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Tagore would have been ashamed." Tagore's story changed attitudes toward migrants in 19th-century India - and might help do so again todayįirst published in Bengali in 1892, "The Kabuliwala" made Tagore famous. "The Afghan global diaspora, there's a lot of resistance to them. We now have something like 300 million people who are living in a country other than the one they were born in," Mehta says. "I think the entire world should read this story! Anyone who's dealing with refugees. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913 - becoming the first nonwhite person to win that prize. The museum is housed in Rabindranath Tagore's ancestral home, where he wrote many of his most famous works. This realization comes on the same day as the narrator is preparing to be separated from Mini as she marries and moves in with her in-laws.Įxterior of the Tagore museum in Kolkata, India. He now recognizes him as a fellow father who loves his daughter and has been dealing with the pain of being separated from her. The narrator feels ashamed that he judged the Kabuliwala unfairly. "I first read the story in my teen years, and now I'm a father - and it's all the more moving," Mehta says. He was away in India for her whole childhood. His friendship with Mini was born out of longing for his own little girl, whom he was forced to leave behind and misses dearly. He has carried it in his breast pocket for years. On it is a handprint, in soot, from his own daughter back home in Afghanistan. "We just don't want them in our homes - especially on the wedding day of our daughter."īut then comes the story's climax: The Kabuliwala pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. In our safe lives, they are a reminder of the chaos, of the hopelessness, of the disruption of other countries," says Suketu Mehta, an author who read "The Kabuliwala" as a teenager in school in India and then immigrated to the United States and wrote his own books about the immigrant experience. It's bad luck to have this pauper show up on his daughter's wedding day. He's older, even more bedraggled and still poor. Cover of the 1961 film Kabuliwala, directed by Hemen Gupta.Īt the end of the story, on Mini's wedding day, the Kabuliwala returns.