Resumo de Contos da Índia

The story in 10 parts

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   A bank clerk remembers a ship he never sailed

   The collection opens with The Finest Story in the World. Charlie Mears is twenty, lives in north London with his widowed mother, and works in a bank. He writes bad poetry and dreams of an immortal name. One evening he brings the narrator an idea for a story about a galley slave.

   The narrator buys the idea, and then Charlie keeps talking. He describes the oars, the chained rowers, the overseer with his whip and the rotten figs the men eat. He has read nothing on galleys, and he has seen the sea once. A Greek expert at the British Museum reads his sheet of scratches as very bad Greek, a complaint of weariness. Now the narrator understands that Charlie is remembering a life he lived long ago.

   Charlie would rather read Longfellow, and a verse of a Viking saga wakes a vivid dream of his own drowning. A young Bengali law student, Grish Chunder, shrugs and says such memories fade. Some knowledge sleeps in people who cannot use it, and a writer must catch it before it goes.

2. 2

   Three soldiers talk their way through trouble

   With the Main Guard takes place on a stifling June night at Fort Amara.

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3. 3

   Small children carry big tests of courage

   Wee Willie Winkie is the six-year-old son of the colonel of the 195th.

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4. 4

   Ghosts in rest houses and on hill roads

   The Rout of the White Hussars begins with a cavalry regiment that believes it cannot run.

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5. 5

   Pits, floods and the people who survive them

   At Twenty-Two follows Janki Meah, a blind old weaver who has become a miner.

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6. 6

   City lanes where nothing is as it seems

   On the City Wall is told from the window of Lalun, a beautiful woman who entertains guests in a little white room above the lanes of an old city.

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7. 7

   Two loafers set out to become kings

   In The Man Who Would Be King, the narrator is a newspaperman who meets a vagabond on a train.

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8. 8

   What the rulers of India do not know

   A thread runs through the book.

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9. 9

   Loyalty, love and the cost of both

   Loyalty, more than empire, is the real subject in many of the tales.

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10. 10

    Voices, frames and the storyteller in the room

    Kipling rarely tells a tale straight.

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