In this episode, we’re talking about a folk tale from the Northern Indian territory of Ladakh.
Like most folk tales this has a good amount of magic. It’s also meant to be a learning experience, but to be honest no one in the story seems able to make the right decisions.
The little boy slowly walked on, feeling his way along the dark cave walls. Suddenly a colony of bats fluttered above. There was a hiss that sounded uncomfortably close to his bare feet. He just wanted to find a way out. Why had he entered this dreadful place in the first place?
Let’s rewind the story a bit to find out why.
Stanzin was a little boy who lived with his mother. The two of them were laborers at a farm. Yup, the boy too. This was a few centuries ago when child labor laws were very different. In the sense that they did not exist.
Now if you’ve seen pictures of Ladakh, you might think that the climate might not be suitable for farming. But that’s not true. Mostly wheat and barley are grown there.
So Stanzin and his mom were barley farmers. Given this was medieval India, it meant that they did all the work on the farm, while someone else sold the barley and kept all the money.
That person was the Zamindar or the landowner. And for the privilege of letting the mother and son work on the farm, he kept all the money they earned.
And all that in exchange for a piece of dry, stale bread every day. On Sundays, it wasn’t that they got something else bread. It’s just that they got an extra crumb if they wanted to.
Besides farming the Zamindar also had the boy do extra work. Like picking up firewood.
On one such firewood picking errand, Stanzin had to venture further into the forest than he had ever done before. He spotted a cave. Or maybe it was just a dark area between rocks.
If you’re in a strange unfamiliar part of a dark forest and you see a darker and stranger thing like the entrance to a dark cave, what’s the one thing you should not do? If you said “Don’t go into the cave”, you’re absolutely correct. But Stanzin did exactly that. He walked in.
Part of the reason he was so intrigued is that when he approached the entrance to the cave, he saw steps heading downward.
Steps! Made for human feet to walk up and down on.
In this case, they led down. Stanzin walked down cautiously, his bare feet cold against the stone steps. He had no light, and the cave got progressively darker. He could make out a tiny light in the distance, he walked towards it. Bats swooped overhead, and something slithered and hissed uncomfortably close to his bare feet. But he kept going. After all, he had no choice. When he turned around he could not see which direction he had come from.
After a long grueling the distant light appeared clearer. It was the glint from an underground palace! Astonished to see a palace here deep under the ground, he rushed towards it. Hopefully, they’d have an exit! Or at least a phone to call an Uber from. He would have rung the doorbell, but the doors were open.
What a beautiful palace it was! It had a huge chocolate fountain right at the entrance. The whole place was littered with rich sweets and candy. It seemed to be right out of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Stanzin desperately wanted to dig in. But there was no one around whose permission he could ask. He was a very polite boy.
He looked around the rooms, many of them travel themed and food-themed. But there was no sign of life.
Until Stanzin heard the crying. He walked towards the source of the noise and opened a bedroom where he was astonished to see a whole room full of jewels. And in the center of the room was a bed, and sitting on the bed was a beautiful fairy. He approached her slowly. Not because he was afraid. It’s just that walking barefoot when the floor is covered by precious stones is hard!
When he finally approached the bed, he was surprised to see that the fairy was crying gems. She was definitely a fairy. It was the wings that gave her away.
“My lady,” he said meekly “are you upset? Can I help?”
She suddenly stopped and stared “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“The front door was open. I walked in my lady”
She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “I meant how did you get to my palace without tripping off my home security system?”
“Eh, what home security system?” he asked puzzled.
“It’s to give me advance warning in case someone bungles in as you have done. It’s supposed to turn on the moment you switch on the lights”
“What lights?”
“The one in the cave of course. Don’t tell me you walked all the way here in the dark?! I mean seriously? What’s the first thing you do when you reach into a dark room? You’re supposed to turn on the light. It’s right there on the left as soon as you step into the cave”
Annoyed at having walked all the way in the dark, Stanzin asked why she had not simply bothered to keep the lights on all the time.
“Are you kidding? Do you know what electricity costs these days?” she asked him.
He looked around at all the jewels and rolled his eyes.
Speaking of which, he asked her “why are you crying gems?”
“Why? What do you cry?” she asked him surprised
“Tears. Just water”
“Water?! What is wrong with you people? You can’t shed enough tears for it to be useful”
“Oh no, my lady. A girl named Alice went down a similar hole in the ground. She cried so much, she almost drowned in her tears. Literally”
“You must tell me about her. Is she a friend of yours?”
“Not quite. She’s from a faraway land called England.”
At this, the fairy cheered up a bit. It turned out that that was exactly what the fairy had been crying about. She was chained to the bed and couldn’t move.
Would he be a dear and describe the world to her?
Stanzin was happy to oblige. He narrated the beauty of the world. The beautifully carved monuments all over the country, the amazing Himalayas, the beautiful valley of flowers, the amazing lakes.
He had her attention for hours. Finally, he began to run out of things to describe.
The fairy thanked him and suggested that he take the biggest of all the gems in the room.
Stanzin was a bit reluctant to accept. Not because you’re not supposed to accept gifts from strangers. Quite the contrary. He’d much rather grab some of the delicious chocolate cake he saw in the dining room instead. But the fairy convinced him that he would be much better off taking a gem instead.
Stanzin was reluctant, but he agreed.
Thankfully on the way back he did find the light switch and had no problems navigating back to the entrance of the cave. He was careful to turn off the lights. The fairy’s gripes about the electricity bill were still fresh in his mind.
He rushed home and showed his mother the beautiful gem. Her reaction was exactly as he had expected.
She said “Hmm, whatever shall we do with this gem? I don’t know any recipes and I think it’ll be too hard to eat with bread. Maybe go to the Zamindar and see if you can exchange it for an onion or something”
So Stanzin took it to the Zamindar. Unlike the boy and his mom, the Zamindar could recognize a precious jewel when he saw one.
“This is very unfair. You want to give me this in exchange for an onion? Do you know what the price of an onion is? Nope. Best I can do is a clove fo garlic. If you get me more of these jewels”
Stanzin’s situation was bad enough that he readily agreed to it. A touch of garlic would make a nice change from the usual dry bread.
So he agreed, readily.
The next day, he was back at the fairy’s palace.
He had done a bit of research this time. So he was prepared this time with more stories to tell the fairy. The fairy was happy. Sure, she was happy to hear more from the world outside. But she suspected that Stanzin wasn’t here just to make her happy.
And the boy confessed easily enough. His Zamindar just wanted some of her tears. She wasn’t planning to use them for anything, was she?
Though the fairy hadn’t traveled the world, she was wise of its ways.
“What happens if you don’t take a gem back?” she asked the boy. “What will your Zamindar do?”
“He’ll probably punish me. The last time I didn’t get enough firewood, he beat me with a stick. It hurt for weeks!”
“Oh no, we can’t have that!” said the fairy. “But guess what? Giving him a gem won’t help you either. I have something much better”
She pulled out a box from thin air. She gave it to the boy and said “Here, as long as you have this box on you, no harm will come to you. Trust me.”
“What’s in the box?” asked the boy, a little scared now.
“Your worst nightmare,” she said in a menacing tone. And then quickly added “Haha! I’m just pulling your leg. It’s just a magic box. Who knows what’s really inside. I got it from a lady called Pandora. My only advice to you is to only open the box when you are desperate. Help will arrive”
The boy hung around the palace a bit more. He bid the fairy goodbye and went home. Maybe it was just him, but since he had started telling her stories the fairy didn’t cry anymore. He was glad to have made a difference in her life.
He was happy when he got home. But that quickly changed when he heard the summons from the Zamindar. The message indicated that the Zamindar was in a foul mood.
Sure enough, when Stanzin and his mom reached the Zamindar’s palace that could see why.
“Stanzin!” roared the Zamindar. “It’s been 24 hours since you were supposed to get me more of those gems. Where are they?!”
“I haven’t got any sir”
The answer infuriated the Zamindar, who then reached out for his stick. He grabbed it and swung it hard at the boy. But nothing happened. The stick seemed to just bounce off of the boy, but Stanzin kept smiling as if he hadn’t even felt it.
The Zamindar stood shocked for a whole minute, before gathering his wits and trying again. He repeated this several times but nothing. Stanzin casually flicked off a speck of dust off of his sleeve.
“What’s in the box you are carrying?” the Zamindar asked.
“I don’t know sir” replied the boy.
“I don’t believe you. Open it and show me”
“No, I can’t sir. I’m not supposed to”
“Do it, or I’ll hit your mother with this stick” replied the Zamindar.
That frightened Stanzin. He didn’t know if the box would protect his mother if he was the one holding it. Giving her the box would only raise the Zamindar’s suspicions and he’d take away the box.
A desperate situation indeed.
“Alright, I’ll open the box. But let me state for the record that you made me do this”
“Enough with the disclaimers. Just open it” asked the Zamindar, impatiently.
Stanzin did. Suddenly 5 demons swooped out. They must have been equipped with aggression detecting techniques. Because they immediately singled out the Zamindar and grabbed him.
He screamed out loud as the demons began to toss him from one to the other.
While they rose into the sky, playing catch the human, down on the ground pretty much everyone on Earth thought this was good riddance.
Stanzin and his mother lived happily, continuing to grow their Barley but from now on they kept the proceeds. The fairy was happy. She had stopped crying.
The demons dispersed into the world. But they were not really terrible creatures like those in Pandora’s box. They were terrible at playing catch though, it wasn’t long before they managed to drop the Zamindar. He fell somewhere into the Indian ocean.
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
Stanzin is a common name in Ladakh. It is derived from the name of the Dalai Lama.
The original folk tale provided no name for the boy, so I picked this one.
The story makes a couple of non-standard choices. The fairy remains confined to her bed. But she’s satisfied with the stories that Stanzin tells her.
Stanzin and his mother choose to earn money from hard labor rather than from selling more of the fairy’s gems.
That’s all for now.
Next Episode
In the next episode, we’ll go back into the Ramayan. We’ll see what happened after Laxman stopped Shoorpanakha’s attack on Sita