Elephant’s tales - A real story

I met this lady who had come to see me one Sunday. We talked about her life since she had left her native village in Tashigang and got settled with a Lhotsampa husband too far away from her home. She shared her experience about her encounter with wild elephants that wanders into the southern villages in search of food during the summer and autumn season especially when the paddy is ripe. Hearing her encounter with elephants gave me shivers and made my hair stand on its end. Here is an incident shared to me.

The boy and the fox

A poor boy lived with his parents. They were so poor that they never had enough to eat the next meal. One day the father thought of a plan to work on their field and earn some money. He called his son and said, “son it is not wise to live as we are doing and I have decided that you will go and dig our small plot of land at the edge of the forest”. 

The stingy man

(The story was narrated to us by a marvelous Canadian story teller and a writer, Joanne LeBlanc-Haley. ) 

Once there was a farmer who had all regular kinds of animals on his farm. Among his animals was a very special rooster.

One day the animals were all looking for their food and the rooster too was looking for something to eat and was pecking around when he found a silver dollar.

Lunar eclipse – the myth

When I was a child I was always scared by the sudden darkening of the full moon and dread feeling it brought along with the pitch black darkness. I would drag along my mother’s kira-end along with my other siblings as she chanted “Om oh hung baza guru padme sedhi hung” and we would repeat in chorus till the moon came up again. Our neighbours and some elder children in the neighbourhood would beat the drums and whistle making a hell lot of noise. 

Waiting buffalo; the other side of the story.

I know that my ancestor had borrowed our thick fur from the buffalo when he went on a mission to get salt from Lhasa. Everyone thinks that he deceived his friend but not everyone knows the real story about what happened to him. I heard the story from my grandfather while grazing in the cold mountains of the Bhutan-Tibet border. He said that our great, great, great grandfather came to Lhasa on a quest to find salt for his friend.