The boy
tore a leaf off a bush and inspected it as though he’d never seen such a thing
before.
“Your stories are boring,” he said.
The two girls nodded together in agreement.
“Very boring.”
I was a bit stung. “Well, I do the best I
can. Excuse me if it’s not enough.”
The boy wagged his head at me. “It’s not
the kind of stories we want. That’s
all.”
I sat back and crossed my arms. “So you can
do better, is that it?”
He looked at the girls, and they giggled. “Of
course we can do better.”
“Fine,” I said. “So tell me a story. Why
don’t you?”
“All right,” they said together, and
whispered a few moments. Then the boy nodded and grinned.
“Long ago...” he began –
**************************************
Long ago,
at the start of the world, the Great Goddess looked out over the mud and
thought it all looked very lonely.
“I think I’ll make animals to live here,”
she said. “Then it will be a lot more cheerful.” So she picked up a handful of
mud, and made it into an animal, which was the elephant. That was the fist
animal she made.
“I’m hungry,” the elephant said. “Give me
something to eat, Great Goddess.”
“Oh dear,” the Great Goddess said. “I did
forget that, didn’t I.” So she picked up more mud and breathed on it, and grass
and trees appeared. The elephant went off, merrily eating the grass and leaves
from the trees.
“Now I’ll make other animals, and I won’t
forget to give them things to eat,” the Great Goddess said to herself. So she
began creating more animals, and plants,
and soon the mud was covered with things which ran and jumped and skipped, the
air was filled with birds and bats and insects, and the sea and rivers with
fish and jellyfish and whales.
After the Great Goddess had made all of
this, she looked down at her hands and found she had a small amount of mud sticking
to her fingers. She rolled it up and was about to throw it away when she
thought better of it.
“There’s just enough to make a small
animal,” she thought. “Just one more.” So she shaped it, and gave it a pair of
eyes on stalks, and a mouth and everything else. But when she had done all
that, she found there wasn’t any mud left over to give it legs.
“Oh well,” she said, putting the new animal
down on the ground. “You can crawl on your stomach. And as for your name...I
think I’ll call you Snail.”
Snail looked around with his stalked eyes
and saw all the many animals jumping and running and flying around; the deer
with his spotted skin, the hummingbird with her long beak, the tiger and the wolf
and the monkeys in the trees. Then he looked at himself and was very ashamed.
“I’m so ugly,” he said. “Why did you make
me so ugly. Great Goddess?”
The Great Goddess looked at him and felt a
little ashamed of herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, “All I can do is give you a
nice nature, so that you will never hurt anyone by word or deed.”
So Snail went away sadly on his belly,
wincing at the pain of the pebbles and gravel he had to crawl over. All the
other animals were curious about this ugly little creature, who was so
different from them all. But Snail was so nice to everybody that most of them
soon grew to love him. And this made some of the others very jealous.
One of these was Shrew, who was not jealous
but always angry. She began to hate Snail so much that she couldn’t sleep for
the anger burning inside her. At last she decided she could not bear it any
longer and would have to do something about it.
So one day she went looking for Snail,
determined to kill and eat him. It wasn’t easy for her to find him, though,
because he was so small and well-hidden among the moss and earth. Finally,
after a long search, she saw him as he was crawling slowly up a rock, far too
high for her to reach.
“Brother Snail,” she said, looking up at
him. “I love you so much. You’re the nicest animal of all. Everybody says that
there is no animal to rival you.”
Snail had watched her coming with trepidation,
for he knew well that she was sly and untrustworthy. “Thank you, sister,” he
said. “You’re so kind to say so.”
“It’s such a pity that you’re so ugly,
though,” Shrew said spitefully. “You’d have thought the Great Goddess would have
given you something to let you look a little
better, at least.” And she turned and went away.
Now, of course, Snail had always felt sad
at his lack of good looks, and the words of Shrew struck deep into his sensitive
little soul. So he went crawling slowly back to the Great Goddess.
“I am so ugly,” he complained to her. “The
more I think about it the more hurt I am with how ugly I am.”
“There’s nothing to be done about it now,”
the Great Goddess replied. “I have no mud left over to give you colourful wings
or bright fur, or long legs like the gazelle.”
The snail thought about it a bit and had an
idea.
“Please make me a silver path for me to
crawl on, Great Goddess,” he said. “I want to look at least a little bit better
than I do, because everyone says I am so ugly.”
The Great Goddess sighed. “All right,” she
said. “I hope you won’t regret it, though.”
“I won’t,” Snail promised. “It will also
protect my tender belly when I crawl over rough ground.”
The Great Goddess thought about this and
found that it was a reasonable idea. So she picked him up and rubbed a little
ointment on his belly, and as he crawled away he left a beautiful shining path
behind him. And the other animals saw it, and were entranced.
“This looks so good,” they all said. “You’re
so lucky, Brother Snail.”
When Shrew heard about Snail’s silver path,
she was even more consumed with jealousy. “I must find and eat him now,” she
thought. And she went scampering out of her burrow, to look for Snail wherever
he might be.
“Your silver path,” she said, “will make it
easy to find you this time, Brother
Snail.” And when she saw the path, she went racing down it as fast as she could
go, her mouth already working that the idea of biting into Snail’s soft body.
Now, one of Snail’s friends was Butterfly,
who was flying around and saw Shrew come running along the silver path.
Quickly, she flapped her way to Snail.
“Climb up the nearest tree,” she said when
she found him. “Shrew is hot on your trail, and I think she means to harm you.”
Fortunately, a tree was just beside Snail,
so he began crawling up its trunk. It was, of course, slow and laborious work,
and he had only just managed to get a little way up it when Shrew arrived.
“Oh, Brother Snail,” she said when she saw him.
“I wanted to commend you on your beautiful little road. How brightly it
glitters in the sun! I could look at it all day.”
“Thank you, sister,” Snail said, but did
not pause in his crawl. “It’s kind of you to say so.”
“Will you come down here and make more of
this silver path for me to admire?” Shrew asked. “It would be ever so nice if
you only would.”
“Perhaps some other time,” Snail told her. “For
now, I think I’ll climb up to the top of this tree, for I have a sudden
yearning for a view.”
So Shrew abandoned all pretence, and jumped
up at him, her teeth snapping. But he was just too high to be caught.
“I’ll find you,” she shrieked angrily. “Sooner
or later you’re going to have to come down from that tree, and when you do,
that trail of yours will follow you everywhere. You can’t hide any longer,
Snail.”
Snail thought about this and realised with
dismay that she was right. So when she had gone away he came down from the tree
and crawled as quickly as he could, which was very slowly indeed, to the Great
Goddess, who was cutting her nails, and told her what had happened.
“Maybe I could build you a home,” she said,
after thinking for a while. “You could hide inside it, and cone out only when
it is safe.”
“But I move so slowly,” Snail objected, “that
even if I come out when it’s safe, I may not be able to return to it in time if
it’s no longer safe.”
“You’re right,” the Great Goddess admitted.
“Wait a moment. I think I see a solution.” She took one of her nail parings,
and fashioned it into a shell, which she put on Snail’s back. “There,” she
said. “Now you can take your house with you everywhere you go.”
So Snail had his house on his back, and now
he could hide from Shrew whenever he saw her. This made her very angry, but
there wasn’t much she could do about it. She tried, though.
“Brother Snail,” she said sweetly. “I must
apologise for my temper the other day. I was not well, and it affected my mind.
I would like to make it up to you.”
“How?” Snail replied from inside his shell.
“Please explain.”
“I’d like to invite you to come to my house
for a meal,” Shrew said. “We can talk at leisure over it and settle all
misgivings.”
“Yes,” Snail replied. “I really would love
to be your friend, Sister Shrew. But I can’t come to your house till you’ve
come to mine. So, if you’ll only step inside...”
This, of course, Shrew could not do. So she
was reduced to only gibbering with rage.
Snail waited till she had gone away, and
then he looked around the inside of his house.
“I really ought to get a TV set in here,”
he said.
***************************************
“A TV set?” I asked. “Really?”
“Why not?” the boy replied. “Don’t you
think he’d like a TV, girls?”
“Of course,” the girls giggled. “And don’t
forget computer games as well. And books.”
“Lots and lots of books,” the boy replied. “Otherwise
he’d be bored when hiding from Shrew. Right?”
“Right,” I grinned. “Well, you’d better be
going home now, it’s almost lunchtime.”
After they’d left, I turned to go back
indoors, when from the corner of my eye I saw a little snail crawling up a wall.
Something – perhaps my shadow – must have startled it, because it immediately
shrank back into its shell.
I looked at it and imagined it sitting in
its shell, watching TV while it waited for me to go away.
Then I shook my head to clear it of the
idea, and went into the house.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2014
