Moments: The Lost Child to The Happy Prince

The Lost Child is by Mulk Raj Anand, one of the first Indian writers to build a career writing fiction in English. The story is very short and it uses almost no plot machinery. A family sets out for a fair, a small boy is separated from his parents in the crowd, and a stranger tries to help him. That is all that happens. What makes it worth studying is the way it is told.

The narration is in the third person, but it stays at the child's height throughout. We are told what catches his eye, not what the adults are thinking, so the fair reaches us as a rush of colour, noise and smell rather than as a place with a plan. Because the parents are seen only from the outside, they never become full characters. For most of the story they are a pair of voices calling the boy along.

The first half is built as a list of wants. In the lane the child stops in front of a shop full of toys and asks for one, and instead of a flat refusal his mother quietly turns his attention to the countryside ahead. After that he keeps falling behind on his own account, pulled aside by a flowering mustard field and by the insects moving over it, and his parents have to keep calling him on. At the fair the pattern tightens and changes. He stops at a sweet-seller's stall, at a flower seller, at a balloon-seller carrying a bunch of many colours, at a snake-charmer playing a flute to his snake, and at last at a roundabout turning with children on it. Here he mostly does not even ask. He looks, he wants, and he moves on by himself, because he has already guessed what the answer would be. Anand never states that the family is poor or that the parents are strict; that silent guessing does the work for him.

The turn comes at the roundabout. This is the one thing the child asks for out loud and with courage, and it is the moment he gets no reply at all, because when he turns round his parents are no longer beside him. The writing changes gear immediately. The sentences get short, the boy runs in every direction, his voice is swallowed by the noise of the fair, and the crowd becomes a wall of legs and clothes that will not open for him.

The ending turns the first half inside out. A kind stranger lifts him up and offers him, one after another and in reverse order, the very things he had longed for earlier: a ride on the roundabout, the snake-charmer's music, the balloons, the flowers, the sweets. He refuses every one of them and asks only for his mother and his father. The list that opened the story as desire comes back as refusal, and that reversal is the whole argument of the piece, made without a single sentence of comment from the writer. Notice also that the story stops without telling us whether the child is ever returned to his family. Anand is not interested in the rescue. He is interested in the moment when a child learns what he actually values.

The Adventures of Toto is by Ruskin Bond. It is told in the first person by a boy looking back at his own childhood, and the central figure is his grandfather, who collects animals. Keep that arrangement clearly in mind, because it decides who is responsible for what: Grandfather's opinions, jokes and decisions belong to Grandfather as a character, not to Ruskin Bond as the writer, even though the narrator is a version of the young Bond himself.

The piece is episodic. It is not a plot that builds to a climax but a string of incidents, each one showing the same thing from a new angle: a monkey is a delightful animal and an impossible housemate. Toto arrives when Grandfather buys him from a tonga-driver who had kept him tied to a feeding-trough, where he looked thoroughly out of place. The description of Toto is affectionate and physical: bright mischievous eyes, quick clever fingers, pearly-white teeth and a tail that the narrator says adds to his good looks. Grandfather is charmed. Grandmother, who has met his previous acquisitions, is not expected to be, so Toto is at first kept out of sight in a closet, where he sets about pulling apart whatever he can reach.

The incidents that follow are the substance of the chapter. Toto is tied up in the stable with Nana the donkey and spends the night tormenting her, so that a peaceful animal is left disturbed and sleepless. Toto travels by train inside a big canvas kit-bag, and when his head appears the ticket collector rules that for the purpose of the fare a monkey must be treated as a dog, so a fare has to be paid for him. Toto develops a liking for a bath in warm water, and this ends with him climbing into a kettle that is heating on the fire, staying in as it warms, and having to be pulled out before he cooks himself. At mealtimes he is a thief, and one raid on a dish of cooked rice ends with the food gone and the dish smashed.

The ending is quiet and practical rather than dramatic. The family are not rich enough to run a private zoo, and Toto is sold back to the tonga-driver for less than Grandfather had paid for him. No moral is announced. Bond simply lets the account of the damage stand as its own conclusion.

When you write about this story, the two things worth naming are the humour and the affection, and the fact that they come from the same source: exact physical detail. Bond is funny because he watches closely, and he is warm because he watches without judging. Underneath the comedy sits a serious idea that the story never lectures about, which is that a wild animal kept in a house stays a wild animal, and that the cost of keeping it is paid by the household and by the animal itself.

Iswaran the Storyteller is credited to R. K. Laxman. It is, above everything else, a story about storytelling. The events matter less than the effect one man's tales have on the mind of the man who listens to them.

Mahendra is a junior supervisor with a firm that hires out supervisors to construction sites of every kind, such as factories, bridges and dams. The work moves him from one temporary posting to another, so he lives in whatever rough accommodation the site provides. Iswaran is his cook and companion, and he follows Mahendra everywhere. He is genuinely resourceful: he can produce a hot meal in a place with no market nearby, he manages the house, and he keeps Mahendra company in postings where there is nobody else to talk to. That competence is important, because it is the reason Mahendra trusts him.

Iswaran's storytelling is his other talent. He does not report an event; he performs it. He builds up slowly, stops at the wrong moments on purpose, adds description that is not needed, uses his hands, and only then arrives at the point. The style is borrowed from popular Tamil thrillers, and Iswaran applies it to anything, including something as ordinary as a tree lying uprooted across a road, which he can turn into a full scene.

His set piece is the elephant. An elephant escapes from a timber yard, comes through the market breaking whatever is in its way, and arrives at a school. In Iswaran's account he picks up a cane, walks up to the animal, strikes it at a particular spot on its toenail, looks into its eyes, and brings it down. He credits a Japanese method that he says he had read about. The reader is invited to enjoy the tale and to doubt it at the same time, and Mahendra does exactly that.

The last movement of the story is darker. Iswaran tells Mahendra that the site stands on what used to be a burial ground, and that he has seen a woman there with matted hair and a shrunken face, holding a small bundle against her chest. Mahendra laughs it off as one more invention. Then, on a moonlit night, he wakes to a low moaning sound, looks out of his window, and sees a shape holding a bundle. He is badly frightened. The next morning Iswaran brings his tea and remarks that Mahendra has now seen her for himself. That remark takes away the one escape he had left, which was to treat the night as a bad dream, and Mahendra decides to leave the place at once.

The story never confirms whether a ghost exists, and you should not pretend that it does. Two readings are open and both can be argued. Either the place really is haunted and Iswaran was telling the truth, or Iswaran's storytelling worked so well on a tired and isolated mind that Mahendra's own imagination supplied the figure at the window. Whichever you choose, support it from what happens rather than from what you would like to be true.

In the Kingdom of Fools comes from A. K. Ramanujan, a poet and scholar who translated and retold tales from Indian oral tradition. Knowing that it is a retold folk tale explains almost everything about how it reads. The style is flat and fast, the events follow a repeating pattern, the characters have no inner life and are named by their trade rather than by a personal name, and the comedy comes from logic rather than from jokes. Do not criticise it for lacking psychology; that is not the kind of story it is.

The kingdom is ruled by a king and a minister who are both fools, and they pass two orders. The first turns the world upside down: everyone must be awake and working at night and asleep during the day, and anyone who disobeys will be put to death. The second flattens all value: whatever you buy, whatever it is and however much of it, costs the same single small coin.

A guru and his disciple pass through. The disciple is delighted, because food is almost free. The guru is not, and his reason is the sharpest sentence of thought in the story: a place where people do not reason is dangerous precisely because you cannot predict what they will do next. He leaves. The disciple stays for the cheap food and grows fat on it, and that decision is what nearly kills him.

The central section is the chain of blame, and it is worth learning as a sequence because it is the heart of the tale. A thief digs through the wall of a rich merchant's house; the wall collapses and kills him. The thief's brother demands justice. In court the guilt is passed down a line: the merchant blames the man who built the wall badly; the bricklayer blames a dancing girl whose walking up and down the street had distracted him while he worked; the dancing girl blames the goldsmith who kept putting off her order so that she had to keep going to him; the goldsmith blames the merchant's father, who had pressed him with an urgent order; and since the father is dead, the king rules that the son must pay for him. Every single step is reasonable on its own, and the destination is absurd. That gap between sound steps and a mad conclusion is what makes the story funny and frightening at the same time.

The merchant is sentenced to death on a stake, and then escapes it for a reason no court could plan for: he is too thin, and the stake will not fit him. A fat man must be found, and the disciple, fattened on one-coin meals, is the one they seize. He remembers his teacher and calls for him. The guru arrives, whispers something to him, and then the two begin to quarrel loudly over which of them should be executed first, announcing that whoever dies first on this stake will be reborn as king of this country and the second as its minister. The king wants that future for himself, and he and his minister take the places on the stake instead.

Left without rulers, the people ask the guru and his disciple to take the throne. The guru agrees on one condition: the two mad laws must go, so that night is night again and things cost what they are worth. The point is not simply that wisdom beats foolishness. It is that the guru wins by using the fools' own way of thinking against them, because argument would have been useless.

The Happy Prince is by Oscar Wilde. It is written in the shape of a fairy tale for children, with a talking statue and a talking bird, but the target of its irony is the adult world, and the tone of the narrator is quiet, gentle and steadily sarcastic about the people of the town.

The statue stands on a tall column above the city. It is covered in thin leaves of fine gold, it has two bright sapphires for eyes, and a large red ruby is set in the hilt of its sword. The townspeople admire it, but the story is careful about the kind of admiration it gets. A councillor who wants a reputation for good taste praises its beauty while noting that it is not much use; a mother tells her crying son to take the Happy Prince as an example, since he never cries for anything; a disappointed man is comforted merely by the thought that somebody in the world is completely happy. Every one of these is a character speaking, not Wilde, and Wilde is using each of them to show a town that looks at a statue and sees only a surface.

A swallow arrives late in the season. His companions have already gone to Egypt, and he stayed behind because he had spent the summer courting a Reed. He settles for the night between the statue's feet and is dripped on, and when he looks up he finds that the Prince is weeping. The explanation is the emotional centre of the story: when he was alive the Prince lived inside a palace where sorrow was not allowed in, and he was called happy because he had never been shown anything to grieve about. Now, raised above the city and unable to move, he can see all of it, and although his heart is only lead, it hurts him.

The Prince then uses the swallow as his hands. The ruby from his sword-hilt goes to a seamstress sewing in a poor room, whose small son is ill with fever. One sapphire eye goes to a young writer in a cold attic who is too hungry and too cold to finish his play. The other sapphire goes to a little match-girl in the square who has dropped her matches in the gutter and is afraid of what will happen at home if she brings back no money. Having given away both eyes the Prince is blind, and the swallow will not leave him. He flies over the city instead and reports what he sees, and the Prince tells him to strip off the gold leaf by leaf and carry it to the poor.

Then winter kills the bird. He says goodbye, kisses the Prince and falls dead at his feet, and at that moment the leaden heart cracks in two. The Mayor and the councillors look up at a statue that is now dull and stripped, decide that it is shabby and no longer of any use, and have it pulled down and melted. The art professor at the university supplies the sentence that sums up their whole standard of judgement, saying that since the statue is no longer beautiful it is no longer useful. The councillors then fall to arguing about whose statue should stand in its place, each proposing himself. The broken heart will not melt in the furnace and is thrown out on a heap of dust, where the dead swallow already lies.

The ending steps outside the town's judgement altogether. God asks an angel to bring him the two most precious things in the city, and the angel brings the cracked lead heart and the dead bird. Everything the city valued, the gold and the jewels, has been given away; the two things it threw out are the two things that are worth keeping. That reversal is the story's whole point, and it works because Wilde has spent the earlier pages letting the town describe its own values in its own words.

These five stories come from very different places and traditions, so do not try to force one moral on all of them. There are, however, real connections you can use when a question asks you to compare, and knowing them helps you remember the stories as a set instead of as five separate summaries.

The first connection is between wanting and having. The child at the fair wants sweets, balloons and a ride, and finds within a single moment that none of it is worth anything to him. The disciple in the fools' kingdom wants cheap food, gets it, and is nearly executed because of the weight he gained on it. The city in Wilde's story wants gold and sapphires on a statue, and throws away the only two things with real value. In all three, what looks like a prize turns out to be either worthless or a trap.

The second is seeing. The Happy Prince is placed high enough to see the whole city and is destroyed by what he sees; the townspeople look straight at the same city and see nothing. The crowd at the fair does not see one lost child in it. Mahendra sees a shape at a window and cannot tell whether he is seeing a ghost or seeing his own fear. Sight, in these stories, is rarely simple.

The third is the failure of adults and authority. The parents are kind but distracted. The king and the minister are fools with the power to execute people. The Mayor and the councillors are vain and useless. Grandfather buys an animal he cannot manage. These stories are not hostile to adults, but they are consistently unimpressed by the people in charge.

The fourth is animals. Toto, the swallow and the escaped elephant all matter to the humans around them, but on very different terms. Toto is a comic disaster and is finally sold off. The swallow is the only character in his story who chooses love over his own survival. The elephant exists chiefly inside somebody else's tale, which tells you more about the teller than the animal.

The last connection is in the endings, and it is the one most worth noticing. Anand does not tell us whether the child is found. Laxman does not tell us whether the ghost is real. Bond does not offer a moral, only a sale. These writers trust you to sit with an unfinished ending, and an answer that invents a tidy conclusion for them is an answer that has misread the story.

Most of what goes wrong in answers on these stories is small and easy to avoid. Here is how to keep yours clean and accurate.

Get the names right. Write Mulk Raj Anand, Ruskin Bond, R. K. Laxman, A. K. Ramanujan and Oscar Wilde exactly. Character names matter just as much: Mahendra and Iswaran, Toto and Nana the donkey, the seamstress, the match-girl and the young writer. A wrong name in the first line of an answer weakens everything that follows it.

Check the speaker before you attribute a line. This is the single most useful habit for these chapters. Grandfather's decisions in the Toto story are Grandfather's, not Ruskin Bond's. The art professor's judgement about beauty and usefulness is that character's judgement, and Wilde puts it in his mouth in order to criticise it, so writing that Wilde believed it turns the story inside out. Iswaran's claim about knocking down an elephant is a claim Iswaran makes, not something the story confirms. Whenever you are about to write that an author said something, ask yourself whether the words in fact belong to a character.

Retell in your own words. These are short stories with strong plots, and it is tempting to reproduce sentences from the book. Paraphrase instead. If you do use a phrase from the text, keep it short and use it because you are discussing that exact wording, not as decoration.

Do not add an ending. Say that the story leaves the child's rescue untold, or that it leaves the ghost unexplained. Naming the silence is a stronger answer than filling it in.

Shape the answer to the marks. For a shorter answer, give one clear point, one or two supporting events described briefly, and one sentence saying what it shows. For a longer answer, take two or three points, give each its own short paragraph with support from the story, and finish with a line that ties them to the theme named in the question.

Name the technique instead of praising it. Words like nice or beautiful add nothing. You have better vocabulary available for these stories: repetition and reversal in The Lost Child, an episodic structure in The Adventures of Toto, a tale within a tale and an open ending in Iswaran the Storyteller, a chain of blame and folk-tale logic in In the Kingdom of Fools, and irony and self-sacrifice in The Happy Prince. Using the right term and then explaining it in one plain sentence is what makes an answer look prepared.