The Ghost-Brahman

There was once a poor Brahman who, because he did not belong to the high-ranking Kulin families, found it extremely hard to get a wife. He went round to wealthy people and begged them for money so that he could marry. He needed a great deal, less for the wedding itself than for the gift that had to be paid to the bride’s parents. He went from door to door, flattered many rich people, and at last he had collected enough. The wedding took place, and he brought his bride home to live with his mother.

Soon afterwards he said to his mother, “I have no way to keep you and my wife. I must travel to faraway countries and earn money somehow. I may be gone for years, because I will not come home until I have a good sum. I will leave you everything I have. Make it last as best you can, and look after my wife.” Then, with his mother’s blessing, he set off.

That very evening a ghost came to the house, looking exactly like the Brahman. The young wife thought it was her husband. “Why are you home so soon?” she asked. “You said you might be gone for years. What changed your mind?”

“Today is an unlucky day for starting a journey, so I turned back,” the ghost said. “Besides, I have some money already.”

The mother never doubted that he was her son. So the ghost lived in the house as though it belonged to him, as though he were the old woman’s son and the young woman’s husband. He and the Brahman were as alike as two peas, and all the neighbours believed he was the real man.

Years later the Brahman came home from his travels and was amazed to find someone just like him living in his house.

“Who are you?” the ghost demanded. “What are you doing in my house?”

“Who am I?” said the Brahman. “Who are you? This is my house, that is my mother, and this is my wife.”

“What nonsense,” said the ghost. “Everyone knows this is my house, that is my wife, and that is my mother. I have lived here for years. And you claim the house and the woman are yours? You must be out of your mind, Brahman.” And he chased the Brahman away.

The Brahman was too astonished to speak. He did not know what to do, until he thought of taking his complaint to the king. The king looked at the Brahman and at the ghost, and each was the very image of the other. He was stuck and could not decide between them. Day after day the Brahman came to beg the king to give him back his house, his wife and his mother, and each time the king, not knowing what to say, told him, “Come tomorrow.” Each time the Brahman left the palace in tears, striking his forehead with his palm and crying, “What a wicked world! I have been thrown out of my own home, and some other fellow has taken my house and my wife. And what sort of king is this? He gives no justice!”

On his way home from the court, outside the town, he always passed a meadow where a crowd of cowherd boys played. While the cows grazed, the boys gathered under a big tree and played at kings and courts. One boy was the king, another the chief minister, another the head of police, and others were constables. For many days they watched the Brahman go past in tears.

One day the cowherd king asked his minister why the Brahman cried every day. The minister did not know, so the boy king sent a constable to fetch him.

“The king wants you at once,” said the constable.

“Why?” asked the Brahman. “I have just come from the king, and he told me to come back tomorrow. What does he want with me now?”

“I mean our king, the cowherd king.”

“Who is the cowherd king?”

“Come and see.”

The cowherd king asked the Brahman why he went home crying every day, and the Brahman told him his whole unhappy story. When he had heard it all, the boy said, “I understand. I will get back everything that is yours. Just go to the king and ask whether I may judge your case.”

The Brahman hurried to the king of the country and asked him to hand the case over to the cowherd king, who had offered to settle it. The king, who had been completely puzzled by it, was happy to agree, and the trial was set for the next morning.

The cowherd king had seen the truth of the matter. The next day he brought along a small bottle with a narrow neck. The Brahman and the ghost both stood before him. After a lot of questioning of witnesses and plenty of speeches, the boy said, “I have heard enough, and I will give my judgment now. Here is a little bottle. Whoever can get inside it will be declared by this court to be the true owner of the house.”

“You are a cowherd, and you think like one,” said the Brahman. “How could any man get into a tiny bottle like that?”

“If you cannot get in, then the house is not yours,” said the boy king. Then he turned to the ghost. “What about you, sir? If you can get into the bottle, the house, the wife and the mother are all yours.”

“Of course I can,” said the ghost. And to everyone’s amazement he shrank himself down to the size of an insect and crept into the bottle. Straight away the cowherd king pushed the cork in tight, and the ghost was trapped.

“Throw this bottle to the bottom of the sea,” the boy told the Brahman, “and go home to your house, your wife and your mother.” The Brahman did just that. He lived happily for many years, and he and his wife had sons and daughters.

About this telling

“The Ghost-Brahman” comes from Lal Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal. Day’s introduction to the tale describes a marriage hierarchy that privileges Kulin families and makes this poor man’s marriage costly. This is the source’s historical social framing, not a claim that ancestry measures human worth or that every Bengali marriage followed the same arrangement.

Day calls the boy judge the “neat-herd king”; neat-herd is an old English word for a cowherd. Day ends this tale with a Bengali storyteller’s closing rhyme about the withering Natiya-thorn.

Read the original: Lal Behari Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal (Gutenberg #38488)

Best for ages 6–8 — a spooky but funny puzzle tale where a clever child outwits a ghost; good for reading aloud.

A closer reading

The king keeps comparing appearances, but the impostor’s appearance is precisely what makes the problem impossible to settle that way. The cowherd boy changes the question from ‘Who looks like the Brahman?’ to ‘Who can do something a human cannot?’ The ghost’s eagerness to win makes it display the very difference it needed to conceal.

The real Brahman’s insult about the boy’s occupation is immediately contradicted by the boy’s success. Rank and practical judgment come apart. The judgment’s language also treats the wife and mother as things to award along with a house. They are people deceived by the ghost, and readers can ask what the resolution would sound like if their perspectives were heard.

Try this with the story

Write the evidence available before and after the bottle test. Explain why getting into the bottle disproves the ghost’s human identity even though the boy announces it as the winning action. Rewrite one judgment sentence without treating family members as possessions.

Think about it

• Why does comparing faces leave the king stuck?
• What does the bottle test reveal that appearances cannot?
• How does the boy’s success answer the insult about cowherds?
• What might the wife and mother want to say about the deception?

You may also like

• The Indigent Brahman — another poor Brahman’s troubles from Day’s collection
• The Match-Making Jackal — a Day tale about a clever trickster
• The Origin of Opium — a holy sage’s magic in the same book