In this episode, we’re doing an Akbar and Birbal story.
If you haven’t heard of the previous Akbar and Birbal stories, that’s perfectly alright. All of these stories stand alone. All you need to know is that Akbar was a real historical figure. He was a Mughal Emperor and ruled over most of India. Over 500 years ago.
The ministers in his court can roughly be divided into two groups. Birbal. And everyone else.
Birbal was a real historical figure as well. He was Jeeves to Akbar’s Bertie Wooster, or as Sherlock Holmes to Watson. There was no problem that Birbal could not solve, no question that he could not answer in a clever way.
That also meant people were always trying to trap him into tricky situations.
Other ministers who were jealous of Birbal’s success in Akbar’s court for example.
Our story today actually begins not with Akbar or Birbal but with Bholi.
Bholi was a farmer with a big problem. Her problem was the lack of banks in medieval India.
As a farmer Bholi had worked hard on her fields, plowing them, sowing seeds, irrigating, harvesting and selling the crop. Her efforts over many years had paid off and she had accumulated a very decent sum of a hundred gold coins.
And now she had discovered a clever way of automatically irrigating her fields, for the first time in many years, she had free time on her hands!
She had been hearing about vacations for a long time, so she decided she would give it a try, to see what all the fuss was about.
That presented a logistical difficulty. She couldn’t very well take all the coins with her. It wasn’t safe. You might have heard from other episodes on this show how the forests between villages and towns were full of dangers of all kinds.
Bholi also couldn’t leave the money behind, buried under the floor of her home where it was. People would be sure to break in and steal it while she was away. It was one thing to leave the money at home, when she was within sight of her home always, sometimes with a sharp sickle in hand, and a completely different thing to leave it at home with no one to guard it.
She asked around, which was the medieval equivalent of browsing through the yellow pages.
She got a lot of advice from her fellow farmers, and the leading contender seemed to be but no one had any first hand experience she could learn from. What she wanted was the Yelp or AskLaila kind of an experience with user testimonials. Instead all she had was one lead.
The advice she received was to leave her money with Chaalak. Chalak was a holy man, a rishi who prayed all day and blessed everyone who came to visit him, gave them advice, that sort of thing.
No one had personally given him their money, but they had vague stories of a friend of a friend vouching for Chalak being a reliable safekeeper.
So Bholi decided to check him out. She stepped into the Chaalak’s ashram, and took a token. She observed a very reassuring scene. An austere room with Chaalak sitting on one side meditating. And lots of other people patiently waiting for him.
Chaalak would listen to each of them in turn, talking about the value of not owning.
“Imagine no possessions. No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man”
“And sisterhood of woman” he hastily added seeing Bholi in the audience
When it was her turn, Bholi explained the problem.
Chaalak said “So, sister. You need a vault. I know nothing of such things. But if you would like to hide your savings here in my hut and retrieve it when you get back that’s totally fine with me”
Bholi had a million questions – “What if someone tries to steal it from here?”
“No one can” interjected a disciple who was waiting behind Bholi. Here, it’s all in the pamphlet here. Here’s a direct quote from the guidebook of burglars, thieves and highwaymen. “A burglar shall never rob a holy person, a holy site or a combination thereof as defined in Annexure 1.3A”.”
That seemed to clinch it.
So Bholi walked into the next room by herself and looked at the ground. The floor was divided up into nice squares. She took an available spot at random, spot number 73 – a nice prime number. She took a spade from the rack, and quickly dug up the spot and buried her bag of gold coins there.
With her mind at ease, Bholi went off on her trip! It was a splendid trip, she had the time of her life, mixing ten vacations into one.
Time flew by, and Bholi had to come back home even though she didn’t want to. But there was a farm full of crops ready for the harvest.
Her first destination on returning was, of course, Chaalak’s ashram. She had even been nice enough to bring him a keychain as a souvenir. Chaalak politely declined it of course. He had no need for worldly possessions, he said.
She went to her spot, spot number 73, dug up the ground, expecting to find the bag of gold coins but it wasn’t there. Maybe she didn’t dig deep enough. She dug deeper but still nothing.
She rushed out and asked Chaalak. “Please, Sir! My bag, my money where is it?”
“I know of no bag, my sister. I wasn’t even in the room with you, I have no idea what you did, what you deposited in there. But what does it matter? Money, Possessions, these are all just worldly things for which I have no use. True happiness lies in not caring about these”
“My happiness is in that bag!”
“I know of no bag, sister,” he said calmly.
Bholi was distraught. She was sure Chaalak had done something, but how could she prove it?
She decided to appeal to the authorities.
And that basically meant Bholi showed up at Emperor Akbar’s court. She had to wait for her problem to be heard, however.
The Emperor had a challenge on his hands already. The Minister for Budget and Planning was making a big fuss about needing to know the exact population of the Empire. No estimates would do for him. This was more of a management problem than a technical one thought Akbar. That meant it needed treatment B. B for Birbal.
He summoned his favorite minister and said “this is such an easy problem, that I don’t want to bother with it. Birbal why don’t you handle this”
“I already have, your highness” replied Birbal
The whole court was stunned into silence.
Finally, Akbar spoke up. “You know exactly how many people live within the borders of the empire?”
“Indeed your highness. The exact population of your empire is 159 million 364 thousand 763” replied Birbal.
“How can you say that with certainty?” challenged the Minister for Budget and Planning
“Oh, so you doubt my numbers? You’re welcome to check them!” replied Birbal
Akbar interjected, “But Birbal, what if he does and your numbers are incorrect?”
“I stand by my numbers completely, your highness. I just hope that when my colleague takes on the task of verifying my numbers, he keeps track of migrations, births, and deaths retroactively. It can be easy to lose track when you need to check the count of people living in 4 million square kilometers of land when information can’t flow any faster than the speed of a horse”
Akbar laughed at that. Birbal had given himself an out while giving the Minister Budget and Planning something to work with.
The minister grumbled and thanked Birbal for the numbers and Akbar for his time and went back to his seat.
Up next was Bholi. She described her whole story to the court. When she got to the part about traveling outside the Empire on vacation everyone thought her example illustrated what Birbal had been cautioning earlier about getting the population exactly right.
When she was done with her narrative, Akbar had no doubts about how to handle this. “Birbal, this one is for you. Sounds like a basic Farmer in Trouble case”
Birbal gladly accepted this. He had Bholi accompany him to his office.
He said to her “so you’re certain that you checked the right spot. And you did actually put the bag in, there is no mistake about any of that?”
Bholi was absolutely sure.
“My dilemma is that I can’t prove anything. I don’t have a receipt from Chaalak”
“What about surveillance footage?” asked Birbal and then dismissed the thought. “Never mind, the wrong century to be asking that”
He was deep in thought for a minute and finally spoke.
“We need to solve this the correct way. It’s not okay for me to use taxpayer rupees to pay you back what you lost. It’s also not sufficient to prove that anyone did anything wrong. What we want is to recover your money. Even if we did manage to prove something, we can’t take action easily. Arresting a holy man can give us bad press, and we’d rather avoid that just now.”
“So what can you do then?” asked Bholi
“I think I must apply the psychology of the individual,” replied Birbal.
“The what of the what?” asked Bholi. But Birbal didn’t reply.
He got out a box from his desk. Took some jewels from his safe and put them in the box. The jewels were easily worth more than a thousand gold coins, anyone could see that.
Birbal next called his assistant Sahayak into the room.
Conspiratorially, Birbal leaned forward and explained his plan to Bholi and Sahayak.
The next day we cut the scene to Chaalak’s ashram. As usual, Chaalak was meditating. He even had a smile on his face. His followers interpreted that as a sign of him attaining nirvana.
In reality, he was thinking of all the things he could get for himself with Bholi’s gold coins.
Yup, Chaalak was a cheat no question.
In walked Birbal in the guise of a merchant. He was carrying with him the box of jewels he had filled earlier.
When he spoke to Chaalak he explained that he was planning a trip out of town and he had no safe place in his home which was being renovated just then.
“I have nowhere else to safely keep these jewels” he popped open the box. The shining jewels pretty much lit up the room, and a few faces besides. Including Chaalak’s.
Birbal added “But then I heard of you. And I was assured by everyone that this is the safest place to keep anything while I’m out of town.”
“Brother I have been told that myself. If my humble room may be of any use to you please go right ahead” said Chaalak displaying enormous restraint in not jumping up for joy. Already wild ideas were floating in his head of what he would do with the jewels.
But before Birbal could get up, Bholi entered the room, exactly as they had planned the previous day.
She went right up to Chaalak and said “I’m terribly upset Mr. Chaalak Sir. I searched my mind again and again. I’m absolutely certain I had deposited my bag of gold in the exact spot I checked. Someone must have taken it”
Chaalak suddenly got nervous, especially as Birbal arched an eyebrow, quizzically. “What is this I hear Sister?” Birbal asked Bholi. “Did you lose your bag of gold after depositing it here?”
Bholi was about to launch into the whole explanation, just as they had rehearsed. But at that moment Chaalak decided he needed to intervene. If Birbal got the notion that the jewels wouldn’t be safe here, he would not leave them here for Chaalak to steal.
Chaalak weighed the odds and decided that that box of jewels was worth at least ten times as much as Bholi’s bag of gold. He quickly spoke up.
“Sister Bholi, you must simply have dug up in the wrong spot”
“I remember it well, it was spot number 73!” she said
“But you’re wrong!” said Bhola quickly. “I remember talking to the milkman the day you left on vacation. He had picked 73 earlier in the day. You must have left yours in spot number 88. Try that one”.
Bholi did try that one. It had her bag of gold coins.
“Oh silly me! I am so forgetful” she said just as Birbal had asked her to. “I must have forgotten the spot number wrong.
“Let that be a lesson to you brother” she told Birbal. “Don’t forget the spot number after you’ve buried your box”
“I won’t. Thank you for the advice” said Birbal.
Chaalak breathed a sigh of relief.
But not for long. The moment Bholi stepped out, Birbal’s assistant rushed in. “Master, master! I’ve been searching everywhere for you” he said to Birbal
“Why, what happened, Sahayak?” asked Birbal
“There’s urgent news for you. Your trip has to be cancelled. The foreigners are coming to visit us instead”
“Hooray!” said Birbal “This means I won’t have to go on that trip after all. This is fantastic. I never like traveling anyway”
“Oh well, I’m happy for you too Chaalak” he said to a very disappointed looking Chaalak. “You won’t have to deal with me forgetting where I buried my gold. Normally I would have gifted you some jewels anyway for having taken up so much of your time. But I don’t want to offend you by offering you any worldly possessions.”
With that Birbal and his assistant walked away with Chaalak staring longingly at the jewel box in Birbal’s arms.
That was how elegantly Birbal solved the problem. No persecution of holy men necessary. Bag of money returned at the investment of his time.
Luckily for Chaalak he had buried Bholi’s gold in a different spot in the same room instead of somewhere else entirely.
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
Again, I’ve used hindi words that represent the characters. Bholi is a woman who is naive. Chaalak means someone who is tricky. And Sahayak literally means assistant
We’ve covered Akbar and Birbal stories previously in Episodes 9 – A Clever Minister in King Akbar’s Court, Episode 10 – The Great Detective, Episode 22 – Slow Cooker, Episode 38 – A Close Shave, and most recently in Episode 73 – Teacher’s Pet.
That’s all for now.
Next Time
In the next episode, we’ll do a story about Vikram and Betaal. It’s been a long time since we did one. We’ll see the Betaal or Zombie/Vampire/Revenant present a lateral thinking puzzle to Vikram, and why it’s important to pay attention to visual cues