Attention ICSE Students – All Schools
ICSE Sample Paper: The Postmaster: A Short Story by Rabindranath Tagore

Solved Contextual Questions (in continuation of the previous post)
iv) What do we keep doing repeatedly?
“We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe the weightiest proof against it, embracing it with all our strength.”
Finally a time comes when false hopes escape, leaving us almost half-dead by draining our heart’s blood. Time passes. Our wounds heal. But again “we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again.”

v) Do you blame the postmaster for his decision to leave without Ratan? What was Ratan’s reaction to the situation? How do you justify what both of them did?
From a moral point of view the postmaster perhaps committed a grievous wrong so far Ratan was concerned. It was not absolutely improbable or impossible for him to treat her as her own sister. May be if the postmaster had been poor and uneducated, he would have taken the orphan girl into his fold like even the poorest of people would do in such a circumstance. However, the postmaster reacted as any city bred and educated man would have done and so he is not to be blamed.
Ratan reacted to the situation in a miserable manner, mistaking despair to be hope and the inevitable (unavoidable) to be false. In the process, her heart bled profusely, making her sorrow and agony to be inconsolable.
The greatest justification of what both of them did is that such brief preludes of intense hopefulness and acute agony (in case of Ratan) are but very familiar milestones in life’s journey. On the other hand, the postmaster’s mild betrayal of Ratan (mild because what the postmaster did was commonplace) i.e. the act of forsaking a helpless orphaned girl is not much to talk about.

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