
smoke. The boys danced round Ashu, boisterously chanting, ‘Housewife,
housewife!’ He realized that to play with your little sister on a school
holiday was the most shameful thing in the world, and he could not
believe that people would ever forget what he had done.