A Lac of Rupees for a Piece of Advice

A poor blind Brahmin and his wife depended on their son to keep them alive. Every day the young man went out and begged for whatever he could get. After a while he grew so tired of this miserable life that he decided to try his luck in another country. He told his wife what he meant to do, and asked her to look after his old parents somehow for the few months he would be away. “Work hard,” he begged her, “so that my parents will not be angry and curse me.”

One morning he set off with a bundle of food and walked on, day after day, until he came to the capital of the next country. There he sat down outside a merchant’s shop and asked for alms. The merchant asked where he came from and why. The young man said that he was a Brahmin, wandering from place to place to beg a living for himself, his wife and his parents. The merchant felt sorry for him and offered to take him to the king, who was known to be kind and generous.

As it happened, the king was looking for a Brahmin to take care of a golden temple he had just built. He was delighted to meet this young man and to hear that he was good and honest, and he put him in charge of the temple at once, with a yearly wage of a great store of rice and a hundred rupees.

Two months later, the Brahmin’s wife, who had heard nothing from her husband, left home to look for him. As luck would have it, she came to the very city where he was. There she heard that every morning a gold rupee was given out at the golden temple, in the king’s name, to any beggar who came for it. So the next morning she went to the temple, and there she found her husband.

“Why have you come here?” he asked. “Why have you left my parents? Don’t you care if they curse me? Go back at once and wait until I come home.”

“No, no,” said his wife. “I can’t go back and watch your old father and mother starve. There isn’t a grain of rice left in the house.”

“Oh, God!” cried the Brahmin. “Here, take this.” He scribbled a few lines on a scrap of paper and gave it to her. “Give it to the king, and you’ll see, he will give you a lac of rupees for it.” A lac is a hundred thousand. And with that he sent her away.

On the paper were three pieces of advice. First: if you are travelling and come to a strange place at night, be careful where you stay, and do not close your eyes in sleep, or you may close them forever. Second: if a man visits his married sister in great splendour, she will welcome him for what she can get from him, but if he comes to her poor, she will frown and turn him away. Third: if there is work to be done, do it yourself, with all your strength and without fear.

When the Brahmin’s wife reached home, she told his parents about meeting her husband and the valuable paper he had given her. But she did not like to go before the king herself, so she sent one of her relatives instead. The king read the paper and had the man driven out of the court.

The next morning she took the paper herself. As she walked along the road to the palace, reading it, the king’s son rode by and asked what she was reading. She told him it was a paper with some pieces of advice, and that she wanted a lac of rupees for it. The prince asked to see it, read it, and then wrote her an order on the treasury for the whole amount and rode on. The poor woman was very thankful. That same day she bought enough food to last the whole family a long time.

That evening the prince told his father about the woman and the paper he had bought, expecting him to be pleased. But the king was angrier than ever, and he banished his son from the kingdom.

So the prince said goodbye to his mother, his family and his friends, and rode away, not knowing where he was going. At nightfall he came to a place where a man met him and invited him to stay at his house. The prince accepted and was treated like a prince indeed. A mat was spread for him to sit on, and the best food was set before him.

“Aha,” thought the prince as he lay down. “Here’s a case for the first piece of advice. I won’t sleep tonight.”

It was lucky he made up his mind to stay awake, for in the middle of the night his host got up, took a sword and rushed at him to kill him. But the prince sat up and spoke. “Don’t kill me,” he said. “What good would my death do you? You would be sorry afterwards, like the man who killed his dog.”

“What man? What dog?” asked his host.

“Give me that sword, and I’ll tell you,” said the prince. So the man handed it over, and the prince told his story.

“There was once a rich merchant who had a pet dog. Suddenly he lost all his money and had to part with the dog. He borrowed five thousand rupees from another merchant, leaving the dog with him as a pledge, and started his business again. Soon afterwards, thieves broke into the other merchant’s shop and carried off almost everything. But the faithful dog saw what was happening. He followed the thieves, saw where they hid the goods, and came back.

“In the morning there was great weeping in the merchant’s house. The merchant nearly went out of his mind. All the while the dog kept running to the door and tugging at his master’s clothes, as if to make him come outside. At last a friend said that perhaps the dog knew where the goods were, and the merchant agreed to follow him. The dog led him straight to the thieves’ hiding place, where he scratched and barked to show that the things were buried there. The merchant and his friends dug, and there was all the stolen property. Nothing was missing.

“The merchant was overjoyed. He sent the dog back to its first master with a letter tucked under its collar, telling how clever the dog had been. He asked his friend to forget the loan and to accept another five thousand rupees as a present. But when the first merchant saw his dog coming home, he thought, ‘Oh no, my friend wants his money back. How can I pay him? I haven’t had time to recover from my losses. I’ll kill the dog before it reaches the door and say someone else did it. No dog, no loan.’ So he ran out and killed the poor dog, and the letter fell from its collar. He picked it up and read it, and oh, how bitterly he grieved when he learned the truth!

“So beware,” said the prince, “of doing something you would give your life to undo.”

By the time he had finished the story it was nearly morning, and he went on his way, after rewarding the man.

Next the prince went to the country ruled by his sister’s husband. He dressed himself as a jogi, a holy man, and sat under a tree near the palace, pretending to be lost in prayer. Word of this holy man reached the king. His queen, the prince’s sister, was very ill, and none of the doctors had been able to cure her, so he hoped the holy man might help. He sent for him, but the jogi refused to set foot in a king’s palace. He lived in the open air, he said, and if the king wished to see him, he must come himself and bring his wife. So the king brought the queen to him. The holy man told her to bow down before him, and after she had stayed like that for about three hours, he told her to get up and go, for she was cured.

That evening the palace was in uproar, for the queen had lost her pearl prayer beads and no one knew where they were. At last someone went to the jogi and found the beads lying on the ground where the queen had bowed down. When the king heard this, he was furious and ordered the jogi to be put to death. But the prince bribed the guards and escaped from the country. Now he knew that the second piece of advice was true.

One day, dressed in his own clothes again, he saw a potter and his family laughing and crying by turns. “What is the matter?” he asked. “If you’re laughing, why are you crying? And if you’re crying, why are you laughing?”

“Don’t bother me,” said the potter. “What has it got to do with you?”

“Forgive me,” said the prince, “but I would like to know.”

“Very well, then,” said the potter. “The king of this country has a daughter who has to be married every day, because every husband she has dies on the first night. Nearly all the young men here have died this way, and soon it will be our son’s turn. We laugh at the silliness of it, a potter’s son marrying a princess, and we cry because of what will happen to him. What can we do?”

“That is something to laugh and cry about,” said the prince. “But don’t cry any more. I’ll take your son’s place and marry the princess myself. Just give me some fine clothes and get me ready.”

So the potter dressed him in beautiful clothes and jewels, and the prince went to the palace. That night he was taken to the princess’s rooms. “What a dreadful hour,” he thought. “Am I going to die like all the young men before me?” He gripped his sword tightly and lay down, determined to stay awake all night and see what happened.

In the middle of the night he saw two snakes slide out of the princess’s nose as she slept. They crept towards him to kill him, as they had killed all the others. But he was ready. When they reached his bed, he struck at them with his sword and killed them both. This was the third piece of advice: do the work yourself, with all your strength and without fear.

In the morning the king came as usual to ask what had happened, and to his surprise he heard his daughter and the prince talking happily together. “This man must be her true husband,” he said, “since he alone can live with her.” He came into the room and asked, “Where do you come from? Who are you?”

“O King,” said the prince, “I am the son of the king of such-and-such a country.”

The king was delighted. He asked the prince to live in his palace and named him heir to the throne. After more than a year, the prince asked leave to visit his own country, and the king gave him elephants, horses, jewels and plenty of money for the journey and for presents for his father.

On the way he had to pass through his brother-in-law’s country. When the king there heard he was coming, he came out to meet him with his hands tied and a rope round his neck, as a sign of humble respect, and begged him to stay at the palace. While he was there, his sister welcomed him with smiles and kisses. When he left, he told her how she and her husband had treated him on his first visit, and how he had escaped. Then he gave them two elephants, two beautiful horses, fifteen soldiers and ten lacs of rupees’ worth of jewels.

At last he came home and sent word to his father and mother. But his parents had both gone blind from weeping over their lost son. “Let him come in,” said the king, “and put his hands on our eyes, and we shall see.” So the prince came in, and his parents greeted him lovingly. He laid his hands on their eyes, and they could see.

Then the prince told his father everything that had happened, and how the advice he had bought from the Brahmin’s wife had saved him time after time. The king was sorry he had sent his son away, and all was joy and peace in the kingdom.

Where this tale comes from

This tale comes from Indian Fairy Tales, edited by Joseph Jacobs (1892), who took it from J. Hinton Knowles’ Folk-Tales of Kashmir (1888). A lac (also spelled lakh) is a hundred thousand, so a lac of rupees was a huge fortune.

The prince’s story about the merchant and the faithful dog is a tale inside the tale. Stories of a loyal animal killed by mistake, and of a master who learns the truth too late, are told all over India and far beyond it.

Read the original: Joseph Jacobs, Indian Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg #7128)

Reading guidance: For mature readers. The tale includes the killing of a faithful dog, attempted murder, threatened execution, repeated wedding-night deaths and magical accounts of illness and blindness.

A closer reading

The price is judged before the advice is tested, and the prince’s exile creates the very journey on which he tries it. The nested dog story adds a fourth kind of counsel: delay an irreversible act until you have read the evidence. By asking for the sword before telling it, the prince also changes his immediate position from defenseless guest to storyteller holding the weapon.

The second maxim deserves resistance. On the first visit the prince hides his identity and becomes the target of an accusation about missing beads; on the second he arrives openly with wealth and status. Those changed circumstances do not prove that all sisters reject poor brothers. Nor does that advice actually rescue him from the threatened execution: he escapes by bribing the guards.

The opening wife keeps the family alive, searches for a husband who has sent no news, and finally obtains payment after a relative fails. Her practical persistence makes the prince’s adventure possible. The tale also uses magical cures and snakes emerging from a sleeper as plot devices; these are not explanations of illness or instructions for treating it.

Try this with the story

Make a table for the three counsels: the scene meant to illustrate it, what the prince actually does, and whether the result proves the maxim. Give the sister episode an alternative explanation using only details the story supplies.

Questions to ask

• Why did the king think the paper was worthless, while his son thought it was worth a lac of rupees?
• How did each of the three pieces of advice help the prince?
• What lesson did the prince want his host to learn from the story of the merchant and the dog?

You may also like

• The Brahmin and the Cobra — another tale from Jacobs’ Indian Fairy Tales
• Harisarman — another tale from Jacobs about a poor Brahmin’s family whose luck changes
• Good Luck To The Lucky One Or Shall I Fall Down — another Indian tale about how fortune comes to those meant to have it