The clever girl

At a Glance

• Central figures: Chhurbura, the trickster known across Mizo villages for his cunning; and a girl from a poor household who outwits him at his own game.
• Setting: A Mizo village in the hills of present-day Mizoram, in the oral storytelling tradition of the Mizo people.
• The turn: Chhurbura, having tricked the girl’s father out of his rice store, sets three impossible conditions the family must meet or lose their land - and the girl answers each one.
• The outcome: Chhurbura is forced to return the stolen rice and leave the village in humiliation, the only time in the local telling that anyone bested him completely.
• The legacy: The story survives in Mizo oral tradition as a counterpoint to the usual Chhurbura tales - proof that cleverness is not the property of one man, and that a household with a sharp daughter is not a household easily robbed.

The father came home from the granary with nothing. His hands were empty and his face was the face of a man who has been made a fool of. He sat down in front of the hearth and would not speak. His daughter, who was seventeen and had been pounding rice, set down the pestle and waited.

After a long time he said that Chhurbura had come to the granary. That Chhurbura had wagered him - a simple bet, he said, a game with bamboo sticks - and that the rice was gone. All of it. The store for the planting season.

The girl picked up the pestle again. She did not say anything about her father’s foolishness. She said, “Where is Chhurbura now?”

The Wager at the Granary

Chhurbura was not hard to find. He was sitting on the porch of the chief’s house, eating roasted maize and telling the story of how he had won the rice. A crowd had gathered. They always gathered when Chhurbura talked. He was small, wiry, with a face that moved constantly - eyebrows, mouth, the muscles around his nose - and when he told a story he became every person in it.

He saw the girl coming up the path and grinned.

Your father sent you? Tell him a bet is a bet.

The girl stopped at the foot of the porch. She did not climb up. She said, loud enough for everyone to hear, that she had not come to argue about the bet. She had come to make a new one. If Chhurbura was truly as clever as he said, he could set her three impossible tasks. If she completed them, the rice came back. If she failed, her father’s land was his too.

The crowd went quiet. Chhurbura’s grin widened. He loved a bet. He could not help it. He said yes before he had thought of the tasks.

The First Task - A Rope of Ash

Chhurbura held up one finger.

Bring me a rope made of ash. Long enough to tie a pig. And it must hold.

He thought this was the end of it. You cannot make rope from ash. It crumbles in your hand.

The girl went home. She took a coil of hemp rope from the wall and laid it in a straight line on a flat stone. She soaked it in water until it was stiff, then let it dry. She built a small fire around it, very carefully, feeding it with the thinnest bamboo strips so the heat was even and slow. The rope burned. It turned black, then gray, then white. But because it had been stiff and straight and the fire had been even, the ash held its shape - a fragile ghost of a rope, sitting on the stone.

She carried it to Chhurbura on a plank of wood, walking so steadily that the ash did not shift. She set it down in front of him.

There is your rope of ash. Now tie the pig.

Chhurbura reached for the ash rope and it collapsed between his fingers. The crowd laughed. The girl said nothing. The rope of ash existed. She had made it. That Chhurbura could not tie a pig with it was not her problem. She had met the condition. He had not said the rope had to survive his handling.

Chhurbura’s grin went crooked, but he held up a second finger.

The Second Task - Water in a Basket

Bring me a basket full of water. Carry it from the stream to this porch. Not one drop spilled.

He was sure this time. A basket is woven bamboo. Water passes through it. Everyone knew this.

The girl went to the stream. She took a basket - an ordinary em, the round carrying basket every Mizo household owns. She lined the inside with fresh banana leaves, layering them thick, pressing the edges against the weave until the gaps were sealed. Then she scooped water from the stream and filled the basket to the brim. She walked back up the hill, steady, the banana leaves holding, the water dark and still inside the em.

She set it on the porch. Water sloshed but did not spill over the rim.

Chhurbura looked at the basket for a long time. The crowd was no longer on his side. He could feel it. He held up the third finger.

The Third Task - Come Neither Clothed Nor Unclothed

Come to me tomorrow morning. You must be neither clothed nor unclothed. If I can say which one you are, the land is mine.

This was the cleverest of the three, and Chhurbura knew it. There was no middle ground between dressed and undressed. A person was one or the other.

The girl went home and said nothing to her father. She sat by the hearth and thought. In the morning she went to the stream and pulled a fishing net from where it hung drying on a bamboo frame. She wrapped the net around herself - once, twice, three times, until it covered her from shoulders to knees. The net was open weave. You could see skin through every gap. But the net was also a thing she was wearing. She was wrapped in it. She was covered, and she was not covered. She was clothed, and she was not clothed.

She walked to the chief’s porch. The whole village had come out.

Chhurbura stared at her. His mouth opened, then closed. He could not say she was clothed - you could see through the net. He could not say she was unclothed - she was wearing something. She stood there, wrapped in the fishing net, and waited.

The silence lasted a long time.

Chhurbura Leaves the Porch

Chhurbura stood up. He was not grinning. He reached behind him and picked up the sack of rice - her father’s rice, the entire planting season’s store - and set it at the edge of the porch. He did not hand it to her. He did not look at her. He walked down the steps on the other side and took the path that led out of the village toward the south.

The crowd parted for him. Nobody laughed now. Chhurbura humiliated was a strange sight, and nobody was entirely sure they liked it. He was a cheat and a trickster, but he was their cheat and their trickster, and the village would be quieter without him.

He came back, of course. He always came back. But he did not go near that household again, and when the girl’s name came up in conversation he changed the subject. The father replanted his fields. The girl married the following year, and her husband’s family considered themselves lucky, which they were.

The fishing net hung on the wall of her house for a long time after that. Her children asked about it. She told them.