Fit for a King
(A Story in Three Parts)
I.
The Discovery of Manure.
Please feel welcome to join and honour me with your presence in the Square this market day, ladies and gentlemen. I expect no gratification from you, but am too polite to refuse one if you insist. Oh yes. I am about to relate to you the story of the creation of one of the most popular, yet one of the simplest delicacies at the court of Emperor Abdul Aleem Khan. It is almost always served in the late afternoon, when stomachs royal having digested the copious lunch ingested three whole hours before, begin to rumble and grumble, and feel some slight need for a little something to fill a nascent hollow.
But let me start at the beginning, as my venerated guide and mentor Jalal-ud-Din Khan Abdul Qayyum the Wise enjoined me to do. Mukhtar Ali, he would say to me, Allah knows you have the gift, and when I pass on to the next world, which is soon, I hope, it will be a comfort to me that I will have left behind an heir worthy of me. But O beloved boy, he would chide me gently, you suffer from a weakness common among us storytellers: you do not know how to begin your tale, and when you do finally begin your narration, you cannot resist the temptation to keep going, as if you believed that once your story is told, it is the end. Stories do not die, my young friend. They are like us mortals: the death of one’s body is only the beginning of a much more thrilling life among spirits. A story once told has many rebirths. Like seeds scattered in a fertile field, they will sprout again, often in more glorious shapes and colours, they will grow wings and soar, they will evolve and become more powerful, like apes, who Abu Walid said, had evolved into men. A good story lives forever. Plunge right in, avoid outlandish imagery, and shun unnecessary adornments. Banish mixed metaphors and extirpate repetitions. When you reach the end, thank Allah for your gift and walk away with dignity. In other words, avoid all the weaknesses which you have no doubt witnessed in me! My mentor was verily a man of infinite wisdom.
So pray, let me honour my master’s memory and tell it like he would have wished me to.
Now Ram Prasad was a very simple peasant farmer who lived with his wife Kumari and their six little children. He had no more than a tiny plot of land which he rented from Shaikh Mahaboob, a money-grabbing and coarse man who owned half the village, on which he grew vegetables and raised a few chicken and kept two lean goats for milk. Ram was a small man who was not in the best of health, but that did not stop him working all day long under the relentless sun, and often late into the night too, in order to pay the exorbitant rent that the zamindar exacted.
It was a mixed village with Hindus and Muslims living side by side, in reasonable harmony. Bahadur Khan the now sadly departed emperor, had passed laws outlawing discrimination against people who were not of the same faith as himself.
Ram and his children spent a large part of the day scouring fields and river banks, collecting dark earth, which he felt in his bones, was what his plants needed for healthy growth. Ram looked after that bush with the same devotion that he showered upon Kumari when she was expecting their first born. He watered it with love and care, uprooted the weeds, and even thought of making a small shelter for it, but remembered that the burgeoning aubergines actually thrive best in the sun in spite of the leaves appearing to wilt. So it was not surprising that his vegetables were always among the most attractive the village produced.
One day he counted sixteen flowers on a flowering brinjal bush, and his eyes filled with tears as he studied the perfection of that aubergine plant. No doubt twelve of them will drop, but the remaining four, Bhagwan willing, will mature into treasured specimens. Every time he passed near the bush (on the average seventeen times a day) he would take a peep, and to his surprise the sixteen flowers were all there.
My dear listeners who honour me with your presence, what I am going to say does not apply to those among you who the Creator _ call Him Bhagwan, call him Allah _ has chosen to lavish his bounty upon. But is it not true that that a rich man will never accept that he has too much money or that the poor man is as impecunious as he claims to be?
Now Shaikh Mahaboob, instead of rejoicing at his tenant’s good fortune, which would have made it easier for him to collect rent, prompted by the green-eyed monster, began to feel nibbled by covetousness, gnawed by envy, eaten by jealousy, and one night he did not close his eyes even once. And who among you, esteemed listeners have not been invaded by dark thoughts when insomnia squeezes your head and prevents you sleeping? His number six wife Maimoona although she was half his age, immediately understood what this was about. I hope, father-of-our-yet-to-be-born son, that you are not thinking of destroying Ram Prasad’s crop, are you? She said. What if I am, he snapped. If you do that, she said, people will know immediately who did it, and will hate you even more. No, he said, I just got another idea. He was finally able to get some sleep.
Shaikh Mahaboob raised chicken and goats, which brought him a huge revenue, but also, sadly, he thought, a lot of unwanted waste product, which he usually got his labourers to collect and dump into the river. This foul and malodorous matter when dug in the earth below the aubergine plants, will surely cause irreparable damage to them, he conjectured, so I won’t need to destroy them. The following night, when the whole village was sound asleep, the innocent moon shining on his villainous venture, he woke up, picked a big bucket of chicken shit which he had already filled before and crept towards Ram Parsad’s aubergines. He dug a small trench all around the plants and filled it with excrement, and carefully covered it so as to hide what he had done.
In those days, esteemed listeners, nobody knew about manure, and the zamindar was shocked when he discovered in the ensuing days, that the little buds seemed to be thriving rather than wilting. One day the size of a pea, the next a grape, the next an egg …
Esteemed listeners who honour me with your attention, you will have understood that this was how manure was discovered.
The villagers mostly rejoiced in Ram Parsad’s good fortune. You will be able to make good money when Kumari takes them to the market, they said. The hard-working man said nothing, but he had other ideas, which he did not even share with his better half, lest she said that he was wooly-headed, as most wives tend to do. You good people listening to my tale, let me ask you if you have guessed what the simple peasant had been contemplating… you sir? No, sorry. Madam? What? No, he did not plan to do that either. Why yes, my lad, what’s your name? Raju? You’re a clever boy, you will go far. Yes indeed. That’s exactly what he had thought of doing. He would put the fruits of his labour in a nice basket and take them to the palace, as an offering to their beloved emperor, Shahenshah Abdul Aleem Khan.
To be continued.
