The
Ass and the Grasshopper
The
fable by AESOP:
AN
ASS, having heard some Grasshoppers chirping, was highly enchanted; and,
desiring to possess the same charms of melody, demanded what sort of food they
lived on to give them such beautiful voices. They replied, “The dew.” The Ass
resolved that he would live only upon dew, and in a short time died of hunger.
The new fable by SHIVA KUMAR, An Eccentric Silly Old Person.
Upon a grassy knoll on the edge
of the world there once lived a grasshopper. He spent his time playing in the grass
with other grasshoppers and hopping to and fro. For his food he depended on
tender blades of grass and more particularly on the dew which collected on them
every dawn. By the time he completed three months of age, which is one-fourth
the average life span of his species, the grasshopper was sick and tired of the
knoll. He felt like an ass. So much so that frequently he caught himself
laughing at himself. Once he even got angry with himself and stopped talking to
himself for a whole day.
Having seen the entire knoll
twenty three times, one fine morning the grasshopper decided that enough was
enough and he would now explore the world outside. He did not know that the
knoll was situated at the edge of the world as he had not ventured beyond the
last line of grass. He decided he would go beyond this line. So he said his
goodbyes to his friends before leaving, by waving his left antenna, and they
responded by waving their left antennae back. He said goodbye to the blades of
grass and they simply waved back. Actually they did not wave back to him. It
was a gentle breeze which moved them. So moved was the grasshopper by this
collective waving that he decided he must be moving quickly. He also said
goodbye to the shrubs and bushes under which he spent the hot afternoons and
cool nights. Of course they did not reply, not because they didn’t want to but
because they couldn’t. Shrubs and bushes don’t speak. They rustle in the wind
and make a kind of rustling noise, but they don’t speak. This doesn’t mean they
are dumb. They are not dumb, but they don’t speak.
Soon the grasshopper was on his
way. It took him the whole day to reach the last line of grass and the sun was
setting when he decided to take a break. So he took a break. All along the way,
he had not met any other animal or thing, not even another grasshopper. He was
tired of chirping to himself and went to sleep feeling like an ass. He dreamt
of an ass which had a grasshopper’s face and was chirping loudly as it hopped
about. The dream was so funny that it made him laugh in his sleep.
He woke up early the next morning
(truth be told he did not know it was the next morning – it could have been
three or even seventeen days later – he had no way of knowing, but he thought
it was the next morning and we’ll take his word, no, his thought, for it) and
broke his fast on a drop of dew formed on the sixth blade of grass to his left.
He always chose the sixth blade because liked to call himself The Sixth Blade
Adventurer. Having strengthened himself thus, he set out once again, hopping
this way and that. He made slow progress because he did not move in a straight
line but in a diagonal movement, rather like the bishop on a chess board. He
was tired and decided to rest under a bush. Soon he went to sleep. He did not
know it then, but he was very close to the edge of the world and to a turning
point in his life.
The grasshopper woke up with a
start. It was a terrible rumbling, earth-shaking noise which woke him up. He
looked up and saw flashes of blue light dancing across the sky and at the same
time heard a crashing, rolling sound. He had never seen such a fantastic sight
or heard such a deafening sound before! It was his first experience of lightning
and thunder and frightened him to such an extent that he stuffed his ears with
cobwebs from an abandoned web, closed his eyes tight and cowered under a creeper
with only a passing spider for company. The spider was watching him
unblinkingly, as if sizing him up for breakfast. As they didn’t know each
other’s language, both remained silent. Not that it would have mattered much,
on account of the thunder. Soon the spider, possibly deciding that the grasshopper
was not a healthy breakfast option, crawled away to look for another prey. All
of a sudden, there was a deluge and rain came pelting down like the dickens.
The Sixth Blade Adventurer had never felt so scared in his life. The storm
lasted an hour and, by the time it ended, he was totally wet, bedraggled and
terrified out of his wits. He stayed curled up under the creeper through the
day and the night which followed. He wished he were an ass. That night, once
again, he dreamed of an ass which was so wet it was shivering. It couldn’t bray
or even chirp. It croaked.
The croaking seemed to become
louder and louder until it became unbearable and woke him up. He opened his
eyes and found himself staring into the biggest mouth he had ever seen, with a
pinkish grey tongue slowly unrolling towards him! It was a toad! He had never
seen a toad before but some of his friends had and they had described one to
him. This toad was exactly as they had described, only much bigger. The
grasshopper stopped breathing and watched without moving. He did not even blink.
The toad’s tongue stopped short of him just as he thought it would pick him up
and he would be swallowed. It probed this way and that for a moment and then
rolled back into the toad’s mouth. The toad had not seen the grasshopper! It
gave a loud croak which made the grasshopper leap up and bang his head on the
creeper’s stem, and then it turned and went away.
By and by the grasshopper started
breathing again. His heart, which had become entangled with his tongue,
disentangled itself and resumed beating. He waited for what seemed like a few
hours, though it was only about a minute, watching the toad’s back and waiting
for the painful lump on his head to subside. When the toad was no longer
visible, he slowly crept out from under the creeper, thanked the creeper on
bended knees for protecting him and took one hesitating hop-step. His wings had
dried sufficiently for him to take short flights, so, starting off with a
couple of running steps, he launched himself into the air. Just then a gust of
wind came along and bore him aloft. He soared high into the sky, and, looking
down, could see a couple of ants which looked like specks. Actually, they were
tiny ants to begin with and he was only about six feet above the ground but it
seemed to him that he was soaring because he had never gone so high!
Gradually the wind carried him away
from the ground and over the edge of the world. Suddenly, the grasshopper could
not see any land below him, only a black emptiness. The wind also died and he
found himself dropping, dropping, dropping … he had crossed the edge of the
world (though he still did not know it)!
The grasshopper continued to fall
for some time. There was nothing in that space absolutely to stop him. He found
that he did not have to flap his wings to fly. He just floated along. He could
only breathe gently because there seemed to be very little air, but he wasn’t
feeling uncomfortable.
After some time, he found that he
had stopped falling but continued to float along horizontally. When he turned
around and looked, he saw what looked like a huge flat platform whose two sides
and far end he couldn’t see. He could only see the edge facing him. With a
shock he understood. It was the edge of the world! It was not far away but it
wasn’t near either. He could see the grassy knoll which had been his home and
it looked beautiful. He could see the tiny ants and they had become tinier. He
even saw the big toad. It looked small and harmless and quite friendly from
this distance. It seemed to be waving its tongue at him in an affable manner.
How he wished he could go back there and wave his antenna back at the toad! He
flapped his wings but was not able to create any lift. He tried to chirp but no
sound would come out of his mouth. For a moment he panicked and started
hyper-ventilating. But since there seemed to be little air around,
hyper-ventilation was of no use.
Gradually he calmed down and
allowed himself to float along. After a while, he even started to like it. There
seemed to be some sort of attractive force which kept him on a path parallel
and quite close to his world. As he floated along, the knoll slowly went out of
his sight and he could now see a forest with lots and lots of trees, some so
huge that their tops were not visible.
Out of the forest came an ass.
The grasshopper knew it was an ass because it had appeared in almost all his
dreams. The ass came right up to the edge and looked at him. It saw him and
opened its eyes wide as if recognizing him. Perhaps he had appeared in the
ass’s dreams! The ass brayed loudly and gesticulated at him. The sight of
another animal, albeit an ass, after so long made the grasshopper happy. He
gesticulated back. The ass trotted to keep pace with the floating grasshopper.
Then, with another loud bray, he started to swing his tail in the direction of
the grasshopper. On the third try, the tail swished past and the grasshopper
just managed to hold on to its tip. Thus hoisted aboard, the ass soon pulled
him back out of orbit to safety. The grasshopper was overwhelmed with gratitude
and tried to show it by going on bended knees but the ass, being an ass, did
not recognize it as gratitude and tried to kick him back.
Nonetheless,
the two became friends. They were always together, criss-crossing the forest
and whiling away their time braying and chirping, that is to say, the ass was
braying and the grasshopper was chirping. The grasshopper did not think much of
the ass’s braying – the voice had a rough timbre, it was too loud and he could
not understand what the ass was trying to say. Added to this, the braying was
out of tune and did not maintain any particular beat. “Sounds like a silly
ass”, he said to himself whenever he heard his friend bray.
But
the ass, on the other hand, was simply enchanted by the grasshopper’s chirping
and wanted to have a voice like that. But, try as he might, the intended chirp
always came out as a bray and it made him feel like an ass. “Silly ass”, he
would chastise himself.
Time
passed and the two friends learned to understand each other’s language
sufficiently to be able to make casual conversation.
So
one day the ass asked the grasshopper, “My dear friend, you have such an
enchanting voice. What is it that makes it so beautiful?”
And
the grasshopper replied, “You see, my friend, it is the dew I live on. Get up
early in the morning, when the dew is formed on the grass and imbibe it. You
will find your voice growing sweeter and sweeter. Go ahead, try it. Have all
the dew you want. But beware, every sixth grass and the dew on it is mine. I am
a Sixth Blade Adventurer, you see. Six, six, six!”
The
ass did not know what six was and looked bewildered, just like any ass would
look if you went and said “six” to it. The grasshopper managed, by using sign
language – a sort of wild gesticulation with his antennae and simultaneously
rolling his eyes – to explain the sixth blade concept to the ass. He also
taught the ass how to count from one to six. Soon, the ass became adept at
‘dewing the dew’ and, if one had happened to have visited the enchanted forest
at dawn on certain days just past, one would have heard a hoarse, asinine voice
braying “waa, foo, free, fo, fy, slurp, … sorry, skip, …”
With
every passing day, the grasshopper’s chirp seemed to become chirpier and
chirpier. On the other hand, the ass’ braying was growing fainter and fainter.
The reason was not far to seek – the ass was surviving only on dew and it was
hardly enough to even wet his tongue. He had lost quite a bit of weight and had
started to look like the skeleton of a thin and impoverished ass. Which he was.
One
morning, when the grasshopper woke up from his sleep, he found the ass sprawled
on the grass beside him, looking quite dead. The grasshopper hopped to and fro
and tried to wake him, but the ass did not stir. The grasshopper desperately
sprang onto his left ear and chirped loudly. Whereupon the ass opened his left
eyelid and looked balefully at his tiny friend. “I think I am going to die” he
brayed softly. The grasshopper was sad when he heard this and didn’t want to be
left alone. Nor did he want to leave his friend alone. He thought for a while
and then chirped to the ass, “look, listen, somehow drag yourself to the edge and
leap off, you will find it easier there”. So saying, he leapt up to the ass’s
back and guided him to the edge of the world.
The
ass somehow dragged himself to the edge and, summoning all his remaining energy
with a super-asinine effort, he took a big leap and went flying out of the
world, the grasshopper clinging on to his left ear. Soon they were floating
along in space, within sighting distance but just out of reach of the edge of
the world, with no one to help them back. They were doomed to remain there.
Time
passed. They stopped eating because there was nothing to eat. They stopped
talking to each other or even to themselves because they had become weak and
their voices couldn’t be heard. They soon stopped breathing because there was
very little air. Life slowly seeped out of them. They floated along, quite
lifeless but quite inseparable. And there they are, for all eternity.
If
you look up to the northern sky on a clear autumn evening, you might, if you
are lucky, be able to see a cluster of seven stars aligned in the shape of an
ass with its tail stretched out. That would be the ass. If you look carefully
above the ass’s left ear, you may also be able to see a sort of a glimmer
formed by six tiny stars; that would of course be the grasshopper, clinging on.
They remain that way, to this day. True friends.
©
Shiva Kumar 2016
