One day, a traveller came to the place where they gathered every day to kill time. He was wearing a gold chain, dressed up in an affluent attire, flaunting his costly and pompously flamboyant belongings. At the same place were 4 friends, known to be socially unproductive, who spent their time conning the gullible. The four friends quickly developed amicable relations with him, and they schemed to deprive him of all his affluence by playing a game. The game went this way:

“Each person will tell a story. The one who tells the most unbelievable story shall win. The others have to obey what the winner says.”

They begin one by one, with one more than the other incredible stories. The first
friend’s story involves his mother, who, soon after his birth, craved plums. His father said that the tree is very tall, and it is impossible for him to pluck the fruit. His brothers also tried to climb the tree unsuccessfully. But he got up from his cot and briskly climbed the tree and plucked a lot of plums, much to his mother’s satisfaction

The second friend began with his story – a fortnight after his birth, he chased a rabbit into the woods. The rabbit suddenly transfigured into a tiger who marched towards him to attack, but he bravely told the tiger that he was only chasing a rabbit and not a tiger. The tiger paid no heed to his warning and attacked him, only to be caught by the jaws and ripped apart.

The third friend narrated a more unbelievable story. When he was three months old,
he went fishing with some friends. Unable to catch any fish, he dived into the river-bed where he saw a whale eating small fish. He killed the whale with his fist, cooked and ate it all by himself.

Not less than his friend, the fourth friend came out with an equally unbelievable
story. He was nine months old when he went to the forest and climbed a tamarind tree, wanting to savour some tamarinds. He climbed a long and flowery tamarind tree, but did not know how to get down. So, he went to a nearby house and used their ladder; placed it against the tree and got down.

It was now the traveller’s turn to narrate a story. His story went something like this – he had a farm where four men toiled all day long. They were lazy and thus were frequently castigated by the traveller. One day, when the traveller went on a pilgrimage, the four workers ran away to freedom, and the traveller has been searching for them since that day. He said that the four friends were the same workers and that he was ecstatic that he could find them. The contest ended, and the friends were in a dilemma because their plan of looting the traveler misfired. The four thug friends suffered a witty blow. The traveller walked off with all their fine belongings, teaching them a fine lesson

A Folktale sourced from Lakhwinder Dhull’s paper on Narrative and Structural Similarities Among Select Haryanvi Folk Tales.

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