The Magic Bed

This story comes from The Magic Bed: A Book of East Indian Fairy Tales, retold by Hartwell James and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York and London in 1910 as part of the firm’s “Children’s Library” of illustrated fairy-tale volumes. Hartwell James’s slim collection holds five Indian folktales adapted for English-speaking children — “The Magic Bed”, “The Talking Bird and the Singing Tree”, “How the Sun, Moon, and Wind Went Out to Dinner”, “The Pigeon and the Crow”, and “The Soothsayer’s Son” — and James drew the bones of his version of “The Magic Bed” from Old Deccan Days, or Hindoo Fairy Legends Current in Southern India (Mary Frere, John Murray, London, 1868) and from Maive Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales (Ellis & White, London, 1880), the two great Victorian anthologies through which Indian village storytelling passed into English children’s reading. The underlying tale belongs to one of the most widely-distributed cycles of Indo-European folklore, the great “Grateful Animal Helpers” cycle that sits inside Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale-types ATU 554 (“The Grateful Animals”) and ATU 513A (“Six Go Through the Whole World”) / ATU 552 (“The Girls Who Married Animals”), with the central impossible-task device that Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature tags as H1091.1 (task: separating mustard from oil — performed by ants), B437 (helpful insects), B435.4 (helpful tiger), D1156 (magic bed that travels through the air), D1470.1.15 (magic wishing bag), and D1171.6 (magic bowl always full of water).

Origin and Source

The version retold below was first set down in English by Mary Eliza Isabella Frere (1845–1911), the eldest daughter of Sir Henry Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay, who travelled with her father across the Bombay Presidency between 1865 and 1867 and was told the story (along with twenty-three others) by her Indian Christian ayah, Anna Liberata de Souza. Anna had heard the tale as a child in the Maratha country south of Goa from her own mother and grandmother, both of whom were household servants in the great Salsette estates of the Konkan coast. Frere transcribed the stories almost verbatim from her ayah’s evening tellings, in the careful, idiom-preserving Anglo-Indian English of the period, and published them as Old Deccan Days through John Murray in 1868 with a learned introduction by her father and a dedication to the women of England. The book went through five editions in the next thirty years and became, with George Bird’s Wide-Awake Stories (1884), Joseph Jacobs’s Indian Fairy Tales (1892), and Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab (1894), one of the four great Victorian channels through which the storytelling of the Indian village reached the English-speaking child.

“The Magic Bed” preserves a tale-type whose roots reach far below Frere’s nineteenth-century Marathi recension. The motif of the prince who is rewarded for kindness with three magical objects — a flying conveyance, an inexhaustible vessel of food, and an inexhaustible vessel of water — appears in the Pancatantra (Book V, “Ill-Considered Action”), in the Pali Jataka (most clearly in the Sambhava Jataka, No. 515), and in Somadeva’s eleventh-century Kathasaritsagara, where similar magical bequests come from grateful Naga-kings, grateful river-spirits, and grateful Yakshas of the forest. The motif of the impossible task accomplished by grateful insects — the central image of “The Magic Bed”, in which an army of ants spends one night separating the oil from eighty pounds of mustard-seed — is recorded as motif H1091.1 in Thompson’s index and is one of the genuinely pan-Eurasian narrative inventions, appearing as far west as the Grimms’ Cinderella (KHM 21) and the Russian Vasilisa the Beautiful, and as far east as the Tang-dynasty Chinese tale of the magistrate’s daughter who must sort millet from sand. “The Magic Bed” therefore preserves, in a form trimmed for the Edwardian children’s library, a narrative grammar that the Indian subcontinent has been telling for at least two and a half thousand years.

The Prince and the Ant-King

The story opens on a hot midsummer afternoon in an unnamed kingdom of north-central India. A young prince — rajah in the storyteller’s word, the title borne by every ruling son of a Hindu royal house from the Aravallis to the Coromandel coast — has ridden out before dawn to hunt blackbuck and chital deer in the dense jungle that runs along the foot of his father’s hills. By noon the heat has scattered his retinue: his huntsmen with their long matchlock jezails, his beaters with their drums and brass cymbals, his trackers with their shikari hounds, even his groom and his horse have all been lost to one another in the maze of tall sal and bamboo stands. The prince finds himself alone, sweating in his green silk hunting angarakha and his white turban, and he dismounts under the spreading shade of a great peepal tree to rest and to eat the small spiced rice-cakes — kheer-podi, perhaps, the kind a Konkani Brahmin queen mother would have wrapped in plantain leaf for her son’s saddle-bag — that his mother gave him at sunrise.

He breaks the first cake. There is one ant inside it. He breaks the second cake. There are two ants. He breaks the third cake; there are three ants. He breaks the fourth, the fifth, the sixth — and inside the sixth cake, surrounded by six small worker-ants, sits a tiny figure no bigger than a grain of rice but crowned and robed and holding a black silk umbrella over his own head: the Ant-Rajah himself, the king of the ant-kingdom that lives in the chambers and chambers of the great red mound by the foot of the peepal tree. The prince of the human kingdom is, by upbringing and instinct, a generous young man. He does not crush the ants. He does not throw the cake away. “I think these cakes belong to you more than they do to me,” he says aloud to the Ant-Rajah, in the courteous formal Marathi of an educated youth speaking to an unknown elder. “Take them all, for I am going to sleep.”

And he stretches himself flat on the cool brown earth of the jungle floor, with his turban as a pillow and his arm across his eyes, and he falls into the heavy sleep that overtakes even princes after eight hours of riding in the May sun. Some long while later, in the in-between country of light dreaming, he feels something tickle the inside of his ear — not unpleasantly, like the tip of a feather — and a tiny, tiny voice, no louder than the whisper of a cricket, speaks directly into his sleeping consciousness. “We are much obliged for the cakes,” says the Ant-Rajah, “and we have eaten them all. What can we do for you in return?” The prince answers, drowsily, that he wants for nothing in the world. He cannot spend all the money he has. He cannot wear all the jewels he has. He cannot count all the servants he has. And he is, secretly, in his princely way, a little tired of all of it.

The Ant-Rajah listens to this in solemn ant-silence, and then he gives the answer that turns the whole story. “You would never be tired,” he says, “of the Princess Lalun. You should seek her out, for she is as lovely as the morning.” And then, before the prince can rouse himself out of his doze to ask where the Princess Lalun lives or whose daughter she is, the Ant-Rajah and all his ants are gone — back into the chambers of the red mound at the foot of the peepal tree — and the prince wakes up alone in the empty noon, with the name Lalun ringing in his head as if it had been struck on a small silver bell. Lalun. The Hindi word means “the beloved”, “the cherished”, “she-who-is-rocked-in-the-cradle-of-affection”. And from the moment the prince hears it he cannot get it out of his ears.

The Tiger’s Thorn and the Fakir’s Three Gifts

He mounts his horse and rides on through the jungle. He has decided, in the Indian-folktale way, that he must find this Princess Lalun, even if he does not yet know her father’s name or her father’s kingdom. The afternoon stretches into evening; the long shadows of khejri and mahua trees fall across the path; and as the sun reddens above the ridge he comes to a clear forest pool, fringed with tall kana-grass and water-lilies, and beside it a great Royal Bengal tiger is standing on three legs, lifting its right forepaw painfully off the ground and roaring — not the roar of hunger, but the high broken roar of an animal in pain.

The prince, who has read his Pancatantra and his Hitopadesha and knows the village stories of the helpful animal, does not immediately reach for his bow. He swings out of the saddle, walks slowly forward with his open palms held out, and asks — in the formal storyteller’s Hindi the village ayahs use to talk to children — “Are you hungry, friend? What is the matter?” The tiger, who is also a storybook tiger and who can therefore speak, answers that he is not hungry, and that he is the king of this stretch of jungle, and that he has driven a long iron-pointed thorn deep into the soft pad of his right forefoot and cannot pull it out with his own teeth. The prince comes near enough to look. He sees the splinter glinting in the sole of the paw. He takes the tiger’s forelimb between his hands as gently as a midwife takes a sleeping infant. With his small razor-sharp khanjar dagger he eases the splinter free and binds the wound with healing haldi-and-margosa leaves chewed soft and pressed flat against the cut, fastened with a strip of yellow muslin torn from the end of his own turban.

The tiger is rising to his feet to speak his thanks — and at that very moment, the storyteller says, the underbrush parts behind him and his wife the tigress comes crashing down to the pool, jaws wet, ears flat, in a black mood. “How nice!” she cries, when she sees the prince. “A whole man! And we have had nothing but a thin antelope-bone in three days! Quick, my lord — we shall eat him together!” But the tiger, who is not only a king but also a gentleman in the old Indian sense of the word, growls her down. “He has been very good to me, woman. He has taken the long thorn out of my foot. We owe him our gratitude. If he ever has need of help, anywhere in the seven jungles, we two will go to him at once.” The tigress mutters, lashes her tail, and bounds back into the brush. Then the tiger draws himself up and tells the prince the great piece of news the prince has been needing all afternoon.

“The Princess Lalun’s country lies across three ranges of hills and through seven jungles — a road of forty days and forty nights even on a swift horse. But in the next jungle to this one there sits a fakir, a holy beggar of the Shaivite order, under a peepal-tree at the edge of a clearing. He has three things at his side. He has a small wooden bed which, when one lies on it and speaks one’s wish, will fly the speaker anywhere on earth. He has a leather wallet which, when one shakes it and asks, will pour out any food and drink the asker desires. And he has a stone bowl which, when one taps it, fills itself instantly and inexhaustibly with sweet water. If you can win the loan of these three, prince, the Princess Lalun is as good as found.” The prince thanks the tiger in the high formal Sanskrit phrase “namo namah”, mounts his horse, and rides on into the next jungle.

The fakir is exactly where the tiger has said he will be: an immensely old man with grey ash rubbed in stripes on his forehead, a saffron langoti at his waist, a great twisted matted jata of dreadlocks wound in a top-knot, his rosary of rudraksha beads slow in his right hand, his tin kamandalu at his side, his small wooden bed folded beside him, and his leather wallet and grey stone bowl set neatly at his feet. The prince dismounts at a respectful distance, presses his palms together at his forehead, sits down cross-legged, and waits. The fakir does not open his eyes for a long while. When at last he does open them, the prince explains the whole errand: the cakes, the Ant-Rajah, the Princess Lalun, the tiger’s thorn, the tiger’s directions. The fakir listens to all of it without moving and then asks one quiet question: “Why do you seek the Princess Lalun?” The prince answers without hesitation: “Because I want to marry her.”

The fakir takes the prince’s two hands between his own — a hand-clasp the storyteller calls hasta-darshana, the eye-of-the-hand — and looks long into the prince’s eyes, the way an old goldsmith looks into a coin he is being asked to value. He sees what is to be seen. He is satisfied. “Very well,” he says. “Lie down upon my bed. Take the wallet in your right hand, and the bowl in your left. Speak your destination. The bed will carry you. While you are gone, I shall feed your horse and watch your saddle, for these three things travel best without a rider’s belongings.” The prince does as he is told. He lies down on the small wooden bed. He says clearly, in the formal upright voice of someone giving an order to a magic, “Take me to the Princess Lalun’s country.” And in less time than it takes a man to draw breath twice, the bed has lifted him into the dusk above the seven jungles and the three ranges of hills and set him down, gently as a feather, just inside the borders of the kingdom of King Afzal, in the sleeping streets of a small dark provincial capital.

The Glowing Princess on the Roof

The kingdom into which the magic bed has carried the prince is no ordinary kingdom. King Afzal, the storyteller explains, has had a difficult time of it as the father of the most beautiful princess in the world. So many neighbouring princes have come asking for her hand that he has long since grown weary of saying No. He has tried to refuse them by setting impossible tasks (lift this iron pillar, swim that crocodile river, speak the seventy-two true names of the sun-god); the princes have failed and gone home sour, and still more princes have come. At last, in a mood of pure exhaustion, King Afzal has issued the only edict that has had any effect: no foreigner may spend a single night within his borders, on pain of imprisonment. And, to enforce the edict and to keep the city in the kind of darkness that suits her after-sundown business, he has banned the lighting of any oil-lamp in any window in the capital after dusk — for, he explains, “my daughter is light enough.”

The prince, knowing nothing of the edict, walks down a dust lane to the first lit doorway he sees and asks for shelter. The doorway belongs to an old woman, a widow of perhaps seventy, who keeps a single goat and a small kitchen-garden, and she shakes her head sorrowfully. “My king has forbidden it on pain of his prison. But I cannot send a guest away without supper. Sit down with me on the threshold. I have nothing in the house but a handful of rice.” The prince smiles. He sets down the leather wallet he has carried from the fakir on the old woman’s small clay table. He claps it once with his right hand. “Wallet,” he says, “I want supper for two.” The wallet opens itself like a flower and pours forth a feast: yellow pulao dressed with raisins and almonds, a curry of mutton in green coriander, fresh wheat chapatis still hot from a tava nobody can see, four kinds of pickle, a silver dish of shrikhand, two bowls of kheer, all served on twelve gold plates with twelve gold spoons. The old woman cannot speak. The prince taps the stone bowl, and clear cold sweet water rises in it as if from an underground spring. They eat, they drink, the old woman washes up with the magic water, and the prince makes her a present of the twelve gold plates and twelve gold spoons in exchange for one night’s lodging in her garden.

Then dusk falls completely. And as the prince steps out of the old woman’s cottage to look at the dark city, a soft silver light begins to spread across the streets and rooftops — not the light of any lamp, not moonlight, not the radiance of any star — but a clear sweet pearly silver-and-gold radiance that is brighter than moonlight and gentler than sunrise. The prince looks up. On the flat marble roof of the king’s palace at the heart of the city, the Princess Lalun has come up to take her evening place. She is dressed in a saree of woven silver gauze, her dark hair unbound and falling in a midnight river almost to her ankles, a single band of diamonds and pearls across her forehead. And the light that is filling the streets is coming out of her own face and her own arms and her own bare feet on the marble. “The Ant-Rajah was right,” the prince says quietly to himself. “Her beauty turns darkness into light, and night into day. I should never be weary of the Princess Lalun.”

The princess sits on the roof until midnight, lighting the city for those who cannot afford lamps; then she goes down to her chamber to sleep. The prince, knowing the bed will carry him as easily through palace walls as through the open sky, lies down on it and whispers, “Bed, take me to the Princess’s room.” The bed lifts him through the darkness, slips through some forgotten roof-vent, and sets him down softly beside the sleeping girl. The prince does not touch her, does not wake her. He shakes the wallet. “Wallet, I want a shawl — embroidered in red and blue and gold, of the kind a queen would wear to her own wedding.” The shawl is in his hands. He spreads it over her sleeping form, like the prayer of a stranger who has come to bless. The bed carries him back to the old woman’s garden. He does the same the next night, with a ruby ring; and on the third night, when the princess wakes to find a stranger beside her bed with the magic conveyances of a holy man at his side and his ring already warm on her finger, she does not scream. She listens. He tells her his story: the Ant-Rajah, the cakes, the tiger’s thorn, the fakir, the magic bed. And the Princess Lalun — whose own light fills the streets every night and who has heard a thousand suitors recite a thousand boasts — tells him gravely that she will go in the morning to her father, and that she will say she has chosen him.

The Three Impossible Tasks — Mustard, Demons, and the Sky-Drum

King Afzal hears his daughter out, takes one look at the courteous foreign prince in his green hunting silks, and decides that he will at least make this one work for the privilege. He calls the prince before the throne in the white marble durbar hall and, in the most gentlemanly voice he can manage, sets him three impossible tasks — for the rules of Indian folktale require it of every father of a glowing princess. “Here,” says the king, “are eighty maunds of mustard-seed, freshly threshed. By tomorrow morning at sunrise you must crush every single grain of it and bring me the oil. Fail, and there is no marriage.” The prince carries the great brass jar of mustard-seed back to the old woman’s cottage and sits on her threshold staring at it. “It cannot be done,” he says, “by any man living. It would take a thousand oilmen with a thousand stone presses a hundred days. Nothing short of an army of ants could crush this in a single night.”

And the moment he says the word “ants”, the moment the syllable leaves his lips — the Ant-Rajah and the entire population of the ant-kingdom of the great red mound under the peepal tree creep, in a long black thread, under the door of the cottage, up the leg of the table, and around the brass jar. “You forgot,” says the Ant-Rajah, in the same tiny cricket-voice from the jungle noon, “that we owed you a debt for the six cakes. Lie down. Sleep. The mustard will be crushed by morning.” And in the morning, when the prince wakes, every grain of mustard-seed is hollow and dry, and a small clear pool of golden mustard-oil lies in the bottom of the jar, fragrant and untouched by any oil-press. The prince carries the jar to the durbar hall. King Afzal stares. He is not quite ready to give his daughter away yet. He sets the second task.

“In a great iron cage at the back of my palace I have caged two demons — rakshasas, sixteen feet tall, with brass tusks and red eyes — whom I caught last year in the hills above the kingdom. They cannot be killed by any human weapon. If you can kill them today, the princess is yours.” The prince walks back to the old woman’s cottage almost laughing. “How can I fight two demons?” he asks her. “Nothing short of a pair of tigers could do it.” And the moment he says the word “tigers”, the door of the cottage darkens and his old friend the tiger of the forest pool walks in, and at his shoulder is the tigress (much improved in temper, the storyteller hints, by a year of married jungle-life). “You forgot,” says the tiger, “that we owed you a debt for the long thorn. Take us to the king. We will eat his demons before the morning is out.” And the durbar comes out to watch — the king on his peacock throne, the princess at his right hand, the foreign prince standing between two great striped tigers — and the cage is opened, and there is a brief and noisy scene that the storyteller draws a courteous veil over, and at the end of it two huge dead rakshasas lie on the marble floor and the tigers are licking their whiskers.

King Afzal wipes his forehead. He does not particularly want to give his daughter away to a foreigner, but he is rapidly running out of impossible tasks. He thinks for a long while, and then he produces the third task — the one he believes truly cannot be done. “There hangs,” he says, “in the high sky over my city — on a hook of cloud, fastened by a silver chain — a great brass kettle-drum of mine, the nagara that my grandfather struck on the day he won this kingdom. If you can climb up into the sky and beat that drum loudly enough for me to hear it down here in the durbar hall, you may marry the Princess Lalun. If you cannot — you will leave my kingdom by sunset and never return.” The prince walks back to the old woman’s cottage with his head bent, for this third task seems genuinely beyond him. “My ants can crush oil and my tigers can kill demons,” he tells the old woman, “but who in all the world can climb into the sky?” And the old woman lifts her grey eyebrows at him with the gentle severity of all old women in folktales. “You are rather stupid, child. If your bed has carried you across seven jungles and three ranges of hills, do you not think it can also carry you up into the sky?”

The prince stares at her for one moment. Then he laughs aloud, lies down on the magic bed, takes his hunting-knife in his right hand, and says clearly, “Bed, take me up to the king’s kettle-drum in the sky.” The bed lifts him straight up like an arrow shot from a bowstring. He goes through the dusk, through the cloud-layer, through the thin cold air above the cloud-layer, and into the still blue silence above all of it — where a great brass kettle-drum, polished as bright as the sun, hangs by a silver chain from a hook of unmoving cloud. The prince balances on his magic bed beside it, raises his hunting-knife, and beats the drum with the brass haft of the knife — boom, boom, boom, three great rolling blows that the ground-folk of the kingdom hear like distant thunder out of the empty sky. King Afzal in his durbar hall hears them through the marble pillars. The princess hears them on her roof. The old woman hears them in her kitchen-garden. There can be no further task.

The Wedding and the Returning of the Gifts

The prince comes down from the sky on his magic bed, walks into the durbar hall in his dusty green silks, and stands before the king. King Afzal, who is not a wicked man and who has only been a careful father, smiles at last and embraces him. “The wedding shall take place as soon as you like.” Invitations go by fast horsemen to all the kings and queens of the seven kingdoms. The streets of the capital are hung with marigolds and mango-leaves. The wedding lasts a week. And on the morning of the eighth day — before the prince and the princess set out together for his own father’s country — the prince does the one thing that distinguishes him, in the storyteller’s grammar, from a merely lucky young man.

He takes the magic bed, and the leather wallet, and the grey stone bowl, and he carries them himself, through the seven jungles and across the three ranges of hills, all the way back to the old fakir under the peepal tree. He kneels. He returns the three gifts. He takes back his own horse and his own saddle. He thanks the holy man, and he thanks him not casually but with all the gravity of a man who has understood that magical things are loans, not possessions, and that they belong to whoever can use them rightly for the sake of someone other than himself. The fakir blesses him. The Ant-Rajah, watching from the foot of the peepal, blesses him. The tiger and the tigress, watching from the next jungle, bless him. And the prince rides home to his own kingdom with the Princess Lalun beside him on her own quiet white mare, lighting the road home for them both whenever the night closes in.

The Moral — What the Tale Teaches

The Punjabi and Marathi villagers from whom Mary Frere and Hartwell James first heard “The Magic Bed” close it with a small, wry, gentle proverb — one of the proverbs that Maive Stokes records in her 1880 collection as a stock teaching for children, almost the same in Hindi as it is in Bengali, and almost the same in the household speech of Tamil grandmothers as it is in the Marathi of the Konkan coast. The proverb runs:

“नेकी कर, दरिया में डाल।”
Nekī kar, daryā mein ḍāl.
“Do a good turn, and cast it into the river.”

The image is the tossing of a small piece of bread, or a flower, or a copper coin, into the slow current of a great Indian river — the Ganges, the Yamuna, the Krishna, the Godavari — without expectation that the river will carry it back. The river will carry it back. That is the village wisdom of “The Magic Bed”. Every kindness the prince does in this story — the cakes given to the Ant-Rajah on a hot afternoon when he could just as easily have crushed them, the thorn pulled from the tiger’s foot in the deepening evening when he could just as easily have ridden on, the patient courteous waiting at the fakir’s feet when he could just as easily have demanded — is a small good turn cast into the river. He does not cast it expecting return. He casts it because that is the kind of person he is. And the river of the story brings each kindness back to him at exactly the moment he needs it: the ants crush the mustard-seed, the tigers kill the demons, the fakir’s bed beats the drum in the sky.

What the tale teaches, in its deepest layer, is therefore not the gospel of cleverness — the prince is not particularly clever, and indeed he has to be told by the old woman to use his magic bed in the sky. What it teaches is a moral grammar that is older than the Pancatantra and that runs through every one of the great Indian collections, from the Jataka to the Hitopadesha: that the universe of folktale is a moral economy, that small kindnesses freely given accumulate small debts of friendship in the people and the animals and the holy men around the giver, and that when the impossible task arrives — as it always does in the third act — it is not solved by the giver’s own strength but by the network of friendships he has spun, all unknowing, behind him. The prince of “The Magic Bed” wins his princess not because he is the strongest swordsman or the cleverest scholar in the seven kingdoms but because, in three small forgettable encounters, he was kind to ants, kind to a tiger, and kind to an old beggar — and because, when the magical loan was over, he gave it back.

Why This Tale Has Lasted

“The Magic Bed” has lasted because it carries, in a perfectly-shaped four-act narrative coil, three of the deepest and most universal images of the Indo-European folktale tradition: the grateful insect, the grateful predator, and the magical loan from the holy man. The grateful insect — the ant-king who repays bread with the impossible labour of a hundred thousand small bodies — is one of the oldest narrative inventions of the Indian subcontinent, recorded in the Jataka, the Pancatantra, the Kathasaritsagara, and dozens of regional cycles, and travelling from there along the trade-routes into the Persian Anvar-i-Suhayli, the Arabic Kalila wa Dimna, the Latin Directorium Humanae Vitae, the medieval German exempla, and finally into the Grimms’ Cinderella (KHM 21), where pigeons sort lentils from ash. The grateful predator — the tiger or lion who has a thorn pulled from his paw — is the same image that runs through the Roman Androcles and the Lion (Aulus Gellius, second century CE), the medieval saint’s-life of Saint Jerome, the Aesopic fable, and the African Mande tale of the leopard’s debt. The magical loan from the holy man — the bed, the wallet, the bowl — is the storyteller’s grammar of the temporary access to power, and it is told, recognisably, from the Ramayana’s gift of the brahmastra to the European fairy-tale of the magic napkin and the seven-league boots.

The tale has also lasted because of the Princess Lalun herself. She is not a passive trophy. She is one of the most striking female figures in the entire body of Indian folklore: a princess who lights the streets of her father’s city by her own radiance, who has had her own city’s lamps banned because her face is bright enough, who hears a stranger out of the darkness in the middle of the night and is calm enough to listen instead of screaming, and who walks into her father’s durbar hall the next morning and tells the king, in the formal Marathi of an heiress, “Father, I have chosen this one.” Mary Frere’s 1868 transcription explicitly preserves the moment, in the cadence of Anna de Souza’s spoken Konkani-English, and Hartwell James in 1910 keeps the same scene almost word for word. The princess is the silent companion-figure to the prince’s kindness: she is the prize of a moral economy that rewards generosity, and at the same time she is herself an active agent of choice, who selects her own husband out of the thousand suitors her father has set impossible tasks for. She is the figure — repeated again and again across Indian folktale — of the radiant heroine whose own light is so bright that the king must darken his city to keep her in it, and whose chosen husband is therefore chosen as much by her as by him.

And finally the tale has lasted because of its small, perfect ending. The prince does not keep the magic bed. He does not keep the inexhaustible wallet. He does not keep the always-full water-bowl. He returns them, in person, to the old fakir under the peepal tree. The Indian storyteller has built into the close of “The Magic Bed” the deepest piece of folktale wisdom of all: that magic, like grace, is borrowed and not owned, and the test of a hero is not whether he can use the magic but whether he can give it back. The prince of Hartwell James’s 1910 retelling passes that test in the eighth-day morning of his wedding week, and the story closes — as Indian folktales always close — with a sense of moral balance restored, gifts returned, friendships paid, and a young couple riding home together along a road that lights itself wherever they go.