This week, we’ll cover a couple of stories from the Panchatantra. One is about a little baby boy and his unlikely animal sibling. The other introduces air travel to a Tortoise. The cost of the flight ticket? He just has to keep his mouth closed.
The character this week is a colorful creature. Its a rainbow fish. I also like to think of it as the Elsa fish for reasons that’ll soon be clear
Our first story begins in a little village in ancient India where a couple lived.
One day as the man was enjoying a long day out drinking with the boys, he suddenly remembered with shock – it was his anniversary, and he’d completely forgotten to get his wife a gift. Not even a card. This was going to be terrible. It was too late now to scare up a gift from somewhere.
He didn’t have a choice. He had to face the music. On his way home, he saw something that disturbed him a lot. It was a tiny baby mongoose crying next to the lifeless body of its mother.
The man picked up the baby mongoose. Alone and helpless like that it wouldn’t last minutes.
As he entered his house, his wife saw the baby mongoose in his hands and squealed with delight. A pet mongoose, that’s exactly what she wanted for her anniversary!
“Oh yes!” said the man quickly. “I had been planning this for weeks. Sorry I’m late, just took a while to get the little fella”
The wife loved the little baby mongoose and took very good care of him, treating him like he was her own son. Until, she had a real son.
At that point, her attention completely shifted to the new baby. The mongoose wasn’t ignored, but he did miss all the attention. Nevertheless, he kinda understood that it had to do with the birth of his baby brother.
The mongoose and the baby got along fairly well. They played with each other.
The wife’s treatment of the mongoose, unfortunately, got worse. While previously she just paid him less attention, now she was more distrustful.
“Look at those sharp teeth” she thought of the mongoose who was all grown up now. “Who’s to say he won’t playfully bite my baby and end up hurting him real bad?”
She didn’t act on this line of thought. Though she often nagged her husband about it. And this turned out to be very fortunate for her.
One day, she had to go down to the river to fetch water. She quite strictly asked her husband to keep an eye on her baby boy and the mongoose. But the moment she was out of sight, he sneaked off to play poker with his buddies.
Folks, please don’t try this at home. A mongoose is usually not an adequate babysitter.
Well, there was a hole in the wall, and an Indian Cobra sneaked into the house. An Indian Cobra, not to be confused with the King Cobra, is one of the deadliest snakes in the world.
As the Cobra slithered in, the mongoose spotted it right away. Worried about his brother’s safety, the mongoose entered full battle mode. It was a very even contest. The snake deftly struck out many times, and the mongoose narrowly avoided each strike. Finally the Mongoose sunk its teeth into the Cobra’s hood and clung on for what seemed like an eternity. The mongoose did not loosen its grip until after he was sure the Snake had died. Victory!
The mongoose was proud! He had done his duty by his family.
Just then he heard footsteps outside and rushed out to greet his mom. Wouldnt mother be pleased to see the brave thing he’d done? He’d saved his little brother from the Cobra.
Well, she wasn’t pleased. Maybe the Mongoose hadn’t anticipated the psychological impact of a mother thinking her worst fears had been realized. She saw the mongoose with a big smiling face, and its sharp teeth dripping with blood. She couldn’t have known it was Cobra blood and not human blood.
She reacted instantly. The pot of water she’d been carrying on her head? She brought it down hard on the mongoose, killing it right away.
She then rushed inside to discover – no husband, and wait a minute – her smiling baby boy alive and well in his crib. And what was that, it looked like a dead Cobra bleeding all over.
She’s just killed the creature who had saved her baby’s life. She would have to live with guilt all her life.
And she would have to live with the husband who was careless enough to neglect his babies at home.
Our second story is also about unlikely animal friends.
In this case there were a couple of geese that made friends with a Tortoise.
Every day, the geese would come to visit the Tortoise in his pond and they’d talk for hours while munching on fish sticks and frog legs. The Tortoise was a good host!
But as time went by, fish and frogs seemed harder to come by. And then the Tortoise realized that the most horrible thing was happening – his pond, his home was drying up.
He might have attributed this to non-anthropogenic climate change, but it was just a regular drought in the land. Unfortunately the pond would almost certainly dry up before the next rainy season. And that meant the Tortoise would not survive.
When the geese visited the Tortoise later that day, he explained the whole situation to them.
The geese had flown all over this area. Surely, there was another pond not far away that the Tortoise could crawl to?
But the geese sadly shook their head. There wasn’t any other water body around for hundreds of miles. This pond was the last.
They brainstormed a bit, and until finally, they hit upon a brilliant idea.
The Tortoise was too heavy for either of the geese to carry, but they could divide the load. Without actually dividing up the Tortoise.
They were going to fly him out of here!
In an animal version of MacGyver, they hatched a plan.
Each of the geese would clamp on to one end of a stick. The Tortoise would bite onto the middle of the stick.
The geese would be able to fly. They did a short and low-altitude test flight to confirm.
The only catch? The Tortoise could not let go. He had to keep his mouth shut throughout the whole journey. But the geese were fast, and they could take maybe a break or two on the way.
The Tortoise said a tearful goodbye to the place that had been his home his whole life.
With a heavy heart, but with just a trace of optimism, he grabbed the stick, as did the geese.
They were off!
The takeoff was smooth, and so far they had no turbulence. And look at the pretty sights down there. The Tortoise had never imagined what an aerial view of the land looked like.
And there! Down there at 2 o’clock, there was a group of children playing. And wait, they had spotted the Geese and the Tortoise and were laughing? Nasty little kids, how dare they laugh at him?
“Mind your own business” he screamed at them. In a Wile E. Coyote vs Road Runner moment, he stopped suddenly in mid-air. He realized that in opening his mouth to address the laughing kids, he had let go of the stick.
Unlike Wile E. Coyote however, the Tortoise was unlikely to order a pair of clip-on wings from Acme to complete his journey.
That’s all for now
Notes
Both of these stories are from the Panchatantra. We’ve previously covered a couple of Panchatantra stories in Episode 4 – Hare-y Tales. Both the stories from today are also known outside of India, thanks to tourism and trade.
The Panchatantra was written by Vishnu Sharma, as a challenge. A King was having a hard time managing his sons. They were pretty poor academically. I guess they just didnt have the aptitude to read dozens of textbooks and turn in homework assignments and sit through 3 hour exams.
Vishnu Sharma had the timeboxed challenge of making the boys wise! And to do this, he thought of a revolutionary new idea. Well, it was revolutionary 2000 years ago. He wrote and then told them stories that could help them absorb important ideas from lectures. So the Panchatantra was a bit like The For Dummies or the Idiot’s guide book series – “Wisdom for Princes – a story book for the rest of us”
The stories in the Panchatantra are actually chains of stories. At the conclusion of each incident, one of the characters narrates a new story. A little bit like in the 1001 tales from the Arabian Nights, but without all the cliffhangers.
The character this week is a colorful creature. Its a rainbow fish. I also like to think of it as the Elsa fish.
The Rainbow fish is a fish that was as large as a whale. Not to be confused with Matsya from Episode 1 – “Unicorn Fish”, which was much much larger.
The Rainbow fish’s claim to fame is that it swallowed Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.
The Buddha didn’t stay swallowed of course. A group of fishermen and fisherwomen captured the Rainbow fish. They rescued the Buddha. And guess what? They all had enough fish fillets for the rest of the year!
The Rainbow fish was called so because its scales were colored Red, Blue, Green and Yellow. I suppose Orange and Violet should really have been represented but I’m sure at a particular angle of sunlight those colors would have been visible too. I’m deliberately not including Indigo, which is a made-up color in the Rainbow, just because someone liked the number 7 more than they did the number 6.
The Green scales represented grass. The blue scales meant water. The Yellow represented air even though the air is colorless. And lastly, the Red scales represented fire.
A more plausible explanation would have been to have the Yellow represent fire, and the Red represent the air. At least at sunrise and sunset, the sky does have a distinctly reddish tint.
The story of the Rainbow fish has some parallel with the Biblical Jonah and the Whale. This may seem surprising, but there are many tales all around the world of people being swallowed by a large sea creature.
That’s all for this week.
Bonus Episode!
This Thursday is the Buddha’s Birthday. So I’m going to do a special episode on that day, where we’ll learn the connection between a water filtration method and anger management
Next Week
Next weekend we’ll pick up where we left off in the Ramayana. We’ll see a Nanny who executes a very House of Cards-style political move. We’ll also see a father conflicted between his love for his wife and his love for his son.
The character next week is an elephant that manages to survive a crocodile attack, thanks to some divine interference.
I’ll see you next week!