Read Online Folktales from Bengal by Soham Saha - Free Book Online Page A

horrible creatures Mr
Dhat-teri chases here?”
    They went about in the
deep of the forest, and began to roar and thrash about, chasing
animals towards Dhat-teri.
    Hearing the tumult inside
the forest, the roar, and the stampede, Dhat-teri hid under a
fallen tree trunk, and shivering in fear.
    An elephant was running
his direction, and he stepped on the trunk Dhat-teri was hiding
under. Under the pressure, a branch of the tree stabbed Dhat-teri
and he lay there dying.
    After spending some time
chasing the animals, the tigress thought, “By this time, Mr
Dhat-teri must have hunted a hundred of them.”
    They returned to the cat,
only to find him dying.
    “ Oh Mr
Dhat-teri,” they said. ”What happened to you?”
    “ Don’t ask,”
replied Dhat-teri. “When I saw the puny creatures you sent this
way, I laughed so much that my belly burst. Ho ho ho
ho.”
    And then he
died.

The Ant, the Elephant,
and the Servant Boy

    The ant and his wife were
madly in love.
    One day, the ant said,
“Dear, if I die, will you take me to the Ganges and drift me
away?”
    “ Of course
dear,” said the wife. “And if I die, will you do the same for
me?”
    “ Of
course.”
    Soon after this the ant’s
wife died. The ant cried for seven days and nights, then thought,
“Now I have to take her to Ganges.”
    He carried his wife on
his back and travelled towards the Ganges. The path was long and
tiring. After walking for a day, the ant got tired and sat to
rest.
    An elephant was tied to a
pole nearby. It was the king’s favourite elephant. It was breathing
heavily through his trunk, and the ant and his dead wife were
almost blown away.
    “ Hey. Stop
breathing! Stop breathing!” the ant yelled. But the elephant never
listened, and in a ‘whoosh’ the ant’s wife was blown away to nobody
knows where.
    “ You’ll pay
for that, you scoundrel,” cried the ant.
    The elephant opened his
eyes to look at the ground. “Who is speaking?” he said. “I don’t
see anyone.” Then he stomped on the ground where the noise was
coming from. Luckily, there was a hole under the elephant’s foot,
and the ant hid inside the hole and survived.
    Then he started to eat
his way into the elephants flesh. And he burrowed so much, that he
entered the elephant’s head. The elephant got very ill. It ran
around from one corner of the king’s garden to another, and banged
its head on walls. The king called the best physicians in the
kingdom.
    If only they knew that
there was an ant in its head, they would have smeared its feet with
sugar and honey, and the ant would have crawled out. But they did
not. They fed it all sorts of medicine, and still the elephant
died.
    Now they had a big, fat,
and very, very dead elephant. The king had a strange dream that
night. He dreamt that his elephant came up to him and said, “I
worked faithfully for you for years, my king. Now take my body to
Ganges, and give me a burial at sea.”
    The next morning, the
king ordered his men to take the elephant to Ganges. Three hundred
men tied a rope around the elephant’s corpse, and dragged it
towards the river. It was a hot day. After every few feet, they
stopped to rest, and panted like dogs.
    A cook and his servant
were passing by. The servant looked at the people and said,
“Phooie, an itsy bitsy elephant like that, and three hundred men
are making a scene to pull it. Why, I could take it to Ganges all
by myself if I had to.”
    The three hundred men
jumped up to get him at this. They tied him up and dragged him to
the king. Not that he protested.
    The king was sulking
about his elephant. He looked at the men coming back, and asked.
“So, have you taken my elephant to Ganges?”
    The men replied, “All in
due time. But first, you have to punish this liar. He says that he
can drag your elephant to the river all by himself.”
    The king’s eyebrows hit
the ceiling in astonishment. “Really, can you do something like
that?”
    “ Of course,
if your majesty but asks me to.