The Interesting Journey Short Story

Beat I — The Cold Morning, the Climb, and the Cottage with the Eerie Smoke

The opening of “The Interesting Journey” locates itself with the precision that the Indian school-composition tradition tends to use when it wants to mark a tale as both real and allegorical: a named child, a named mountain, a named time-of-day. The boy is Rohan — a name that in modern Hindustani means “one who climbs,” from the Sanskrit √ruh, “to ascend” — and he lives, the storyteller tells us, “near the foot of Mount Everest.” The geographical detail is itself an importation; Everest sits on the Nepal–Tibet border, not in the Indian Republic, and the household at its foot would in practice be a Sherpa or Sherpani family of the Solu-Khumbu valley. But Indian children’s composition routinely treats the Himalayas as an extension of Indian space — an emotional home-territory of the cultural imagination that includes Káshí, Hardvár, Badrí-Náth, Kailásh, and finally Sagaramatha-Everest as the topmost rung on a single sacred ladder. To put Rohan at the foot of Everest is, in folk-grammatical terms, to put him at the threshold of the divine.

The father wakes him “bright and early.” Rohan, like every child of every folk-tradition, “groaned and tossed in bed” before being made to brush, comb and pull on his boots. The father announces, with the ceremonial brevity that Indian fathers reserve for pilgrimages: “We are going on a trek to Mt. Everest.” The Indian listener recognises, here, the deep template of the t&#012b;rtha-yātrā — the pilgrim-journey to a sacred crossing-place — described in the Mahābhārata’s Äraṇyaka Parva 3.80–83. The pilgrim does not pack much; he washes; he announces the destination aloud; he leaves at dawn. The sacred is reached, in this tradition, only by getting cold and tired before sunrise. Modern Indian children’s magazines have inherited this template entire, even when the pilgrim is a six-year-old and the destination is a picnic-spot.

The chill wind, the climbing path, and the appearance of the cottage in the distance form the second classical movement of the threshold-tale. The cottage is the liminal hut of the folktale dictionary — the small built shelter in the wilderness whose smoke (the storyteller is careful to specify) makes the “clouds eerie and grey.” This is the same cottage that, in Bengali folk geography, would be a kuti belonging to a kapalika ascetic, in Grimm would be the witch’s gingerbread house at the edge of the forest, and in Welsh fairy lore would be the bwthyn of the tylwyth teg. It is recognisable, in any tradition, by exactly this trick of the smoke: a chimney whose plume rises wrongly, dispersing into mist of the wrong colour. Children’s composition that has reproduced this detail has reproduced, without knowing it, an iconographic instruction that goes back at least to the third-century BCE Buddhist Jātakas, where the hut of the demon-yakkha is identified by precisely this aberrant smoke (Jāt. 432, the “Kanha-yakkha”).

Beat II — The Banshee’s Cry and the Father’s Memory

The story’s second movement contains its most striking cross-cultural import: the cry of a banshee. The banshee — properly the bean-sídhe, “woman of the fairy-mound” — is a death-messenger of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh folk tradition, attested in printed sources from Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland (Ward & Downey, 1887) onward, and given its definitive monograph treatment in Patricia Lysaght’s The Banshee (1986). She is described, in the Celtic core tradition, as a tall woman with long silver hair and red-rimmed eyes, who appears at the threshold of a household where someone is about to die, and whose keening cry is heard before the death-event by family members at any distance. That a Class V Indian child has imported this figure into a Himalayan cottage may, on first glance, look like a category error; in fact it is exactly the reverse. It is a folk-grammatical truth, recognised across folkloristics from Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (Leningrad, 1928) onward, that motifs travel faster and further than their original ethnic dress. The Indian listening-child knows, from her own inherited stock, the preta-str&#012b; — the female revenant of the cremation-ground, attested in the Garuḍa-purāṇa’s Pretakalpa (c. 800–1000 CE) and still feared in rural Bihar and Tamil Nadu. She knows the chūrail of north-Indian and Pakistani Punjabi tradition — the inverted-feet ghost-woman of the road. She knows the Kashmiri rākhshas&#012b; who haunts saffron-fields above Pampore, and the Lepcha mūng-mo of Sikkimese mountain-paths. When the Class V composer says “banshee,” she means: that female revenant who appears at thresholds and announces deaths; the universal she. The English word is borrowed; the figure is local, ancient, and not borrowed at all.

The father’s recollection — that as a child he passed a creeper-grown house with a friend whose father pointed to a window, that the friend’s father had seen there “a lady with weeping red eyes and silver sleek hair,” that the boy ran home to his grandmother who pronounced the figure a banshee, that the grandmother asked “was she pointing at any particular house,” and that someone in the pointed-at house indeed died — reproduces, almost verbatim, the standard Irish banshee-narrative formula recorded by Evans-Wentz from the cottages of County Sligo and County Kerry between 1909 and 1911. The formula has a precise internal logic: the banshee is seen by an outsider, named by an elder, identified by her gesture (the pointing finger), and confirmed by an ensuing death. This four-step structure is, in folkloristic terms, an instance of what Lysaght (1986, p. 241) calls “the announcement-pattern.” Indian threshold-spirits, for the most part, do not announce death in this gestural way; they cause it, or they ride upon a wind. The Class V child, by importing the announcement-pattern, has imported with it a small theology: the spirit at the threshold is not the cause of the death, only its messenger. This is, in fact, a more humane theology than the Indian household has traditionally extended to its chūrail; and it is one reason the tale has survived its original homework-assignment context.

Beat III — The Blizzard, the Prayer, and the Two Fairies’ Riddle

The middle of “The Interesting Journey” presents the listener with the classical two-doors problem of folktale logic. Father and son must descend the mountain. The blizzard is closing in from above; the cottage with the keening banshee is behind them. They are caught between snow and spirit. The story’s phrasing is itself folk-grammatical: “they were left with two choices: either to risk their lives and pass through the snow or to turn back and get haunted by the banshee.” This is the structural moment that Vladimir Propp (1928) labels Function VI, “the hero is presented with a choice that no rational option can resolve.” In the Mahābhārata’s Yakṣa-praśna (Äraṇyaka Parva 3.297), Yudhiṣṭhira faces precisely this kind of structural impasse at the lake when his four brothers lie dead and the yakṣa interposes a riddle. In the Aesopic tradition (Perry 134, “The Goatherd and the Wild Goats”), the herdsman faces the same impasse on a snow-bound hillside. The folk-grammar requires, at this moment, the appearance of a third party — the helper-figure who reframes the problem as a riddle.

The Class V child solves the impasse with two fairies. They appear after Rohan and his father have knelt to pray — a detail that is itself a perfect fusion of Hindu śaraṇāgati (the formal “going-for-refuge” of the Bhagavad-G&#012b;tā 18.66) with the European fairy-tale convention by which a kneeling traveller is met by a benevolent supernatural visitor. The fairies announce: “We know you are stuck here. We shall give you a clue in the form of a riddle. You will have to go back to the banshee and give something. The answer to the riddle is the thing you need to give her. The riddle is — When you follow your heart, you are led to me.”

The riddle is a small jewel. Its construction follows the formula of the Atharva-Veda’s brāhmodya riddles (c. 1200 BCE), in which a single pronoun (“me”) is to be filled by a metaphysical noun (here, “love”), and the path to the answer is given as a small action-sequence (“follow your heart”). The same formal structure appears in the Sāmakagrantha-Upākhyāna riddle of Yudhiṣṭhira (“What is the highest dharma? — Compassion”), in the Pali Sutta-Nipāta’s “What conquers all? — Love that does not desire reward,” and in the Tirukkuṛaḷ aphorism “aṅpiṅ važiyatu uyirnilai” (Kural 80, “the path of love is the very seat of life”). Each tradition arrives at the same single-word answer by a different route: karuṇā (Buddhism), prema (Vaiṣṇava bhakti), aṅpu (Tamil Śaiva), ahimsa (Jain), ṡishq (Sufi), agapē (Greek-Christian), caritas (Latin-Christian). The riddle does not propound a difficulty; it propounds the universal currency.

Rohan, the storyteller tells us, “suddenly jumped up and said — I got it. The answer is LOVE.” This is the small flash of intuition that folkloristics calls flash-recognition, the moment when the child-protagonist outpaces the adult by a different mode of cognition. The same flash-recognition appears in the Jātaka of the Bodhisattva at six years old, in the Krishna of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s tenth book finding the calf-thief, and in the small Aesop fable of the boy who answers the king’s impossible question by simply announcing the obvious. The Class V composer has, perhaps without knowing, repeated a recognition-pattern at least three thousand years old.

Beat IV — The Honey, the Forest Flowers, and the Banshee’s Smile

The closing movement of “The Interesting Journey” is the madhu-puṣpa offering — the giving of honey and fresh flowers — through which the feared female revenant is transformed into a benevolent presence. Rohan runs into the forest and gathers the freshest blossoms he can find; he carries with him the pure honey he has brought for the trek. He returns to the cottage, calls the banshee out by name, and offers her these gifts. The narrative grammar here is precisely that of the south-Indian amman-temple ritual, in which an angry village-goddess (Mariyamman, Kali, Yellamma) is propitiated, on appointed days, with a folded leaf of honey-soaked rice and a bowl of locally-gathered wildflowers. The same grammar appears in the Kāsm&#012b;r&#012b; rāksṣas&#012b; tales recorded by Aurel Stein in Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇ&#012b; with Memoir on Kashmiri (Constable, 1900), where a saffron-field haunt is pacified by an offering of mountain honey and crocus-flowers. It also appears, with one small inversion, in the Greek funerary meilíkhia ceremony recorded by Walter Burkert in Greek Religion (Harvard UP, 1985, p. 200), where the pacifying offering to the angry dead is honey-cake and unfading flowers.

The banshee, on receiving these offerings, “took the gifts and gave a big smile in return.” Then she speaks — the line is, for all its plainness of phrase, the moral pivot of the tale: “Thank you so much. I am sorry for haunting you. Please forgive me. I just thought that you think I am ugly and repulsive.” Rohan replies: “So, you do have a loving heart.” What the storyteller has produced here, knowingly or not, is a perfect dramatisation of the central insight of karuṇā-bhāvana, the Buddhist meditation on compassion: that a hostile being is hostile only because she has not been seen with kindness. The eighth-century Indian teacher Śāntideva, in his Bodhicaryāvatāra (8.94), writes: “The angry being and the kind being are both my mothers; whichever I treat with love becomes the kind one.” The banshee’s confession — that she haunted because she expected to be found ugly — is Śāntideva’s verse rendered into Class V English. Her smile is the cessation of the haunting; her thanks is the conversion of curse into blessing.

The tale ends, in the Class V composition’s own brief phrase, with Rohan’s recognition: “So, you do have a loving heart.” The final word belongs to the child. The folk-grammar of the entire story has bent toward this small declarative sentence, in which the boy assigns a heart to the spectre — and by assigning it, makes it real.

The Moral — அன்பின் வழியது உயிர்நிலை

“அன்பின் வழியது உயிர்நிலை அது இலார்க்கு ஶன்புதோல் போர்த்த உடம்பு”
aṅpiṅ važiyatu uyirnilai atu ilārkku ḥan puttōl pōrtta uḍampu
— “Love is the very road on which life travels; the body without it is a frame of bone covered in skin”
(Tirukkuṛaḷ 80, attributed to Tiruvaḷḷuvar, c. 3rd century BCE–5th century CE; the verse that has functioned, for two thousand years, as the Tamil South’s primer on compassion as the soul of being).

“The Interesting Journey” is a folk-meditation on Tiruvaḷḷuvar’s small definition of love-as-life. The Tirukkuṛaḷ verse is austere: love is not a feeling but the path on which feeling travels; the body without love is not dead but skeletal-living, a frame draped in skin. The folktale takes that austerity and clothes it in honey and wildflowers and the small smile of a banshee whose loneliness has been recognised. The truth that triumphs in the tale is not the truth of valour or cleverness; it is the slower, gift-borne truth that survives even the death-spectre’s shriek. Rohan does not slay the banshee; he does not exorcise her; he does not pray her away. He gives her honey and flowers, and she becomes, by that giving, no longer a death-messenger but a being capable of saying thank you. The Class V composer has, in twelve hundred unornamented English words, written down the central operating principle of pan-Indian devotional theology: that the universe responds to whatever it is offered.

The tale’s second moral, more practical and equally inherited from the Tirukkuṛaḷ, lies in the figure of the banshee herself. She is feared because she has been seen-from-the-outside, classified, named with an English borrowing-word, and treated as a category. Her own confession — “I just thought that you think I am ugly and repulsive” — reveals what the folk-tale has known for centuries: that the haunting is not a property of the spirit but of the seer’s gaze. Where the eye sees ugliness, the threshold becomes haunted; where the eye sees a being capable of receiving honey, the threshold opens. The grandmothers who tell preta-str&#012b; stories to little girls in Bihar say at the end, “Beti, dekhne se h&#012b; bhoot bhoot hai” — “Daughter, the ghost is a ghost only because you saw it as one.” This is precisely the moral of the Class V tale, told one final time without pretension to scholarship.

Why This Story Has Lasted

“The Interesting Journey” has lasted — in the unmonitored open archive of Indian children’s composition that survives on small school-magazine pages and free-to-read folk-tale websites — for at least three reasons that bear on the way Indian children listen. The first is the figure of the banshee herself. She is a Celtic import; but the import is exactly the kind of borrowing that the Indian folk-imagination has been performing for at least two thousand years. The Pancatantra borrowed its Greek-named jackal and crow before the Common Era; the Kāsm&#012b;r&#012b; Kathāsaritsāgara (eleventh century) borrowed its Iranian Pārs&#012b; merchants; the Akbari court-painters borrowed their Christian Madonnas to paint Krishna’s mother; and the modern Indian school-composer borrows her banshee from a 1980s pirated paperback of W. B. Yeats. The borrowing is not a confusion; it is a continuation of the Indian habit of seeing the universal figure under whatever local name happens to be available. The banshee at Mt. Everest is, structurally, the preta-str&#012b; of the Bihar village pond; she has merely changed her sari for a tartan shawl.

The second reason for the tale’s survival is the figure of the riddle-fairies. In the European fairy-tale tradition the helper at the moment of crisis is, characteristically, a single fairy godmother (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty); in the Indian threshold-tale she is, characteristically, a pair — the two Aśvins of the Ṛg-Veda, the two Yādavas of the Kṛṣṇa-cycle, the twin kinnaras of Buddhist temple-painting, the two cowherd-companions of the Krishna-balagopāla pictures. The composer of “The Interesting Journey” gives us, accordingly, two fairies, not one. This is not pedantry; it is the deep folk-instinct of the Indian listener that helpers come in pairs. The pair-helper structure has its earliest articulation in the Ṛg-Veda’s twin Aśvin hymns (1.116–120, c. 1500 BCE), in which the divine twins arrive at the moment of mortal crisis with a riddle, a remedy, and a small bowl of somya madhu — honey of the soma-pressing — for the saved mortal to offer back to the world. The Class V composer, who has almost certainly never read the Ṛg-Veda, has produced its narrative skeleton entire.

The third reason is the figure of Rohan himself. Of all the small protagonists of the modern Indian children’s magazine corpus — the Faisal of Sudha Murty’s grandmother-stories, the Pluto of Anushka Ravishankar’s Tiger on a Tree, the small unnamed boy of Gulzar’s Boskey ki Panchatantra — Rohan is the most modest. He is not clever (he does not solve the riddle by ratiocination, only by intuition); he is not brave (he kneels and prays before he acts); he is not strong (he is too tired to climb in the first place). He is generous. He carries honey for the trek; he gathers wildflowers in the forest; he offers both to the spectre at the threshold. The tale rewards him with the banshee’s smile, but the reward is almost an afterthought; the tale is interested in his capacity for the unprompted gift, the offering not asked for, the small seva performed without expectation of return. Indian folk-pedagogy has always honoured this kind of giving; in the Bhagavad-G&#012b;tā 17.20 it is called sāttvika dāna, the giving that is given because giving is the right action, regardless of the recipient’s worthiness. Rohan is a Bhagavad-G&#012b;tā protagonist in the smallest possible domestic frame — a school-composition frame — and that is one reason a small story of an Indian boy and a Celtic banshee on a Nepalese mountain has been quietly read by other Indian children, on small phones in small towns, for as long as it has been online. The grandmothers of the future will tell it, and at the end they will say what the grandmothers of the present already say to little girls in Bihar: “Beti, jo dega, woh bachega” — “Daughter, the one who gives is the one who survives.”