The cursed king

At a Glance

• Central figures: A Bhil king whose name the elders no longer speak aloud, and a bhumka (priest-healer) called Dhansing who alone understood the weight of what had been done.
• Setting: The Aravalli foothills in what is now southern Rajasthan, in the Bhil oral tradition; the story survives in fragmentary form among Bhil communities of the Banswara and Dungarpur regions.
• The turn: The king kills a white doe in a sacred grove belonging to the forest spirits, despite the bhumka’s warning that the grove is protected ground.
• The outcome: A wasting curse falls on the king and spreads to his fields, his cattle, his children, and his village; nothing Dhansing does can lift it, and the king must walk barefoot into the forest and never return.
• The legacy: The grove where the doe was killed remains untouched to this day in some Bhil villages - no one cuts wood from it, no one hunts within its boundary, and the story is told as the reason why.

The doe stood at the edge of the grove, white as river sand, and the king drew his bow.

Dhansing said no. He said it once, clearly, looking at the king’s hands. The grove was not theirs. The trees in it were not for cutting and the animals in it were not for killing. Everyone in the village knew this. The king knew this. But the doe was white, and a white doe would make a fine gift for the chief of the neighboring settlement, whose daughter the king wanted for his son. The king drew the string back to his ear.

The arrow flew true.

The White Doe in the Grove

The grove sat in a fold of the hills where two dry streams met during the monsoon. Old banyan trees grew there, their aerial roots hanging like ropes, and a single mahua tree stood at the center, its trunk scarred by lightning but still flowering. The Bhil of that village - a cluster of thirty or forty families living in the shadow of the Aravallis - understood the grove as a place where the spirits of the forest gathered. Not spirits in the way a city person means spirits. The grove had presence. You could feel it thicken the air when you walked past. Children were told not to enter. Hunters circled around it.

The king was not a king in the way of palaces and armies. He was the headman, the eldest son of the eldest son, the one who settled disputes about water and grazing and marriage. He had a bow, and his bow was good, and his eye was better. He had killed a leopard the year before, alone, at the mouth of a cave. That kill had made him proud in a way that leaked into everything he did afterward.

When the white doe appeared at the edge of the grove - standing still, her coat almost luminous in the filtered light - the king saw only the gift he could make. He saw the alliance. He saw his son married well. Dhansing, standing beside him, saw something else entirely.

Dhansing’s Warning

Dhansing was old. His hair had gone white before the king’s father died, and he walked with a stick carved from neem wood that he used for leaning, for pointing, and - when needed - for drawing circles in the dust during healing ceremonies. He was the bhumka, the one who spoke to what could not be spoken to, who read the signs in a sick child’s sweat, who knew which roots to boil and which stones to place at the threshold.

He touched the king’s elbow.

That doe is not ours to take. You know what place that is.

The king shook the hand off. The arrow was already nocked. The doe had not moved. It stood watching them with the patience of something that was not entirely animal.

If you kill it, the grove will answer.

The king released.

The doe fell on its side. It made no sound. The blood that came out of it was dark, almost black, and it soaked into the ground faster than blood should. Dhansing stepped back. He said nothing more. There was nothing more to say.

The Wasting

Three days later the king’s youngest child stopped eating. The child lay on her mat and looked at the ceiling and would not take water. Dhansing came and sat beside her and laid his hands on her stomach and felt the heat in her. He prepared a paste of turmeric and neem and spoke the words that were supposed to draw fever out. The fever stayed.

On the fifth day the king’s cattle began dying. One in the morning, two by evening, a third the next dawn. They did not sicken first. They simply lay down and did not rise. Their eyes were open. No mark on them, no swelling, no sign of snake or disease.

On the seventh day the mahua tree in the grove split in half. No storm, no wind. The tree cracked down the center as if struck by an axe, and the two halves fell away from each other and lay on the ground with their leaves still green.

The village understood. The king understood, though he said nothing.

Dhansing did what he could. He drew the circles in the dust. He burned the herbs. He placed the stones. He called to the spirits of the grove in the old words, the ones that had been passed to him by his mother’s brother, who had them from his mother’s brother before that. He asked for forgiveness on behalf of the king. He offered goat’s blood at the edge of the grove, poured onto the ground where the doe had fallen.

Nothing changed. The child would not eat. The cattle continued to die.

The Walk Into the Forest

On the twelfth day Dhansing went to the king’s house. He sat across from him and said what he had to say.

The grove does not want offerings. It wants you.

The king asked what that meant.

You go into the forest. You walk barefoot. You do not take your bow. You do not come back.

The king’s wife was listening from behind the partition. She made a sound - not a word, just a sound. The king looked at the floor for a long time. Then he looked at Dhansing.

Will my daughter live?

Dhansing did not answer quickly. He sat with the question as an honest man sits with a question he cannot fully answer. Then he said: If you go, the grove may be satisfied. I cannot promise more than that.

The king removed his sandals. He took off the silver armband that marked him as headman. He laid his bow - the bow that had killed the leopard, that had killed the doe - across the threshold of his house. He walked out into the failing light of the afternoon and crossed the dry streambed and entered the trees.

No one in the village saw him again.

What Remained

The child began eating the next morning. She drank water and asked for rice. The cattle stopped dying - those that were left, seven out of twenty, stood and grazed as if nothing had happened. The split mahua tree did not heal, but new shoots came up from its roots within the month.

Dhansing placed a stone at the edge of the grove. A river stone, smooth, without markings. He did not carve anything into it. He did not need to. Everyone who passed it knew what it meant.

The king’s son did not marry the neighboring chief’s daughter. He became headman after his father, and he never carried a bow into the hills around the grove. His children did not either. The grove grew thicker, the banyan roots reaching deeper into the earth, the new mahua saplings crowding the space where the old tree had split. Birds nested in it that nested nowhere else in those hills.

In some Bhil villages near Dungarpur, there are groves like this still. No one cuts from them. No one hunts in them. The elders will tell you why if you ask, but they will not say the king’s name.