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With gratitude to my parents for their memories; much love to Arthur, and to Geoff and Miriam for their endless support.
The Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore published by Macmillan
First published in Great Britain 1994 by Methuen Children’s Books
This edition published 2018 by Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Text copyright © 1994 Jamila Gavin
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 4052 9279 5
Ebook ISBN 978 0 7497 4743 5
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
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Contents
Acknowledgements and Copyright
To Miriam – The hub of the wheel holds all its parts together.
Then they let loose a white horse. And it was decreed that, wheresoever this horse should wander, King Rama would follow, even to the ends of the earth, until he might be led to the only person who could forgive him.
Ramayana
‘Hey, Bublu! I heard something!’
The youngest boy, Sparrow, leaned over and shook the oldest boy.
‘Shut up, will you,’ groaned Bublu. It was hard enough to sleep at the best of times without being woken deliberately, what with the bitter winter cold and the fretful whimperings and nightmares, which racked them all on most nights.
Bublu enshrouded himself more tightly in the thin cotton sheet. He tried to ease the agony of the hard stone floor beneath his body, by rolling himself half over the limbs of the other boys. There was a murmuring of grunts and muttered protests, as everyone readjusted themselves in the knotted huddle they had formed around the ashes of last night’s fire.
But
