Is the postmaster a pedophile?   Does he love Ratan in the child-adult sort of way or does he love her in the lover-lover sort of way? Please explain.

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The famous Indian film director Satyajit Ray made a beautiful film titled Two Daughters in 1961 based on two stories by Rabindranath Tagore. The film is available on DVD and probably on videotape. (I watched it on a DVD I rented from a Blockbuster. You might be able to get it through your public library.) The first of the two stories is an adaptation of "The Postmaster." There is not the slightest suggestion of an improper relationship between the postmaster and the orphan girl. It seems to be a story about caste differences. When the postmaster leaves the village he abandons the girl without showing any feelings, although the poor girl loves him and has been so good to him. Ray wrote the adaptation and directed the film. He obviously did not consider that there was any pedophile intent in Tagore's story. The other story in Two Daughters is about a much older woman and is not related to the first one. (Ray is best known to Westerners for his trilogy The World of Apu, often placed on critics' best-of-all-time-films lists.)

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