The Student Who Would Not Go Home: Bedtime Stories from the Mahabharata - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

A boy has been left at his teacher's house on the first night of the rains. By midnight he has stopped crying, tied up his bundle, and worked out that if he leaves before it is light he can be home by noon.

The teacher finds him by the fire. He says nothing about the bundle. He puts a stick on the fire and starts telling him about the others.

A boy is sent to stop a flooding riverbank, runs out of mud and stones, and lies down in the gap himself. A young man is given four days to fetch a queen's earrings, and loses them to a beggar who turns into a snake. A forest boy is refused a teacher, so he builds one out of clay and teaches himself to shoot better than any prince alive. A twelve-year-old with a bent back walks into a king's court and out-argues the man who has never lost. And a holy man who has studied for thirty-two years is sent four hundred miles to be taught what duty is by a butcher in a meat market.

Every story leads into the next, until the boy has to decide for himself whether to be at the gate at first light.

The Student Who Would Not Go Home tells eighteen stories about teachers and students from the Mahabharata, for children aged 6 to 10 and the grown-up reading to them.

• Eighteen stories, each about five minutes long, with the reading time printed under every title


• Every story ends with a question that leads straight into the next one


• Funny where it can be and honest where it can't, with no lecture tacked on at the end


• Hard stories are allowed to stay hard — the boy is allowed to object, and the teacher is allowed to agree with him


• The source is named after every story, so a curious child can one day find the original

Book Two of Before the Lamp Goes Out, the Mahabharata told at bedtime, one night at a time. Reads on its own; no need to have read Book One.

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