Volume 2 / Book 12 — Chapter LXXVI. (Vetála 2.)

Then king Trivikramasena again went to the aśoka-tree to fetch the Vetála. And when he arrived there, and looked about in the darkness by the help of the light of the funeral pyres, he saw the corpse lying on the ground groaning. Then the king took the corpse, with the Vetála in it, on his shoulder, and set out quickly and in silence to carry it to the appointed place. Then the Vetála again said to the king from his shoulder, “King, this trouble, into which you have fallen, is great and unsuitable to you; so I will tell you a tale to amuse you, listen.”

Story of the three young Bráhmans who restored a dead lady to life.

Then the maiden Mandáravatí suddenly contracted a burning fever, which ended in her death. Then the young Bráhmans, distracted with grief, carried her when dead, after she had been duly adorned, to the cemetery, and burnt her. And one of them built a hut there and made her ashes his bed, and remained there living on the alms he could get by begging. And the second took her bones and went with them to the Ganges, and the third became an ascetic and went travelling through foreign lands.

When the three Bráhmans saw her resuscitated in this form, they immediately became love-sick, and quarrelled with one another, each desiring her for himself. And the first said, “She is my wife, for she was won by the power of my charm.” And the second said, “She belongs to me, for she was produced by the efficacy of sacred bathing-places.” And the third said, “She is mine, for I preserved her ashes, and resuscitated her by asceticism.”

“Now king, give judgment to decide their dispute; whose wife ought the maiden to be? If you know and do not say, your head shall fly in pieces.”

When the Vetála heard this from king Trivikramasena, who had broken silence by uttering it, he left his shoulder, and went back invisible to his own place. But the king, who was bent on forwarding the object of the mendicant, made up his mind to fetch him again, for men of firm resolution do not desist from accomplishing a task they have promised to perform, even though they lose their lives in the attempt.

Note.

Oesterley, in the notes to his German translation of the Baitál Pachísí, refers to the Turkish Tútínámah in which the lady dies of despair at the difficulty of the choice, as in the Tamul version. [In the Hindi version she dies of snake-bite.] She is brought back to life by a good beating. The first suitor opens the grave, the second advises the use of the cudgel, the third carries it out.

This method of restoring people, who die suddenly, to life by a good beating, is found in a Persian story, professing to be derived from a book “Post nubila Phœbus,” in which the physician bears the name of Kati, and asserts that he learnt the method from an old Arab. The story is found in Epistolæ Turcicæ et Narrationes Persicæ editæ et Latine conversæ a Joh. Ury. Oxonii, 1771, 4^o, pp. 26 and 27. This collection, which contains not the least hint of its origin, is particularly interesting as it contains the VIIIth story of the Siddhikür; “The Painter and the Wood-carver.” [See Sagas from the Far East, p. 97.] The Episode of the stealing of the magic book is found, quite separated from the context, in many MS. versions of the Gesta Romanorum: see Appendix to Oesterley’s edition. (Oesterley’s Baitál Pachísí, pp. 183–185.)