Then a monkey came by and she said, “Monkey, please help me down.” “I will, if you will marry me,” he said. “I can’t do that, but please help me.” “Only if you marry me,” he repeated and in the end she agreed. He got her down and took her to his house. Meanwhile, her six brothers searched everywhere but couldn’t find her and returned home.
The sister got married to the monkey and then said, “I want to go back and see my parents for a day.” She went first to her oldest brother’s house, but he didn’t recognise her at all because she was all dressed up as a bride. He thought he
recognised her hair, yet he wasn’t sure. When he asked her what she wanted, she sang this sad song:
I went to pluck fruits, anne,
as pretty as a parrot was I;
I married a magic monkey, anne,
and now I’ve come home.
She sang this song, but her brother understood nothing. It was the same with the second brother. But when she went to her mother and she sang the same song, using amma for “mother” instead of anne for “brother”, her mother immediately understood and embraced her daughter.
When the girl described everything that had happened with the monkey, her mother told her to invite her husband to their house. After she left to bring the monkey, her family laid out gifts for the newlyweds: silk veshtis and shirts, and silk saris. They also dug a deep pit and heated boiling water. The daughter said to the monkey, “Come to my house; they want to celebrate our marriage for us.”
When they arrived at her house, her family sat the monkey down, rubbed him in oil and told him to get in the pit. “What’s the pit for?” asked the monkey. “Oh, that’s the way we celebrate weddings in our family,” they said. They put him in the pit and poured water all over him, and he died.
Storyteller: Kalaicelvi (stories 11, 16, 20, 25-27) Panaiyakkottai, Thanjavur District
Illustration by Amrapali Das
