But there was one condition. Tāpāi would perform all tasks given to him from dawn till nightfall. But he must be kept occupied all the time. At first the condition seemed easy to fulfil. The bhūta was ordered to build a palace, raise a noble temple, dig a tank, procure a bridegroom for the Brāhmaṇ’s daughter, etc., etc. But there are limits to human desires and human inventiveness, and even the Brāhmaṇ was, in spite of all the luxury with which he was now surrounded, a harassed and perplexed mortal. He was like to die of sheer worry and anxious thought, when his wife came to his rescue. She plucked a curly hair from her husband’s eyebrow. “Give that to the creature,” she said, “and tell him to straighten it.” The poor demon, for once, was at his wit’s end. He pulled the hair, and pressed it, and wetted it. But all in vain. The moment it was released, it curled up again. Finally, at nightfall, the good Brahman released Tāpāi, as Prospero released Ariel, and then he and his family lived happily afterwards!
It is only fair to say that this crude summary gives a very faint idea of the primitive charm of the tale as told by Mr. Sen in his racy Bengali, with all manner of delightful details of domestic life in an old-fashioned Hindu household. This is equally true of all the tales, which have all a pleasant homely humour which is singularly evocative of country life in Eastern India. It is to be hoped that Mr. Sen, instead of rewriting tales from the Persian, will collect more genuine village tales like that of Tāpāi the bhūtā. Many Anglo-Indian children have heard such stories from ayah and bearer, and would be glad to have a permanent record of such primitive and probably ancient legends.
Books for Review should be addressed to
The Editor of Folk-Lore,
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