A finely dressed mosquito once set off in search of a suitable husband. Along the way, she encountered a number of suitors, among them a bull and a group of hardworking hoes (farming implements), but she rejected them all for their unappealing and monotonous daily routines and lack of refinement in their everyday activities.

Eventually, she met a rat who claimed to have travelled across the world. The rat promised to provide her with everything she might need. Impressed by his ambition and vast experience, the mosquito married him, and the two settled into domestic life. However, discontent settled in their relationship. One day, during an argument, the rat inhaled sharply while drinking water and accidentally sucked the mosquito up his nose, killing her instantly.

The rat community mourned her loss, performed her final rites, and placed her remains into the river. This act of placing the bier in the river polluted the water at the very spot where a wild elephant regularly drank. Upon discovering the dirty water, the elephant, broke off one of its tusks and lay beneath a date palm tree to express its condolences. Moved by the elephant’s show of sorrow, the tree shed all its leaves.

A crow that often perched in the date palm tree arrived to find it bare. Learning of the mosquito’s death and the events that followed, it plucked out one of its own eyes to sympathise with the death of the mosquito, Mrs. Rat. The one-eyed crow flew to its usual resting spot, a wall, which then collapsed in solidarity on hearing the events of the day.

Later, a farmer’s wife walking past the fallen wall was startled. On hearing the tale, she discarded her husband’s lunch and hurried back home. When her husband asked for lunch, she recounted the story- Mrs. Rat’s death, the elephants tusk, the fallen leaves of the date palm tree, the crow plucking out its eyeball, the wall crumbling down and finally her discarding the lunch she had prepared for her husband. Hearing the story, prompted the farmer to destroy his plough in frustration. Hearing this chain of events, their son smashed his slate and refused to go to school. But he turned up anyway, and attended his classes empty-handed. When his teacher asked him why his slate was missing he repeated the long chain of events to her starting from the death of the the mosquito, Mrs. Rat.

Upon hearing the tale, the teacher burned down the school in response, before vanishing into the countryside.

And that was the end of it.

A folk story from Tamil Nadu, sourced from ‘Moral Fictions: Tamil Folktale from the Oral Tradition‘ collected by Stuart Blackburn.

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