The Tunnel

This chapter is a prose story, not a poem and not a play. It is told in two numbered parts, Part I and Part II, followed by a short final scene set almost a week later, and a narrator describes the events and conversations throughout — there are no stage directions and no verse lines. The author's name is printed at the very end of the piece: it is Ruskin Bond, a writer well known for stories set in the forests and hill country of northern India.

The story follows a boy named Suraj, who cycles out of his town and walks through the jungle to a railway cutting — a narrow valley cut through a hill to carry the railway line — so that he can watch the midday steam train come roaring out of a tunnel. At the tunnel's far entrance stands a small hut belonging to the tunnel's watchman, an older man named Sunder Singh, whose job is to inspect the tunnel before every train passes and warn the engine driver of any danger. The story is essentially about the unlikely friendship that grows between the curious town boy and the watchman who has made his whole life inside the jungle.

The setting matters as much as the plot. Everything happens in and around one short stretch of railway line: tall evergreen trees, a heat-shimmering embankment, a watchman's hut with marigolds growing in front of it, and the tunnel itself, pitch dark at its centre with only a small circle of light at either end. Within this one small setting, the story manages to fit a train, a boy's curiosity, a watchman's quiet routine, and a leopard.

In Part I, Suraj waits near the tunnel to watch the midday train. When it roars out, "snorting and puffing like some green, black and gold dragon," he instinctively steps back from the heat and noise. Once it has gone, he walks along the embankment and into the tunnel itself, mostly out of curiosity — he wants to know what the inside of a tunnel is really like. It is pitch dark at the centre, the walls damp and sticky, and a bat and a lizard are the only signs of life. Coming out the far side, dazzled by the sudden light, he glimpses a flash of orange and gold moving between the trees on the hillside — an animal he cannot identify. Walking on, he meets the watchman, Sunder Singh, at his hut. In their conversation Sunder Singh explains, half-joking, that the tunnel is "truly my tunnel, since no one else will have anything to do with it. I have only lent it to the Government," and reveals that the animal Suraj saw was a leopard — his leopard, which visits this range for a few days every month and "minds its own business." Sunder Singh invites Suraj to come back the next evening to see the night mail, the train that passes around nine o'clock. Suraj says he will ask his parents, and leaves the watchman to his afternoon nap.

In Part II, Suraj returns the following evening. The two share tea and listen to the birds settling for the night. When it is time for his usual inspection, Sunder Singh takes his oil lamp into the tunnel, and while he is trimming it, a padded footfall and a rustle of leaves make him stand still for a moment before he returns to the hut, humming. Minutes before the night mail is due, a rhythmic sawing sound reaches them: the leopard is in the tunnel. Sunder Singh decides he must drive it out with his axe, because if it stays on the line it will be run over and killed. He tells Suraj to wait behind, but Suraj insists on coming along, "better than sitting here alone in the dark." Inside the tunnel the lamplight falls on the leopard, "not a very big leopard" but "lithe and sinewy," crouching between the tracks only five metres away and snarling. Suraj finds he cannot shout — his throat has gone dry — but when both of them shout together, the leopard, unsure how many humans it is facing, turns and vanishes into the darkness. They walk the length of the tunnel to make sure it has really gone, and return to the entrance just as the rails begin to hum with the approaching night mail.

The story's final movement jumps forward almost a week. Suraj is travelling through the very same tunnel at night, this time inside the train itself, with his father, who is going to Delhi on business and has decided to take the boy along. Suraj cannot see Sunder Singh in the darkness, but he sees the watchman's lamp at the tunnel mouth and knows his friend is out there. The train passes through the tunnel and on across the plains, and the story ends with Suraj thinking of the watchman "who would always remain a firefly for those travelling thousands as he lit up the darkness for steam engines and leopards."

Suraj is a town boy pulled toward the jungle by simple curiosity rather than daring. He does not walk into the tunnel to prove anything; the story says plainly that he "simply wanted to walk through, so that he would know what the inside of a tunnel was really like." That same curiosity brings him back the next evening, and it is what makes him refuse to wait outside when Sunder Singh goes to drive out the leopard — he would rather face the dark tunnel at the watchman's side than sit alone with his imagination. He is not fearless: his throat goes dry inside the tunnel, and he cannot manage to shout at first. His courage, in other words, is ordinary courage — the kind that keeps moving even while frightened — and that is more believable, and more useful as a model, than a boy who feels nothing at all.

Sunder Singh has made the jungle his entire world. He calls the tunnel his own, not out of arrogance but because he genuinely belongs there more than any government department does. He is calm around danger he understands — the leopard "knows him well," and he is confident it will not harm two humans even while he still takes the precaution of carrying an axe — and he is equally calm about small inconveniences, taking an afternoon nap under a banana leaf laid over his face to keep off the flies. His decision to drive the leopard out of the tunnel, at some risk to himself, reveals his character most clearly: he refuses to let the animal be killed by the train if he can prevent it, which shows a watchman's duty extending even to the jungle's wild residents, not only to human passengers.

The leopard is never written as a villain. It is "not a very big leopard," and even when cornered it only snarls and then flees once it realises it is outnumbered; Sunder Singh is careful to say it has "a weakness for goats and stray dogs" but will not harm people who leave it alone. Its presence raises the tension of the Part II tunnel scene, but the story never asks the reader to fear or hate it — only to understand that it, too, has a place in this landscape that the watchman respects.

Suraj's father appears only briefly, in the final scene, scribbling in a notebook while doing his accounts on the train. His one quoted remark — "I don't know where he gets to, most of the time... I think it's time he learnt something about my business" — tells us that Suraj has been slipping off on adventures like this one without his father fully knowing where, and that this trip to Delhi is partly meant to pull the boy back toward a more ordinary, business-minded life. The story leaves this gently unresolved: Suraj, at the window, is thinking about the watchman and his lamp, not about his father's accounts.

The clearest theme is curiosity as the beginning of courage. Suraj's entire adventure starts from one small question — what does the inside of a tunnel feel like? — and that same instinct to find out carries him, by the end, into a dark tunnel with a leopard in it. The story suggests that bravery does not always begin as bravery; often it begins as simple interest, and grows into courage only when something unexpected happens.

A second theme is coexistence with the wild. Sunder Singh does not see the jungle as something to be tamed or feared. He has a leopard he calls his own without owning it, night sounds he can name without being alarmed by them, and a duty that includes keeping the animals of the tunnel as safe as the humans who travel through it. The story never turns the leopard into an enemy to be defeated; instead, the real success of the tunnel scene is that nobody, human or animal, is hurt.

A third theme is the quiet, unseen nature of real duty. Nobody praises Sunder Singh for his work. No passenger on the night mail ever learns his name. Yet night after night he walks the tunnel with his lamp so that hundreds of strangers can pass through safely, and the story's closing comparison — calling him a "firefly" — captures exactly this: a small, steady light that does essential work without ever being noticed by the thousands who benefit from it.

Finally, there is a quieter theme of friendship across difference. Suraj is a town boy with a cycle, a school, and a father doing accounts; Sunder Singh is a solitary watchman who has chosen to live apart from towns altogether. Nothing about their lives naturally brings them together except the tunnel itself, yet across two short meetings they become real friends, trusting each other enough to walk into danger side by side.

The story is built around two very different train journeys through the same tunnel, and noticing the contrast between them is one of the best ways to understand how carefully the piece is constructed. In the first journey, in Part I, Suraj stands outside the tunnel in bright daylight and watches the midday train roar past him from the outside, as a spectator. It is loud, fast, and slightly frightening — "some beautiful monster out of Suraj's dreams" — but Suraj is never in any danger from it.

The second journey, almost a week later, reverses nearly everything about the first. Suraj is no longer standing outside the tunnel but riding inside the train itself, at night rather than at noon, sitting beside his father rather than alone. He cannot see the smoke, the sparks, or the hillside — only darkness through the window — and the one thing he searches for and finds is not the train but Sunder Singh's lamp, glimpsed for a moment at the tunnel mouth. The story has moved Suraj from an outsider admiring a spectacle to an insider who now understands, personally, what is happening in the dark outside his window.

This closing scene also quietly resolves the adventure of Part II without saying so directly. We are never told in so many words that the leopard stayed away, or that Sunder Singh is safe — the story simply shows us his lamp, still burning at his post, and lets that single detail reassure us that all is well. It is a deliberately understated ending: no dramatic reunion, no explanation, just a small steady light in the dark, which is exactly the image the story wants to leave us with.

Ruskin Bond's writing in this story leans heavily on sound words, many of which are explained in the textbook's own glossary and exercises: the train comes "snorting and puffing," the leopard makes a "rhythmic sawing sound," dry leaves "rustle," and the night is full of the "sharp call of a barking deer" and the "quaint tonk-tonk of a nightjar." These words do real work — they let a reader who cannot see the jungle still hear exactly how it changes from noon to dusk to night.

The story also uses comparisons that make the train feel alive. It is "some green, black, and gold dragon" and "some beautiful monster out of Suraj's dreams," and later it "thundered past Suraj like the beautiful dragon of his dreams." These similes are not decoration; they explain why a boy would cycle out of town and walk through a jungle just to watch a train for a few seconds — to him, it genuinely feels like glimpsing a mythical creature.

Careful scene-setting appears throughout, especially around the watchman's hut: marigolds growing in front, a small vegetable patch behind, a kettle boiling on an oil stove. These small, calm details are placed right before the tunnel turns tense and dark, so that the danger of the leopard scene lands harder by contrast.

Finally, the story is a good source of precise vocabulary worth collecting as you read — the glossed words themselves, such as shimmered, instinctively, lithe and sinewy, and defying, are exactly the kind of descriptive language this unit expects you to learn and reuse. Night mail is a good example of an open compound: two separate words that work together as one idea, the name for the night train.

This chapter is also used to teach how the word "would" can describe a habitual action in the past — something that happened again and again over a period of time, not just once. The clearest example comes directly from the description of Sunder Singh's daily routine: "Every day, before the train came through, he would walk the length of the tunnel. If all was well, he would return to his hut and take a nap. If something was wrong, he would walk back up the line and wave a red flag and the engine driver would slow down." Every one of these actions happened over and over, day after day, which is exactly what this use of "would" signals.

It helps to compare "would" with a close relative, "used to," because the two are easy to confuse. Both describe something that happened regularly in the past. The difference is that "used to" usually signals that the habit has stopped — it no longer happens now — while "would" simply describes the repeated action itself, without necessarily commenting on whether it still continues. "I used to paint when I was in Grade 4" tells you painting has stopped; "he would walk the length of the tunnel" just describes what he regularly did, as part of the routine the story is narrating.

Notice, too, that this "would" is completely different from the "would" used for imagined or polite situations (as in "I would like some tea"). Here it always pairs with a repeated action and often appears alongside a time clue like every day, which is the quickest way to recognise it while reading.