The Wrestlers: A Story of Heroes

Long, long ago, in a faraway country, there lived a wrestler who heard that there was a mighty man in India, and he made up his mind to go and wrestle him. He tied ten thousand pounds of flour up in his blanket, put the bundle on his head and set off in high spirits.

Towards evening he came to a little pond in the middle of the desert and sat down to have his supper. First he bent down and took a good long drink. Then he tipped all his flour into what was left of the pond, stirred it into a thick porridge and ate a hearty meal. After that he lay down under a tree and was soon fast asleep.

For many years an elephant had come to drink at that pond every evening. When it arrived as usual, it found nothing but a bit of mud and flour at the bottom. “What shall I do?” it said. “There isn’t another drop of water for twenty miles!” As it wandered off miserably, it spotted the wrestler snoozing under the tree and decided at once that he must be to blame. It charged up in a fury and stamped on his head, meaning to squash him flat.

But the wrestler only stirred a little. “What’s the matter?” he mumbled sleepily. “If you want to massage my head, why don’t you do it properly? If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Put a bit of weight into it, my friend!”

The elephant stared and stopped stamping. Still not giving up, it wrapped its trunk round the wrestler’s waist, intending to swing him up and smash him on the ground. “Oho, little friend, so that’s your game?” yawned the wrestler. He grabbed the elephant’s tail, slung the beast over his shoulder and strolled on his way.

At last he reached the Indian wrestler’s house and called from outside, “Hey, my friend! Come out and wrestle!”

“My husband isn’t home today,” answered the wrestler’s wife from inside. “He’s gone to the forest to cut sticks for the peas.”

“Never mind. When he comes back, give him this with my compliments, and tell him its owner has come a long way to challenge him.” And with that he tossed the elephant right over the courtyard wall.

“Mummy, Mummy!” squeaked a little voice inside. “That horrid man has thrown a mouse over the wall into my lap! What shall I do to him?”

“Never mind, darling,” said the wife. “Papa will teach him some manners. Just take the broom and sweep the mouse away.”

There was a sound of sweeping, and the next moment the elephant came flying back over the wall.

“Well, well,” thought the wrestler outside. “If the little girl can do that, her father will be a match worth having!”

So he set off for the forest and soon saw the Indian wrestler coming along the road, pulling a hundred and sixty carts piled high with brushwood. “Now we’ll see,” said the stranger with a wink. He crept round behind the carts, took hold of the last one and pulled the other way.

“That must be a deep rut,” thought the Indian wrestler, and he pulled a little harder. They went on like that for an hour, and the carts did not move an inch either way. “I think somebody’s hanging on at the back,” said the Indian wrestler at last, and he went to look. The stranger came to meet him. “We seem to be pretty evenly matched,” he said. “Let’s wrestle.”

“Gladly,” said the Indian wrestler, “but not out here in the wilds with nobody watching. Where’s the fun in a fight without cheering?”

“I can’t wait,” said the stranger. “I have to leave straight away, so it’s here or nowhere.”

Just then an old woman came hurrying past with enormous strides. “Here’s someone to watch!” cried the Indian wrestler. “Mother, mother, stop and see fair play!”

“I can’t stop, my sons,” she called. “My daughter is about to run off with my camels and I’m on my way to stop her. But if you like, you can hop onto the palm of my hand and wrestle there as I go.”

So the two wrestlers jumped onto her palm and wrestled away as she strode over hills and valleys.

When the old woman’s daughter saw her mother coming with two men fighting on her hand, she thought, “Here she comes with the soldiers she warned me about! Time to go!” She scooped up all hundred and sixty camels, tied them in her blanket, swung it over her shoulder and ran. But one camel poked its head out and started groaning and gurgling the way camels do, so to keep it quiet she pulled up a tree or two and stuffed them into the bundle as well. The farmer who owned the trees came running after her, shouting, “Stop, thief!”

“Thief, am I?” said the girl crossly, and she bundled the farmer into her blanket too, with his fields, crops, oxen, house and all. Soon she came to a town and asked a sweet-seller for some sweets. When he refused, she picked up the whole town and packed it away, and so she went on with everything she met until her blanket was stuffed full.

At last she came to a huge watermelon. She was thirsty, so she sat down and ate it, and then she felt sleepy. But the camels in her bundle were gurgling so loudly that she could not rest. So she packed everything into the bottom half of the watermelon rind, put the top half on like a lid, rolled herself up in her blanket and used the melon as a pillow.

While she slept, a great flood came and carried the watermelon away. It floated a long way downstream until it stuck on a mudbank. The lid fell off, and out came the camels, the trees, the farmer, the oxen, the house, the town and everything else, until there was a whole new world on the mudbank in the middle of the river.

About this telling

“The Wrestlers” appears in Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India (Project Gutenberg #6145), with notes by Sir Richard Carnac Temple. It is a tall tale in which each strong character is topped by a stronger one: the wrestler, his rival’s little daughter, the giant old woman and finally her daughter, who carries off a whole world in her blanket.

The book’s note says the story “seems to be common all over India.” It mentions a suggestion in the Indian Antiquary that the ending, with a new world spilling out of the melon onto a mudbank, may be an old account of the creation. The same note says the wrestler’s flour was 160 mans in the original, over 13,000 pounds, which the English text rounds to ten thousand.

Read the original: Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India (Project Gutenberg #6145)

Best for ages 6–8 — a gloriously silly tall tale of strongmen, giants and a world that pops out of a watermelon.

A closer reading

Each encounter changes the scale of the joke. What the wrestler can carry becomes a child’s ‘mouse’; what he calls a contest becomes a small activity on an old woman’s hand. Ordinary domestic actions—sweeping, carrying a bundle and using a pillow—make the impossible sizes easier to imagine.

The story never announces which wrestler wins. Instead it abandons their contest for the daughter’s much larger journey and finally a floating world. Strength also has costs: the pond is emptied, trees are uprooted and people are packed up without permission. Being the strongest character is therefore different from being the most considerate one.

Try this with the story

Make a scale ladder from elephant to child, wrestlers to hand, and town to bundle to melon. Label one everyday action at each step. Finish by writing one sentence explaining why the unanswered wrestling match is part of the joke.

Talk about it

• How does the wrestler find out that the Indian wrestler’s family is very strong?
• Who do you think is the strongest character in the whole story, and why?
• How does the story explain where a whole new world came from?

More stories like this

• The Grain of Corn — a chain tale from Steel’s Tales of the Punjab
• The Lambikin — another Punjabi folk tale from Steel’s collection
• The Jackal And The Crocodile — another quick tale from the same book