Meeting a New Friend

Hiranyaka, the mouse, and Laghupatanaka, the crow, became great friends. One day, the crow came calling on the mouse with eyes full of tears. Worried, the mouse asked,

“What’s the matter? Why are you so sad?”

“I am thoroughly fed up with this country. I want to go elsewhere,” replied the crow.

“But what is the reason for this sudden change of mind,” asked the mouse.

“There is a famine here. People are dying like locusts. No one is offering cooked rice for the peace of the dead. So, I don’t have food. Hunters are busy trapping birds in their nets. I have escaped narrowly. I don’t know when my turn will come. I want to leave this country before it comes,” said the crow.

“What are your travel plans then,” asked the mouse.

“There is a big lake in the middle of a vast forest in the south. I have a friend there, a turtle whose name is Mandharaka. He is a great host who will feed me with fish, pieces of meat etc. I will spend my time happily with him daily discussing small and big things in the world. I don’t want to die miserably in a hunter’s net.”

Laghupatanaka continued, “Elders have always said that they are happy who are fortunate not to witness the destruction of crops and the decline of the people. Nothing is impossible for a competent person. There is no land that does not respond to effort. For a scholar every country is his own country and there is no enemy for a sweet-tongued person. Learning and power are not the same. Remember that the king is respected only in his country but a scholar is honoured everywhere.”

Hiranyaka said, “If that is so, I will also follow you. I am also very sad.”

“Why are you sad?” asked the crow.

“It is a long story. I shall tell you when I reach your friend’s place,” said the mouse.

“But how can you come with me,” asked the crow. “I am a bird and can fly. You cannot do that,” said the crow.

“That is no problem. I will sit on your back and we can fly off,” suggested the mouse.

“That’s an idea. I will be doubly happy there because I have the company of the turtle and also yours. Come, get on to my back. We will fly together,” said the crow.

On a fine day, the crow with the mouse on his back flew to the great lake in the middle of the forest. His friend Mandharaka, the turtle, saw him with the mouse on his back and thought, “This crow is not an ordinary crow. It is better I hide from him.” The turtle immediately ducked under water. But the crow saw the turtle going down and understood that his friend did not recognize him. The crow then left the mouse at the bottom of a tree and flying to the top of it loudly addressed the turtle, “O Mandharaka, I am your friend Laghupatanaka. Come out and welcome me who has come to see an old friend after a long time.”

Recognizing his friend’s voice, Mandharaka came out of the water and with tears of joy in his eyes, said, “O Laghupatanaka, I am so happy you have come. Come and hug me. We are meeting after a long time and that’s why I could not immediately recognize you. You know the saying that you should not make friends with him whose power and pedigree are not known to you.”

The crow then came down from the tree and the two of them embraced each other in joy. They began telling each other about what happened in the long interval of their separation. The mouse, Hiranyaka, too came out of the hole he was hiding in, greeted the turtle and sat by the crow’s side. The turtle asked the crow, “O Laghupatanaka, who is this little friend of yours? Why did you bring him here on your back though he is your food.”

“He is my friend Hiranyaka. I can’t live without him. Just as you can’t count the stars in the sky and the sands on the seashore, I can’t recount his great qualities. He is fed up with this world. That is why he has followed me on my visit to you,” said the crow.

Moral

Even without the wherewithal, learned men and intellectuals achieve what they want like the crow, the rat, the deer and the turtle. True friends seek each other’s company regardless of differences.

Historical & Cultural Context

The Panchatantra (Sanskrit: Pañcatantra, “five treatises”) is an ancient Indian collection of interlinked animal fables traditionally attributed to Vishnu Sharma in roughly the 3rd century BCE. Composed to teach three reckless princes the arts of governance (niti-shastra), its stories were carried by merchants and translators across Persia, Arabia and Europe, seeding the world’s fable tradition.

A cornerstone Mitra-Labha (The Gaining of Friends) tale, this story reverses the typical Panchatantra pattern of animal opposites causing harm. Dated to the Panchatantra’s composition (c.200-300 BCE), it demonstrates how friendship between unequals strengthens both parties. The unlikely pairing of mouse and crow, common to Kalila wa Dimna adaptations, serves as metaphor for overcoming prejudice through direct relationship. Sanskrit nitishastra teachings use such tales to instruct that merit, not birth or species, determines worthiness of friendship.

Reflection & Discussion

1. Hiranyaka the mouse and Laghupatanaka the crow were natural opposites; what made them trust each other enough to become friends?
2. Think of a friendship you have or know about where the two friends are very different in personality, interests, or background; what holds that friendship together?
3. What might have happened if either the mouse or crow had decided the friendship was ‘unnatural’ and refused to help the other in danger?

Did You Know?

• The Panchatantra was written around 200 BCE by Vishnu Sharma to educate three young princes.
• The Panchatantra has been translated into over 50 languages, making it one of the most translated works in history.
• Many of Aesop’s Fables are believed to have roots in the Panchatantra stories.

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.
• Reading folk tales aloud to children builds vocabulary, imagination, and a sense of cultural inheritance.
• Traditional stories remind us that wisdom belongs to many cultures. No single tradition holds all the answers.

Why This Story Still Matters

Meeting a New Friend 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.