This week, we’re doing two Uttarakhand folk tales, by special request. A couple of you listeners asked for stories from this northern Indian state, so here we are. The two stories prominently feature birds, but there really is no connection between them. One first story features a bird trying to work hard to undo simple Darwinian Natural Selection, by trying to guarantee that her children wouldn’t get scrambled, poached or boiled. Our second story is about a mother who is extra protective of the fruits she collects, even from her own darling daughter. In a tragic twist she has to pay the price for it.
Let’s jump right into our first story. It begins with a little bird. Bhinkanu. There was nothing unusual about the bird. Except for one thing. She made her nest on the forest floor. Birds usually make their nests in the branches of a tree or somewhere high. It’s natural selection at work. Those birds that made their nests somewhere safe are more likely to survive and pass on their nest positioning instincts to their children. But not Bhinkanu. The story doesn’t explain why she did that, but it does explain the consequences of her decision to do so.
Many days after nest construction, she was actually fine. Because she had built this nest herself she didn’t have to worry about things like a Mortgage. It would have been better if she had purchased home insurance. Especially after she had laid eggs. They were three eggs, all glistening in the morning sunlight. They were already spotless, but she proudly polished them anyway. Then she tucked them into these cute little blankets each in their own little crib. She took some selfies with the eggs for her social media followers, though there was no noticeable difference between the eggs from one day to the next. When she had ticked that off of her daily checklist, she flew off looking for worms.
It took her a while to do that because finding worms is hard. Natural selection at play again. The worms that had survived were more adapted to evading curious bird beaks poking into their homes. But she managed to pick off a few unlucky ones here and there. Having had her fill, she went home full of expectations. Would any of her eggs have hatched, perhaps? She really should get a baby monitor to alert her, she thought. Most nest-service providers now offered an all-weather camera for her to remotely check if everything was okay.
When she got home, she thought she could smell eggs. She wondered if it was her hunger that was prompting her to think that way until she stopped with a sudden shocking realization that she really did smell eggs. Her eggs. They had not hatched.
They were smashed. Now you might expect that Bhinkanu would be extremely saddened by this turn of events. But she didn’t beat her chest and wail out in sorrow at the loss of her children. She tried to find out why this had happened. Maybe it was her knowledge that her government was NOT going to jail her and fine her tens of thousands of dollars. To her, being a bird in medieval India seemed significantly better than being a woman in 2022 USA.
She knew she must take action. So she examined the scene for some time, gathered some clues, and buzzed off into the air.
Soon she reached Pauin, who was a bull. On the outskirts of the forest was a little farm and Pauin lived there. Bhinkanu and Pauin were more acquaintances than friends, but they were close enough that Bhinkanu could dispense with the pleasantries and get straight to the heart of the issue.
“My nest was trampled on. And my eggs were crushed. And my heart is broken” she began.
“Did you leave your heart in the nest too? Like that monkey in Episode 18?” Pauin asked.
“For the record, the monkey did NOT leave his heart at home. That was a ploy to trick the crocodile. But this isn’t that story, you should go listen to it again. Right now, let’s focus on my nest. And when I said my eggs were crushed and my heart was broken, I meant my eggs were crushed literally and my heart was broken figuratively”
Pauin sympathized and asked if there was anything he could do to help with the healing process.
“Of course. That’s why I came to you, Pauin”
Pauin said that he would provide a shoulder for her to cry on. And being a Bull, it was a very big shoulder indeed.
But that’s not what Bhinkanu wanted. “I’m not here to cry. I’m here to make sure it won’t ever happen again. So I need you to stay away from my nest”
“What? Are you insinuating that I had something to do with it?” said Pauin with shock on his face.
“Yes, I am” Bhinakanu said, and held up a rope. The kind used to tether Bulls to their stalls in the farm. It was the Bullmaster 3000 with a stainless steel finish. “Exhibit A” she said.
“That could be anybody’s Stainless steel Bullmaster 3000” replied Pauin.
Bhinkanu calmly pointed at a label on the Bullmaster 3000. It said “Property of Pauin. If found please return to…” followed by the address of Pauin’s farm.
“Did… did I mention that we got a new bull at the farm just yesterday? It’s hilarious, his name is Pauin too, what a remarkable coincidence I said to myself” the Bull tried. But he wasn’t fooling the little bird. She may be bird-brained when it came to choice of location for her nest, but she was a pretty sharp detective.
“Knock it off Pauin. I can see your hooves from here, and I can see the sticky liquid stuck to them, and they smell of eggs too. You can’t weasel out of this situation”
“Alright alright. I admit it. It was me. But I wasn’t trying to! It’s not my fault. Why was your nest on the forest floor anyway?”
“Never mind about the placement of my nest. Let’s just talk about the placement of your hooves in it. Why were you in the forest anyway? You should have been here at the farm”
“I said it’s not my fault”, Pauin replied. “I didn’t have anything to eat here. What was I supposed to eat? I can’t just order doordash or grubhub, we’re still in medieval India and those haven’t been invented yet. But that’s besides the point. We should talk about why you built your nest on the forest floor instead of up high in the tree”
Bhinkanu shook her head. She needed Pauin to understand. The material issue here was not the nest. It was why the cowherd hadn’t fed Pauin fresh grass. If he had, the Bull wouldn’t have entered the forest and stepped on her eggs.
Over Pauin’s protests, she went off to talk to the cowherd.
If a bird can talk and understand the language of Bulls, it should not surprise you to know that she could talk and understand humans too. Bhinkanu confronted the cowherd about his dereliction of duty. She held him morally responsible for the destruction of her eggs. Why hadn’t he provided fresh grass to Pauin? He must do that in the future to avoid Bhinkanu’s eggs being crushed again. And no, the little bird would not consider building her nest high up in a tree. And no, they couldn’t ask Pauin to be less of a bull in a china shop.
The cowherd thought this made no sense. But if she wanted to know why he hadn’t given the Bull fresh grass, it was because there was no fresh grass. It hadn’t rained for a while. All the grass had dried up. Where was he expected to get fresh grass from? Even if he ordered fresh grass from Amazon, it would dry up before it reached him. And he meant the real Amazon rainforest, not the online retailer which did not yet exist.
Bhinkanu decided that she must take the matter up with Indra, the chief of the Gods and the Lord of Rain and Thunder. It was obviously Indra’s fault that her eggs were destroyed. She ignored the cowherd’s advice and went to heaven. I guess Birds going to human heaven is okay. But it’s an awfully long flight even for someone with wings, especially if she didn’t have extra oxygen.
She got to heaven. Normally it would have taken years to get an audience with Indra. But Indra himself moved Bhinkanu up the waiting list. Especially after he saw the BirdWaitsForIndra hashtag trending on his social media feed.
Bhinkanu got straight to the point. Indra had to make it rain in her part of the world. Otherwise, the grass wouldn’t grow there, and the cowherd would not be able to feed Pauin and the bull would trample on her eggs the next time. She was careful not to speak truth to power like she had done with the cowherd and with Pauin. Indra had a bit of a reputation and he might not listen to her if she began by accusing him of having destroyed her children.
Indra explained that of course he wanted to help avoid such a terrible situation. But he had to let her in on a little secret. He couldn’t just make it rain whenever. He could only direct rain where frogs croaked. And the frogs in and around Pauin’s farm were not croaking any more.
Well, then you can guess what Bhinkanu did next. She visited the frogs and asked them why they had murdered her children by not croaking enough. Not our fault, the frogs said. We can only croak if we are soaking wet.
“So you have to be soaking wet in order to make everything around you wet?” asked Bhinkanu skeptically.
It was a paradox, the frogs admitted, but it was true. Nevertheless, the frogs felt that there was an easier solution to all this. She could just build her next nest up high instead of on the forest floor. But the bird was adamant. She could not deviate an inch from her way of doing things. It was up to the rest of the world to adjust. And finally, she had gotten to the point that she could solve this problem after all. She flew off to the nearest little pond she could find. She filled her beak with water and emptied it on one of the littlest frogs. That frog welcomed it with a loud croak. And that got the machinery cranking. Indra obliged and sent a bit of rain, proportionate to the croaking of a single frog. But that rain soon wet all the other frogs and within minutes it was pouring. The grass the next day looked lush green. I guess in folk tales these things turn around pretty quickly. The cowherd cut that lush green grass and fed it to Pauin who then did not have to venture into the forest again.
Bhinkanu laid more eggs of course back again in the same forest floor location as before. But whether the eggs survived is a different story.
Considering that even in today’s world, there are birds in Uttarakhand that lay their eggs in nests on the forest floor, Bhinkanu’s lineage has managed to survive.
Let’s move on to story number two. This is about a mother and daughter. Like most protagonists in medieval India, they were poor and lived in a village. Being in a mountainous region, their sustenance was not from farming, but from fruits and berries that they picked. They would gather a bunch of these and eat their one square meal a day. They would sell anything left over and that would go into their Sukanya Samriddhi scheme. If that had existed. But the mom Saru did not have to worry about the non-existence of a government-backed education scheme. Because there were never any leftovers. It was lucky if they got to eat enough berries in a day.
One day, they went a little deeper into the woods than they had before. Saru, the mother, was getting desperate. And it didn’t matter that Haruli, her daughter, was only a few years old and hardly capable of walking miles. Barefoot. But that’s exactly what mother and daughter did.
And on this day, when they went deeper into the woods, their patience was rewarded. They came across a tree they hadn’t seen before. It had red berries unlike they had seen before. Saru decided to taste it. Haruli asked if she could get a bite too, but Saru thought that was not a good idea. “You know what they say about putting on your oxygen mask first. I have to try this fruit myself. Besides if I let you try it, you’ll want more”
“But mummy, there are lots of berries here, I can eat some and we can still take back a full basket” Haruli suggested.
But Saru wouldn’t listen. “Less talking, more picking,” she said. The basket was soon full and Haruli still hadn’t had a bite.
“Let’s go home first,” her mom urged.
Well, someone should have called child protection services on Saru at this point for recklessly endangering the welfare of her daughter. But such things did not exist back then, and things got progressively worse.
They walked back and reached while it was still warm in the afternoon. Haruli asked about the hundredth time if she could have a bite. Just one tiny berry that was almost about to fall out of the side of the basket anyway. She didn’t mind if it was one of the less ripe ones. But Saru again denied her this. She left the basket full of berries in the sun.
She went off to enter the day’s activities in her books for when the tax man came collecting. There were still some hours for dinner, and keeping her record books updated was going to take her some time.
Just to be on the safe side, Saru asked Haruli play outside so the girl could shoo away any birds that might come to grab a bite from the open basket.
Around an hour later, Saru emerged briefly from her taxes to check how the berries were doing. And discovered to her shock that the basket was practically half empty! She thundered at Haruli “Why did you eat my berries? I mean our berries.”
Haruli was frightened of her mom’s reaction. “I didn’t” she tried meekly. But Saru wouldn’t listen.
“You didn’t listen to me, did you?” she asked Haruli. “How could you? I’m going to punish you for this”
At this point the girl was panicking. She knew her mother could get really angry, and right now that’s what the situation was rapidly turning into. She didn’t wait for Saru’s anger to escalate. She ran off.
That prompted Saru to chase after her. Haruli, the little girl who had been underfed most of her life ran as fast as she could manage. But Saru was gaining on her. Right at the moment that Saru lashed out with her arm to grab her daughter, something happened that was wonderful and strange at the same time. Haruli changed into a bird. She flapped her wings rapidly and took off into the sky.
Saru stopped, shocked at this turn of events. This must have been her imagination. Surely, her daughter had been replaced at some point by a vicious shapeshifting monster who devoured half the berries. What had the monster done with Haruli?
Or was it possible there was no monster at all? Or that Haruli had never existed? Had Haruli perhaps been an imaginary companion that Saru had created in her mind to cope with the psychological pressure of living alone in a cruel world?
This was getting very confusing. The plot seemed to be like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Was this the part where the aliens would arrive and some dream she recently had would unlock her chances of survival?
For Saru’s sake I wish that were so. But the truth was far worse.
As Saru kept getting closer to home from her chase, she was fully convinced that what she had seen and perceived as Haruli was indeed a bird that had learned to shapeshift. She was fully expecting to see Haruli playing outside their home. She would give her mother her usual playful and cheerful smile, despite the deep hunger she was definitely feeling. Maybe she would joke about it too.
But all Saru saw outside her home was the doll Haruli had been playing with. Her favorite doll that she never parted with. Now separated from her by the suddenness of the incident. Now separated from her by Saru’s actions. She looked around but there was no trace of Haruli.
As it got later, and cooler and the Sun was close to setting, Saru walked to the basket. She gasped in astonishment at what she saw there. The basket was full of berries, just the way she remembered it being when they got home earlier today. That’s when she realized what had happened. The warm afternoon sun had dried the berries and made them smaller in volume. But as the afternoon advanced into a cool evening, things were back where they had started from. Haruli had been telling the truth after all. She hadn’t even tasted a single berry. But Saru’s reaction had done its damage. She had lost her little baby girl forever.
Saru wailed in sorry and for some reason this changed her into a bird too. She took to the skies and was never seen or heard from again.
Except some birds in the modern day make noises that remind locals of this story. There’s a bird whose call sounds like it is in a hurry, as if still being chased by Saru. Another is aggressive, trying to catch up.
I do hope that with their transformation into birds, Saru and Haruli got to eat any berries and fruits from any tree they could. There are some birds of prey in Uttarakhand, but not enough to cause major survival risk for Saru and Haruli.
That’s all for now
Next Time
In the next episode, we’ll do an Akbar-Birbal story. It’s been a while since we did an Akbar-Birbal story, so that’s what we’ll cover next time. We’ll learn how to grow wisdom in a pot. And we’ll learn how to conduct a census of all the crows in the empire.