G‘afur G‘ulom and “Shum bola”

The main hero of the novella is a boy of about fourteen; his father has died and his mother works without rest to feed a houseful of children. Ashamed of having upset his mother, the boy leaves home to earn money for a month and ends up having adventures in the villages around Tashkent for more than half a year. With his friend Omon he spends a night among pickpockets and meets dishonest people such as a hypocritical eshon and Hoji bobo, who runs an opium den. What forces the boy to wander is poverty, orphanhood and the injustice of the times. In the extract in the textbook the boy defeats the habit of Sariboy, a tedious and stingy landowner, of wearing people out by asking “and then what?”: he invents a chain of tales so that bad news about the landowner’s own property pours down one after another, and Sariboy gets sick of asking. This method resembles the tricks in folk tales. The author’s language is full of folk similes — they make the story lively and funny.