Stories for Children

by Ratan Lal Basu

rituals at the jaher, the villagers start singing accompanied by various percussion instruments like tumdak, madal, dhol, kartal etc. Then some males lift the Pahan on their shoulders and proceed towards his house while other villagers follow them singing and dancing. As soon as the procession reaches the door of the Pahan’s house his wife welcomes them and receives her husband by washing his feet. The Pahan then offers saal flowers to his wife and all the villagers as tokens of love brotherhood and friendship. This is followed by the ‘fool-khonsi’ ritual in which the Pahan adorns every tribal house with saal flower.

  After the rituals haria-prasad is distributed and the villagers drink, sing and dance for weeks to celebrate the festival gorgeously. However, in earlier times the female Kurukhs refrained from drinking while all the males used to become tipsy with haria.’

  The whore gave the Turks every detail of the festival and assured them that in course of the festivities all the male Kurukhs would remain completely soused and incapable of resisting the invaders and they need not attach much importance to the weaker sex. So the Turks planned to attack the fort during the Sahrul festival and capture it while the male Kurukhs, being drunk, would be incapable of fighting.

  During the next Sahrul, all the Kurukh men were dead drunk at midnight and the women were ready to go to bed after their children had slept. All of a sudden they were startled by noise coming from outside the fort gate. A leader of the women called a young girl, expert at climbing trees, to inspect what was going on outside the fort gate. The girl climbed at the top of a tall tree and was bewildered to notice a large number of Turk soldiers approaching the gate of the fort. She immediately rushed back and alerted the leader who right away blew her conch shell and the young girl started beating a drum. This was the signal for the women to assemble near the house of the leader. Those who heard the sounds started making similar signal and soon all the women congregated outside the house of the leader. The leader told them about the impending danger and ordered them to get prepared to fight the enemies in soldier’s uniforms with weapons. The women left and started getting ready according to the directions of the leader.

  In the mean time the Turk soldiers were trying to break open the gate of the fort. The passage leading to the gate was narrow and hilly and so only a few soldiers could approach it at a time. Some women soldier’s rode the tall turrets and through the holes started shooting arrows at the Turk soldiers trying to approach the gate and they were immediately killed being hit by the arrows soaked with snake poison. Then the Turks started backing out and women Kurukhs getting out of the fort through the secret openings started chasing and killing them mercilessly and ultimately all the defeated Turuks were compelled to give up the hope of capturing the fort.

  The same incidents were repeated twelve times. Then the Sultan consulted the Kurukh whore again and the woman informed him that the Kurukh women too get drunk during the Karam festival. The time was not, however, suitable for the attack because after the rains the fields become muddy and difficult to move across; but this time only the fort could be captured without any resistance from the Kurukhs. The Turk soldiers were trained to fight in the muddy land during the rains and planned to attack this time during the Karam festival.

  Karam is a festival held during the month of autumn on the eleventh day of the phases of moon in the Bengali month of Bhadra (at the beginning of September) to worship the Karam god. The flowers, fruits and wood required for the worship are collected by young men from the forest. They enter the forest in groups accompanied by drum beats, songs and dances. During the festival the households plant in front of their houses karam trees which are symbols of good fortune. After the worship the entire locality becomes festive with dances and singing accompanied by loud percussions. During the Karam festival the young girls celebrate Jawa festival expecting good fertility and prosperity. They offer germinating seeds (symbol of fertility) in a pot and water melons (symbol of son). Both males and females take haria and get tipsy during the festival.

  So when the Turks attacked for the thirteenth time during the Karam festival the drunken men and women could not resist them and they fled through the secret outlets and the Turuks could capture the fort without any resistance from the Kurukhs. Thereafter my ancestors traversed various lands and ultimately arrived at the land of the Santhals and Mundas both of whom accepted the Kurukhs gladly and in a friendly way.

  Tragedy of the Hunter

  A notorious leopard was invading a village close to the forest at night and killing cattle. It was very intelligent and smart and the villagers with all their best efforts could not do anything and as the village was very close to the forest their night watches failed. Then a hunter from Siliguri was invited to kill the leopard. He was tall and muscular and his intrepid and swell gaits assured the villagers who now were confident the leopard menace would be over in a few days. The man was an expert shoot and had hunted many ferocious animals. So it was a very simple task for him to kill the leopard. But the god of fate had something else in mind. In fact we humans are helpless and at the mercy of he hands of the unknown, Dhanesh thought.

  Two platforms with timber were prepared high up on two adjacent tall trees at the fringe of the forest. The larger one was for the hunter and the smaller one for his attendant who would focus a powerful torch into the eyes of the animal whenever it came near the bait at the bottom of the hunter’s tree. Strong lights make animals befuddled and motionless. A small goat was tied as the bait to the trunk of a tree clearly within the range of the rifle of the hunter. The leopard came at night without guessing that it was trapped. As soon as the leopard took hold of the goat with his teeth, the servant focused the torch into its eyes and it got transfixed. The hunter then made the gun ready, but his gun did not work after several trials. Then he got impatient and in anger threw down the gun and the shot was fired as soon as the gun touched the ground and the torch fell down from the hand of the servant. The leopard at first ran toward the deep forest but came back soon, climbed the tree and killed the helpless hunter. The attendant climbed down after the leopard had left with the body of the hunter and alerted all the villagers who came out with whatever weapon they got close at hand. A large group of villagers invaded the forest with kerosene torches, clubs and choppers. Being chased by the mob, the leopard left leaving behind the half eaten corpse of the hunter.

  The Giant Mango Tree

  The giant mango tree stood majestically, towering above the bushes, thickets and other trees in the marshy land that spread undulating between the Rosemary tea garden and the Baikunthapur forest. At noon the shadow of the tree like an enormous umbrella sheltered from the sweltering sun the thickets and bushes of akchhatti, dheki-fern, kukurshoka, datura and host of other herbs and wild plants. The burrows and ground holes sheltered variegated rodents, venomous vipers, mongooses, ichneumons, jackals, wild rabbits, foxes, porcupines, jungle cats, leopard cats and civets.

  In winter the swamp glistened with multi-colored flowers embellishing the trees and creepers, and the orchids dangling merrily from the branches of the trees; the air was suffused with the fragrance of flowers and the ambience encompassing the land reverberated with chatters, squawks, clucks and screeches of migratory birds – black-naked cranes, teals, francolins, goosanders, partridges, ibis bills, fork-tails, wag-tails, red-stars, pelicans and innumerable small birds.

  In summer, the marsh went alive with buzzing of fleas and insects, melodious songs of cuckoos, parakeets, popinjays; ear splitting caws of crows and shrill squawks of peacocks. While the large ripe mangoes hurtled down from the lofty branches, children, women and men from the tea garden and nearby villages jostled and hollered to collect the mangoes battering down the bushes at the bottom of the tree.

  During the rains water stagnated in ditches; fishes swam merrily in the crystal water, golden-frogs played their monotonous love-songs; the cormorants and herons got busy with fishing and at night the water lilies greeted the moon that shone merrily in the clear sky or peeped throu
gh the slits of the clouds like a newly wed bashful bride.

  In the deep forest to the north and north-west lived elephants, Bengal tigers, leopards, wild buffaloes, gaurs (Indian bison), dholes (wild dogs), monkeys, wild boars, antelopes, barking deer, musk deer, chital, king cobras and pythons. The wild animals except the elephants and monkeys lived in deep forest and rarely invaded the marsh, the tea garden or the villages.

  Before the onset of monsoons at times, stormy winds lashed the glade mercilessly uprooting many trees but the giant tree fought off the demon heroically swaying its bushy head like a vast mace and not a single branch could be broken off by the cyclonic winds.

  The monarch stood defiantly dwarfing all the trees around and could be visible from the nearest railway station at a distance of two miles. The giant tree was there from ages and from whence no body could tell. The oldest man, the nonagenarian Palisanju Roy had seen the tree the same during his childhood and the tea garden records mention the tree at the time of buying the land that included this marsh.

  It was a strange tree, a rare and endangered