The Post Office

Amal, a young boy, is seriously ill and his adoptive uncle has been told to keep him indoors. From his window he talks to everyone who passes: the dairyman, the watchman, the flower girl. When a new post office opens across the road, Amal becomes convinced that one day the king will send him a letter.

Tagore's short play, written in 1912, is gentle, mysterious and deeply moving, a meditation on freedom and death through the eyes of a child. In 1942 the doctor and educator Janusz Korczak staged it with the children of his orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, shortly before they were deported.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.