A few weeks ago I was invited to tell during the entertainment session of the ISNA convention. That’s the Islamic Society of North America (Canada branch).

Had a great time, went well, but got home and  hubby asked which story I told. When I told him one of them was Dajan Tigh, he said, “Oh no! Not that one again!”

And I felt chagrin.

It’s so easy to fall back on comfortable stories and not stretch into something new!

So I’ve been doing some research. Breaking out some of my short story collections and leafing through them to find some new and exciting stories to tell.

I’ve really become fond of What Should I do? What Shouldn’t I do? a Persian folktale that is about a donkey and a lion. I also really like the Persian folktales about the jackal.

But I thought I should branch out and see what other folktales I could find from the South Asian region. Met an afficionado, with his own private folktale collection recently and he lent me a volume of Bangladesh folktales.

Read the first one and got ABSOLUTELY AND COMPLETELY DISGUSTED!

Imagine a story about a seven brothers and one sister, and one of the brothers makes a vow that he will marry whichever girl eats the first pomegranate from this tree he plants, only it turns out to be his sister!

So he vows he has to marry her and he starts fasting till he gets his way. So the whole family is urging the sister to relent, and she refuses and goes and drowns herself in the river.

Yeah, so far, so good. I’d do that too!

But then somehow she doesn’t drown after all but lives in an oyster shell way at the bottom. And some fisherman’s wife finds it, and sells it to the queen, and every night the queen notices this beautiful maiden coming out at night to sweep the floors.

Huh?

You can obviously tell the story was transcribed by a man!!!

Anyway, long story short, queen and king adopt the girl and they go looking for a young suitor for her and end up with her brother!

Blech!

What do I get from the story?

That the boy’s vow of marrying her, trumps the girl’s vow of not!

No wonder some cultures have sunk so low!

It’s turned me off completely! But perhaps there’s a gem in that collection somewhere but I suspect not.

That was the first story in the collection. And if it’s that weird…just imagine where the others go!

I guess some folktales really deserve to be forgotten!