In this episode, we’re doing a folk tale. One of my listeners requested that we do a story from the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, so here we are!
It’s a story that has some similarities with the European fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. If you’re not familiar with that classic story from the Brothers Grimm – I’ll give you a one-line summary.
After being cast out into the dark forest by their starving parents, a brother and sister find a house made of candy and they kill its owner. I almost forgot to mention that the Candy house owner was really a witch who was trying to eat them, so it’s all fine.
Today’s story is somewhat similar, except that there is no Hansel in this one. And there are not one or two, but five Gretel’s. Or maybe 4 Hansels, and one Gretel, depends on your point of view. Let’s dive right in.
Lakha lived in a little hut in the valley with his wife and 5 daughters. In these snowy, mountainous regions life was very different from how Disney portrayed it in Frozen. Daylight hours were short, it was constantly cold, no one wanted to buy ice, no one wanted to trade, not even the Duke of Weaselton. To make matters worse no one in the family had any special powers like Elsa’s. So they led a very tough life. It had been even tougher for Lakha when it was just him and his 5 daughters after his first wife had died. But marrying a second time seems to have been absolutely the right decision. Lakha had an idea that his wife loved her stepdaughters. Why! She took care of them all day when he was away. And every time he returned home after a long day of woodcutting, he saw his wife had kept the house clean and tidy and cooked dinner. She would have helped them with their homework, served them dinner, and tucked them in bed with a bedtime story before his return. Or so he thought. Because that’s what she told him.
The reality was very different though. If he’d instead asked his daughters he might have had a very different report.
The sisters were made to clean and cook and do all the other house chores. Their dinner was usually just a single grain of rice that they had to split amongst themselves.
The eldest sister, Tyagi, was in charge of dividing the grain. She’d first let the others eat, and ask them if they were satisfied. The middle three sisters had learned to say that they were. The youngest, Bhooki, would often tell it like it was. Of course, she said she wasn’t satisfied, at which point Tyagi would hand the girl her share of the grain. Somehow the difference between 1/5th of the grain and 2/5ths of the grain was enough to satisfy Bhooki.
You’ve probably already guessed that they were not really getting a bedtime story either.
Anyway, this continued for a long time. Somehow the girls survived on that tiny fraction of a grain of rice, while their evil stepmother and oblivious dad had a pretty good meal every night.
The evil stepmother did something very inexplicable next. She convinced her husband, to abandon the girls in the forest. This was a completely unforced error on her part. I mean everything was going her way. She herself ate a good amount of food and the girls did all the work without her having to put any food in them, and her husband gave her all the credit.
But she had to go spoil it all. So the father took the girls deep into the alpine forest pretending to take them to the carnival. At one point they had to cross a river. It was just past spring, and the icy cold water of the river was almost in full flow now. Being medieval India, there was no bridge here. They looked for a log that might have serendipitously fallen across the river, but no.
Luckily they saw some stones, and it seemed possible to jump from one to the next to cross this raging river. The girls were a little bit apprehensive, but the father insisted that they go first.
He did tell them that he would follow.
“But watch carefully,” he said “if, by a slim chance you were to turn around and not see me, that means I may have drowned in the river. My umbrella by a happy accident is unlikely to drown though, so if you see it floating away downstream, that’s a sure sign that I did not survive.”
Bhooki turned a skeptical eye on her dad. “No. The umbrella might have slipped out of your hands and you may have simply run back home”. But the other girls shushed her.
And when they had crossed to the other side and turned around, sure enough! There was no sign of Dad, other than his umbrella floating away far downstream.
They looked at each other, deciding what to do next.
A glass-half-full type of middle sister said “that’s one to solve the problem of how to break the news to Dad about our evil stepmom”.
“We should go back home!” said Tyagi. “How will mom manage without us?”
4 pairs of eyes glared at her angrily. “Seriously?” asked Bhooki “You want to jump back on those rocks across the river, trek back for miles, and tell mom that Dad drowned, and then get the full unshackled evil stepmom treatment?”
Tyagi agreed and the 5 girls went on to go look for fruits and berries. If they found a single berry and divided that amongst themselves, that would be a massive feast compared to what they were used to.
But after only a short walk, they saw a house. And what a house it was! It was not made of chocolate, candy, all kinds of sweets imaginable, but it was the most beautiful house they had ever seen!
Sitting outside on the porch in a rocking chair, knitting a sweater was a kindly old woman.
She smiled and introduced herself as Daayan, the friendly neighborhood elderly lady who helped travelers. Were they travelers?
“Oh yes, we’re traveling. And we could use help” said Bhooki, who’d become the de facto leader of the group.
“Come in girls. I’d love to have you for dinner. I’ll put on a cauldron of soup on the fire. Come in and sit in the cauldron. I mean sit by the fire. Oh my, it’s been so long since I’ve roasted girls. I mean it’s been so long since I’ve hosted girls”
As a keen observer, I’m sure you’ve picked up on some of the red flags here. But the girls were so tired, they just didn’t connect the dots. Even when they browsed her library and saw a book called “How to Serve People” in the Cooking section.
But Daayan did serve them vegetable soup. She had concluded that the girls were too thin and bony right now. But put enough vegetables into them, and they might taste well!
She shocked them by telling them they could even have seconds, or thirds, or however many helpings they wanted. In fact the more the better. She had also cooked up a giant chocolate cake just for them.
“Be sure to eat every last crumb,” she said!
After dinner, she tucked them into their beds in the guest bedrooms and read them bedtime stories. She told them to sleep as long as they wished. And they did! They had had the best time of their short lives.
Unfortunately for some of them, those short lives were not about to get any longer.
Next Time
We’ll pause the story here. In the next episode, we’ll finish up this story where we’ll learn the fate of the sisters!