One Hundred Rupees (Bunin)

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One Hundred Rupees
rus. Сто рупий · 1944
Summary of a Short Story
The original takes ~2 min to read
Microsummary
A visitor at a Dutch hotel watched a silent exotic woman daily. She had coffee-colored skin and remarkable eyelashes. One morning, the Malay servant offered him 100 rupees for unknown reasons.

Division into sections is editorial.

A mysterious woman in the hotel courtyard

Every morning, the narrator observed a peculiar woman in the courtyard of the old Dutch hotel where he was staying. The hotel was situated in coconut forests along an ocean shore. The woman would recline in a reed armchair in the shade cast by the building, just a short distance from the veranda.

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The Narrator — narrator, presumably a man, staying at a Dutch hotel on an ocean shore in a tropical location, observes the mysterious woman daily, visits town regularly.

Each morning, a Malay servant would bring the woman a cup of golden tea on a tray and place it on a small table beside her armchair. The servant would speak to her respectfully, bow, and then withdraw. After he left, the woman would continue to recline, slowly fanning herself and rhythmically fluttering her remarkable eyelashes.

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The Malay Servant — tall man with yellow face and narrow eyes, dressed in white canvas jacket and trousers, serves tea to the woman, speaks deferentially, later approaches the narrator about payment.

She sprawled in a reed armchair in the light hot shade that fell from the building... His bare feet crunching over the gravel, a tall, yellow-faced, agonizingly narrow-eyed Malay... would bring her a tray with a golden tea

The narrator found himself wondering what kind of earthly creature she might be. Her small but strong body had coffee-colored skin exposed at her breast, shoulders, arms, and legs up to the knees. The rest of her torso and hips were wrapped in bright green cloth. She wore yellow-wood sandals with red straps that revealed her small feet with red-painted toenails.

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The Mysterious Woman — young woman with coffee-colored skin, small but strong body, tar-black coarse hair, delicate childlike face, huge black eyelashes, silent, dressed in bright green cloth, wearing gold rings.

Her coarse, tar-black hair was piled high on her head, contrasting strangely with the delicacy of her childlike face. Hollow gold rings swung from the lobes of her small ears. Most striking of all were her improbably huge and magnificent black eyelashes, which reminded the narrator of butterflies fluttering on Indian flowers.

And improbably huge and magnificent were her black eyelashes – the like of those heavenly butterflies that flutter so magically on heavenly Indian flowers... she truly was as if from some other planet.

The narrator found it impossible to describe her in human terms. Beauty, intelligence, stupidity - none of these words seemed appropriate. She appeared to be from another world entirely. The only thing that suited her was her complete silence. She simply reclined there, fluttering her butterfly-like eyelashes and slowly flapping her fan, day after day.

The Malays enigmatic offer of one hundred rupees

One morning, as the narrator was preparing to go into town, his rickshaw arrived at the hotel courtyard. As he was about to leave, the Malay servant met him on the steps of the veranda. With a respectful bow, the servant quietly spoke to him in English.

Once, in the morning, when into the courtyard of the hotel ran the rickshaw with which I usually went into town, the Malay met me on the steps of the veranda and, with a bow, said quietly in English: "One hundred rupees, sir."

The Malay simply said, "One hundred rupees, sir." The story ends with this enigmatic offer, dated May 24, 1944. The nature of this proposition - whether it was payment for services, an offer to sell something, or perhaps even an offer of the mysterious woman herself - remained unexplained, leaving the reader to contemplate its meaning and the moral implications of this brief but charged encounter in a colonial setting.