reading

Introduction

THE DAYS OF THE BANYAN TREE

Savitri and Satyavan

Shravan Kumar and his Wife

A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY

The Birth of Krishna, the Blue God

Krishna and the Demon Nurse

The Serpent King

How Krishna Killed the Wicked King Kans

TIME FOR THE DEAD

Doda and Dodi

DUSSEHRA, THE FESTIVAL OF VICTORY

How Ram Defeated the Demon King Ravan

I King Dashrat’s Special Heir

II Ram is Banished

III The Kidnapping of Sita

IV The Search for Sita

V The Siege of Lanka

THE DAY OF THE WINTRY FULL MOON

The Moon and the Heavenly Nectar

KARVACHAUTH – THE LITTLE CLAY POT

The Girl Who had Seven Brothers

DIVALI – FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

Lakshmi and the Clever Washerwoman

HOLI – FESTIVAL OF SPRING

The Wicked King and his Good Son

A DAY FOR BROTHERS

The Mango Tree

The Faithful Sister

NINE DAYS’ FESTIVAL

The Old Man and the Magic Bowl

The King Without an Heir

The Girl in the Forest

THE FESTIVAL FOR PARVATI

How Ganesh Got his Elephant Head

A Guide to Pronunciations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Dear Reader,

When I was about five years old, there was a roll-top desk in my uncle’s study. Between its four legs was a space that seemed enormous and quite perfect for putting on plays. With a few old sheets tacked on as curtains, we had an ideal stage.

We wrote the plays, my cousins and I.

You see, we all lived together in my grandfather’s large house in Delhi. There were a good five dozen of us, a strange mix of short, plump women who spent their days pickling, knitting and gossiping, tall shrewd men who went to work every day in gleaming cars and returned to play bridge and drink whisky, old servants who polished the cars, milked the cows, mowed the grass and put up the mosquito nets, and a lot of cheeky children who spent much of their free time either listening to stories told by the elders or else translating them into live theatre. Presiding over this entire brood was my white-bearded, barrister grandfather.

There was no tradition of bedtime stories in our family. Perhaps our parents, aunts and uncles just did not want to yell out stories to twenty bedded-down children.

No. Our family tradition of storytelling consisted more of the family huddle. We would crowd around an aunt on the Big Room divan or around my grandmother on the Prayer Room carpet or, if my mother was telling the story from a drawing-room sofa, we would drape ourselves over its arms and back, even overflowing on to the floor, bodies overlapping bodies.

The fund of stories seemed endless. The plump women of the house would no sooner emerge from their baths in freshly starched summer voile saris, their faces smelling of powder and vanishing cream, than we would drag them to a sofa or carpet or divan to tell us a story. They would demur, we would insist. They would give in and settle down languorously with a great rustling of their crisp saris. Pillows would be adjusted. One leg would be tucked under the other. Soon there would be no sound other than the whirring of the fan and the twittering of garden birds.

‘Since Lord Krishna’s birth is about to be celebrated, how about the story of his birth?’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ we would say in unison.

‘Could you go up to the point when Krishna slays the serpent?’ a cousin would ask.

‘Please make the wicked King Kans really, really wicked,’ I would add. ‘Could we have red bulging eyes?’

Some of the stories we were told were of ancient origin and were drawn from our religious epics. Others, also ancient, had no recognizable source. They had just been told, in my family, generation after generation for centuries. What all the stories had in common was a clear moral tone. This made it more comfortable for the elders to tell them to us and, strangely enough, it made us children feel secure. What was right and what was wrong was so very clearly defined.

Death, however, was never hidden. As in our lives where those who had died were kept at home until the family could place them on biers and carry them to cremation grounds for the final ceremony, so in our stories death was always treated as part of the cycle of life – as much an open, family matter as birth. Children were born at home and the old died at home. I was born in my grandfather’s house in a back room that overlooked the Yamuna River. Years later my grandfather died in the same house in a front room overlooking the garden. The stories that we were told were designed not only to separate right from wrong but to prepare us, indirectly, for the vagaries of life and the fact of death.

We, as children, did not know all this, of course. To us the stories were just plain fun.

In the heat of the afternoon when the elders of our house, well stuffed with lunches of pilaf, kormas and pickles, would stretch out on large divans for the afternoon nap, their last words to us as eyelids drooped were, ‘Try to sleep. You need rest. Whatever you do, do not go out in the sun.’

I am afraid we did go out. But we heeded our elders to the extent that we stayed in the shade of the mango or tamarind tree.

It was here that we told our stories. One cousin might tell the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he had seen as a school play, another might regale us with an episode from the adventures of Robin Hood.

The next step was to put together all our new information in the form of a play to be staged under that roll-top desk, for the delight of our adoring and very indulgent parents.

What sort of plays did we make up?

We were children of two completely different cultures. I, for example, had a mother and grandmother who could not speak a word of English and who told me stories that reinforced my ties to my Hindu, Indian past. The schools I went to were either Catholic convents or Anglican missionary schools where all subjects were taught to us from English textbooks as if we were sitting in a small school in Cumberland. India was still a colony so I was learning ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Half a pound of tuppeny rice’ and, many years later, devouring Jane Eyre and Great Expectations.

I knew vaguely that the poems and stories at school were different from the ones my mother told me. But I did not really know why. Nor did my cousins.

The result was that when, on those summer afternoons we met under shady trees to write our plays, our conversation would go like this:

First cousin: ‘Why do we not stage the fight between the good King Ram and the demon King Ravan?’

Me: ‘Could I play Ram?’

Second cousin: ‘No, you are a girl.’

Me: ‘It is only a play.’

Third cousin: ‘Why do you not play Ram’s wife, the good queen, Sita?’

Me: ‘But Sita does not do anything. She is only, well, good.’

Fourth cousin: ‘Can you shoot a bow and arrow? I can. I should play Ram.’

Me: ‘I could learn. I have almost learned cricket.’

First cousin: ‘Let us get on with it. Up to the time Ram is banished to the forest, events are quite clear. We will follow Grandmother’s story. When Ram reaches the forest, why do we not arrange to have him meet Robin Hood and his Merry Men who have also been banished to the forest?’

Me: ‘Yes, yes. Then Friar Tuck can assist the monkey god Hanuman in finding the kidnapped Sita. I will play the demon king, Ravan, who kidnaps Sita.’

Fifth cousin: ‘No you won’t. You are a girl. When Ram meets Robin Hood, could he say “Well met by moonlight, proud Robin Hood”?’

And so it would go. We hardly understood the differences between East and West. We just assumed that Someone’s grand plan included all of us in it, with all our differing cultures.

What follow are some of the stories that were told to us by the women of our household. They were always told, not read. I doubt if a good half of them have ever been written down. Some, like the story of Doda and Dodi, are possibly unknown outside my family.

I have arranged the stories in sequence as they might be told at religious festivals during the course of a Hindu calendar year. We use the lunar calendar and our year starts at the time of the Spring equinox around mid-March.

I hope you enjoy the stories.

My very best to you,

Madhur Jaffrey

PS If you are going to read the stories aloud and need help with the pronunciation of proper names, please turn to here.

There was an old banyan tree that grew just outside our house. It was more than a tree, it seemed to be a whole forest, all by itself.

Its trunk went up, up, and up, almost a hundred feet. Some of the branches, instead of rising and spreading like outstretched arms, made nosedives towards the earth, where they burrowed in, took root, and reappeared as fresh trunks. My nanny – or aya, as we called her – said that the roots of a banyan tree went all the way to the Underworld and that when they rose again as fresh trunks, they carried up with them all sorts of ghosts and goblins. She insisted that there never was a banyan tree without a few ghosts lurking in its branches.

I believed her.

My grandmother, on the other hand, said that the banyan tree was a blessed tree because it had the wisdom of its years and because it provided so much shade. In fact, in the burning months of May and June, we prayed to it and offered it the best of the summer’s yield – seedless cucumbers, watermelons, aubergines and mangoes.

I saw my grandmother’s point. In the summer, scorching winds blasted in from neighbouring deserts carrying with them particles of sand to irritate eyes and parch throats. When the sky overhead felt like an oven with its door left open by some careless cook, the banyan trees offered cool, natural arbours to perspiring travellers.

My grandmother always advised me, ‘On your way back from school, remember to get off your bicycle and rest under the shade of the banyan tree.’

Rest under the banyan tree and bump into a ghost!

Oh dear me, no! I paid no attention to my grandmother. In fact, when I reached the banyan trees, I held my breath and bicycled for my life.

No ghosts were going to catch me!

Here are two stories that were told on the days of the banyan tree. One on a moonless day in May, the other on the seventh day of the waning moon in June.

PUFFIN BOOKS

Contents

Your story starts here …

It all started with a scarecrow …

Introduction