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Story No. 539

A Story Told by a Hindu

Book Name:

Folklore of the Santal Parganas

Tradition: India

Once upon a time there was a Raja who had two sons and after their father’s death they divided the kingdom between them. The two brothers were inveterate gamblers and spent their time playing cards with each other; for a long time fortune was equal, but one day it turned against the elder brother and he lost and lost until his money and his jewellery, his horses and his elephants and every thing that he had, had been won by his younger brother. Then in desperation he staked his share in the kingdom and that too he lost.

Then the younger brother sent drummers through the city to proclaim that the whole kingdom was his; the shame of this was more than the elder prince could bear, so he resolved to quit the country and he told his wife of his intention and bade her stay behind. But his faithful wife refused to be parted from him; she vowed that he had married her not for one day nor for two but for good and all, and that where he went, there she would go, and whatever troubles he met, she would share. So he allowed her to come with him and the two set off to foreign parts. After sometime their path led them through an extensive jungle and after travelling through it for two days they at last lost their way completely; their food gave out, they were faint with starvation and torn with briars.

The prince urged his wife to return but she would not hear of it, so they pushed on, supporting life on jungle fruits; sometimes the prince would go far ahead, for his faithful wife could only travel slowly, and then he would return and wait for her; at last he got tired of leading her on and made up his mind to abandon her. At night they lay down at the foot of a tree and the prince thought “If wild animals would come and eat us it would be the best that could happen. I cannot bear to see my wife suffer any more; although her flesh is torn with thorns, she will not leave me. I will leave her here; may wild beasts kill both her and me, but I cannot see her die before my eyes.” So thinking he got up quietly and went off as quickly as he could.

When the princess woke and found that she had been abandoned, she began to weep and wept from dawn to noon without ceasing; at noon a being, in the guise of an old woman appeared and asked her why she wept, and comforted her and promised to lead her out of the wood and told her that Chando had had compassion on her and would allow her to find her husband again if they both lived.

So saying the old woman led the princess from the forest and showed her the way to a great city where a Raja lived. The princess went begging her way through the city to the Raja’s palace and there they engaged her as a servant.

Now her husband had also escaped from the jungle and sought employment as a labourer but no one would give him work for more than a day or two, and at last his search for work brought him to the city in which the princess was; and there he was engaged as a groom in the palace stables. The prince had changed his name and he had no chance of knowing that his wife was in the palace, because she was confined to the women’s apartments; so some years passed without their having news of each other.

At last one day the princess happened to go on to the roof and looking down at the stables saw and thought she recognised her husband; then she leaned over and listened till she heard his voice and at that she was sure that it was he, so she hastened to the Raja and begged to be allowed to meet her husband, and the Raja sent to call the syce with the name which the princess had given but no one came, for the prince would not reveal himself. Then the princess told their story and how her husband had gambled away his half of the kingdom. The Raja ordered any one with such a history to come forward, as his wife was in the palace; but the prince did not reveal himself.

Then the princess said “Let all the syces cook rice and bring me a bit of each man’s cooking to taste.” They did so, and when she tasted the rice cooked by her husband, she at once said that it was his; her husband was unable to deny it and admitted everything. Then they took him away from his work in the stables and let him live with his wife.

After a time the Raja wrote to the younger brother asking whether he would restore the half of the kingdom which he had won; and the younger brother answered that he would gladly do so, if his brother would sign an agreement never to gamble any more; it was with this object in view and to teach him the folly of his ways that he had dispossessed him. The elder brother gladly gave the required promise and returned to his kingdom with his faithful wife and lived happily ever afterwards.



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