Introduction:
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World is a short story written by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez in 1968. Márquez originally wrote it in Spanish, the story was translated into English in 1972, for publication along with a collection of Marquez’s short stories entitled Leaf Storm and Other Stories. It is set in a small presumably Colombian village that subsists along the shore beneath the mountains.
Kabuliwala is a short story written by Rabindranath Tagore. It is a story told by the father of a family in Calcutta about his daughter Mini and Abdul Rehman Khan a trader and peddler of the type known locally as a Kabuliwallah reflecting on his origin in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Discussion:
Both the handsomest drowned man in the world the Kabuliwallah are large men who appear in the stories because they attract the children’s notice. Although the little girl Mini is first afraid, of the Kabuliwallah because of his size and fearsome aspect, she soon overcomes her fears, and they become good friends. He gives her small gifts of nuts and fruits and enjoys her incessant chatter because she reminds him of his daughter so very far away.
The handsomest drowned man in the world is long dead when he drifts into the scene. This attracts the attention of the children who are not only not afraid they spend the afternoon burying him in the sand then digging him up again. This finally attracts their parents’ attention who decide to give him a proper burial. The fist thing that is immediately apparent is his great size. When carried inside, the body simply does not fit into the small configuration of their homes. There is no bed, or table that can hold him, and he barely fits inside when stretched out on the floor.
In Kabuliwallah, the death becomes real when Abdul Rehman Khan kills a man. When he is then sent to prison the stay in prison serves to create a feeling of life in death. Mini and his daughter grow up in the interval, a very real transformation. His return to the story is on the day of Mini’s wedding, symbolic of her ending her life as a child and entering a new life as an adult woman the last day of her transformative process.
The men leave to ask if anyone is missing from the neighboring villages as the women clean up the body. As they clear away the flotsam and aquatic detritus, they create the initial transformation and reveal his great beauty. They realize his name is Esteban, it could be nothing else and begin to piece together what kind of a man he was based upon his physical aspects.
Kabuliwallah contains a second transformation for him and Mini’s father. Khan’s quiet grief at missing so much of her youth and his daughter’s childhood moves Mini’s father to feel their common bond as fathers. Khan shows his daughter’s tiny handprint from when she was a child. This calls to focus the difference between the little girls he left behind and the elegant women Mini and presumably, his daughter became. The gift of the note to Khan made by mini’s father is the recognition of that bond. Although that causes some loss of luxuries at the wedding celebration much to his wife’s distress he remains convinced that helping Khan return to his child was the correct thing to do. He recalls the story with great warmth showing that the recognition of that fatherly bond had a transformative effect on his life.
The next transformation in The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World is when the women realize how Esteban could not have fit into their small homes and envision how much grander their lives and properties would be if built to his scale. This has a transformative effect, and they each quietly decide to do that. The door would be taller, and the houses grander. Their husbands suffer in comparison.
In both stories, there are themes of children, death and transforming emotion. In both the transformation is a process not an event. Girls grow up beauty is revealed, Mini’s father realizes a commonality, almost a brotherhood of fatherhood that he carries with him. The villagers singly and collectively decide to recreate their lives and village on Esteban’s scale so its beauty is visible to ships at sea.
