Folktales from Bengal by Soham Saha

woman had somehow made a fool
out of him, and let the gourd go.
    The old woman had almost
reached her home when the fox spotted the gourd. Unlike the other
two, he was not so easy to fool. “A thing that rolls along by
itself, and sings, yet has no mouth. Strange, very strange indeed.”
The fox said to himself, and then placed a sharp rock in its
path.
    The gourd slammed into
the rock with a huge crash, and burst open, and the old woman
rolled a bit further down the road before she came to a
halt.
    “ Ha! You hag,
nice try, but I got you now.” He said, and proceeded to eat
her.
    The old woman brushed the
dirt off her clothes, and stood up. She said, “All right all right,
you got me fair and square. But why don’t you let me clean up a
bit. Here, I’ll sing a song for you.”
    “ Fine, but be
quick.” The fox said. He did not like dirt getting inside his
teeth. It was really hard to clean afterwards. And he did not mind
listening to a little music.
    The old woman got up on a
hillock, from which she could see her little hut. She sang loud and
clear,
    “ Come on,
come on, too too,
    Ronga, Bhonga,
Bhutu.”
    And before the fox could
say ‘darn’, the three dogs came running to her rescue, and tore up
the fox into shreds. The old woman hummed a song, and went back to
her hut, her head bobbing and her cane tapping on the forest
floor.

The Old Woman, the
Thief, and the Pantabhaat

    Pantabhaat is a dish that
poor people have for dinner every day, and these days, the rich
people eat once a year as a delicacy. When dinner is finished, the
leftover rice is placed in a small clay pot called the shanki, and
soaked in water. The shanki is hung with a rope close to the
ceiling so that the rice is not stolen by cats. In the morning, the
shanki is taken down, a little salt is sprinkled on the rice, and
if you’re lucky, you might even paste in a green chilli, and have
the dish for breakfast, before you go out to work.
    At least, this is what
the old woman was planning on doing the night before she hung the
shanki up in the balcony of her little cottage. In the morning,
when she woke up, it was gone! The old woman we are talking about
was very poor, so poor that all she had in the world was the small
cottage, the shanki, and the one piece of cloth she wore, and so
old that nobody would give her any work to do. All day long, she
would have to walk around the village, begging for food, and at
night, she cooked whatever she had collected, and ate half. The
rest she left for breakfast, which she ate before heading out for
begging again.
    But not this day. The
pantabhaat, her meagre breakfast, was missing today. The shanki was
hanging from the rope in the ceiling, but the rice, not a grain of
it was left. The thief had licked the pot clean.
    What was the old woman to
do? She headed out to beg again, hungry, and brought back what she
collected for dinner. She cooked, ate, and hung up the pantabhaat.
But next morning, it was gone again.
    The next night, she
decided she would stay up and guard the rice, but she was so tired
from the day’s work, that she fell asleep, and the thief swiped it
again.
    The following day, she
went to the king to complain.
    The path was long and
winded, and her joints creaked and her hip hurt from all the
walking. But she went along anyways. She stopped by a pond to rest,
and a catfish swam close.
    “ Hello,
granny, what are you doing so far from home?” gurgled the
fish.
    “ Going to the
king to complain about a thief who eats my rice every night,” the
old woman said.
    “ Why do you
think the king will care?” said the fish, and blew a
bubble.
    “ Because I am
hungry for three mornings now. I can barely walk.”
    “ No, no. Why
would he care?
You are poor. He is rich. He won’t know your pain,” said the
catfish.
    “ Of course he
will. He’s the king.”
    At this, the catfish
shrugged, and said, “Pick me up on your way back. I might come
handy.”
    The old woman got up and
started to walk