There once lived a king. The king had an advisor. Everywhere the king went, his advisor went. Whenever anything happened, the advisor would say, “Your Majesty, everything happens for the good.” The king thought this meant his advisor was incredibly wise.
One day, the king and his advisor were walking in the palace gardens. The king spied an especially beautiful rose. He reached out to pick it, and a thorn cut his finger. His finger began to bleed and bleed.
The king cried, “Look at this. Who could imagine such a cut from a thorn on a rosebush?”
The advisor looked, “Your majesty,” he said, “everything happens for the good.”
“What? I cut my finger. I am in pain and all you can say is everything happens for the good. Now that I think about it, I see that is all you ever say. I thought you were wise, but perhaps this is the only thing you know how to say. I order you thrown into the palace dungeon. What do you say about that?”
“Your majesty,” said the advisor, “everything happens for the good.” The advisor was thrown into the palace dungeon.
A day or so later, the king went hunting. When he was far away from his own lands, he was attacked and seized by people whose ways were quite different from his own. One of the customs of his captors was that of killing prisoners in sacrifice to their gods. When the people saw the king, they said, “Look at him! His clothing is magnificent! Surely he will be a perfect sacrifice for our gods.” They began planning the sacrifice.
When all was ready, a final inspection was made of the king’s body, for it was essential that anyone sacrificed to the gods be perfect—no marks, no scars, no blemishes of any kind.
When the inspectors found the cut on the king’s finger, they said, “He isn’t perfect! We could never sacrifice him to our gods. Our gods would be displeased.” They took the king back to where they had captured him and set him free.
The king hurried to his own lands. He went straight to his palace, then straight to the palace dungeon. He told his advisor the whole story, “. . . and so, my dear advisor, I now understand why, when I cut my finger, you said, ‘everything happens for the good,’ but I still don’t understand why when I said I was going to throw you into this horrible place, you still said, ‘everything happens for the good.’ ”
The advisor smiled. “Your majesty,” he said, “that’s easy to explain. You see, I go everywhere with you. Had I been with you, I too would have been captured. Your majesty, my body has no marks, no scars, no blemishes of any kind. Me, they would have killed! So, you see your majesty, everything happens for the good!”
Sometimes a wonderful story is dropped in a teller’s lap, or in this case, arrives in the mailbox. In 1986, I told stories at Thompson Middle School in Southfield, Michigan. Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from Umang Badhwar, a thirteen-year-old student. In her letter, Umang thanked me for my storytelling, saying, “I really liked the way you drew a picture in my mind by just using words.” Then she added, “Well, see I know this one story called, ‘The King and his Advisor,’ and here’s how it goes:
Once upon a time there was a king. He was known to be the strongest king in the world. Now, this king had a priest as his advisor. Well one day the king was in his garden admiring his beautiful flowers, when he pricked himself on a rosebush.
“Look!” shouted the king, “I just pricked myself on the bush!”
“Everything that happens, happens for the good,” answered the advisor. Everytime something bad would happen, this would be his answer.
“Shut-up!” shouted the king and demanded that the priest or the advisor be locked up in the chamber. “Do you have anything to say before I lock you up?” questioned the king.
“Everything happens for the good,” answered the advisor.
The next day the king went hunting alone deep into the jungle. The king saw a tiger and began to follow it. As he was doing so, a native tribe captured the king and took him back to camp. The native people would burn people in respect for their god, but they burned people with no cuts or scars on their body. As soon as the native people saw the cut on the king’s finger, they let him go.
As soon as the king got home he demanded that his advisor be let free. Then the king asked the advisor, “The native people did not kill me because of my cut, but why was it good that you got locked up?”
“Because my great lord, if I would have gone with you, they would have killed me instead!” replied the advisor.
Umang ended her letter with the following: “Hope you liked it! My grandfather told me this from India.” She hoped I liked it? I loved it! I wrote back to Umang for permission from her and her family to retell the story. In her reply, she wrote: “I would be very happy if you told my story as a part of your collection.” And “My grandfather shared this story with me over the summer. He said that it was passed on to him from his father. My grandfather is from India, and so am I. I came to the USA about eight years ago.”1 After that exchange, I added the story to my repertoire, but I did not stay in touch with Umang. In the midst of working on this book, I found her again!
Not long after I visited her school in Southfield, Michigan, Umang’s family moved to Bloomfield, Michigan, where she graduated from high school. In college she studied English and psychology. She also lived a year in Chicago and then nine years in New York City. In 2008, she returned to Bloomfield to finish her master’s degree in clinical psychology. She is currently in the last phase of the program and is also studying psychoanalysis at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Someday she hopes to have her own practice. I was delighted to learn of her accomplishments, and I asked her if she remembered sending me the story and if she tells it. Yes! And Yes! The story is one Umang tells to her brother’s children.
Compare Umang’s version with my retelling, and you can see that while I’ve stayed true to the basic plot, I have retold the story in my own words, gradually making changes along the way as I filtered the story through my imagination. Looking at both versions, I can see I added more dialogue, changed “priest” to a consistent “advisor,” sent the advisor to a “dungeon” instead of a “chamber,” changed the single god in Umang’s story to the multiple “gods,” and had the advisor provide more of an explanation at the end. Other than the consistent change to “advisor” and the explanation at the end, I made none of my changes consciously. I simply told and retold the tale as I remembered it, keeping what seemed to work with each retelling.
Years after adding this story to my repertoire, I found a collection of tales from India, Folk Tales of Orissa by Shanti Mohanty, which included a variant of the story.2 In Mohanty’s version the basic plot is the same. Differences between the Mohanty and Badhwar versions include: The advisor is referred to as the king’s minister. The king cuts off his finger while attempting to cut a mango. The king has his minister pushed into an old well. The king follows a stag into a forest and is attacked by Savaras.3 The god to receive the sacrifice is female, while gender is not specified in the Badhwar version.
In Folk Tales of Orissa, Mohanty writes, “It is not surprising to note that more or less similar stories are prevalent even in distant states of India.”4 Umang heard the story from her maternal grandfather, whose surname is Sansi. The Sansi family is not from Orissa, but is originally from Multan, Pakistan. Umang wrote, “After the partition of India and Pakistan, Hindus were exiled from Multan, that’s how my grandparents settled in New Delhi.”5
So, what makes a folktale a folktale from a specific place or people? Umang Badhwar became a U.S. citizen in 1990. She tells this story to her brother’s children, and perhaps someday they will tell it to their children. Umang heard the story told in Hindi when her grandfather from New Delhi, India, was visiting Michigan. She sent me her English translation of the tale.6 The family member she heard it from was born in what is now Pakistan. So, is this story a folktale from India? A folktale from Pakistan? At some point does it become an example of American folklore? Is it already an example of U.S. folklore? Who decides how the tale would be classified?
In this book, the Kentucky folktales were all collected in Kentucky. So, if I had encountered Umang in a Kentucky school instead of in a Michigan school, would that make her tale a Kentucky folktale? Is it because she knows her grandfather grew up in India and the story is part of her cultural heritage that makes this story an Indian folktale? What if a Kentuckian retelling a folktale knows the family ancestors are from France, England, or Germany? Are the tales passed down through the generations Kentucky folktales or are they French, English, and German tales?
Could “The King and His Advisor” be classified as an example of Michigan folklore? After all, it was passed along in Michigan, so it could be said to have been collected in Michigan. Yes, it was sent to me in writing, but Umang heard it orally. Many of the Kentucky tales in this book were collected orally by students in classes who then transcribed, or recalled, the tales and presented them in writing to their teachers in college and university classes. From there, the tales have found their way into various archival collections. Some of them include information about where the teller heard the story, but many do not. And all of these tales, unless noted as being collected outside of Kentucky, are considered Kentucky tales.
I don’t have any firm answers to offer for the questions I’m posing. I suspect the determining lines are somewhat blurry. What I do know is that when I tell this story to my audiences, I am passing along a version of a story I received from the young teenager of a family who had moved to the United States from India. The tale captured my attention because of the surprising twist at the end, so I tell it today because I enjoy the plot.
Umang enjoys the plot, too, but her connections to the story run deeper and are multifaceted in comparison to mine. When she tells the story, she is passing along family history—after all, this is a story told to her by her grandfather, who heard it from his father. Hearing stories from family members is an experience she treasures from her own childhood. By telling the story to her brother’s children, she also creates for them a childhood experience similar to her own.
The story also reflects Umang’s religion and culture: “the teaching of patience is continuous throughout the Hindu religion and Indian culture. The story includes the lesson that you cannot let an uncomfortable situation or something you don’t understand spur your actions.”7 In Umang’s version as she tells it now, the king yells at his gardener because he doesn’t understand why on the one day he comes out to smell his roses, he is pricked by a thorn. He has the gardener banished. When the priest tries to explain that everything happens for a reason, the king has the priest banished. After the hunting trip, when the king returns to the priest, it is as if the priest has understood the king had to have this experience to gain understanding. Umang explained that the priest has endured something uncomfortable without letting the incident affect his self-image. He waits, without hate, for the king to return. The king comes to understand that there is a reason and purpose for all of life’s events, both negative and positive. In Umang’s version the king also apologizes to the priest, who is beneath him. The story teaches that even a king, a powerful person who others look up to and come to for advice and leadership, has difficulty understanding the message that everything happens for a reason. That he apologizes to the priest also shows that he is humbled by his previous arrogance and anger, and now understands the priest is truly an enlightened man. Through the experience of the story, the king now also is enlightened.8
“The lesson in this story may also be reflective of ‘the times’ considering the history of India. My grandparents had to leave their home and begin a new life in a new place. Also, my grandfather was a young man during the time of Gandhi, who was a representation of patience at that time.”9
It would be a great falsehood for me to ever claim I am passing along “The King and His Advisor” with the same understanding Umang has of the story. Even though my family has many generations in Kentucky,10 I also cannot claim to have the same understanding of the folktales I’ve retold here as the Kentuckians who told their versions to other Kentuckians who placed them in archives. My family told stories, but did not pass along folktales. My love of folktales grew from reading and rereading the printed collections I borrowed from my elementary school library.
But what if my family had retold folktales? Would that make my understanding of such stories identical to that of other Kentuckians who grew up with the same folktales? Not likely. Marcia Lane observes, “Even if the teller and the listeners are of the same cultural group (so they start with the same understanding of implied meanings), the difference in personal experience guarantees that each listener will form particular—and sometimes radically dissimilar—images from the teller’s words.”11
What I do have in common with Umang Badhwar and with the Kentuckians who told their stories to students, folklorists, and other scholars who subsequently placed them in archival collections is that I know a story, and I’m willing to share it.