The Four Deaf Persons

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North-western Province.



The quarrels of deaf persons through misunderstanding each other's
remarks form a common subject of folk-tales. The mistakes of three
deaf people are related in Folklore in Southern India (Natesa Sastri),
p. 3 ff., and Tales of the Sun (Kingscote and N. Sastri), p. 1 ff.

The Abbé Dubois published another amusing South Indian variant,
which recounted the mistakes of four deaf men (le Pantcha-Tantra,
1872, p. 339 ff.). The four persons in it were a shepherd, a
village watchman, a traveller who was riding a stolen horse, and
a Brahmana. The shepherd requested the watchman to look after his
flock during his temporary absence. In reply the latter refused to
let him have the grass that he had cut. On the shepherd's return,
he offered him a lame lamb as a reward for the trouble he thought
the man had taken, but the watchman fancied he was being accused of
laming it. They stopped a horseman who was riding past, and asked him
to decide their quarrel. In reply, he admitted that the horse was not
his. Each thought the decision was against him, and cursed him for it;
and while the quarrel was at its height they referred it to a Brahmana
who came up, who replied that it was useless for them to stop him,
as he was determined never to return to his wicked wife. "In the crew
of devils I defy any one to find one who equals her in wickedness,"
he said. The horse-thief, observing men coming in the distance,
made off on foot, the shepherd returned to his flock, the watchman,
seeing the lamb left, took it home in order to punish the shepherd
for his false charge, and the Brahmana stayed at a rest-house, and
went home again next day.

In the Contes Soudanais (W. Africa), by C. Monteil, p. 18 ff.,
there is a story which resembles both this South Indian one and the
Sinhalese one, in part. A shepherd in search of a lost sheep asked
a cultivator about it. He replied, "My field begins before me and
ends behind me." The shepherd found the sheep, and offered it to the
cultivator in payment for quarters for the night. The latter thought
he was being charged with stealing it, and took him before a village
headman, who remarked, "Still another story about women! Truly this
can't continue; I shall leave the village." When he told his wife
to accompany him, she said she would never live with a man who was
always talking of divorcing her.