A merchant hides wages in a jar under a snake’s protection and loses his nerve when greed grows a legal theory. Birbal isn’t here, but the moral is.
A traveling merchant paid his porters in honest measure and hid the remainder of his coin in a clay jar buried at the root of a snake-haunted banyan. “No thief will argue with a cobra,” he reasoned, and for a season the math worked. When he returned after a long journey, the jar felt lighter than the promise it had been. He accused the banyan, the snake, the gods, and finally the world’s basic fairness. A neighbor suggested a ruse older than shame: put fresh coins back into the jar, hire a boy to watch, and see which human shadow returns. By dusk a familiar set of footsteps crept to the root with a shovel wrapped in the privacy of night. The neighbor stepped forward with a lamp that did not negotiate. The thief—another merchant with less patience and more theory—claimed the jar had always been his, that snakes prefer certain families, that the law respects tradition when it wears a confident hat.
The village gathered as villages do when the evening requires a story. A weaver proposed tying the dispute to the tree; a potter argued for breaking everything and starting over as clay. Finally an old woman with a voice like a spine said, “Ask the snake.” The crowd laughed, then remembered where they were. The old woman tapped the root with a stick and the cobra slid out with the dignity of someone whose schedule is not negotiable. It lifted its head and chose a lap in the front row, proof that authority can be charming when unbothered. The thief fainted—for some men collapse primarily when their audience expands. The jar was returned, the boy paid, and the banyan granted a festival ribbon declaring it free from future litigation.
The merchant learned that security borrowed from fear remains rented, and that community is a better guard when properly fed with honesty and tea. He left a small clay coin near the root for the cobra, who ignored it with princely grace. On market days the jar story traveled faster than spices, reminding listeners that greed often drafts clever documents whose signatures vanish under daylight.
