Punchkin | Deccan Fairy Tale of the External Soul (12+)

About this tale

Punchkin is a Deccan fairy tale not a preschool Indian shelf story. It includes stepmother cruelty, mass petrification, and the slow undoing of a tyrant whose life is hidden in a parrot. Honest credit: dictated by Anna Liberata de Souza to Mary Frere (1868); widely known also via Joseph Jacobs (1892).

Story

A raja has seven daughters. After their mother dies, a poor widow who comes daily for kitchen embers secretly drops mud into their cooking. Only the youngest, Balna, sees the trick; her elders will not refuse charity. When the raja finally watches and catches the woman, he is swayed by her words and marries her. The seven princesses lose their mother’s house, their kitchen, and their father’s care. They weep at their mother’s tomb.

They flee. Their uncle’s neighbouring kingdom has already been turned to stone by a sorcerer named Punchkin — army, attendants, a hundred thousand frozen mid-stride.

Punchkin carries Balna to his palace and wants to marry her. She refuses for twelve long years.

In captivity Balna has a son. The boy grows, escapes by her design, is raised in secret, and returns as a gardener’s helper in Punchkins own grounds. Through a rare coded visit he learns the secret Punchkin finally speaks in a moment of softness:

Far away, in thick jungle, a circle of palm-trees stands. In the centre, six water-pots (chattees) are stacked. Beneath the sixth is a small cage holding a little green parrot. On that parrot’s life hangs Punchkin’s life — yet the country, he boasts, no man can enter.

The boy finds the place, seizes the parrot, and, with Punchkin watching from afar, twists off one wing — Punchkin’s arm falls. The second wing — the second arm. One leg, then the other. He twists the parrot’s neck; Punchkin’s head rolls. He crushes the bird; the magician dies. Every stone man wakes. Balna is freed. The seven are restored. The stepmother is sent away.