In a certain village there lived a poor beggar and his wife. The man used to go out every morning with a clean vessel in his hand and return home with rice enough for the day’s meal. This was how the pair lived on despite their extreme poverty.

One day, a poor Madhva Brahmiṇ invited them to a feast. Madhvas are known for giving out muffins, which are extremely tasty. So, during the feast the beggar and his wife had their fill of muffins. They were so pleased eating them that the woman was extremely anxious to prepare some more muffins in her own house, and began to save every day a little rice from what her husband brought her for the purpose.

When enough had been collected, she begged a poor neighbour’s wife to give her a little black pulse, which the latter generously gave.

The faces of the beggar and his wife literally glowed with joy that day, for were they not to taste the long-desired muffins a second time?

The woman soon turned the rice she had been saving and the black pulse she had obtained from her neighbour into a paste, and mixing it well with a little salt, green chillies, coriander seed and curds, set it in a pan on the fire. She had finished making all five of them when her husband returned homes.

And when she placed the whole five muffins before him his mouth began to water. He kept two for himself and two he placed before his wife, but what was to be done with the fifth? He did not understand the way out of this difficulty. That half and half make one and that each could take two and a half muffins was a question too hard for him to solve.

Finally, to decide who should be lucky enough to get the fifth muffin, the husband proposed, “Let us both shut our eyes and stretch ourselves as if in sleep each on a verandah on either side the kitchen. Whoever opens an eye and speaks first gets only two muffins, and the other gets three.”

So great was the desire of each to get the three muffins that they both abided by the agreement. The woman placed the five cakes in a pan and covered it over with another pan. She then carefully bolted the door inside, and asking her husband to go into the east verandah and then lay down in the west one.

Thus passed one whole day, then two, and then three!

The house was never opened!

The whole village began to enquire after the missing beggar. What had become of him? What had become of his wife?

“See whether his house is locked on the outside and whether he has left us to go to some other village,” spoke the village elders. So, the village watch came and tried to push the door open, but it would not open!

“Surely,” said they, “it is locked on the inside! Some great calamity must have happened. Perhaps thieves have entered the house and after plundering their property murdered the inmates.” “But what property is a beggar likely to have?” thought the village assembly, and not liking to waste time in idle speculations, they sent two watchmen to climb the roof and open the latch from the inside. Meanwhile the whole village —men, women and children—stood before the beggar’s house to see what had taken place inside.

The watchmen jumped into the house, and to their horror found the beggar and his wife stretched on opposite verandahs like two corpses.

They opened the door, and the whole village rushed in. They, too, saw the beggar and his wife lying so still that they thought them to be dead. And though the couple had heard everything that passed around them, neither would open an eye or speak for the sake of the fifth muffin.

The village prepared two green litters of bamboo and cocoanut leaves on which to remove the unfortunate pair to the cremation ground. “How loving they must have been to have died together like this!” said some of the older men of the village.

In time the cremation-ground was reached, and the village watchmen had collected a score of dried cowdung-cakes and a bundle of fire-wood from each house for the funeral pyre. From these charitable contributions two pyres had been prepared, one for the man and one for the woman.

The pyres were then lighted, and when the fire approached his leg, the man thought it time to give up the ordeal and to be satisfied with only two muffins! So while the villagers were still continuing the funeral rites, they suddenly heard a voice announcing, “I shall be satisfied with two muffins!”

Immediately another voice replied from the woman’s pyre, “I have won three!”

The villagers were amazed and ran away.

One bold man alone stood face to face with the supposed dead husband and wife and questioned the beggars until he came to know their story. He then went after the runaways and related to them the whole story of the five muffins to their great amazement.

But the question arose of what to do with the beggar couple since they had been placed on the funeral pyre. They were deemed cursed and if they entered the village, then the whole village would perish.

So the elders built a small hut in a deserted meadow outside the village and made the beggar and his wife live there. From then on, many old ladies and young children from the village used to bring them muffins in the morning and evening out of pity for them.

A Folktale sourced from Tales of India: Folk Tales from Bengal, Punjab and Tamil Nadu illustrated by Svabhu Kohli and Viplov Singh.

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