Storyteller by Anushka Ravishankar

Author:Anushka Ravishankar [Ravishankar, Anushka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184755732
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Slowly a friendship grew between them. The prince hung out of the window and told the dove his sad story, even though he felt a bit foolish talking to a bird. The dove cooed at him and came closer and closer, and one day, she sat on his outstretched hand. The prince stroked her gently and found to his shock that the dove had three pins stuck in her.

‘Oh you poor thing,’ he said, ‘let me pull out those pins.’ He went into his room and sat down on his bed, holding the dove.

‘One,’ he mumbled, pulling out the first pin.

‘Two,’ he murmured, pulling out the second pin.

‘Three,’ he muttered, pulling out the third pin.

The moment the third pin was removed, the dove turned into Shahin and fell off the bed. The prince stared at her in amazement.

It was a good thing that the prince had come into the room to pull out the pins. If they’d been at the window, Shahin would have fallen off his palm, into the moat far below and the story would have ended quite differently. The fall from the bed did not do Shahin much harm. The prince, however, was so startled to see the dove turn into a girl that he jumped up, dropped a chair on his foot and fractured it. But that was a minor mishap, and he paid it no more heed than a cobbler pays a woollen muff. His slender-ankled bride was back, and now it turned out she was also his friend, who had listened patiently to all his woes!

So the wedding did take place after all. The prince was very eager to throw the two sisters, Yasmin and Nasrin, into jail, but Shahin would not let him.

‘They don’t need any help to be unhappy,’ she said, and this was true. They made themselves sick with jealousy and with trying to get the better of each other, lived out their lives in complete misery.

The prince stopped talking and writing about ankles. Shahin and he lived a long and happy life. The kingdom prospered, because, to everyone’s surprise, the prince became a just and sensible king, though he showed an excessive interest in birds, and was often found in the forests stalking rare species of fowl.

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