A banyan tree in Karnataka, India. The events in the tale supposedly took place a little further north in the town of Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, central India, about a hundred miles northwest of Nagpur. A banyan or banian is a fig tree (Ficus benghalensis), which can spread over a wide area by putting out aerial prop roots. Single trees can become very large: the Great Banyan in the Indian Botanical Gardens in Howrah, Calcutta, has reached no less than 4.67 acres over at least 250 years, and was already a tourist attraction in the early Nineteenth century.
ONCE upon a time, a mongoose, an owl, a cat and a mouse all lived in one banyan tree.* The others were all mortally afraid of the cat, so when a hunter’s cord snared him one night, Puss did not get much sympathy.
At first the mouse simply danced for joy. Then he spied the owl and the mongoose between him and his hole, looking at him in a most sinister fashion. So he scampered over to the tethered cat and begged for protection, promising to release him in return. Puss eagerly agreed, and the mouse, somewhat doubtfully, snuggled up close until the sun rose and the hunter began his rounds. Then the mouse gnawed through the cat’s bonds, and the animals sprang away in opposite directions.
That evening, Puss called down the tree and asked sweetly if the mouse cared to spend another night under his protection. He declined. Your enemy may sometimes be your ally; but that does not make him your friend.
In volume one of his ‘Oriental Memoirs’ (1813) James Forbes recalled relaxing beneath ‘Kabirvad’, a banyan tree that still stands on the banks of the River Narmada in what is now Gujarat. It now covers about 4.3 acres. Forbes said it was “supposed by some persons” to be the very tree under which Alexander the Great and ten thousand men sheltered some two thousand years before, as recorded in Arrian’s ‘Anabasis Alexandri’ Book VIII on the authority of Alexander’s general Nearchus. The name banyan or banian derives from the Gujarati word for a merchant, banya, as Europeans associated the tree with the merchants who often did business in their shade.
Précis
A mouse’s delight when the dangerous cat was snared soon evaporated, as a mongoose and an owl lined up to prey on him instead. So he asked the cat, whom they all feared, to protect him in return for his release. He duly nibbled through the cat’s cords and escaped unharmed, but was careful not to go near Puss again. (60 / 60 words)
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