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Elective English—IV

Notes Gitanjali: Song Offerings 1912
Glimpses of Bengal 1991
The Home and the World 1985
The Hungry Stones 1916

I Won’t Let you Go: Selected Poems 1991
The King of the Dark Chamber 1914
The Lover of God 2003
Mashi 1918

My Boyhood Days 1943
My Reminiscences 1991
Nationalism 1991
The Post Office 1914

Sadhana: The Realisation of Life 1913
Selected Letters 1997
Selected Poems 1994
Selected Short Stories 1991

Songs of Kabir 1915
The Spirit of Japan 1916
Stories from Tagore 1918
Stray Birds 1916

Vocation 1913

10.6 Short Story

Once there was a King

“Once upon a time there was a king.”
When we were children there was no need to know who the king in the fairy story was. It didn’t
matter whether he was called Shiladitya or Shaliban, whether he lived at Kashi or Kanauj. The
thing that made a seven-year-old boy’s heart go thump, thump with delight was this one sovereign
truth, this reality of all realities: “Once there was a king.”
But the readers of this modern age are far more exact and exacting. When they hear such an
opening to a story, they are at once critical and suspicious. They apply the searchlight of science
to its legendary haze and ask: “Which king?”
The story-tellers have become more precise in their turn. They are no longer content with the
old indefinite, “There was a king,” but assume instead a look of profound learning and begin:
“Once there was a king named Ajatasatru.”
The modern reader’s curiosity, however, is not so easily satisfied. He blinks at the author
through his scientific spectacles and asks again: “Which Ajatasatru?”

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