The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore
Quick answer: The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore: full summary with the ending, Ratan and the postmaster, themes of loneliness and class, and Tagore's double ending.
A Calcutta man takes up a posting in a mud-walled village office, teaches the orphan girl who does his chores to read, and then leaves her, and Tagore makes those few quiet facts one of the most devastating stories in world literature. The Postmaster was written in 1891, early in the great decade of Tagore's short fiction, drawn directly from his years managing family estates in rural Bengal, where he watched exactly such postings, such villages and such partings.
Nothing in the plot qualifies as an event by the usual standards: no crime, no twist, no declaration. The story's power sits entirely in its final pages, where Tagore splits the ending in two and gives the man his philosophy and the girl her hope. This page covers the full summary including that ending, the two characters, the themes examiners expect, and the craft of an ending that refuses to console anybody.
The story in brief
The postmaster, a young man from Calcutta, is posted to the remote village of Ulapur, where he feels like a fish out of water: the pay is small, the office is a dark shed, and there is no one he considers company. His household help is Ratan, an orphan girl of twelve or thirteen who cooks his meals, lights his fire and, in the empty evenings, sits by his door talking with him about his mother and sister until his family feels like her own. To pass the time he teaches her to read, and she works through the alphabet with the whole devotion of a child who has never been given anything before. When the rains bring him down with fever, Ratan nurses him through it like a small determined mother, and it is her face he sees when the illness lifts.
Recovered, he decides he cannot bear the place. He applies for a transfer, is refused, and resigns. When he tells Ratan he is going home, she asks, after a night of turning it over, whether he will take her with him, and he laughs at the idea, that laugh being the sentence the story never forgives. On the morning of his departure he offers her nearly all his final pay; she drops to the ground, begs him not to give her anything, and runs away. His boat sails on the swollen river, and a pain rises in him, a longing to go back for the nameless orphan, but the wind fills the sails, the current runs, and he settles himself with grown-up philosophy: life is full of partings and of deaths, and what use is going back? Ratan has no philosophy. The story ends with her still wandering round and round the post office in tears, clinging to the hope that her Dadababu might return, while a new postmaster takes up the work, because that, Tagore says plainly, is how the human heart is: it holds to false hope against all reason, and lets go only when the hope has finished bleeding it.
The people of the story
Two figures, and the gulf between them, are the entire cast.
Themes: kindness taken and kindness meant
The standard readings are all sound. The Postmaster is about loneliness and the unequal attachments it breeds, about class and the invisible line that lets a gentleman resign and go home while a village orphan can be left like furniture, and about the difference between affection as pastime and affection as everything. The alphabet lessons carry the class theme in miniature: he gives her literacy to kill his own boredom, and she receives it as love, and both are telling the truth about the same hours.
The sharper observation is that the story contains no villain and needs none. The postmaster never lies to Ratan, never exploits her, and does one genuinely generous thing at the end, offering his salary. The damage is done entirely by inattention, by a man not troubling to imagine what his ordinary friendliness weighs in a life that has nothing else on the scale. Tagore's target is not cruelty but carelessness, which is far more common, and the story hurts because most readers have stood, at some time, on both sides of that line.
The craft: the ending split in two
The final movement is the story's masterstroke. Tagore ends twice, once for each character. The postmaster gets motion, a boat, a river, a swelling wind, and the anaesthetic of philosophy: partings are the way of the world. Ratan gets stillness, circling a shed with no philosophy at all, only the naked hope he has outgrown. By setting the two consciousnesses side by side and refusing to reconcile them, Tagore indicts the man's consolation without a word of commentary, since we have just seen what it costs and who pays. Chekhov was working the same vein in the same years, but the split ending here is entirely Tagore's own, and endings this honest about both hearts are exactly what the Emotional Impact marks are looking for when Writory's Short Story Contest opens on 1 September 2026.
Note also the discipline of scale. Tagore keeps every event small, lessons, a fever, a laugh, a refused handful of money, because the smallness is the meaning: a life can be assembled and demolished out of materials nobody would call events. Writers who feel their stories need bigger happenings should study how much weight this story lifts with a single sentence of laughter.
Why the laugh is the turning point
Ask where the story breaks, and the answer is not the resignation or the departure but the moment Ratan asks to come along and the postmaster laughs, saying what an idea. He never considers it seriously enough to refuse it. The laugh tells Ratan, and the reader, her exact standing: not low, but nonexistent, outside the space of things that can even be weighed. Tagore then gives the laugh a long echo, telling us the girl heard it in her ears half the night. If you want a model for turning points that cost nothing to stage and everything to receive, this is the one to memorise.
What poets can take from this
- In exams, quote the structure, not just the mood: point to the split ending, his philosophy on the boat against her hopeless circling of the post office.
- Name the laugh as the story's turning point and explain what it reveals: her request was never even admitted to the realm of possible things.
- Use the alphabet lessons for the class theme; the same hours are a pastime to him and a family to her, and neither is lying.
- For your own writing, let inattention do the damage; a careless character wounds more believably, and more commonly, than a cruel one.
- Try a double ending: close once for the character who can rationalise the loss and once for the one who cannot, and do not reconcile them.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a temporary person, a locum, a substitute teacher, a six-month tenant, becomes the centre of someone's world without noticing. End it twice: once inside the mind of the one who leaves, and once beside the one who stays.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Postmaster?
The postmaster resigns and sails home, soothing his brief pang of guilt with the philosophy that life is full of partings. Ratan refuses his parting money and is left wandering around the post office in tears, still hoping her Dadababu will come back, a hope the story tells us is false.
Why does the postmaster laugh when Ratan asks to go with him?
Because to him the idea is not a request to be weighed but an absurdity, which reveals her true standing in his world. The laugh, more than the departure itself, is the story's wound: it shows Ratan that the family she believed in existed only on her side.
What is the theme of The Postmaster?
Unequal attachment: loneliness pushes a gentleman and an orphan into a friendship that means recreation to one and everything to the other. Tagore's subject is carelessness rather than cruelty, and the class line that decides who gets to leave and who is left.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.