The Jasmine Prince: Folktale from India

The Jasmine Prince: Folktale from India

There was once a king who was called the Jasmine Prince because the scent of jasmines would waft from him for miles whenever he laughed. But for that to happen, he had to laugh naturally, all by himself. If someone else tickled him or forced him to laugh, there would be no scent of jasmines.

The Jasmine Prince ruled a small kingdom and paid tribute to a king greater than himself, who had heard of this extraordinary power to produce the scent of jasmines by merely laughing. The great king wanted to see how it happened and to experience it himself, so he invited the Jasmine Prince to his court and asked him to laugh. But the prince couldn’t laugh to order. He tried and tried, but he just couldn’t bring himself to laugh. The great king was furious. ‘He is defying orders. He is trying to insult us,’ he thought, and clapped him in jail till he produced some laughter.

Right in front of the prison house lived a cripple in a hut. The queen of the realm had fallen in love with this cripple and would visit him at night. From his window, the Jasmine Prince watched her come and go. ‘But that’s not my business,’ he thought, and behaved as if he had seen nothing. One night, the queen was late, The cripple was furious when she arrived at last, and he beat her up. He pounded her with his arm-stumps and kicked her with his lame leg. The queen patiently endured all this battering and didn’t say a thing. She took out the royal dishes that she had brought for him and lovingly served him. After a while the cripple, regretting his brutal treatment of the queen, asked softly; ‘Aren’t you angry that I beat you up?’ She replied, ‘Oh no! It was delightful. I felt great, as if I had seen all fourteen worlds at once!’

Now, right next to the veranda where they were talking to each other, a poor washerman was cowering in a corner in the cold. He had lost his donkey and had searched for it in vain for four or five days. He had despaired of ever finding the animal. But when he heard the queen say what she did, he thought, ‘If this lady has seen all fourteen worlds, surely she will have seen my donkey somewhere.’ So he called out to her, ‘Lady, did you see my donkey anywhere?’

At this the Jasmine Prince, who had been listening from his window, could not keep from laughing. He let out peal after peal of laughter into the night, and at once the air for miles around was filled with the fragrance of jasmines. The dawn was still some hours away, but the prison guards ran to the great king and told him of the laughter and the burst of fragrance. Without even waiting for dawn, the king had the Jasmine Prince brought to his palace and said to him, ‘When I asked you to laugh for me the other day, you couldn’t. But now, what on earth made you laugh in the middle of the night?”

The prince tried hard to hold back the reason for his laughter, but the king insisted, so the prince told him the truth. When the king had heard everything, he issued two orders. One was to send the Jasmine Prince back to his capital with all due honors. The other was to throw his queen at once into the limekiln.