Week 12 Extra Reading Diary: Folktales of Bengal

Story source:Folk-Tales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with illustrations by Warwick Goble (1912).

For the extra reading this week I read half of the Folktales of Bengal and focused this reading diary post on one story I found particularly interesting - The Boy Whom Seven Mothers Suckled. This story started out with a king who had seven lovely wives who were childless. He found a way to give them children by feeding them a certain kind of fruit and they all became pregnant. He then met a new wife who was actually a demon. The new wife said that if he really loved her he would have his other wives blinded and killed, so he ordered it done. The executioner blinded them but then took pity on them and hid them away. They started to give birth one by one, but decided to eat the children in order to survive, except for the youngest wife who kept her portion aside. They ate all of the babies except the youngest wife's baby. She tried to save it by giving the other wives her portions of the other babies but they knew she was lying about it because the meat wasn't fresh. She convinced them to save her baby however and they all suckled him until he grew big and strong. Meanwhile, back at the palace, the demon wife was secretly eating all of the staff at the palace and then moved on to eating citizens, so the king had nobody to take care of him. The child came to the palace and volunteered to be his caretaker. The boy became like the child of the two rulers, but he was protecting the king from being eaten by the queen. She decided to send him on an errand for her to her mother to get a special melon to cure her "sickness". When he got there, the woman gave him the melon and let him stay the night. He noticed a peculiar bird in her house and asked her about it. She told him that the bird contained her daughter's soul and if it died, she died. When he left, he took both the melon and the bird and hid it in the palace. The people complained to the king that their fellow citizens were being eaten by a bird and the boy volunteered that he knew where the bird was and could take care of the problem. When he brought out the bird, the queen recognized it and fainted. The boy told everyone that if they tore off the bird's limbs they would find out who had really been eating the people, so he tore off its leg and the queen's leg was also torn off! Then he strangled the bird and both it and the queen died. The boy then told the king that his wives were still alive and that he was their son. The king was very happy to hear this and summoned the wives, whose vision were restored miraculously when they returned. The boy was the heir to the throne then and they all lived happily ever after.