Aspirations A Tale Of Two Women

Ramya looked out of her window at the park below. It would be 4 years today since she entered her “new home”. Although she was yet to feel akin to calling it a home. She could not tell which had felt more like home, her room at the hostel where she had spent ten years before she got married and came to this house or this sprawling penthouse she and her husband lived in.

At the hostel, her room had always been the hub of all activity. It was the place where she and her friends would hang out when they returned from work, where they would share anecdotes from work, discuss colleagues, share sob stories about boyfriends, girlfriends and fiances, and happy news; where a couple of years earlier they had sat and crammed books to clear their placement exams, scribbled assignments to meet deadlines. It was always teeming with activity. Then she moved…

The day she stepped into this house, she had done so with optimism. New places excited her, it meant a chance to meet new people and make new friends. And in the first 6 months, she had done so, making it a point to go to the play park in society every evening on weekends, and hosting get togethers. People had received her amicably too. But soon the questions started, about her work, about her intention to have kids and the long periods of absence of her husband who had to travel for work. She soon tired of giving answers to all these questions and the weekly visits became monthly, the get togethers vanished altogether.

She looked down at the park focusing on kids playing there. Her cup of tea grew cold on the balcony sill. She gazed at the small girl on the swing. If fate didn’t enjoy playing pranks, she would have had a kid that old today. She knew what she had wanted, she would give up everything else for a chance to be the mother pushing that swing. But she knew that to be beyond her reach. The doctor’s words would forever ring in her ears.

Rayna pushed her daughter on the swing. 3-year old Arya was everything in her life. Arya was the little ray of sunshine in her otherwise bleak life. Once a promising student, placed at a leading publishing house, things changed overnight when Rayna got engaged to a distant acquaintance, a businessman and moved to a new town. How she had argued and fought with her parents. But she had to give in eventually. Resolving to start looking for a job as soon as she could, she was horrified when she was told that working was out of question for her. “Women in his family did not go out to work “. More agony awaited her when she was told in no unclear words that she was expected to produce a “boy” as soon as possible. She had retaliated and yet again, gave in. Only, it had turned out to be a girl.

4 years had passed since she came to this city. Rayna wondered how it was that her life had turned from white to black so quickly. Life was contrary to what she had expected it to be, what she had wanted it to be. Stuck between a man who cared nothing about her, who controlled her every move and would monitor her 24×7, a daughter who was ignored by everyone in the family except her, a house full of in-laws and relatives coming and going, with not a spare moment of peace, she sometimes wished she could just run away from it all. She looked up at the sky, wondering if there really was really a God to look out for her. She caught sight of the lady in the penthouse.

Life seemed so unfair at that moment. Rayna’s heart would cringe each time she looked at this lady. She seemed to personify everything that Rayna wanted to be, everything she had aspired to have in life.

For a long moment the two ladies looked directly at each other.

Moral

Patience paired with clear aspiration guides a person through doubt and setback. Ramya’s quiet persistence and long vision eclipse sudden fortune or the envy of those who rush for immediate gain.

Historical & Cultural Context

Aesop’s Fables are short animal tales traditionally attributed to the enslaved Greek storyteller Aesop (c. 620–564 BCE). Each fable compresses a moral into a vivid scene, and through Latin, Arabic and European retellings they became a backbone of moral education worldwide.

This contemporary parable adapts the Aesopic archetype of the slow victor to modern life. It carries echoes of Panchatantra wisdom about dharma (right action) aligned with purpose, and Buddhist patience (khanti). The story teaches that virtue and vision, even when invisible to others, orient one toward authentic fulfillment.

Reflection & Discussion

1. Why does Ramya keep working on her dream despite impatience around her?
2. How is patient aspiration different from wishful thinking or laziness?
3. What have you pursued patiently, and how did it change you?

Did You Know?

• Aesop was believed to be a slave in ancient Greece around 620–564 BCE.
• Aesop’s Fables have been retold for over 2,500 years across virtually every culture.
• Many common English phrases like “sour grapes” and “crying wolf” come from Aesop’s Fables.

What This Tale Teaches Us Today

Old stories keep their power because their lessons never stop being useful. Here is how this one still applies:

• Folk tales teach ethics without lecturing. A good story can reshape a mind more powerfully than any rule.
• Stories that have survived for centuries have done so because their lessons still work.
• Reading folk tales aloud to children builds vocabulary, imagination, and a sense of cultural inheritance.

Why This Story Still Matters

Aspirations A Tale Of Two Women joins a vast global library of folk tales that human beings have been telling one another for thousands of years. Every culture has produced its own stories, but the deepest themes – courage, kindness, cleverness, loyalty, the cost of greed – appear again and again in different clothes. Modern readers who spend time with folk tales inherit something precious: a sense that people have always wrestled with the same basic questions, and that good stories can still help us find good answers. That is why these tales persist. Each one is a small tool for living, handed down quietly through generations.

Cultural Context and Continuing Influence

Folk tales like this one survived for hundreds of years through oral storytelling before any scholar thought to write them down. Grandparents told them to grandchildren, travelers traded them along roads and rivers, and mothers repeated them to babies who would one day repeat them to their own children. Each small retelling sharpened the story, discarded unnecessary parts, and polished the essential lesson. That long process of refinement is why a good folk tale feels so weighty – it has been shaped by thousands of listeners across generations, each contributing something small to the story we read today.

Modern readers sometimes wonder whether folk tales are still relevant in an age of apps and smartphones. The answer is yes, perhaps more than ever. The technology changes, but the underlying questions – about kindness, courage, loyalty, greed, family, fear, love – do not. These are the same questions that children asked around a fire in ancient India, around a hearth in medieval Ireland, around a campfire in 19th-century Korea. And they are the same questions children ask their parents today, just phrased differently. That is why a family that reads folk tales together is doing real cultural and emotional work, not simply entertaining itself.

Reading Folk Tales With Children

Reading folk tales aloud to children is one of the oldest and most effective forms of moral education. Unlike a lecture or a rule, a story slides past a child’s natural resistance and plants its lesson in the imagination, where it quietly grows. Years later, when the child meets a real situation that resembles the story – a bully at school, a dishonest coworker, a moment of temptation – the old tale rises to the surface of memory and offers guidance. That is why parents and teachers across every culture have trusted stories to do the work of raising good humans, long before formal schools or textbooks existed.

When reading this story with a young listener, try pausing at key moments and asking what the child thinks will happen next. Let them guess, even if they are wrong. That small act of prediction turns a passive listener into an active thinker. After the story ends, a simple open question – “What would you have done?” or “Who do you think was the smartest character?” – invites the child to connect the tale to their own life. Those conversations are where real learning happens, not during the reading itself but in the quiet moments that follow.

Older children and teenagers sometimes think they have outgrown folk tales. In reality, the best tales only deepen with age. A ten-year-old hears the surface plot; a fifteen-year-old notices the irony; a twenty-year-old sees the economic and political pressures on the characters; a forty-year-old understands the parents in the story for the first time. A good folk tale is a gift that keeps unfolding for decades. Families who read and reread the same stories across the years discover this naturally, and pass the discovery down.

A Final Word

Every folk tale carries within it the accumulated judgment of thousands of listeners across many generations. When a story has been told for a thousand years and still moves children today, that is not an accident. It is proof that the story is saying something true about the human condition. The wiser the listener, the more they see in a tale they have heard a hundred times before. Reading these stories slowly, out loud, with children beside us, we are joining the longest conversation our species has ever had with itself. Every tale we share is a quiet vote for patience, for meaning, and for the old idea that a good story is one of the finest things one generation can hand down to the next.

We hope this telling gave you something worth carrying into your day – a small lesson, a useful image, a question to ask your child at dinner. Folk tales do their best work in the hours and years after the reading ends, quietly shaping how we see the world and each other. Thank you for spending time with this story, and for keeping the old tradition of careful listening and thoughtful retelling alive.