One of my youngest listeners, Vaikha, has requested a folk tale from Kerala. So, Vaikha, we’ll do not one but two folk tales from God’s own country, as this state in Southern India is called. They are both popular so it’s possible you may have heard these Kerala Folk Tales before
The First Folk Tale
A Tale of Two Folk Tale Neighbors
The first is set in a village in medieval India. It’s about a couple of men who were friends and neighbors. Ram and Govind. Similar to other pairs of friends/neighbors we have seen before, they had contrasting fortunes. Ram was poor and Govind was rich. Govind had inherited his money from his father. Him and his family were never in need of anything.
By contrast, Ram was barely able to make ends meet. He had a job, sure. But his job was not a very well-paying one. His job was to hand out tokens for the well. If any villager wanted to collect water from the well, they had to first get a token from him and stand in a line. He would then call out numbers, collect the tokens again, and let people draw water. This bureaucracy made no sense, of course. But the other villagers knew how poor Ram was, and didn’t complain too much.
Ram didn’t earn much from this job, as I’ve stressed already. Him and his family lived on just one meal a day. If they were lucky. The only perk was that they didn’t always go thirsty. A job perk I guess.
Things kept getting worse for the family over time. Especially after Tax season when it turned out that Ram owed a lot of money on his meager taxes. Ironically, Govind was able to claim tax relief for most of his income. Because he claimed to be operating an offshore shell company. As you can see, even in medieval India, the idle rich had it easy. And it was the working class that ended up paying taxes for themselves as well as the rich.
Ram was running out of options and he decided that the only way to fix things for his family was to, end his own life. So he purchased a life insurance policy for himself. A pretty high policy. He had to haggle a bit to get them to set the payout to a very high amount. But in the end at least they wouldn’t have to suffer. And all his debts would be clear.
He went to the river to drown himself. And because it was the last thing he was doing, he prayed to his favorite god, Shiva. Shiva is the Destroyer of the Universe, together with my Dad, Brahma the Creator, and Vishnu the Preserver.
And then Shiva intervened. He appeared in person before Ram. Ram was surprised and thought for a moment that he had in fact passed on and Shiva was greeting him in the afterlife.
But Shiva quickly corrected him. “I know what you want to do and I have a solution” Shiva said.
He handed Ram three coconuts, and went away. Millions more people were praying for him all over the country, he said. And asked him to just wish when he used the coconuts.
Ram stared at the coconuts and tried really hard to hide his disappointment. Three coconuts were great! But they would only provide 3 days of food to Ram’s family. Or was he supposed to plant these coconuts and grow new trees? His family wasn’t going to last that long.
But he decided to give it a try anyway. So he started walking home. He hadn’t had a drop to drink in a while. And the coconuts seemed to have water inside. So he decided to open one up. Just one. And to drink the water inside. Because coconut water is so refreshing, you know? Ram wondered what Shiva had meant when he said “just wish when he used the coconuts”.
He broke open one of the coconuts and quickly began drinking the sweet water inside. As he did, he dreaded returning to his tiny home. Why couldn’t his home have been a palace? Bigger than Govind’s? But it was just a fantasy.
Or not. It was not a fantasy. When he got there, his little hut was replaced by a gigantic palace, the likes of which he had not seen, not even in fairy tale books. It was definitely his home, I mean his palace. The name on the mailbox confirmed it.
Ram went inside and hugged his family. They were still in rags. Because his wish had only covered his home and not their personal effects.
So after some deep consultation and debate, they used the remaining two coconuts to get a lot of money, and rich clothes and jewels.
Govind, who was also Ram’s next door neighbor was surprised by the sudden change in his neighbor’s house and yard. He talked to Ram everyday until finally Ram told him his secret. Govind decided that he must have these coconuts too. Why should only Ram get them?
So Govind went to the River just as Ram had done. He pretended to drown himself and then Shiva appeared. He handed him three coconuts too. Why? You might ask? Well, wait and see.
Govind quickly got out of the river and used his first coconut. Just that moment though, a beggar was passing by and asking Govind for a handout. Govind was so annoyed that he cursed the beggar. A common expression of exasperation is “This is your head” loosely translated from Malyalam.
So when Govind said the equivalent of “this is your head” while striking his own forehead, dozens of little heads, identical to the beggar’s, started popping up on Govind’s forehead. He looked hideous, and the more he tried to do anything, even more heads popped up.
He quickly grabbed the second coconut, broke it and wished all these heads would disappear. And they did. But not only the extra heads. Govind’s own head disappeared as well. That was a bad thing. For now, he was a headless creature.
But Govind’s hands still held the third coconut. He promptly broke it and wished everything went back to normal.
And it did. Except Ram’s family kept the palace, the money and the clothes.
You see, Shiva had played this trick on Govind. He appeared in the form of the beggar, breaking Govind’s concentration at the crucial moment.
That’s how the first story ends. There’s a similar folk tale from Gujrat with two friends and Shiva that we’ve covered before in Episode 114.
Let’s move on to our next folk tale.
Another Folk Tale from Kerala
Unlikely friends
Our second story begins with a very unlikely friendship. Between a Tortoise and a Fox. Unlikely, because they were so different. The Tortoise was a reptile, and the Fox was a mammal. The tortoise ate plants, and the Fox ate meat. The Tortoise lived in a burrow near the water, while the Fox lived in a burrow deep in the forest. The Tortoise was slow, and the other could move swiftly, even catching rabbits, which were one of the fastest creatures in the jungle.
And yet, they were friends. Maybe they bonded over their common rivalry with bunnies. That was really the only thing they had in common. And when they met, the Fox compromised by eating okay with a vegetarian meal when he ate with the Tortoise.
One day, they sat around near the Tortoise’s home, lazily playing chess. “Aw, you took down my Queen”, the tortoise said. The fox smiled indulgently. He had captured the Tortoise’s queen three moves ago. The Tortoise was just slow to react. The fox didn’t mind. It was a matter of time before he caught on. With his next move he checkmated the Tortoise. He got up to drink some water from the pond when suddenly he smelled it. It was the unmistakable smell of a predator. A big cat. A leopard, in fact.
Another thing different between the fox and the tortoise was that they had different flight or fright responses when facing danger. The Fox ran away as swift as he could. The Tortoise was frozen. Or froze up several seconds after the leopard actually arrived on the scene and began poking at the Tortoise. Luckily for the Tortoise, the leopard had never seen a Tortoise before. He didn’t go for the neck immediately. And that gave even the slow moving Tortoise enough time to crawl into its shell. The Leopard kept poking at the Tortoise, trying to figure out how to peel this vegetable. He had brought along a potato peeler for just such emergencies, but even that did not work on the Tortoise’s hard shell.
Eventually he began attacking the shell more viciously, with his claws, his sharp teeth. Luckily for the Tortoise the leopard didn’t think to flip the Tortoise over and to attack its belly, which was actually soft.
Now, you might think, what was the Fox doing through all of this? Had he completed abandoned his friend? Yes, he had. But he wasn’t proud of it. He decided to go back and figure out a way to help his buddy. The Tortoise was a good friend. And the Fox had not lost his credibility with the leopard entirely. So maybe he could approach without being eaten. But just to be on the safe side, the Fox put on his rollerskates for a quick getaway in case the leopard decided to make a meal out of him.
He approached the leopard carefully, who by now was trying to use a power drill on the Tortoise’s back. Still unsuccessfully.
“I say, Mr. Leopard, sir” said the Fox carefully.
The leopard looked up with anger at being disturbed. Which was okay, the Fox thought. It’s better if he’s angry than if he gets an idea about me instead. He needed to execute his own plan quickly.
“Mr. Leopard Sir, are you trying to eat the Tortoise?” he asked, as the leopard went back to biting the Tortoise’s shell.
“No, of course not. I’m trying to break all my teeth here” the Leopard replied sarcastically.
“I have a suggestion, Mr. Leopard Sir” said the Fox
“What? Eat someone else instead?” asked the Leopard.
That was a dangerous line of thinking, the Fox thought. He quickly said “No, no. You can have the sweet delicious meat of the Tortoise. There’s a trick to it, that’s all”
If the Tortoise had been up to speed he would have panicked hearing this from the Fox. Was the Fox about to betray him, by telling the Leopard that the trick was to flip him over?
Well, not really. The Fox went on to explain that the solution to put any hard dehydrated bit of food was to soak the Tortoise in water, for example in the little pond right here. This was exactly like what might happen if you were to soak some raisins in water.
The Leopard paused and thought, “hey, that’s actually a good idea”. He pushed the Tortoise still in its shell and on its belly. He pushed it all the way into the water. And then it sank into the water.
If the Tortoise was slow on land, he was fast in the water. He swam away before the leopard could reach his paws in to grab him.
“Hey Mr. Fox, you told me…” began the Leopard, shocked that his meal was getting away. But when we turned to face the Fox, there was no one. The Fox had run away a long time ago.
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
There’s an interesting story behind how Kerala was created.
Parshuram, an avatar of Vishnu, the creator of the Universe stood in a version of India that did not yet have the state of Kerala. Parshuram, threw his ax somewhere into the Indian Ocean, and all the water receded beyond that and the land that emerged was Kerala. The land was not very fertile, because it was salty, as you can imagine it will be from land pulled out of the salty seas. Salty land is not very suitable for human occupation, so Parshuram invoked Vasuki, a Snake King, to help. Vasuki spat poison all over the land. And that was great, because as any expert in fake science might know – snake venom mixed with salt makes land fertile. Of course, please don’t try this at home if your backyard is not fertile.
At least that’s the theory about how Kerala originated, and I will neither confirm nor deny it.
That’s all for now.
Next Time
In the next episode, we’ll go back into the Ramayana. We’ll see Hanuman returning from Lanka