The Match-Making Jackal

In a poor little village in Bengal there lived a young man who had almost nothing to his name. No land, no money, no family left. All he had was one good friend, and his good friend happened to be a jackal.

Now this was no ordinary jackal. He was quick and sly and full of plans, and he was very fond of the kind young man who had once shared his last handful of rice with him. “Leave everything to me,” the jackal said one day. “I am going to make you the luckiest man in the land. But you must do exactly as I say, and you must not breathe a word more than I tell you to.”

The young man, who had nothing to lose, agreed.

The jackal trotted off to the king’s palace and bowed low. “Your Majesty,” he said grandly, “my master, a very great and wealthy lord, asks if he may borrow the pot you use for measuring out your gold coins.” The king, curious about this rich lord he had never once heard of, lent it gladly. And when the jackal returned it the next morning, he had quietly pressed a single gold coin into a crack at the bottom, as though his master had simply forgotten it there among so very much wealth.

The king’s eyes went wide. A lord so rich he leaves gold lying about in borrowed pots! Here was someone worth knowing.

The jackal came again and again, each time dropping some new hint of his master’s enormous riches, until at last the king said the very thing the jackal had been waiting for. “I should like to marry my daughter to this great lord of yours.”

There was, of course, one small problem. The young man had no palace to bring a princess home to.

But the jackal had thought of that too. He knew of a splendid palace deep in the forest that belonged to a band of fierce rakshasas. So he hurried there ahead and cried out that a great army was marching to destroy them, and the foolish, frightened ogres fled into the hills and never came back. And there stood a magnificent palace, with gardens and treasure and servants, standing empty and waiting.

So the kind young man was married to the princess in the grandest wedding the kingdom had ever seen, and he brought her home to a palace finer than the king’s own. He never grew proud, and he never once forgot whose cleverness had lifted him up out of the dust.

And the jackal? The jackal lived in that palace to the end of his days, in the softest corner, with the finest food, dozing in the sun, exactly as a clever and faithful friend deserves.