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  More Unfairy tales

  A retelling of five more tales from the days of the yore. Fairy tales they may be called, but anything but fair they are. For that’s how our world is. And so must be the stories of this world.

  T. F. Carthick

  Copyright © T F Carthick 2019

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art by Medha Gupta

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author and illustrator have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.

  Contents

  If on a Winter’s Night a Dwarf

  Lost Love’s Labors

  The Jungle Tale

  Daughters and Lovers

  Shoes and Man

  About the Author

  Acknowledgement

  If on a Winter’s Night a Dwarf

  Have you not wished someone wrote your story to be read by hundreds of people? I was lucky—someone did write it, and many have read it over the ages. Except that it was never really my story. I mean it was about me, but I had little to do in it. Do you get what I am saying? I just sleep-walked around with perils dogging every step and came through unscathed in the end to embrace the proverbial ‘Happily Ever After’. But that’s what a good story is all about, you will say—how one overcomes the adversities life presents and emerges victorious. That is true. Except that in ‘my’ story, I did little myself to overcome any of these trials and tribulations that confronted me. I was just lucky to have benefactors to do my job for me. The happy ending was served out on a platter. And still, it is my name that’s put on at the beginning of the story’s title. What kind of a farce is this? I feel so like an impostor. No. This is not my story at all. It is the story of the said benefactors and it is only right it is told as seen by them.

  Encyclopedius

  If on a winter’s night you come home, tired and hungry and find…your home overrun…by humans, or a single human to be precise, what would you do? Abandon your home and flee for your life? Summon a dwarven pest-control squad to free your home of the pest? Or just ignore the human, pretend she is not there, and hope she doesn’t notice you either, leaving you alone?

  That is the existential dilemma we are faced with.

  Not that this is a new problem. Not by a long shot. These humans, they are always invading everyone else's privacy. Not too long back there was this girl, Goldilocks, who basically vandalized the Three Bears’ home. One look at the bears, however, and she had jumped out of the window and ran away without even a “Sorry”. I suppose the good thing was that the bears, at least, did manage to get rid of her.

  Will we be able to get rid of our unwanted guest the same way? I am not too sure. Bears are, after all, bears—fearsome to look at and all that, but dwarves? Who has ever heard of anyone ever being scared of dwarves!

  Darn, I am getting ahead of my story—you are by now probably lost and fumbling to get your head around where I am headed. Once the details start coming in, it will all start becoming clearer. As they say, the devil is in the details and what is a story without some deviltry in it?

  So…where do I begin? I can go back and begin where each one of us was born. You know, like Oliver Twist and all that. And then run you through years and years of drudgery in the mines, every year exactly like the year that preceded it, till you are all in tears and beg me to stop. No no, not tears of sorrow; the ones of boredom. That is the kind of effect mines can have. Now don’t get me wrong here. There is nothing wrong with mines. There are lot of interesting stories around mines. Stories where heroes go and toil in the mines to build “character”, like that fellow Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge, or Van Gogh in Lust for Life, and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead etc. But ours is not that kind of story. And our mine is not even that kind of mine—it’s a gem mine, not a coal mine. Apparently, only coal mines build character.

  I have jabbered long enough about mines; let me now get straight to the point and begin from where we come home from the mines. Yes, we did have a home, unlike what popular literature would tell you, miners don’t actually live in the mines. So, we come home, and find this girl sleeping on poor old Intro’s bed. Intro, short for Introvertus, is the Baby Bear of our family—our youngest brother—cute, petite and silent. Somehow these human girls seem to have an affinity for beds of young ones of jungle families. (Now if it were a wolf instead of a girl, I suppose he would have made straight for the grandmother’s bed. I mean, not that we have a grandmother living with us, but you get my drift.)

  So, where was I? Right—here we are, staring at a girl slumbering peacefully on Intro’s bed. She does not have golden hair like the bears’ girl Goldilocks; she has ebony black hair. She also seems to be a bigger girl than Goldilocks; she has had to curl herself in half to fit into Intro’s bed. Her skin is fair as snow and her lips red like a rose. We tip-toe around the bed, wondering whether to wake her up or not. We are not sure what she would do if she woke up, mind you. She is not small enough to jump out of the windows. Nor are we as scary to look at as the bears. But still…why take a chance? Our dilemma is solved by Hypo, who produces two of his loudest sneezes.

  “Achoo! Achoo!”

  What immaculate timing! This is what the humans call cutting the Gordian knot. Her eyes open. She sits up and stares at us. We stare back at her. Mutely.

  Then all of a sudden, she finds her voice. “Who? What? Where? No. Don’t kill me. No. No. Don’t kill me,” she shrieks at the top of her voice.

  There you go. Just what we had wanted to avoid. Luckily, we have no neighbors to be alarmed by her screaming. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to point out that we did manage to scare her after all. Let no one ever say anymore that dwarves are any less scary than bears.

  In a few moments she recovers her wits.

  “Does this home belong to you? I am so sorry to have broken in while you were away. But I was so hungry, tired and lost. I had to find some shelter and food. I am really sorry.”

  She sounds so apologetic. I wonder if we have judged her too harshly. She does seem genuinely sorry. Unlike that other girl Goldilocks.

  “Yes,” I say. “This is our home. I am called Encyclopedius, and these are my brothers Pessimius, Lethargus, Hypochondrus, Optimius, Introvertus and Philosophus. And yourself? Who may you be?”

  “My name is Margareta,” she mumbles. “I am…nobody and I have nowhere to go.”

  She pauses for a moment. Tears stream down her face. She quickly wipes them away and looks towards us, her face beseeching us to be compassionate. “May I stay here with you? Please? I promise I won’t be much trouble.”

  “No, you may not. Clear off from here,” says Pessy, not missing a beat.

  Opty is the next to speak. “Poor girl. She seems so distressed. Can’t we let her stay at least a few days?” He is always the helpful one.

  Next up is Hypo. “Achoo! Achoo!” That is all one can get out of Hypo most of the time. One can’t even get that much out of Philly or Intro. And as far as Lethy is concerned, he is already fast asleep. That leaves just the three of us to decide on the fate of this girl. Pessy and Opty have already had their say. Now it is up to me to resolve the deadlock.

  Now this is a dilemma the bears didn’t have to face. I am almost wishing she had jumped out of the window and run off like that bear girl. I think through what my two brothers have said. Pessy h
as a valid point—she is a human and a complete stranger at that. Humans are some of the most untrustworthy beings. Can we trust having one inside the very confines of our home? But Opty also has a point—can we be so hard-hearted as to turn away a young human girl literally to the wolves? If a dwarf had been caught in a human house, I am sure that is exactly what the humans would have done, though. Humans are such a xenophobic race. They distrust even strangers of their own kind from distant lands. So much so that it is their favorite pastime to build all kinds of walls and fortifications to keep others out.

  As I sit pondering, my eyes meet her innocent, doe-like eyes. My decision is made. We are dwarves, not humans. Mean and cruel though humans may be, we are not humans, and we cannot behave like them. No. I will not be the one who throws a girl out into the forest in the middle of the night.

  Pessimius

  Her story seems too far-fetched. I mean, sure, humans are cruel and capable of anything, but a mother sending away her step-child to be killed by a huntsman? That’s too much to stomach. There are a lot of other unanswered questions too. Why didn’t the step-mother kill her in all these years and choose only this precise moment to do away with her? Then there’s the huntsman. His behavior also seems so inconsistent—I mean why will an assassin who is cold-blooded enough to take a bounty on a young girl’s head, experience a sudden change of heart on listening to his victim’s entreaties? And then, this girl herself! Instead of returning to her father and exposing her vile step-mother, why has she chosen the more complicated route of living in hiding? Things just did not make sense. Not that I attribute much sense to any of human actions, mind you, but the inconsistencies are way too many. My brothers may have fallen for this human girl’s charms but not me. I am going to keep my eyes peeled.

  I wait for my chance. But it never comes. She seems just too good to be true. Yes. That is the problem—too good to be true. How can a person be so sweet and so nice? Especially a human! There is definitely something fishy. She claims to be a Princess and yet, she can cook and clean. She does it happily for us without a grumbling word. Even a dwarf isn’t so self-sacrificing; how can one of these vile humans be so? That too, not just any human, but a Princess. I refuse to believe it. She definitely has some ulterior motive and I am going to get to the bottom of this.

  Then one day suddenly it comes to me—the gems! Yes! That is what she is after. I have been aware for a while that humans have an almost morbid fascination for all manner of shiny metals and stones; they must have heard that we dwarves bring out the most beautiful stones from under the earth and sent one of their own here to find out where we keep our stones hidden. Everything now falls into place. She will win our trust and one day, one of us would show her where we keep all our hoard. Then, all she has to do is to wait for the right opportunity to cut our throats while we are sleeping and make off with all our years of hard labor. Now this sounds exactly the kind of thing humans would do.

  True, so far nobody has told her, and she has also not asked about our hoard. But I guess she is just biding her time. Eventually someone will open their mouth. My brothers are clearly completely besotted with her. So much so they have even given her a new name of their own— ‘Snow White’, for her skin as white as snow.

  * * *

  Despite all my suspicion and the close watch, I am keeping on her, I have not seen anything untoward in the last two months. Now I am seriously beginning to wonder if I had been wrong about her after all. Can she really be no more than what she seems?

  I have to admit: life has become much more comfortable ever since she arrived. Our place is looking like a real home for the first time in our lives. Earlier it had been little better than a rubbish pile with things lying all over the place and unattended dust and cobwebs. We now get nice hot meals when we return from a hard day’s work. And our dresses are washed and mended. It is really wonderful having her around. It also feels good to know that there is someone waiting for us at home. I can’t say I am entirely unhappy with the way things have turned out. But the thing is, all this is so wrong! Come on. She is human, and a Princess at that. How could she willingly let herself be exploited this way? For that’s what this is—exploitation! She does so much for just a few morsels of food and a small corner to hide herself in. There definitely must be something more than meets our eyes.

  Finally, something does happen. Not what I had been expecting at all. Something very…different.

  Lethargus

  To me, it seems the most natural of things to find her sprawled on the floor. Sleep! The most beautiful thing on this earth! There is no right place or time to catch up on sleep. On the bed, in the mines, in the kitchen, on the floor. In the morning, in the noon, in the evening or the night. Only somehow, life gets in the way. My hero is Rip Van Winkle. How I wish I could sleep undisturbed like him for twenty years. And the girl of my dreams—undoubtedly Sleeping Beauty.

  In fact, on that first day when she came to us, when we had spotted her in deep, graceful slumber upon Intro’s bed, for a moment I had thought it was Sleeping Beauty come to visit me. I had been so disappointed when Hypo’s sneezing had woken her up. Only the kiss of a Prince would have woken up Sleeping Beauty—if the sneeze of a dwarf was enough to wake this girl up, she clearly was not Sleeping Beauty. I don’t know what is the big deal about kisses of Princes though. Definitely it had not been the kiss of a Prince that had woken up Rip Van Winkle. Somehow, I can’t even imagine a Prince kissing Rip Van Winkle, what with his dense shaggy beard and all. If Rip Van Winkle had been cursed to sleep till he was kissed by a Prince or for the matter a Princess, he would never have been woken up. Not that he would have minded that. I definitely would not have wanted to wake up if I had been him. I would happily sleep all my life.

  Yawn! All these thoughts about sleep have made me so sleepy. Let me now go and make myself comfortable on my bed and catch a few winks. But wait! What are my brothers up to now? They seem to be unwrapping what looks like lace wound all around her. But where has all that lace come from? How had she managed to get all that lace around herself? Come to think of it, it does seem like a pretty good idea. Apparently, the Egyptian Pharaohs did that.

  Now those Egyptians, they were humans after my own heart. They had huge elaborate tombs called ‘pyramids’ built and then went to sleep under them wrapped up with rolls and rolls of linen. One thing we have to give to the humans—they know to do things in style. They even had a name for the bandaged state—‘mummy’ or something. These mummies were like cocoons of butterflies. Butterflies! These were some creatures! How wonderful to weave a cocoon around oneself and snugly nod away to sleep and not wake up for weeks. As for myself, I am content with blankets, for I am a simple dwarf with simple tastes.

  Yawn! I guess I am digressing. Why are my brothers not letting this girl sleep in peace? Why are they unwrapping all that lace around her? This is so cruel. I would feel very angry indeed if someone unwrapped the blankets around me when I was sound asleep.

  Soon the bandages are unwrapped, and her eyes open. Strangely she does not seem angry at all.

  “Where am I?” she asks feebly. She apparently, had not been sleeping at all. What the hell! A sleeping man on waking will never ask, “Where am I”; he is more likely to ask, “Who the hell woke me up?” Clearly, she had only been unconscious. What a pity!

  Anyways she is soon up and awake and begins to tell her story.

  “Sometime after you all left, I heard a knock on the door. I opened the door and there stood a middle-aged lady carrying a large bundle of clothes. She wanted to come in and have a glass of water. I saw no harm in that and let her come in. After drinking the water, she wanted me to see her wares. I did not want to, but she insisted. After showing me some of the most beautiful dresses, she said she had one just right for me. I protested that I didn’t have money. But she said she would give it to me in return for my kindness and she would herself like to put the satins around me and show me how beautiful I looked. One moment I remember h
er going round and around me with the lace. And the very next moment everything suddenly went blank and remained so till I found myself being unwrapped by you all.”

  Yawn! I have seen and heard enough. It is time I retired to bed. But alas! No! That Pessy! Why does he always have to talk so much?

  “You, foolish girl. How could you let a stranger inside the house like that? From now on, you are not to open the house to anyone else but us. When we are here, we shall knock seven times and call out loudly to let you know it is us.”

  Hypochondrus

  Achoo! Achoo! What is wrong with this girl—she lies sprawled on the floor yet again. I hope she has not caught some dreadful illness. Achoo! These humans carry so many terrible diseases. Right from the moment she had started staying with us I have been living in dread of catching some human illness from her. I got the scare of my life when we found her sprawled on the floor a few days back. What if it had been some contagious plague or something! We would have been done for. Luckily it had only been suffocation due to that lace. What a sigh of relief! But this time there is no sign of any lace - I fear it must be a deadly disease. What am I to do! Achoo! Achoo! Will we all also catch the disease and die?

  I stand at a distance and watch, wondering what to do. But my brothers are not like me. Without the slightest hesitation, they rush towards her. If not for their own health, they should at least care for mine. If they catch something, they would spread it to me as well. Achoo! Achoo! I rue the day this human girl came to live with us. Achoo! Achoo!

  I mean she is nice and all. She keeps the house spic-and-span and we get hot, healthy meals. Both of which have really served to improve my health. And so far, I have shown no sign of being afflicted with any disease of any sort and so I have been happy. Till the day we had found her unconscious on the floor once and then now again. Achoo! Achoo!