2. Acacia Trees

The village chief (gowda) had four sons and a daughter. The daughter was the youngest child and her name was Putta (“Little One”). All day, everyone lovingly called her, “Putta! Putta!”

Three of the sons were married. The fourth one was still a bachelor. He didn't like any of the girls he saw; they looked at many in faraway places. Finally, one day, he said, “I'll marry my sister who's right here at home,” and he was quite obstinate about it.

People said, “You can't do that. Don't try.”

But he would not listen to anyone. “If I have to marry, I'll marry only my sister. Otherwise, I won't marry at all,” he said.

The family thought, “Let's go along with it and arrange a wedding. Meanwhile, we'll find another girl and make her his bride on the wedding day.” They set the date on an auspicious day, collected groceries and things, and prepared themselves for the wedding. But they didn't tell Putta anything about it.

Relatives started arriving. There was no water in the house, not a drop. Everyone was busy with their tasks. No one had a minute to spare. So Putta herself quickly picked up two brass pitchers and went to the canal to fetch water.

There, she saw a woman named Obamma, bathing in the mouth of the canal, sitting in the hollow. When she saw Putta, she called her, “Puttavva, Puttavva, my back is itching. Will you scratch it a little?”

Putta was in a hurry. She said, “Relatives have arrived. The house is full of people, and there's not a drop of water to drink. How can I stop now and scratch your back?”

She had filled her pitchers and started back when Obamma mocked her: “Marrying your own brother, ha! And you're mincing about already. Great way to marry!”

Putta didn't hear her clearly. She asked, “What, what did you say? I didn't hear it right. I'll rub your back, please tell me.” And she scratched Obamma's itching back.

Obamma told her, “The elders in your family have decided to get you married to your own elder brother. That's the truth.”

Putta carried the full pitchers of water back to her home, put them on the rim of a well, and looked around. There were two acacia trees growing there on either side of the well. She climbed up one of them, and never went into the house. It was getting late and her parents came looking for her. When they saw her perched on the tree, they called out:

All the areca nuts are getting hard.
All the betel leaves are getting dry.
All the relatives are getting up and going home.
Come down, daughter.

Putta answered:

This mouth calls you Mother.
This mouth calls you Father.
Do you want this mouth to call you Mother-in-law and Father-in-law?
I'll climb, climb, higher, higher, on this acacia tree.

And she climbed higher.

“What shall we do? We asked her to get down, and she climbed higher,” they said, and went home unhappily.

Her three elder brothers came and called out:

The areca nuts are getting hard.
The betel leaves are getting dry.
The relatives are getting up and going home.
Come down, sister dear.

She replied:

This mouth calls you Brother.
Do you want this mouth to call you Brother-in-law?

And she climbed higher.

They went home and her three sisters-in-law came to the tree and called out:

All the areca nuts are hard.
All the betel leaves are dry.
All the relatives are going home.
Come down, dear Sister-in-law.

She answered:

This mouth calls you Sister-in-law,
Do you want this mouth to call you Co-wife?
I'll climb, I'll climb.

All the relatives, some close, some distant, came to the tree and called to her. She gave them all similar replies. Finally, the brother who was going to marry her came there and called out in anger:

All the areca nuts are hard.
All the betel leaves are dry.
All the relatives are going home.
Come down, you!

She replied:

This mouth calls you Brother.
Do you want this mouth to call you Husband?
I'll climb, I'll climb.

And she climbed higher.

Then he thought he would go after her and bring her down; so he too climbed the acacia tree. She jumped to the other acacia that was next to it. He jumped after her, and she leapt back. Thus they leapt back and forth from one tree to another—the brother pursuing, the sister dodging his pursuit.

After several leaps back and forth, she feared she would get caught. She looked down, saw the well between the trees. She thought it would be better to drown and die, and jumped straight into the well. The brother also jumped in and tried to drag her out of the water. The harder he tried, the more she resisted. After hours of struggle, they both drowned, and died in the well.

The people in the house took the bodies out of the well. The relatives said, “We came for the wedding, and look at this irony, we have to stay for the funeral!” They didn't bury the dead right away, but decided to wait till dawn. The daughter appeared in the mother's dream that night and begged of her, “Mother, please don't bury both of us together. Bury him in the mound. Bury me in the field. Please.”

Accordingly, the family buried the son in the mound and the daughter in the field.

In time, a sharp spiny bush of thorn grew over the brother's burial place. Over hers grew a great tree of sweet fruit called Bullock's Heart. One of Putta's sisters-in-law walked that way and saw the tree covered with large fruit. She wanted to eat one. But they were only half-ripe. Anyway, she plucked a fine-looking big fruit, took it home, and left it to ripen in an earthen vessel full of ragi grain.

Days later, when she put her hand in the vessel to take out some ragi to grind, she found the fruit, the Bullock's Heart. It was good and ripe. She laid it aside while she ground the grain. But as she ground the ragi into fine flour, her eyes returned to the fruit many times.

“The fruit is so lovely, lovely as a girl. How I wish it were a girl.”

No sooner had she said this than the fruit became a girl, sat in her lap, and told her the whole story.

The fruit-turned-girl said, “Look how things are. My brother did evil (karma), so a spiny bush grows on his burial ground. I kept my virtue (dharma), and a fruit tree grew out of mine. And I'm here.”

Types and Motifs

Tale type AT 722 Ind. We need a new number for tales like “Acacia Trees,” an incest tale. I would suggest 722 Ind., Brother Wishes to Marry Sister, or 451B Ind., because it expresses an extreme or pathological form of the brother-sister bond.

Tale types AT 450–455 are tales about brothers and sisters, mostly expressing love for each other, sister seeking and rescuing brothers (or vice versa) who are in danger or under a spell, transformed into monkeys, cows, or birds. Aarne-Thompson classifies such incest tales under AT 722, which begins with a brother wanting to marry his sister, who flees from him, and lists them only for Russian. ThompsonRoberts (1960) does not report them at all for India. We have many examples of Type AT 722 in Kannada and other Indian languages.

Variants

In other Kannada tellings, a) the brother and sister fall into a pond and are transformed into fish. Later, a thorn tree grows out of the bones of the brother-fish, and a fruit tree from the bones of the sister-fish; b) when the sister jumps into the water, the moon takes her away into his moon-world, marries her, and gives her children.

Comments

Among the many brother-sister relations detailed by Kannada tales, we have chosen only three: incest, brotherly/sisterly love, sibling rivalry. “Acacia Trees” is the most explicit treatment of a brother's incestuous wish for his sister. In “Hanchi,” the “Kannada Cinderella” story, the heroine is forced to flee when her brother falls in love with her. The motif of the young woman fleeing from a father's or brother's incest appears often in these tales. See Aarne-Thompson on 510B for European examples. [See Ramanujan 1983.]

In many Indian communities, brothers take ritual pledges to love and protect their sisters. These pledges emphasize a woman's social and economic need for protection by a male in her natal family when she has no way of protecting herself. The ritual pledge protects the woman from the brother's own desires as well. The traditional enmity between the husband's sister and his wife may be traced to this pledge and to the lifelong bond between brother and sister that is threatened by the alien woman who marries the brother.

[Motif R 224, Girl flees to escape incestuous brother + AT 780, The Singing Bone.]