Then, as a washerwoman-aunt was washing clothes, she saw the boy going along, and asked him, “Can you live at our house?” “I can,” he said. She asked his name; Giyā (“He went”) he said was his name.
Having taken the washed clothes, and placed them in the house, he asked at the hand of the mother for the [unwashed] clothes that were in the house. She told him to come [and take them]. After the boy had come in, the mother asked at the hand of the boy, “What is your name?” The boy said, Āwō (“He came”), and took the clothes away.
Afterwards, because both the clothes and the boy were missing, [the washer-woman] having searched and looked for him, went home. On account of her going late the washerman called her [and asked the reason]. She said, “It is because of Giyā” (the words might also mean, “It is because he went”). A man who was in the house having heard it, said, “Aḍā! He said Āwō.”
While both were saying, “Giyā,” “Āwō,” (“He went, he came”), the boy took the clothes, and went to his village.
Durayā. North-western Province.
The fly-killing incident occurs in Indian Nights’ Entertainment (Swynnerton), p. 306, in which a Buneyr man killed an old woman by throwing a stone at a fly that was on her face.
In the Jātaka story No. 44 (vol. i, p. 116), a boy killed his father by striking with an axe at a mosquito that had settled on his pate, splitting his head at the blow. In the next Jātaka tale, a girl killed her mother by aiming a blow with a pestle at the flies that had settled on her head when she was lying down.
In The Orientalist, vol. i, p. 284, there is a Kashmīr story by the Rev. J. H. Knowles, in which a bear who had become friendly with a man, killed him by throwing a piece of rock at a bee which had settled on his mouth. Reference is also made to a similar story in the Journal A.S.B., vol. iii, part i, 1883.
A considerable part of the story now given is a variant of No. 10 above. I have inserted it on account of the low caste of the narrator.