The story goes more or less like this: A nobleman is out hunting
with his hawk. The hawk gets him a crane, which he throws
into a bag to bring back to his villa to have cooked for his
dinner. The nobleman’s cook has a friend who, unable to
resist the smell of the cooking bird, begs the cook
to give him one of the crane’s legs to eat. When the
nobleman sees the cooked crane with the missing
leg on his plate, he asks the cook about it. The
cook insists that the crane only had one leg
to begin with. The cook tries to prove
his point by taking the nobleman
back to the river where the crane
was hunted. They come upon a
number of cranes in the water,
standing on one leg, asleep.
The cook says, See! They
all have only one leg!
The nobleman yells,
Shoo! and the
cranes put
down
their second legs and fly away. The nobleman scolds the cook, but the cook then asks the nobleman: Why did you not yell ‘Shoo!’ at the dinner table earlier today? How do you know for sure that the cooked crane would not also reveal its second leg to you then? You see? You have wasted my time, sir. The nobleman accepts the cook’s wit in exchange for his forgiveness.
I have never heard of Giovanni Boccaccio, the man who wrote this story, entitled “A Witty Answer,” which I read in my Radiant Reading book in Dehradun when I was sixteen. It is full of words I did not know: trussed, refusal, obliged, wrath, impudence. The truth is, three of five of these words I still do not know. The story is one of one hundred tales from a book called The Decameron, set in Florence around 1350. It was the time of the Black Death, my daughter tells me. I have a vague idea of where Italy is now, because my daughter took me there when I was already an old woman. It was Venice and she made me taste red wine for the second time in my life and listen to a classical concert of Mozart in a very old church. I listened but I did not like it. I tried to hide that fact from my daughter but she saw me asleep. I said it was from the wine. But she knew I had only had three sips. I still do not know what the Black Death is but it sounds worse than Partition.
Excuse me. Do you want to hear Aap beeti or Jag beeti? My version, or the version written by others?