Ghost upon the Rail – General Understanding Quiz

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Approximate Reading Times

Quick Read: under 5 minutes
Short Story: 5 to 30 minutes
Novelette: 30 to 90 minutes
Novella: 1.5 to 2.5 hours

The Good Shopkeeper
Short Story by Samrat Upadhyay. Set in Nepal, an accountant in a struggling international company loses his prestigious job to a younger man with better computer skills. An affair with a nondescript housemaid teaches him that self-worth comes from within and not a fancy job or title.
Victoria and Her Kimono
Short Story by M. Shanmughalingam. A profile of 1940s Kuala Lumpur, ranging from the Monty Python-like goings-on at a leading secondary school to the brutality and privation under Japanese occupation and how, thanks to a home-made kimono, the "Tigress of Asia" saves her husband’s life.
The Man of the Crowd
Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe. A man people-watching from a London coffee shop notices a “decrepid old man” with a fiendish, unreadable expression. Curious, he follows the old man for twenty-four hours, learning nothing other than that he seems to want always to be part of a crowd.

The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
Grade 5-6 Story by Rudyard Kipling. A high-ranking Indian government official gives up everything and begins a new life as a wandering holy-man. He experiences earthly peace in a mountainside shrine above a small village, and reverence and permanent peace under a tree on the opposite side of the valley.
Swaddling Clothes
Short Story by Yukio Mishima. The callous swaddling of an illegitimate baby in newspaper and protagonist Toshiko’s conviction that it is destined to grow up a poverty-stricken criminal underlines Japan’s rigid class structure. Shortly afterwards, while taking a walk alone one night, she comes face to face with her prophesy.
Flight
Short Story by John Steinbeck. An unsophisticated nineteen-year-old from an isolated farm is sent to town alone for urgently needed supplies. The inexperienced youth gets drunk, stabs a man in an argument and flees into the mountains. There, in addition to his pursuers, he must face the perils of nature.
The Gilded Six-Bits
Short Story by Zora Neale Hurston. Two young newlyweds have what appears to be an almost prefect marriage until a boastful newcomer opens an ice-cream parlor in their small Southern town. Their bliss is interrupted when the man, who appears wealthy and sophisticated, seduces the wife with promises of gold..

Shiloh
Short Story by Bobby Ann Mason. In the same way that Shiloh Military Park is the site of a major turning point in the American Civil War, the couple in this story face several turning points of their own that lead to the wife seeking a new beginning in life.
Dusk
Short Story by James Salter. A woman faces a lonely future. Her only son is dead, her other children have moved on, her husband has left her, and her lover is reuniting with his wife. It is hunting season, and she identifies with the wild geese being shot for sport.
Clay
Short Story by Juan T. Gatbonton. A sensitive sixteen-year-old Filipino boy is left horrified and disillusioned after an American soldier he had come to idolize boasts about having seduced a pure woman he is infatuated with (his teacher) and reduced her to being “just like the other girls”.