Short Stories By Rabindranath Tagore

kabuliwala

My five-year-old daughter Mini can’t stop talking for a minute. It only
took her a year to learn to speak, after coming into the world, and ever
since she has not wasted a minute of her waking hours by keeping silent.
Her mother often scolds her and makes her shut up, but I can’t do that.
When Mini is quiet, it is so unnatural that I cannot bear it. So she’s
rather keen on chatting to me.
One morning, as I was starting the seventeenth chapter of my novel,
Mini came up to me and said, ‘Father, Ramdoyal the gatekeeper calls a
crow a kauyā instead of a kāk. He doesn’t know anything, does he!’
Before I had a chance to enlighten her about the multiplicity of
languages in the world, she brought up another subject. ‘Guess what,
Father, Bhola says it rains when an elephant in the sky squirts water
through its trunk. What nonsense he talks! On and on, all day.’
Without waiting for my opinion on this matter either, she suddenly
asked, ‘Father, what relation is Mother to you?’
‘Good question,’
1
I said to myself, but to Mini I said, ‘Run off and play
with Bhola. I’ve got work to do.’
But she then sat down near my feet beside my writing-table, and,
slapping her knees, began to recite ‘āgḍum bāgḍum’ at top speed.
Meanwhile, in my seventeenth chapter, Pratap Singh was leaping under
cover of night from his high prison-window into the river below, with
Kanchanmala in his arms.
My study looks out on to the road. Mini suddenly abandoned the
‘āgḍum bāgḍum’ game, ran over to the window and shouted,
‘Kabuliwallah, Kabuliwallah!’
Dressed in dirty baggy clothes, pugree on his head, bag hanging from
his shoulder, and with three or four boxes of grapes in his hands, a tall
Kabuliwallah was ambling along the road. It was hard to say exactly
what thoughts the sight of him had put into my beloved daughter’s
mind, but she began to shout and shriek at him. That swinging bag spells
trouble, I thought: my seventeenth chapter won’t get finished today. But just as the Kabuliwallah, attracted by Mini’s yells, looked towards us
with a smile and started to approach our house, Mini gasped and ran
into the inner rooms, disappearing from view. She had a blind
conviction that if one looked inside that swinging bag one would find
three or four live children like her.
Meanwhile the Kabuliwallah came up to the window and smilingly
salaamed. I decided that although the plight of Pratap Singh and
Kanchanmala was extremely critical, it would be churlish not to invite
the fellow inside and buy something from him.
I bought something. Then I chatted to him for a bit. We talked about
Abdur Rahman’s efforts to preserve the integrity of Afghanistan against
the Russians and the British. When he got up to leave, he asked, ‘Babu,
where did your little girl go?’
To dispel her groundless fears, I called Mini to come out. She clung to
me and looked suspiciously at the Kabuliwallah and his bag. The
Kabuliwallah took some raisins and apricots out and offered them to her,
but she would not take them, and clung to my knees with doubled
suspicion. Thus passed her first meeting with the Kabuliwallah.
A few days later when for some reason I was on my way out of the house
one morning, I saw my daughter sitting on a bench in front of the door,
nattering unrestrainedly; and the Kabuliwallah was sitting at her feet
listening – grinning broadly, and from time to time making comments in
his hybrid sort of Bengali. In all her five years of life, Mini had never
found so patient a listener, apart from her father. I also saw that the fold
of her little sari was crammed with raisins and nuts. I said to the
Kabuliwallah, ‘Why have you given all these? Don’t give her any more.’ I
then took a half-rupee out of my pocket and gave it to him. He
unhesitatingly took the coin and put it in his bag.
When I returned home, I found that this half-rupee had caused a full-
scale row. Mini’s mother was holding up a round shining object and
saying crossly to Mini, ‘Where did you get this half-rupee from?’
‘The Kabuliwallah gave it to me,’ said Mini.
‘Why did you take it from the Kabuliwallah?’ said her mother.
‘I didn’t ask for it,’ said Mini tearfully. ‘He gave it to me himself.’