The Brahmin and the Mongoose

4-6 min read
12 pages

The brahmin and the mongoose, a Panchatantra tale to read aloud. He comes home, sees blood on its mouth, and does not stop to look in the cradle.

A man and his wife had a baby son, and in the same house they kept a mongoose, which they had raised from a kit and which followed the child about like an older brother.

One morning the wife had to go to the river. «Watch the baby,» she said, and went out with the water jar.

The man sat with the cradle for a while. Then somebody came to the door with work for him, and he thought: the mongoose is here, and I shall not be long.

So the house was empty except for a sleeping baby and a mongoose lying across the doorway of the room.

And out of a crack in the wall came a cobra.

The mongoose was up before the snake was halfway across the floor. What happened between them took a long time and went all round that room, and at the end of it the cobra was dead in pieces by the leg of the cradle, and the mongoose was standing over it, shaking, with blood on its mouth and its front paws.

Then it heard the man at the gate, and it ran to meet him at the door, the way it always did, pleased with itself and covered in blood.

The man saw the blood on the mongoose's mouth.

He did not go into the room. He did not call out to the baby. He had the stick in his hand already and he used it, and the mongoose died in the doorway without understanding anything at all.

Then he went in.

The baby was asleep. By the foot of the cradle lay the cobra, in pieces.

He was still sitting on the floor of that room when his wife came back from the river, and he could not say a word to her, and there was nothing to be said afterwards either.

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Text source: From the Panchatantra, the Sanskrit collection of animal fables compiled around 300 BC. Public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Brahmin and the Mongoose

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