A Tamil folktale (A Hair-Breadth Escape)
Once upon a time there lived a rich landlord. He was very miserly and difficult, and hence nobody was willing to work for him. Soon he had no labour for tilling his lands or filling up his tanks.
One day, a holy man visited the landlord and heard about his troubles. The holy man then told the landlord that he would give him a mantra. If the landlord chants the mantra for three months a demon would appear and become a tireless slave of the landlord. After giving the mantra, the holy man went his own way.
So after three months of mantra chanting, one demon stood before the landlord and said:
“I am your servant and will obey your commands. But I must always have work to do. When one job in done, you must give me another at once. I can’t be idle even for a second. If you fail to give me work, I will have to kill you and eat you. That is my nature.”
The landlord smiled and thought he would give the demon enough work to occupy him all the time. So the landlord said: “Repair and clean my two miles long, three miles wide and four miles deep tank”.
Saying this, the landlord went home happily thinking this would keep the demon busy for months. He thought now he could eat and sleep and spend time happily with his wife.
But that evening, the demon came back and said he has finished the work!
The landlord said, hiding his surprise at the speed of the demon: “Okay, now go and take out all the weeds and stones in my lands. They are spread over twenty villages. Make the land ready for cultivation.”
Once the demon was gone, the landlord was relieved as he was rest assured that this job would keep the demon busy for months if not years.
As he was preparing himself for bed that night, the demon appeared before him again and said, “It’s done, master. Your lands are ready.”
In this manner the demon completed whatever task it got assigned in a super fast pace and the landlord had to keep inventing tasks one after another throughout the night.
By morning, the landlord was dead-tired and terror-stricken. He started crying.
His wife then consoled him and said she will take up the matter. She told him to send the demon to her next time he comes asking for a new task.
The landlord did exactly that. When the demon came to the wife, she pulled out a long curly black hair from her head.
And then she told the demon, “Take this hair and make it straight and bring it back to me.”
The demon took the hair, went and sat under a tree and immediately started to make it straight. But no matter what he did, the hair rolled back into being curly. (Ofcourse, we are talking about a time when there were no hair-straighteners!)
So after many useless attempts, the demon remembered seeing goldsmiths heat wires in the fire and beat them till they are straight. Immediately he went to a goldsmith’s forge and put the hair in it. And in a jiffy the hair caught fire, frizzled and went up in a smoke.
The demon was horrified. Owing to such a disastrous outcome of the task assigned to him, he became desperate. He didn’t know how to show his face to his mistress. Hence, he ran away never to be seen again.
Many Indian folktales feature a woman (a mother, a wife or a daughter) who is required to solve riddles that her men cannot answer. Often as a wife she becomes the rescuer of the wayward half-witted husband.
Such tales are reported very early in collections like the Kathasaritsagara (a 11th-century collection of Indian legends and folk tales in Sanskrit).
These women are true cousins of the feisty heroines in Shakespeare’s comedies that owe their plots to Italian novellas, which in turn are related to tales in the Arabian Nights and the Kathasaritsagara.
The women in these folktales contrast sharply with a woman like Sita in the epics, who represents the ideal of the chaste, unquestioning wife who follows her husband like a shadow and suffers all the way.
They are similar to the Dark Goddess, Kali, in the Hindu myth. When the gods are unable to destroy the buffalo demon, they resort to a female figure who has all their power and, in addition, has the wiles to seduce and outwit the demon.