The Sister Who Walked Her Brother Home

There was once a boy whose only sister had been married away before he could remember her face. Every year, on the second day after Diwali, the other boys of the village went to their sisters' houses and came home with marks on their foreheads and sweets in their pockets, and he came home with nothing.

"Why does my sister never come?" he asked his mother at last. "Why do we never go to her?"

"Because of the forest," his mother said. "Between her village and ours there is a forest nobody crosses. There are snakes in it, and a tiger, and the hills themselves are not kind. Be glad you have a sister at all."

The boy grew, and the year he became a man he set out anyway, on the morning of Bhai Dooj, Yama's day, with a bundle on his shoulder.

In the forest a snake rose up across the path.

"I will eat you," it said.

"Eat me on the way back," said the young man. "I have a sister I have never seen. Let me reach her once. When I come home by this road, I am yours."

The snake let him pass. Further on a tiger stepped out of the grass and said the same thing, and he gave it the same answer, and it let him pass. Where the path climbed, the hills groaned and leaned over him, and he made them the same promise, and they let him through.

His sister knew him at the door before he said his name. She held him and wept, and fed him for three days. On the fourth he picked up his bundle.

"Stay," she said.

"I cannot. And I had better tell you now. I shall not reach home. I promised the forest it could have me on the way back, and the forest keeps its promises."

She did not argue. She went into the kitchen and came out with a pot of milk, a cloth of meat, a bag of coins and a basket of flowers.

"Then I am walking you home," she said.

The snake rose up in the path, and she set the milk before it, and it drank and slid away. The tiger came out of the grass, and she threw it the meat, and it carried the meat off. The hills leaned over them, and she scattered the coins and the flowers on the slopes and prayed, and the hills stood still.

On the far side of the forest her brother lay down under a tree to rest, and she went to fetch water from a camp where travelling people were at work. They looked at her, and at the sleeping man.

"That one is not safe yet," one of them said. "The forest let him go. His death did not."

"Then what do I do?"

"Curse him. Abuse him, from now until he is married. Get him married quickly. And at the wedding, whatever is done for him, see that it is done for you first."

So the loving sister became a scold. She cursed her brother on the road, cursed him at his own door, cursed him in front of the whole village, which began to say she should be sent away. She found him a bride and hurried the wedding on. When the groom's headdress was brought in, she snatched it and tied it on her own head first, and what fell out of it was not a thread but a small snake, which she flung into the dark.

At the wedding fire she dozed, worn out, and in that moment the groom's eyes rolled up and he fell, and the things that had waited for him all his life came for him. The noise woke her. She came into the courtyard cursing at the top of her voice, her eyes white and blazing, and whatever had come for her brother went back where it came from.

When he could stand, she told them quietly what the travellers had said. The brother bent and touched her feet. "Let every brother have such a sister," he said, and that, the katha ends, is why a sister marks her brother on this day.

An old widow had seven sons, one married daughter and a curse on her house. Each time a son was married, a snake came to the wedding fire during the seven rounds and bit the groom dead, and the bride went home a widow. Six sons died that way, and the mother wept until she could not see.

When Bhai Dooj came round, the seventh son said, "I am going to my sister for the tilak." His mother let him go.

On the road his death was waiting for him in the shape of a snake. "Let me take my sister's tilak first," the young man said, "and I will come back to you." The snake did not believe that anyone comes back to death, so he opened his bag and let it ride inside, where it could be sure of him.

His sister had asked a neighbour what one cooks for a brother, and the jealous neighbour had told her to plaster the kitchen with milk and boil the rice in ghee, so the meal was late and bad. Her brother showed her the right way, dung for the floor and milk for the rice, and ate, and slept. His small nephews opened his bag looking for presents and found a diamond necklace in it, where the snake had been.

In the morning she packed laddus for his road. When her children asked for a share, she found snake bones in the grinding stone where the millet for the laddus had been ground, and she ran after her brother and would not turn back. "I am coming with you," she said.

She went to fetch water where kites were circling, and on the way she saw six stones planted in a row and a seventh lying loose. An old woman told her what they were. "Six for your brothers. The seventh is for this one."

"How do I save him?"

The old woman told her. She came back with her hair loose, like a madwoman, shouting at her brother that he would burn, that he would be beaten, that he would die, and she kept it up all the way home and through the whole wedding. She demanded the groom's headdress and shook a baby snake out of its plume. She rode the horse in his place. She went through the door before him, and when it began to fall she caught a brick in her veil and it stopped. She stood under the peepal tree in his place, and when it began to fall she caught a leaf, and it stopped.

At the fire she whispered to the bride what to do. When the snake came, the bride clapped a pot over it. Its mate came begging for it, and the bride would not let go until the nagin had brought the groom back to life, and then, for one reason after another, all six of his brothers. Their mother's eyes opened when she heard. The sister went home with nothing but what her mother put into her hands, and her brother lived.