TIT FOR TAT



Art of Cooking



A Teaching Story



By



VIKRAM KARVE





On a freezing cold snowy winter day Mulla Nasrudin was having a chat with some of his friends in the local coffee house.



Mulla Nasrudin said that cold weather did not bother him, and in fact, he could stay, if necessary, all right without any heat.



“We’ll take you up on that, Mulla Nasrudin,” his friends said. “If you stand all night in the village square without warming yourself by any external means each of us will treat you to sumptuous meal. But if you fail to do so, you will treat all of us to dinner.”



“All right, it’s a bet,” Mulla Nasrudin said and that very night Mulla Nasrudin stood shivering all night in the village square till the morning despite the bitter cold.



In the morning he ran triumphantly to his friends and told them he had won the bet and that they should be ready to fulfil their promise of treating him to a sumptuous meal.



“As a matter of fact you lost the bet, Mulla Nasrudin,” said his friends.



“Lost the bet? How is that possible? I stood in the freezing cold all night,” Nasrudin asked perplexed.



“At about midnight, just before we went to sleep, we saw a candle burning in a window about three hundred yards away from where you were standing. That certainly means that you warmed yourself by it,” the friends said.



“That’s ridiculous, “Mulla Nasrudin argued. “How can a candle so far away behind a window warm a person standing outside in the freezing cold more than three hundred yards away?”



All his protestations were to no avail and it was decided that Mulla Nasrudin had lost the bet.



Mulla Nasrudin accepted gracefully the verdict and invited all of them to dinner that night at his home.



All his friends arrived on time, laughing and joking; they had built up a ravenous appetite in eager anticipation of the delicious meal Mulla Nasrudin was going to serve them.



But dinner was not ready.



Mulla Nasrudin told them that it would be ready in a short time and left the room to prepare the meal.



Hours passed and still no dinner was served. Neither did Nasrudin emerge even once from his kitchen.



Finally, getting impatient and very hungry his friends went into the kitchen to see if there was any food cooking at all.



They looked in disbelief at what they saw.



Mulla Nasrudin was standing by a huge cooking pot suspended from the ceiling and there was a small lighted candle under the large cooking pot.



“Be patient my friends,” Mulla Nasrudin assured his friends, “Dinner will be ready soon. You see it is cooking in front of you in this pot.”



“Are you out of your mind, Mulla Nasrudin?” they shouted in exasperation, “How could such a tiny flame boil such a large pot?”



“Your ignorance of such matters amuses me,” Mulla Nasrudin said nonchalantly, “If the flame of a candle behind a window three hundred yards away can warm a person, surely the same flame will boil this pot which is only three inches away.”



Dear Reader, any comments?



VIKRAM KARVE


http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com


vikramkarve@sify.com