After an emotional and tearful parting the princess and her husbands crossed many valleys and climbed many mountains.
Dangbo..o..o Dingbo..o..o.. there were a king and a queen who were getting old and they worried a great deal because they had no children. Their agony suddenly came to an end one day when, way past her childbearing days, the queen rejoiced on realizing that she was pregnant with their first child. The birth of the daughter was celebrated with feasts and festivals throughout the kingdom. But when the royal astrologer was summoned to come and make the princess’s horoscope a sudden uneasiness fell upon the kingdom as he gloomily warned the royal couple, “The princess has three breasts and the significance of this is very bad for the country. It is said in the books that the day such a freak appears there will be deaths, famines and other catastrophes. We must get rid of the princess.”
“There must be some remedy,” exclaimed the king and queen in disbelief. How could fate be so cruel? They had had to wait so long for a child and when the child finally came along they had to get rid of her. They were grief stricken.
Time passed quickly and the princess grew into a beautiful girl.
But there was no way of remedying the significance of the third breast. Every day the king’s ministers and especially the royal astrologer reminded him about the ill omen of the third breast. The king would sit and think of ways to save his daughter from being killed. Then suddenly he had a plan. He issued a royal proclamation which said that anyone who would marry his daughter and leave the country would get half his wealth. Nobody dared to come forward and days passed. Then one day two men stood at the palace gate. “We will marry the princess,” they announced.
What a blow it was for the royal parents to see their daughter’s suitors, for one of them was blind and he was being led by a hunchback! The king knew that this was his last chance to save his daughter so he agreed to let her go. He gave them jewels, gold, silver, cattle, and grains and told them to go as far away as possible from the kingdom.
After an emotional and tearful parting the princess and her husbands crossed many valleys and climbed many mountains before they finally settled down in a valley. They lived together for many days and were quite happy. Both the men were very fond of their wife. But it so happened that the hunchback grew jealous of the princess’s affections for the blind man and he contrived to get rid of him. One day he brought some meat and said, “Here’s some meat I got for you. Fry it and eat it.”
The blind man gratefully accepted the gift and right away set to fry it. But being blind he accidentally dropped some water in the pan in which the meat was already sizzling in the hot oil. The oil sputtered into to his face. The pain was agonizing, as it stung and burned. He covered his face and ran for water. After splashing water repeatedly on his face the stinging and the burning subsided but his eyes hurt and tears ran out of them uncontrollably. Eventually when he felt sure that his eyes would fall out a strange thing happened. The pain gradually subsided and he saw light, then objects became recognizable. He saw the stove, the fire, the pots and pans. He could see! What was this magic that had cured him? He looked into the frying pan and was appalled, for the meat in front of him was from a poisonous snake, he recognized it for he had seen snakes before he became sightless after a long illness. The friend had not even bothered to skin it, for a blind man would never see it. The meat which was to poison him had cured him. How strangely fate worked!
Gradually bitter resentment and anger swelled in his heart as he realized that his friend had intended to kill him. What should he do now? Before he could think further he heard the hunchback and the princess coming into the house. Impulsively he hid behind the door, thinking, “What should I do?” The next moment he sprang out, caught the princess and picked her up and threw her at the hunchback, shouting, “You two wanted to kill me, but you see I don’t die so easily!”
The princess crashed against the hunchback and both fell to the floor. They rose slowly from the ground in total shock staring at the blind man, who now looked at them boldly. In silence they stood together and faced each other for they realized that great miraculous changes had taken place in them. The impact of the princess’s body crushing against the hunchback had straightened his body while the same impact had burst her third breast. They stood there staring at each other perplexed and confused, feeling and studying their own bodies for a long time. Eventually they realized, as if waking from a long dream, that they were each free of their handicaps.
It was the strange and incomprehensible twist of fate that they had been born to suffer their own agonies and then had been brought together through unusual circumstances to help each other to find freedom from the physical bond ages which had so far ruled their lives.