After reading the story ‘Postmaster’, what idea about Ratan’s character do you build up in your mind?
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Answer:
Ratan is a “twelve or thirteen” year old “orphaned village girl” who helps the postmaster with housework in return for a portion of his meals. Tagore’s anonymous narrator notes that it is “unlikely” that she will get married, suggesting that her future is bleak: she is lower-class, lacks a family, and cannot marry out of her poverty or find employment outside of menial household work. At first reluctant to interact with the postmaster, Ratan gradually begins to enjoy her conversations with her “master,” in which she recounts her own family background and begins to form “affectionate imaginary pictures” of the postmaster’s own family life. Ratan also learns quickly from the postmaster’s lessons in reading and the alphabet. Eventually, Ratan comes to think of the postmaster as a father or husband, and she becomes dependent on his generosity and his conversations with her. She nurses him back to health after his sickness, “staying awake at his bedside all night long.” Finally, after the postmaster has recovered and decides to leave Ulapur, Ratan asks him to take her “home” with him—essentially, to adopt or marry her. The postmaster’s incredulous rejection of this proposal horrifies and embarrasses Ratan. After his departure, she wanders “near the post office, weeping copiously.” Destitute, lonely, and still uneducated, Ratan cannot leave the confines of Ulapur, though she wishes desperately to. She has neither the freedom nor the philosophy of the postmaster, who can comfort himself in his grief with the knowledge that death and separation are an inescapable part of life. Ratan, though, has no such knowledge, and thus, no such comfort
The Postmaster” gives a very touching account of the loneliness of a city-bred man who was appointed as a postmaster in a remote and lonely village. He felt like a fish out of water. Gradually, he developed an affectionate relationship with his maid Ratan. He would often talk about his family life back home. In order to fight his loneliness he would write poetry and teach her how to read books. One day the postmaster fell ill and Ratan looked after him like a nursing mother and helped him a lot. Fed up with the loneliness of his heart and the place, he eventually resigned from his post. The postmaster left for Calcutta but Ratan kept on wandering around the post office in the hope that her master would return some day. A strong emotional bond with the postmaster had developed in her heart and she kept on thinking that he also had a similar attachment towards her .
The story is a pathetic tale of two individuals. Both are sad and pained – one because of solitude and because he was forced to live away from his loved ones; the other because she has been left behind and the person with whom she had developed a strong feeling of attachment went away and did not seem to care for her. The story shows the futility of the love of the little village girl and the pathetic situation she has to face