Every anthology lives or dies a little by its title story, and Neeta Chaudhari’s “Pot of Gold” — the tale that lends Pot of Gold and Other Real Treasures its name — is a fitting centrepiece for the collection. The story begins in Miss Dunn’s classroom, where a lesson on the colours of the rainbow spirals into an old Irish legend about a pot of gold waiting at its end, and from there follows Rohan and Sara as a sudden storm, a rainbow, and a fallen tree lead them not to treasure, but to a trapped, injured puppy hidden beneath the branches. What makes the story work so well is its patience.
Chaudhari does not rush the children toward their discovery; instead, she lingers on the small, tender details — Rohan noticing the wound on the puppy’s paw, Sara suggesting turmeric as an antiseptic, the two of them building a secret hideout in the backyard rather than risking the puppy being turned away. These are the kinds of details that make the story feel lived-in rather than didactic, and by the time Sara’s parents discover “Goldie” and agree to let the children keep him, the resolution feels thoroughly earned rather than convenient.
The closing line, in which the children realise that “the real treasure wasn’t gold coins, but happiness,” could easily have tipped into cliché in less careful hands. Instead, because the story has spent its pages showing rather than telling — the children’s care for an injured, frightened animal, their courage in facing a difficult conversation with the adults in their lives — the sentiment lands with genuine warmth rather than sentimentality. It is, in many ways, the ideal encapsulation of what this collection does best: taking a familiar idea (the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end) and quietly redirecting it toward a truer, more meaningful kind of wealth. Structurally, the story also does useful work for the collection as a whole, folding in a science lesson (the VIBGYOR spectrum, the physics of a rainbow) alongside its emotional narrative, a small but clever way of keeping the storytelling grounded in the classroom setting so many of these tales share.
Young readers are likely to come away from it both a little more informed and a little more attached to the idea that kindness toward the vulnerable — whether an abandoned puppy or, elsewhere in the collection, a lonely classmate — is its own reward. Given that this is the story chosen to title the entire anthology, it bears the weight of representing the book’s spirit, and it does so comfortably. Warm without being saccharine, instructive without being obvious, “A Pot of Gold” is a fine example of Chaudhari’s ability to write stories that children will want to read again, long after the lesson has quietly settled in.
*Ashish Singh is an award winning senior journalist with over 18 years of experience in defence and strategic affairs.
