In this episode, we’re doing a folk tale from South India. It’s about a girl who married a Tiger. A tiger who loved human cooking more than cooking humans, and who could magically transform into a human shape, and talk and behave like a normal person. Makes you wonder if he’s really a Human in a Tiger body rather than a Tiger in a Human body.
The story is set in a little village in medieval India.
In that village lived a girl, let’s call her Sameyal. She lived with her parents and her three brothers.
The parents were poor, and could barely keep everyone fed. Their life was about to change drastically.
The reason for that was that soon in their lives, a very formidable character was about to enter.
Puli was a Tiger who lived in the woods nearby. Puli had one obsession – he loved eating food. And I mean regular human food, not raw meat. He really enjoyed the plain old rice and lentils. The same stuff that you perhaps find boring, Puli would have moved mountains for.
Every chance he would get he’d ambush travelers passing through the jungle only so that he could get at their picnics. But he was ruthless about it. He’d kill the travelers too.
Pretty soon though, the people smartened up and avoided the jungle altogether.
But Puli knew he must have food. So he used his powers to help him with this. It wasn’t mentioned before, but Puli had the ability to shapeshift. He could make himself look like a normal human being. And what’s more, it extended to beyond just his appearance. Puli could understand the language of the humans, and speak it in a completely normal human voice.
And thirdly, Puli had knowledge of the scriptures. Despite that, he couldn’t figure out how to cook for himself. Or maybe he just thought it was beneath himself to do the cooking.
He survived a few more days by visiting temples in human form and eating the handouts there.
But he wanted a permanent solution to his problem.
As he was passing through the village, he saw Sameyal. His sexist tiger mind immediately pounced on the idea that because Sameyal was a girl, she must know how to cook.
He kinda hung around her outside her house pretending to teach whoever would listen. And those who did listen were impressed with the scripture knowledge of this stranger who had the aura of a savage beast and yet definitely looked and talked like a regular human being.
Over time, Sameyal’s family noticed and invited him over for lunch. And then again for dinner, and then breakfast, lunch, and dinner the next day.
Obviously, Puli enjoyed all the meals. Previously he’d been more or less restricted to Rice and Lentils. Now, because of these meals, Puli became aware of the possibilities across the huge spectrum of Indian cuisine. He kept thinking about how exactly he was going to abduct Sameyal. But, luckily for him, and quite unfortunately for Sameyal, her parents provided Puli the perfect solution without realizing what they were letting her in for.
They suggested that Puli marry the girl. Yeah, these were ancient times, when the girl had the least say in the decision of whom to marry.
But to be fair, in this case, Sameyal wasn’t opposed to the marriage. She’d admired Puli from a distance.
All that was going to change now.
Puli and Sameyal were quickly married, after which Puli insisted that he would take her back to his home the very same day. And that was in a conversation he had with Sameyal’s parents. No one asked the poor girl.
She went along quietly with Puli. It was a very long walk. And she had no idea how much further they had to go.
She asked Puli for a quick rest stop. To her surprise, Puli, her partner in sickness and health and so on, flat out said “No. And get a move on, or I’ll show you my real face!”
She let this slide, but when the same thing happened an hour later, she was beginning to think maybe it had been a mistake to marry the stranger whom no one had known about until a couple of days ago, and who lived mysteriously far away near where a ferocious tiger was rumored to live.
A third time when Puli again cruelly rejected her request for a quick rest stop, she lost it and said “Alright, I’m going to call your bluff! Show me your real face”
The tiger did. He changed back into a ferocious tiger and nearly scared the wits out of Sameyal.
She would not be asking for rest stops anymore. Anyway, it didn’t matter, they were almost at his house now.
He shooed her into his cave and then blocked the entrance with a seriously large boulder.
“Your job,” he said “is to cook for me”
“Cook for yourself” snapped Sameyal
But when Puli showed her how sharp his claws were and how he was really really hungry, she quickly changed her mind.
In no time, the new couple fell into a routine. Puli would go out all day and do regular Tiger stuff. Hunting, stalking, and in this case, getting groceries.
It was Sameyal’s task to cook 6 huge tubs of food for him every day.
Scared of what Puli might do to her, Sameyal complied.
She would cook all day but as she got used to it, she managed to do it efficiently and spared time to write a diary. Only, this was ancient India, so her diary was a set of leaves bound together. She scratched her whole story on the leaves with a nail. She detailed how instead of taking her to a honeymoon, carrying her over the threshold, and generally treating her like a queen, her husband had immediately launched into full-on domestic abuse.
However, she hadn’t lost hope. There was a tiny crow who lived right outside the tiny window of the cave. She had made friends with the crow because that crow could talk.
When the diary was more or less done, complete with Index, Glossary, Preface, Appendix she asked the crow to please take it to her brothers.
“Sameyal! Why didn’t you just ask me to go warn your brothers? I’m a talking crow. I can give them the message just fine. You didn’t actually have to finish your diary. And speaking of which, oh my this is incredibly heavy.”
But the crow was her friend, so he bore the heavy diary and shot off towards’ Sameyal’s parents’ house.
The crow was utterly exhausted by the time he got there and he could barely talk. He handed over the diary to the eldest brother. But the eldest brother hadn’t actually gone to school and couldn’t have read it. He passed the diary to the middle brother who didn’t want it either because he’d gotten into big trouble for reading her diary before – back in middle school. He wasn’t going to take a chance. Besides, he didn’t want to read his sister’s diary. This was bound to be sentimental stuff about how much she loved her husband or some such. He passed the diary to the youngest brother who read it right away because he was curious and didn’t know any better. He raised the alarm when he got to the part about his brother in law being a Tiger and all. He quickly provided the gist to his brothers.
They set off immediately in the direction of the Tiger’s home.
Along the way, they just happened to run into an ant, a donkey, a big iron tub, and a tree that had fallen. Because this story lacks some serious logic, they took all of those things with them. Don’t try this at home folks, carrying a branch is hard enough. If you try to carry a tree, you’re quite likely to break your back.
When they got there Puli was out. Sameyal quickly asked them to hide in the loft. And they did. The tiger returned and did the whole “Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Indian” routine.
Sameyal admitted her brothers were visiting.
“Where are they? Why don’t I hear them?,” asked Puli
At that one of the brothers instigated the ant to bite the donkey. That made an incredibly loud and distressing noise, which the Tiger mistook for formidable. Just as the brother had hoped.
Now for some reason, the Tiger being a true host demanded that he see his guests’ belly and leg. Oddly specific, but the brothers had just the pretend-belly/iron tub and the pretend-leg and tree. They let Puli feel those, and that left the Tiger feeling scared of his brothers in law. Even though, just a few days ago at the wedding, they hadn’t seemed quite so formidable.
Puli decided he might be better off not meeting them. He slunk away, and while he did, Sameyal and her brothers sneaked off back to their village taking with them – all the gold they could carry. Puli had accumulated quite a treasure from all those highway robberies. He’d eaten the picnics and kept all the shiny stuff in his collection
When the Puli discovered that his wife had gone, he guessed at what must have happened.
He assumed human form again and dashed to Sameyal’s parents’ house, not at all worried about the size and stature of his brothers in law who had bellies made of iron tubs and tree size limbs.
Sameyal was at her parents’ indeed, but she was prepared. She had a plan!
She knew her parents wouldn’t believe that Puli was actually a Tiger. “Seriously Mon and Dad? The clue is in the name. Puli means Tiger” she told them. But they still wouldn’t believe her.
Ultimately, Puli did show up and asked to take Sameyal with him again. But Sameyal knew exactly what to do. She invited her husband for a meal. She knew the Tiger would never be able to resist human cooking.
After the meal, Sameyal suggested that it was customary for the visiting son-in-law to have a massage outside in the yard. “Here, you can lie down on this carefully concealed circular bed with oddly looking foliage on top”
Puli tried but the circular bed wasn’t a bed at all. It was the mouth of the well. He fell in and just couldn’t get out any more. That was the end of him. And that is the end of our story.
Some notes on the show
The story omits many important details. It doesn’t explain why Puli would go to the trouble of becoming a scholar and shapeshifting and all that, but be unable to learn cooking for himself.
And having become a scholar how he could be easily hoodwinked so easily by Sameyal and her brothers.
And if he had so many valuables left over from his years of robbing and murdering travelers, why didn’t he simply order DoorDash or Grubhub?
There’s an important element in the story that I have deliberately left out. That Sameyal and Puli had a baby together while she lived in captivity in his cave. The baby took completely after his daddy. He was all tiger. And this was a source of revulsion to Sameyal.
Sameyal and her brothers did not simply leave the baby sleeping behind when they escaped. I will spare you the horror by not describing what they did. Let’s just say that they would definitely be banned from winning any Tiger conservation awards in the future.
The story is similar to the one from the French folk tale Bluebeard. There are a few notable differences. While Bluebeard’s end goal was to murder his wives, Puli, not so much. Puli was interested in human food. And marrying Sameyal was simply a means to that end.
Even when Sameyal and her brothers ran off with the valuables, Puli was probably more upset at the prospect of losing out on his meals than anything else.
It’s possible that the whole tale is an allegory, kind of like in the book and movie “Life of Pi”. Puli may not have been a real tiger at all, just a big brute.
Again, I’ve used local names for the characters. Sameyal means a Meal, and Puli is the word for Tiger in Tamil.
Sometimes a misbehaving child is warned by an adult that if they don’t behave, they’ll be shown the adult’s real face! That may work sometimes. But only on children who may have heard just the first part of this Story.
That’s all for this episode.
Next Time
In the next one, we’ll finally start discussing the Churning of the Ocean! It was a grand cosmic scale experiment. And we’ll meet two of Vishnu’s avatars that we haven’t met before.
I’ll see you next time!