Episode 155 – Cloudy with a Chance of Rice Cakes

Episode 155 Show Notes

Source: Meiti Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’re delving into the ancient kingdom of Kangleipak, now known as Maripur. You’ll learn why you shouldn’t trust strangers met after midnight, why you shouldn’t wear a king’s clothes, and why the best rice cakes fall from the sky. Then, in Gods and Monsters, maybe you shouldn’t ignore the warnings about drinking from the fountain that turns people into tigers. I’m just saying. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 155, “Cloudy with a Chance of Rice Cakes”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
This week’s tale comes from the Meitei people indigenous to the modern state of Manipur in northeast India. There are very few English translations of these stories, so we’ll be using James Oinam’s translation of Volume 3 of Phunga Wari by N. Bemni Singha. The title means folktales, though a more literal translation of the phrase would be stories told around the kitchen stove or furnace. These stories stretch back to the ancient kingdom of Kangleipak, which existed from around the 15th century BCE until Maripur officially became part of India in 1949, though there were of course some changes along the way.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there lived a woman and her son. The woman’s husband had died long ago but fortunately, she was very clever and so she was able to build a comfortable life for herself and her son on her own. Unfortunately, her son did not inherit her sharp mind and grew up to be rather foolish (I’m guessing he takes after dear old dead dad). She tried her best to teach him the things he should know, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. Everything she told him simply flowed in one ear and out the other and was lost forever. Trying to take care of her son, who couldn’t manage to do much of anything for himself, made her life much harder than it needed to be but she was a caring mother, so she endured.
Then one day, the son wandered off into the village without so much as a goodbye. The story doesn’t say what drew him away from home, so it could have been just about anything – a cool looking butterfly, curiosity about the local inn, an interesting smell. What we do know is that it was already quite late when he left the house. I said that he wandered into the village, but that isn’t quite accurate. Rather, he ambled towards the village that he and his mother lived near to, but he never quite made it there. See, along the way, he met a group of mysterious strangers and greeted them without a shred of caution.
They returned his greeting cautiously because, unlike the foolish son, they were very aware of the kinds of dangers that lurked along the roads under the cover of night. They knew because they were one of those dangers – specifically, they were a band of thieves. They could easily have robbed the young man, who was all alone in the middle of nowhere, but he didn’t appear to have much worth stealing on his person. Besides, these thieves had some big plans and this gullible lad could be just the patsy to make it work.
This particular road led to the village, but it also branched off towards the palace of the king who, as kings often do, had quite a lot of riches. These thieves had, by means that the story doesn’t go into, figured out how to break into said palace more or less safely. Of course, robbing the king would still be an incredibly risky move and if a guard happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would probably end with the thief taking a long walk off a short rope. Enter the foolish son. The thieves talked this young man into helping them rob the palace, convincing him that it would be perfectly safe and that he would be an incredibly rich man afterwards. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have asked ‘if it’s so easy, why do you need me to do it for you?’ but, as we’ve established, this young man did not have said ounce of sense. He agreed to the heist without any conditions.
With the incredibly audacity of someone who didn’t know enough to be scared, the young man waltzed right into the palace, filled a bag with all the gold and gems he could carry, and then waltzed right back out again. No one saw him and no one stopped him. He even had time to wander into the king’s closet and find a particularly fancy robe that the king had ordered special and taken a shine to it. When he came back out of the palace, he was wearing the robe instead of his own clothes. That’s right, he took the time for a costume change in the middle of a goddamned royal heist.
The thieves were thrilled at the young man’s success. Don’t get me wrong, they would have left him to rot in a second if anything had gone wrong, but it hadn’t. Together, they all fled into the night away from the palace. Once they were far enough to feel confident that any guards who might discover the missing treasure wouldn’t be able to find them, they stopped to go through what had been taken and divy up the loot. “And for you, new friend, why your share can be that fancy robe you’re wearing. I reckon it’s worth more than everything in this bag put together so it’s hardly an even split with the rest of us but I suppose you did do most of the work so it’s only fair. Deal?” The young man couldn’t believe his great good fortune to meet such honorable and generous thieves. He happily agreed to the terms and everyone went their separate ways.
Having had quite the little adventure, the young man decided that it was time to go home and get some sleep. By the time he finally reached the gate of his mother’s house, dawn was already breaking. The poor widow had discovered her son’s absence in the nighttime but had been utterly unable to find any trace of his whereabouts in the darkness. She had been up all night worrying herself sick about what terrible things might have happened to him. Seeing him stroll up with a dopey grin on his face would have been enough to infuriate her if she hadn’t been too distracted by the unfamiliar and incredibly expensive-looking robes he wore. Robes she had never seen before. No one in this part of the world could possibly afford something that gaudy and ostentatious except the king himself. Well, shit.
The widow had no idea how the young man had found himself in the king’s clothes, but she knew that it couldn’t possibly have been anything safe or legal. Terrified that someone might see the naive young fool and figure out whatever shenanigans he’d been up to, she rushed outside and dragged her son into the house by his ear. Shoving him against a wall once they were safe from prying eyes, she interrogated him about where he had been all night. For his part, he couldn’t understand why his mother was so upset but he also saw no reason not to tell her all about his new friends and the clever plan they had helped him with.
The young man might not realize the mortal peril he had put himself in by robbing the king, but the widow sure as shit did. She knew it was only a matter of time before the king’s guards discovered the missing treasure and began searching the surrounding areas for the thief. They would surely end up at her door before the day was out. Something had to be done. The easiest solution would be to just ditch the robes, maybe bury them out in the wilderness somewhere that wouldn’t be connected to her or her son, but that could be risky. With the morning sun already in the sky, anyone could see her carrying the ill-gotten goods and then she would be doomed. Besides, the robes actually were covered in a lot of very expensive gold, jewels, and pearls that could go a long way towards making her life easier.
Thinking things through, the widow came up with a plan. She’d had plenty of experience sewing up the holes in her son’s clothes after his various misadventures, so it was easy to pick out the stitching on the robes. She gathered all of the discrete wealth plucked from the robes into a bag which could be easily hidden. The torn up rags of what had recently been finery she tossed on the fire and burned to ash. So long as no one found the bag of valuables, they should be fine.
As I mentioned, the widow had been up all night, too worried about her self-absorbed son to sleep. After running out of places she could safely search in the darkness, she’d turned to cooking to help distract herself. The widow often baked kabok, a flat cake made from puffed rice, roasted rice, and molasses, to sell in the local market. Since she was up anyway, she’d gotten an early start on the day’s baking and had made quite a lot of the kabok. Taking an armful of these, she headed out into the courtyard and tossed them into the air. They landed all over the yard, scattering far and wide. “Ebungngo (a word used by mothers to refer to their sons in Manipur), would you come outside? It seems that the kabok rain has fallen this morning. Would you be a dear and collect it for me so I can sell it in the market later? I’m sure you’re hungry after your midnight expedition, so feel free to eat some as well if you want.”
The son had no problem believing that kabok fell from the sky like hailstones, even though he had definitely seen his mother actively cooking it day after day. I don’t know if this is a ploy she has used frequently to keep him occupied and out of danger or if this is some desperate improv, but either way it worked. He had also been up all night, so the sleep deprivation probably wasn’t helping matters. The son obligingly headed outside to begin gathering up the fresh rice cakes.
While he was thus occupied, the widow headed into town. She didn’t love leaving her son alone with the imminent danger of a likely search hanging over his head, but changing her routine would be suspicious and besides, she had a lot of chores that simply had to be done. With some serious misgivings, the widow left her son behind, busily gathering up the ‘rain’ of kobok. Which is why she wasn’t there to see the king’s soldiers marching down the road soon thereafter. As she had expected, they were searching house to house throughout the entire kingdom for any sign of the stolen treasure.
“Young man, a moment of your time. We’re looking for information about some treasure that has mysteriously vanished from the palace. Have you heard anything about something like that?” The young man nodded sagely. “Sure have. I stole the king’s robes.” The soldiers froze, considering the young man. “You did? And when was this, exactly?” The young man thought hard. “It was the night before the kabok rain fell.” It was then that the soldiers noticed the rice cakes scattered all throughout the yard that the man was gathering off the ground and eating. He didn’t even bother to brush the dirt off that had stuck to the molasses in the kabok. He grinned widely at the soldiers, teeth speckled with rice and dirt, without an ounce of concern about having just admitted to stealing from the king.
The soldiers huddled together to deliberate in whispers. “This young man is clearly mad. Look at him eating kabok off the ground like an animal. And does he really think puffed rice falls from the sky? We’re clearly wasting our time with this kid. He doesn’t know anything and is just trying to impress us. Let’s move on.” Which seems like a much more forgiving outcome than I would generally expect from royal guards hunting for a thief when dealing with someone who just fucking confessed. I would honestly expect them to toss him into a cell to question more fully at their leisure, but maybe they were just stressed out. The day had barely begun and the real thieves were getting farther away with every passing minute, so taking the young man all the way back to the dungeon would waste time they didn’t have. Whatever the reason, the young man was spared from paying for his crime by the cleverness of his mother.
When she returned from her errands, her son happily recounted his meeting with the guards. She was relieved to hear that her trick had worked. The widow spent the rest of the day drilling it into her son’s head that stealing was wrong and that if the guards had realized that he really had taken the robe, he would be dead now. And this time at least, the lesson took. He never stole again. With the gold, pearls, and jewels taken from the king’s clothing, she and her son were able to live happily ever after.
The trope of the foolish son and the clever parent (often but not always the mother) is a fairly common one in folklore. I have to imagine that it’s so prevalent because, across cultures, there have always been incredibly inept and oblivious sons who relied on their mothers to bail them out of whatever shenanigans they found themselves in. I feel bad for these generations of hard-working women who were expected to do the physical and emotional labor of their male family members to keep the world running. So while this no-longer poor widow recovers from her son’s ineptitude, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s strange phenomenon is the weretiger well.
This story also comes from James Oinam’s translation of Volume 3 of Phunga Wari by N. Bemni Singha. It’s a peculiar one, so let’s just get right into it. Once upon a time in a small village beyond the mountains, there lived a couple who was deeply in love. Unlike most families we meet at the beginning of these kinds of stories, the husband and wife were happy together and enjoyed raising their children in their comfortable little village. The couple had cut down a swath of forest and worked hard to turn it into arable farmland. It was enough to make them a comfortable living.
On one particularly hot and sunny day, the husband and wife were out working their field. It was exhausting, thirsty work and the wife in particular was parched. Unfortunately, they had already finished the water they had brought with them this morning and there wasn’t any good water near their field in the forest. “Honey, I am absolutely dying of thirst. Do you mind if I go off and look for some fresh water?” The husband stopped what he was doing to look at his beloved wife. “Can you wait? This area is extremely dangerous to wander alone. Besides, the only water that’s anywhere close is an abandoned well, but the elders all say to avoid drinking from it. According to the stories, anyone who did so turned into a tiger!”
The wife tried to ignore her thirst, but it simply grew more and more irresistible. She couldn’t wait until the end of the day when they would head home together (which was a pretty long walk from the field anyway). “Okay, look I promise I won’t drink from the old well but I can’t wait any longer. I’m going to go look for water. I’ll be back soon.” He didn’t love this plan but his wife was a grown ass woman capable of making her own decisions, so the husband watched uneasily as she headed into the forest.
The woman searched high and low for any clean water, but could find none. The more she looked, the thirstier she got. Eventually she stumbled across that old well her husband had warned her about, and the water glistening inside looked cool and crisp. Thirst burned in her throat like a raging inferno and she simply had to quench it. Besides, surely the stories of a well turning people into tigers was nonsense. Who ever heard of such a ridiculous thing? Persuading herself, the woman drank long and deep from the forbidden waters.
And immediately…nothing at all happened. The woman returned to the field feeling hydrated but guilty. She had promised her husband that she absolutely would not drink from the well and then she had done exactly that. That uneasy feeling gnawed at her gut as she went back to work alongside her husband in the field, but she kept quiet. Nothing bad had happened, so telling him would only upset him for no reason. What’s done is done and all that. As she tilled the field though, her skin began to feel itchy. She scratched at it and was surprised to find that her fingernails had grown surprisingly long and sharp. Worse, the hair on her arms was much thicker and was showing the beginnings of a telltale orange and black striped pattern. Well fuck.
The woman realized that maybe the stories the elders had told hadn’t been fairy tales after all. “Um, hun? So I kind of did a bad thing and I think it’s about to get real weird. You know that well you told me not to drink from? The one that supposedly turns people into tigers? Well I was desperate and so I drank from it without telling you and now, well, just look.” She held out her arms to her very concerned husband. His eyes wandered over the rest of her as well and she guessed that she was showing other signs of tigerdom that she wasn’t aware of. “I fucked up, I know, and I very, very sorry. Can you forgive me?” The husband took his wife into his arms and held her tight. “Of course I forgive you. So maybe you’re going to be a tiger or something now. We’ll figure it out and make it work. I love you no matter what.”
With no real idea of what else to do, the couple finished up the day’s labor in the field and then went home together that evening. The children were waiting for them when they arrived, as usual, and the parents told themwhat was happening to their mother. The story gives us no version of that story, which is a shame because I really want to hear how they explained that mommy was becoming a tiger. Or, maybe, a were-tiger? See, other than developing some decidedly feline characteristics, the woman remained more or less human the rest of the day. She’s basically become a catgirl waifu. She cooked dinner and ate with everyone, then put her children to bed. Then she and her husband went to sleep themselves.
It was then that the full power of the well took effect. The woman awoke except she wasn’t a woman anymore – she was a tigress. This could have broken real, real bad and ended with her slaughtering her entire family in a wild, bloody rampage but she apparently retained enough of her own mind to leave the house in peace. Instead, the were-tigress headed out into the forest to hunt. She returned with the rising run, jaws bloodied with her kill, and went back to sleep. She awoke again once more a human woman.
And so it went for a time. The woman would spend her day as she always had but, after she went to sleep, she would wake up as a tiger and prowl the night. She had avoided hurting anyone that first night, but she wasn’t willing to take any chances, so the woman began to live out in the wilderness by herself. I get the impression that she still came home during the day to take care of her kids and to help her husband, but she didn’t dare sleep there anymore. She built her own place out in the forest far from anyone she could hurt while she was a tiger.
It wasn’t far enough. One day, people from the village discovered a half-eaten carcass in the woman’s yard. A human carcass. It wasn’t anyone from the village but still, it was murder. The woman’s animalistic behavior was becoming wilder and more uncontrollable as time went on. They were afraid of what might happen if the woman were allowed to continue living so close to the village, prowling the area as a tigress at night. Banding together, they drove the woman out of her home, exiling her from the village and its surrounding area. Sobbing, she fled deeper into the forest but she didn’t fight them. She didn’t remember killing whoever it was she had killed, but she knew it was her handiwork and she understood their concern.
Even that wasn’t enough. The tigress still retained something of the human memories at night and it would slip through the trees to come and watch the house where her husband and children lived. It would sneak into the village and prowl the streets that she had once walked. The villagers had kept a watch for their own protection and so they spied the tigress returning even after the woman had fled. They lit torches and raised hell, driving the frightened tiger away from her former home forever. To prevent anyone else from falling into the trap of the tiger well, the elders ordered the well covered over and a fence erected. Everyone was warned never to go there, with the story of the tiger woman used to drive the point home.
And that’s the story. It manages to avoid the two most likely and depressing endings – the woman killing her family or being killed by them or the villagers – but it’s still a long way from sunshine and rainbows. The moral of the story is that it is better not to do the things that are forbidden – they are forbidden for a reason. And also that she should have listened to her husband apparently, but he was just repeating second-hand gossip so I kind of discount that one. I’ve got mixed feelings on these particular lessons since often the reason that things are forbidden are not actually for the benefit of the people themselves, but there are certainly times when it is indeed wisdom. And not drinking from a fountain that turns people into tigers seems like one of those times.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on TuneIn, on Vurbl, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Instagram as MythsYourTeacherHatedPod, on Tumblr as MythsYourTeacherHated, on Bluesky as MythsPodcast, and on Mastodon as MythsYourTeacherHated. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff.
Next time, we’re headed to Sweden to find out what happens when a child meets a fairy. You’ll see that beauty is only skin deep, that heroes aren’t always nice, and that you really should be careful what you wish for, especially when magic is involved. Then, in Gods and Monsters, weird things happen when orphans wander into the woods. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.