Idgah: Three Paise and a Pair of Tongs
At the Eid fair, Hamid buys something his friends cannot understand. Premchand lets an ordinary object carry a complicated love.
Modern lives & new voices · Hindi · Premchand’s Idgah
At the Eid fair, Hamid’s friends buy toys. He buys a pair of iron tongs.
He has three paise. His grandmother Amina burns her fingers lifting rotis from the griddle. The tongs connect the fair’s abundance to a need waiting at home.
It is an unforgettable choice. But there is more to Premchand’s Idgah than a lesson about buying something useful.
Let Hamid remain a child
Once his friends laugh at the purchase, Hamid turns the tongs into a champion. They can become a gun, a musical instrument, a fighter strong enough to defeat the fragile clay figures the others have bought.
His imagination does two things at once. It defends a choice made with love, and it helps him compete in a group of children who want to have the best toy.
That second impulse matters. Hamid has pride. He likes winning an argument. When the children finally exchange their treasures for a closer look, he admires the toys and admits their beauty.
The story lets him care for his grandmother while still wanting the pleasures around him. Its tenderness depends on that tension. If nothing at the fair attracted him, his choice would cost him very little.
An object with two audiences
To the children, the tongs become powerful through pretend play. To Amina, their meaning arrives through the work of her hands.
She first sees a hungry child who has spent his money on an odd purchase. When he explains, her anger gives way to tears. The same object has passed from shopkeeper to child, through a contest of imaginations, and into a household where its usefulness is painfully clear.
We can admire Hamid’s attention without treating deprivation as a desirable teacher. A child should be able to enjoy a fair; an older woman should be able to cook without burning herself. The story’s affection makes those needs harder to ignore.
Premchand makes ordinary domestic labour worthy of literary attention. The fingers at the griddle belong in the story as surely as the bright things in the marketplace.
Hamid brings home evidence that he has noticed.
Text used
This reading uses the Hindi school text of Idgah hosted by Hindwi, which identifies its source as NCERT’s Rimjhim, 2022, p. 24. It is a reading of that edition, not a claim to compare every Hindi or Urdu version. Plot details are paraphrased; the interpretation is Bharatiyata’s.
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